Wicked ways

ENTER into the Google search engine the terms “Robert Barker” and “adultery” and the first thing that appears is a line saying “Considering adultery?” and an invitation anonymously to browse further. To press Button A, as it were.

That brief flirtation rejected, the second thing that becomes clear is that there are four times as many hits for “Robert Barker” and adultery than for “Robert Baker” and adultery, the proffered alternative.

Clearly this is good news for Mrs Baker, though Mrs Barker may be rather less happy.

That poor Bob Barker appears so promiscuous, however, may almost entirely be to do with something that happened back in the 17th Century.

Robert Barker was one of the king’s printers, charged in 1631 with producing an edition of what had become known as the King James Bible.

Unfortunately, he made a threeletter mistake on the seventh commandment, the one about adultery.

He omitted the word “not”. Henceforth it became known as the Wicked Bible.

The king – by then Charles I – and the Archbishop of Canterbury were aghast. The nation thought that it had better be aghast, too. “I knew the time when great care was taken, with the Bibles especially,” said the king.

“Good compositors and best correctors were gotten, being grave and learned men, the paper and the letter rare, and faire every way of the best. Now the paper is nought, the composers boyes and the correctors unlearned.”

Reproof positive, almost all the Bibles were burned, the Star Chamber fined poor Barker and his partner a huge amount and Barker spent much of the ten years until his death languishing in a debtors’ prison.

Paul Gilmore, among the organisers of a magnificent Bible exhibition that opened on Monday, is sympathetic.

“If that sort of punishment were still around today,” he says, “the Guardian would be skint.”

THOUGH once it was notorious, the Guardian reference is unfair, a reversion to mistype.

The eternal conundrum, of course, is whether such errors were attributable to carelessness, idleness, mischief or malice.

Hereabouts, the most notorious example concerned a retiring compositor who, probably back in the 1960s, publicly proclaimed the 3.15 at Redcar to be “The Evening Despatch Uphill Handicap for Broken Winded Old Carthorses”. Words to that effect, anyway.

The last of the four possibilities may have been the best bet. That Monday’s Echo spoke of a Liverpool footballer “baring down” on the Sunderland goal may be supposed the first. We all have unlucky streaks like that.

THE Bibles are on display at a cleverly-executed exhibition in St Cuthbert’s church in Darlington Market Place to mark the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible.

Around 260 everyday phrases – salt of the earth, leopards not changing their spots, root of all evil – are said to come directly from those pages.

That St Cuthbert’s director of music found on the organ console a reference to the bit from Revelation about ruling with a rod of iron may be supposed leg-pulling, no more.

A small part of the exhibition also highlights the adage that things that you’re liable to read in the Bible ain’t necessarily so.

The “Murderers’ Bible” had an unfortunate typo – as they say in the inky trade – in urging that the children be killed. It meant filled.

An 1804 edition talked of the murderers being put together, which might have been very cosy, but what they meant was put to death.

There was the Treacle Bible, the Unrighteous Bible – 1 Corinthians 6:9. “the unrighteous shall inherit the earth” – even the Wife Beaters’ Bible, (1 Peter:3) in which men were urged (shall we say) to knock some sense into the little woman back home.

There is much else of an altogether more scriptural – not to say spiritual – nature and by no means only for the pious. The display is open until Saturday from 12-2pm, next week from 10am-4pm and from April 25 to September 30 from 11am-1pm.

THOUGH it forever bears his name, the king is said not so much to have “authorised” the 1611 Bible as to have thought it not a bad idea.

Probably this was because he was preoccupied with lending his name to the former Bishop Auckland Grammar School which also still carries the royal assent.

“Contemporary records,” says the Darlington exhibition, “describe James as having an enormous head, bandy legs, protruding tongue and a tendency to dribble.”

Happily, most of us who attended that great seat of learning are more physically striking altogether.

AS always loitering with intent, we pondered last autumn the origins of the name Linger and Die, a former railway hamlet near Ferryhill. In October it brought a call from Lionel Taylor, now in Spain, who grew up there until he was 14. Now it’s brought a couple of pints, Lionel back up home for the first time in 25 years.

We were at the Surtees Arms, in Ferryhill Station – The Crag they call it thereabouts. As if to remind him that there really is no place like home, a gritting lorry shivered past in the dark. It was March 18.

They’d moved south because his mum didn’t want him to go down the pit.

“The other kids at the school in London couldn’t understand a word I said. They really did think I was foreign,”

recalled Lionel, 78.

He did RAF National Service, became a junior clerk with a shipping company in Liverpool, helped get Bluebird to America and eventually – “like that razor bloke” – bought the company.

It was a convivial 90 minutes, Lionel accompanied by his son Glenn – who builds sets for Midsomer Murders – and his old Ferryhill mate Keith, once one of the area’s top darts players.

What most greatly struck him was that all the pit heaps have gone. It’s one of Durham County Council’s big success stories but there wasn’t time to dwell on it. You know what they say about lingering, do you not?

THE talk had earlier turned to Ferryhill railway station, an occasional train spotting haunt before it closed in the early 1960s.

The big, old waiting room had a coal fire and a large table on which we’d play chucks until chased out by an irascible porter with little else to do.

Chucks was essayed with five small cubes of different colours, thrown into the air and caught – or such was the optimistic intention – between the back of the fingers.

All that I remember is that there was onesie to fivesie and that I was utterly useless; cack-handed.

Does anyone remember all the degrees, unattainable like the higher echelons of Freemasonry, that came after fivesie? Does anyone still have a set or, better yet, fancy a game?

You know what they say, chuck it and see.

A PS. After the column’s recent grumbles about “pre-ordering”

and the like, Saturday’s Times carried a letter protesting at David Cameron’s use of the phrase “prescripted questions”. Was there, wondered the writer, any other kind of scripting? Then there’s pre-planning. “As a project manager,” he added, “I find postplanning so unsatisfactory.”

Maybe it’s best to go with the words from Luke 12:19 – King James Bible, of course – about eat, drink and be merry. Never mind tomorrow, the column returns next week.