Skinny dipping

Stan’s claimed for Bishop Auckland.

As recently as June 30, beneath the headline “Another fine plan” – the Echo carried a story claiming that one of the fire-gutted, vandal-wrecked, good-for-nothing old buildings of the former King James I Grammar School should be turned, at huge expense, into a museum in his honour.

If it weren’t so serious, it would be hilarious.

In comparative terms, young Stanley’s time in Bishop Auckland was a cameo, a one-night stand destined to be nothing more than a bit player in the dramatis personae of his extraordinary life.

Even the widely-held belief that he was baptised at St Peter’s church in the town proves, says author Danny Lawrence, not to be true.

Stan was so weak a child, thought so unlikely to survive, that he was baptised at his grandparents’ home in Ulverston, Cumbria, the town where he was born. He was merely “received into the church” at St Peter’s, on the day – five years later – of his sister’s baptism there.

Though his father had charge of the then Theatre Royal in Bishop – and Theatre Royals at Consett and Blyth – the youngster, inexplicably, remained with his grandparents in Ulverston for the first four years of his life.

He’d barely been in Bishop five minutes, among life’s one-liners, before the family company packed bags in 1895 and moved to North Shields, where Stan spent ten years. He was 37 before teaming up with Oliver Hardy, the pair we knew at Saturday afternoon matinees as Fatty and Skinny.

So why all the drum banging for Bishop? Why a slapstick proposal to spend millions on a blitzed building best demolished to commemorate a man at best peripheral to the town’s history?

There’s already a statue, already a Wetherspoon’s pub. If Bishop Auckland seeks a crowd-pulling monument, why not – in conjunction with the splendid people from the Durham Amateur Football Trust – create a fitting tribute to the town’s football team, uniquely successful and, uniquely, theirs?

SEVERAL years after the family moved to north Tyneside, Stan did return as a boarder to King James I – or St James I as, on one occasion, the author inadvertently describes it.

He lasted barely six months before his dismayed father moved him to Gainford Academy, between Darlington and Barnard Castle, because of the grammar school’s perceived lack of discipline.

“I think I have the honour of being the worst scholar who ever attended there,” the future comic genius once wrote.

The story of how he entertained the late-night staff room – “jokes, imitations, what-the-hell-have you” – is well known.

Lawrence reproduces several of Stan’s letters. The punctuation’s preposterous, the apostrophes egregious.

Had he been in Geoff Hill’s English language class, as some of us were in the Sixties, he’d have been lucky to last six minutes, never mind six months.

􀁧 Danny Lawrence was born in North Shields, stood on the same stage in 1953 that Stan Laurel had occupied a year earlier, became a sociologist at Nottingham University.

The Making of Stan Laurel (McFarland & Co, £29.95), and is also available as an Ebook.

SO I knew how to analyse a clause, assign an apostrophe and spell difficult words, like principle, parallel and pusillanimous.

Mathematics, as countless columns have acknowledged, was another country. Physics – per recent musings on why cool bags keep fish and chips hot – didn’t even radiate to O-level.

Now there are history lessons to be learned, as well. Revealing the connection between Osama bin Laden and Darlington, last week’s column also recalled Henry Pease’s peace mission to Russia in 1854.

Pease was a leading Darlington Quaker, responsible for the vision of Saltburn and for the Stainmore Railway, finally granted an audience with Tsar Nicholas. He and his friends left, we noted, “with a feeling of foreboding anxiety” – as well they might, for war broke out a month later.

As two-thirds of the readership has pointed out, however, it wasn’t the Napoleonic Wars – as, foolishly, we supposed – but the Crimean. “The Quakers’ efforts to avoid the ‘imminent Napoleonic wars’ failed because they set off 39 years too late,” writes Graham Hunsley, in Darlington.

“I bet, having trekked all the way to see the Tsar, your Quaker chums were pretty upset to be told that the Napoleonic Wars had finished almost 40 years earlier,” writes Paul Wilkinson in Knaresborough.

Last week’s column also lamented the two-hour night-time bus journey between Tow Law and Darlington.

“Perhaps,” adds Paul, “they were so late because they’d caught the No 1B.”

It is doubtless because sums seemed so difficult to add up that Malcolm Middleton sends – among many other puns – the one about the elastic band being confiscated during an algebra lesson. It was a weapon of math disruption.

GRAHAM Hunsley also recalls the Crimean influence of William Russell, said to be one of the first great war reporters – a Times man, as was Paul Wilkinson – and influential in bringing the horrors of battle to the masses.

“A vulgar low Irishman who sings a good song, drinks anyone’s brandy and water and smokes as many cigars as a Jolly Good Fellow,”

chronicled a front line soldier. “He is just the sort of chap who gets information, particularly out of youngsters.”

A rather dissolute 1881 Punch cartoon – “From our correspondent – a Man for the Times” – may have summed up the popular perception but in 1895 Russell, then 75, was knighted and a few years later made a Companion of the Royal Victorian Order by Edward VII. Russell, by then, was seriously old. “Don’t kneel, Billy,” said the king, “just stoop”.

Graham believes that the many remaining local references – the Alma Roads and the Sebastapol Terraces – are chiefly down to Russell’s reportage.

Doubtless he is right. Part of Tow Law remains Inkerman – remains, indeed, the eventual terminus of a tortuous bus route. Which bus? The 1B, of course.

IN the enforced half-hour break between buses, we’d had a pint in the Bay Horse in Bishop Auckland, noted last week that the juke box played unsung until it blasted back to Living Doll – Cliff Richard – when the whole pub joined in.

Now in Norton-on-Tees, Keith Belton – another who spotted that error of historical proportions – was a Witton Park lad when Living Doll was released, played the piano in the Bay Horse for £1 a night.

“That was until my mother found out,” he recalls. “”Good Methodists never even went to pubs, much less filled them with drinkers.”

…so finally back to mathematical puns, and Liz Coldicutt sends from America the story of the three squaws. One slept on a deer skin, another on an elk skin and the third on a hippopotamus skin. All three became pregnant.

The first two had baby boys, the one who slept on the hippopotamus had twins – also boys.

All of which goes to prove that the squaw on the hippopotamus is equal to the sons of the squaws on the other two sides.