Screaming pitch

Particularly, however, our attention is draw to lots 211-213, “rare black and white photographs” of the Beatles at Newcastle City Hall, on Saturday, November 23, 1963, and at Sunderland Empire a week later.

They were taken by Keith Perry, then a freelance, but long the Sun’s man in the North-East and fished out again 48 years later. The negatives and worldwide copyright are expected to realise around £700 each.

Saturday’s auction, at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, also includes a black coat worn by Brian Epstein (guide price about £500), the front door from the recording studio where the Beatles – as the Quarrymen – made their first recording (£350 to £500) and a bit of the Cavern Club stage, a snip off the old block at an estimated £1,800.

A Beatles’ Margo of Mayfair talc tin is expected to realise between £150 and £200, but that’s for those anxious to keep their powder dry.

THE picture of the Fab Four doing a passable impression of a ladder gang was taken at Sunderland Empire – “iconic shots never seen before,” say the organisers, and doubtless it is true.

A virtually identical photograph appeared in the following Monday’s Northern Echo, however, taken by long-serving photographer Colin Theakston.

All 4,200 tickets had quickly been sold, though for some it proved a hard day’s night. Sixteen-year-olds Carol Reid, from Sunnybrow, near Crook, and Brenda Peart, from Tow Law, were in ten shilling stalls seats, but still couldn’t hear a word.

“I sat with my hands covering my ears most of the time,” said Carol which could, of course, explain it.

The problem was screaming. “I don’t know why people scream. I couldn’t bring myself to scream,” said Carol.

Thousands who couldn’t get in at all sang She Loves You at the dressing room windows. The windows, so far as reasonably can be ascertained, are not included in the action.

GERARD Wild, in Richmond, was particularly glad to see mention of the Norfolk village of Little Snoring in last week’s column.

“Many who know me well and love me dearly refuse to believe there is such a place,” he says. Gerard also insists that, when with the 10th Hussars, he met a Corporal Gotobed, from Little Snoring.

“There are lots of them round that way,” he says. His friends, oddly enough, seem reluctant to take that one lying down, either.

RECALLING long childhood hours spent train spotting, last week’s column also noted that a freight wagon on the Weardale Railway still – after all these years – carried the single word “Dogfish” on the side. Since it was unlikely that great tanks of small sharks were being carried across Britain’s railways, we’d wondered what it might all mean. Readers took the bait in their shoals: it remains a queer kettle of fish, nonetheless.

Broadly, it seems, the pre-nationalised railways chose fish names in order to abbreviate telegraphic communication.

Though the back line at Shildon seemed only to be doggy paddled, clearly it was the age of aquariums..

Readers recall catfish and sealion – ballast hoppers, both – crab, tench, tunney, mackerel, herring, lamprey, even the occasional grampus. Others write of sea cows and, altogether more alluring by the sound of it, of mermaids, too.

Many were built at the lamented Shildon Wagon Works, the one which got away.

So how might a railwayman remember which was which? “It was all in their little handbook,” says John Lavender, from Swalwell, Gateshead.

Thanks also to John Briggs, Jim Harper, David Kelly, Stephen Smith and others. Not even that familiar railway enthusiast John Rusby, in Bishop Auckland, can explain, however, why the railways should thus have cast bread upon the deep.

Though trucks now have names like Autoballaster and Railgrinder, several insist that the deep-sea diving continues. Clearly there are plenty more fish in the sea.

TRAIN spotters are known as gricers. If they all took themselves off to the Holy Land, asks a reader who seeks understandable anonymity, would it be a pilgrimage of grice?

THEN there’s one of those wonderful little coincidences which for so many years have been these columns’ currency.

Charlie Westberg, who’s 90 and thus entitled to the occasional early night, was listening in bed last Wednesday – “just about asleep to be honest” – to Radio 2’s brass band programme.

Then something snapped him from his somnolence. The evening’s final piece, it was announced, was composed by one of the kings of brass band music – who’d spent all his life at Shildon Works.

A little research reveals that the gentleman was George Allan, and that he was a wagon painter. Goodness knows how many dogfish, and similar piscatorials, have benefited from his brush.

Allan was born in Pears Terrace, Shildon – home of the former Rex Cinema, just a short shunt from the works – in 1864. He was a member of All Saints church choir, New Shildon Juvenile Band and the Shildon Saxhorn Band and wrote more than 70 marches.

An on-line biography credits him with “some of the very best marches for brass bands”; when the Black Dyke Mills Band made a CD “Great British Marches”, five of the 13 were by George Allan.

The online biography’s written by Steve Robson, last heard conducting Stanhope Band. Like that dogfish out of water, and so that the wagon wheel may turn full circle, Stanhope’s in Weardale, too.

WE’D reproduced a classic classified advertising misprint. It was for 1,000 art magazines – from 10p – many of which had been owned by an art restorer. Or as the blooy-minded ad had it, an artery storer. We’ve now heard from Barry Chapman, who placed it, “unsurprised” that he had only one enquiry – and even that one, says Barry, thought that 1,000 at 10p each was £10. “He was from Darlington,” he adds.

…and finally, Gavin Hay, in Darlington, adds to the recent load of Horlicks – how on earth did all this start?

– with memories of Horlicks tablets.

“I was addicted to them 20-odd years ago and would probably have booked myself into the Priory had I had the money.

“I will also admit to eating Horlicks off a teaspoon rather than putting it in milk, which I think spoils it.”

Still wide awake, Gavin also reports spotting a fox in Woodland Road – “at first I thought it was a large cat” – at 10pm the other night.

“I’ve never seen an urban fox, let alone a Darlington fox. I wonder if others have spotted it.”

The column’s now going a-hunting, too. We return in a fortnight.