Tinker’s cusp

MAURICE Logan- Salton, whose name rang distant bells, has emailed from Newcastle about a 1949 film – a “tearful melodrama” it’s said – called Tinker. (It was a Tinker bell, perhaps.) From that unpromising beginning lead all manner of intriguing and improbable flights of fancy, from the black beach of Blackhall to the court of Tsar Nicholas. Firstly, however, back to Mr Logan-Salton.

The loudest bell was that, having left the Conservative party, he had stood as an independent in the Sedgefield constituency in the 1983 General Election, polling but 298 votes. “I was a bit unlucky, the firstever SDP candidate was against me,”

he recalls, asked subsequently for his memories of the contest. David Shand did indeed top 10,000 votes, though Labour’s man – some weteared whippersnapper called Blair – polled more than twice as many.

The film, at any rate, is about a gipsy’s son who runs away from home and eventually gets a place at a residential training school for miners on the Durham coast. Unused to such comforts, he has to be persuaded to sleep in the dormitory and not beneath a tree.

It was produced by Herbert Marshall and directed by the coruscatingly named Alfredda Brilliant, a master copy owned by Renown Pictures – “Home of the British B-movie” – but said to be badly scratched and unsuitable for conversion into a DVD.

The Random Pictures website lists the cast merely as Derek Smith and the Durham Cathedral choir, but there were many more than that.

Other lads at the training school included Skinny (who was malnourished), Scotty, Shorty and Student – the one who helped teach Tinker to read and write.

At any rate, and to cut a 73-minute story short, Tinker again runs away after being wrongly accused of theft, takes refuge from his pursuers in a coal tub on one of those aerial ropeways that ran from the pits to the sea and is about to be dumped into the briny along with several tons of colliery waste when rescued by his friends.

Were any readers in on the action?

Can any bit-part player from those days still add extra interest? Does anyone still have a copy of the film?

Hook, line and Tinker, it would be good to find out more.

IT’S impossible to talk film history – seriously inadvisable, anyway – without consulting Mr Tony Hillman, the brightest of buffs.

Tony, who’s in Darlington, looks it up in David Quinlan’s “British Sound Films: the Studio Years, 1928-1959.

“Tinker, says Quinlan, was “a wellintentioned and photographed film that hasn’t much more to offer.”

That, paradoxically, is when things get really interesting.

The episode of the aerial flights is mentioned, almost certainly filmed at Blackhall, a few miles above Hartlepool.

Not only does Tony recall that the final scenes of the North-East classic Get Carter were set on Blackhall beach – the bit where Jack Carter (Michael Caine) shoots Eric Paice (Ian Hendry) and dumps his body in one of the aerial buckets on its journey to the deep – but that the 40th anniversary of the film’s release is being celebrated a fortnight from now.

The film’s locations, indeed, could almost provide a tour of the North- East – from the allegedly iconic and recently demolished multi-storey car park in Gateshead to Dryderdale Hall, near Hamsterley, said to be home of the “head gangster” (and, in the real life Seventies, to Mr Vince Landa).

They filmed on Newcastle Quayside and at the racecourse, at the Vic and Comet and the West Road crematorium, at Belmont, Broomside and at Blyth Staithes – the scene before Blackhall. “They seem to have got down the coast remarkably quickly,”

observes Tony Hillman, dryly.

Mike Hodges, the director, is due to talk abut Get Carter at an anniversary screening at the Tyneside Cinema on March 11 – one of several events marking the occasion. Could it be that the little Tinker borrowed the idea for Paice’s end from a halfforgotten film made more than 20 years earlier?

Maurice Logan-Salton is again consulted, admits he’s never seen Get Carter. “It would have been a bit naughty, wouldn’t it,” he says, “but what a fascinating possibility.”

BACK on the Rocks, Blackhall may well be accustomed to film fatality. “We’ve had quite a few. There was a woman’s body over the cliffs in one of the Catherine Cookson films,” recalls village historian Harry Archbold. The first coal had been mined in 1913, the aerial flights erected in the 1920s. Demolition started in December 1974, the flights finally grounded three months later.

“I don’t think anyone wanted to keep them,” says Harry, a retired head teacher, “You don’t get nostalgic about things like that when they’ve been on your doorstep for so long. The beach is much better now.”

The Get Carter scenes had first to be approved by the National Coal Board, and by the Mines and Quarries inspectorate. Gang warfare notwithstanding, Harry can’t recall much excitement about that, either.

“I suppose a few of the lads would have had a vantage point from the top of the pit heap, but that would have been about it. In Blackhall we’ve seen it all before.”

THE plot quickens; there is a final twist. Maurice Logan- Salton, who proves to have a bit of a thing about film mysteries, draws attention to another 1971 production – the acclaimed Nicholas and Alexandra, about the last days of the Romanovs.

It starred Michael Jayston and Janet Suzman in the title roles, the part of the Tsar’s son Alexei played – superbly, by common consent – by Roderic Noble, 14 at the time of the film’s release. Roderick – Rick to his friends – was brought up in Darley, near Harrogate, recommended by his elocution teacher for the role and chosen, it’s said, because of his resemblance to the Tstsarevich.

The young Noble then starred in the 1972 ITV series The Main Chance but then effectively disappeared.

An internet exchange last year revealed that he had instead studied geology, took part in a few amateur productions, became managing director of a large North-East company and now lives in Northallerton with his wife and daughter, Katie.

Katie provided much of the information.

“What’s more,” she said, “he’s a pretty great dad.”

The story can hardly be left there.

Next week, with luck and an all-age certificate, we hope to have more on the Tsar who happily fell to earth.

The operator may simply be changing the reels.