Salut! North

In the court of King Charlie

Picture: Peadar O'Sullivan

Any mention of Charlie Hurley takes me straight back not just to Roker Park, where I spent a fair old part of my youth, but to the Old Shildon Workingmen's Club of the late 1960s.

News of the publication of Mark Metcalf's new biography - Charlie Hurley: The Greatest Centre Half The World Has Ever Seen - has done the trick again.

Charlie, of course, was an absolute hero in all Sunderland-supporting areas of the North East, which broadly speaking meant the vast majority of County Durham. Sunderland was a proud component of the county in those days, ahead of the ludicrous invention of Tyne and Wear, and was widely seen as the county football team, the equivalent of Durham County Cricket Club.

The cane and the Bunsen burner tube. That'll teach you....(2)

The angels will just have to wait a little longer. I did not really expect to return to memories of punishments dished out at school, but an opportunity came to me on a plate (I was going to say it came to me in a stroke, but thought better of it).

The plate was served by Mike Amos, son of Shildon, Northern Echo columnist extraordinaire (or "that overachiever out of Albert St" if you prefer the impertinent dissenting opinion offered on these pages by one "Bassy"), tireless servant of the Northern League, godfather to my elder daughter and the man who taught me a fair amount of whatever I know about journalism.

Mike, in common with most people I knew growing up in Shildon, went to Timothy Hackworth Junior and Infant School. Well, that's more or less what it was meant to be called - there may have been a "mixed" in the title, too - but it was Tin Tacks to us lot.

The silence of angels, and the dignity of labour on strike

Even without occasional reminders from friends who have posted little messages, here and at Salut!, I am aware that a little time has elapsed since my last posting.

This is inevitable given the pressure on time created by involvement in a newspaper launch in Abu Dhabi and also by the small matter of moving into a new flat.

Normal service will be resumed before long. In the meantime, feel free to explore the mass of material available at the other Salut! sites and at The National site - see the links in the sidebars.

And be patient: there is more to come on Angels of the North, the dignity of labour and more - whether you like it or not.

Angels of the North (2)

So who was the dark-haired beauty at the Redworth bus stop?

This was not the most important of the questions that gnawed away at me for several weeks of 1966. There was another that needed answering first: how to meet her. And this, the need to meet her, was easier said than done

I would see the girl on weekday mornings as I was driven to my dreary dead-end job in the offices of Cummins Engine Company on the outskirts of Darlington.

My companion was Mike, easily distinguishable from me because he was not only 10 years or so older but actually knew and cared about the things that were being made at the factory. He could be said to be Doing Well in his job. The arrangement was that for an appropriate weekly sum - which, in keeping with the early traditions of these reminiscences, I can no longer recall - he would pick me up and drive me to work, though rarely home again at the end of the day.

Mike did not much like inconvenience, and stipulated that I should walk down Byerley Road and pass to the southern side of the Shildon railway crossings, where I was to wait for him. He did not want to risk being held up as shunters ambled to and from the wagon works.

Redworth is a small village roughly a quarter of the way into the eight-mile journey from Shildon to Darlington. And there without fail, as we passed each morning in Mike's sensible Hillman Imp, would stand the girl, satchel on her back, waiting for her bus to school. I was 17, and I guessed her to be about the same, but clearly bright enough to have stayed on for her A levels.

The dignity of labour (1): Shildon Shops

My first job, if you do not count paper rounds, babysitting or doing the shopping for neighbours, was in the Loading Bay at the railway wagon works known to everyone for miles around as Shildon Shops.

Do I remember that first day as if it were yesterday? Have I remained on close terms with the people I worked with? Does the actual date I started the job spring readily to mind? Not, I am sorry to say, so much as a bit of it.

Reliable memories of what I did each day, how much I was paid or who I met - all the important details of anyone's entrance into the world of work - have long since vanished.

How I envy those people who can delve into their minds and extract precise figures for pocket money, the size of their first pay packets and what they spent on earliest major purchases - train set, bike, car, whatever. My memory, excellent though it is in respects that sometimes surprise me, is nevertheless highly selective.

The figure of £1.50, or thirty bob as I'd have called it then, does suggest itself as the weekly reward from one of the paper rounds. I know my first property purchase was a flat in Greater London for about £9,000 and I even remember raising the 10 per cent deposit by selling a freshly purchased Vauxhall Viva, the only car I have ever owned from new. It had only a thousand or so miles on the clock, though if you looked carefully you could just about make out the imperfections of bodywork repairs that sadly became necessary after some clot ran into me as I drove it home from the showroom.

At an early Salut! North posting, I also took a stab at the price of cod and chips from Robinson's fish shop at the top of Diamond Street. But I would not be especially surprised to hear that the passing of years had distorted even that recollection.

And I certainly could not put an accurate figure on my first salary even if life depended on it. Nor, indeed, do I recall with anything approaching conviction how much I earned when I moved to subsequent jobs. There are cluttered files in which I may have stored some documentary evidence, but they are in the basement of my home. If such paperwork does exist, I have not set eyes on it for years and my home, incoveniently, is thousands of miles from here in France.

Angels of the North (1)

Ann, Barbara, Anthea, Dorothy, Christine, Rosemary, Margaret, Trish, Irene, Belinda. And the dark-haired beauty at the Redworth bus stop.

This is not a Salut! North version of that harmlessly silly song about having "a little bit of Monica in my life/a little bit of Erica by my side......". It is just the list of girls who occupied places of varying affection in my heart when I was single.

Even if you add a couple of missing names, it is not a particularly long list by the standards of today or, for that matter, the not quite so liberated 1960s. It becomes shorter still if you filter out one or two that scarcely qualify for inclusion as girlfriends.

My friend Len had much greater success. We'd prowl the rec path on spring and summer evenings, giving the eye to - and hoping to get it back from - any pretty girls that came our way. Actually, it was Len doing most giving of the eye. With perfectly good reason, he would tell me that when it came to chatting up, I had neither boldness nor finesse.

One day soon......

.......I intend to find time to write and post some more memories. The pressure of work is building, I am no longer wifeless in Abu Dhabi and everything must wait its turn.

In the meantime, feel free to let me know what you think of the new design - appropriately, if rather grandly, called Vicksburg Desert.

Programmed to fail

Life, for most of us, is a messy mixture of success, failure and downright ordinariness.

There is no special desire on my part to dwell on the middle bit of that list; it is just that when I think of my young days in the North East, the failures stand out rather more prominently than the humdrum, and much more so that success.

That introduction could have led into any one of several topics. Schooldays, despite what has already appeared at Salut! North, could be explored further. So could the process by which I came to realise I was unlikely, after all, to play for Sunderland. What about those feeble early attempts to attract girlfriends?

All in good time. For now, let me tell the sad rags-to-rags story of the North Eastern Programme Club.

Maybe these Scottish programmes would have sold
Picture: Lutrus

Growing up

Salut! North is growing up.

Sixteen items posted.....it is what you have seen it become and there is much, much more to say. Each time I pour out one set of reminiscences, I know two things will happen.

First? My sister, Sandra, will write in (or to me) from Middlesbrough - where, unforgivably for any Durham lass, she has reinvented herself as a Boro fan - to correct my memory. Well perhaps that was harsh, since in truth she knows not the first thing about football and can therefore just about be excused for not supporting Sunderland (and probably thinks, in any case, that Boro still play at Ayresome Park).

The other thing that happens? Some other memory from childhood, youth and early adulthood streams back into mind. So this site has a long way to go. You will hear - inshallah (I am, after all, in inshallah country) - about girlfriends, elocution lessons, play, fights, jobs and much more besides. That list may well change, grow longer or get shorter.

But please remember - Irene from the Netherlands included, before I say "Irene, goodnight, Irene" - that I am helping to launch a new newspaper, an unbelievable project on more than one level in the age we live in. It is a huge challenge and a huge job; I do not have time to do that job AND write as often as I would like on my various websites.

My wife joins me (finally) in Abu Dhabi this weekend; she deserves some time too, and not only because she has packed a rolling pin to bring as hand baggage.

Friday - tomorrow - is the start of the weekend here and I may well have something to add then. You will find more in due course, if only you can bear to be patient and keep coming back. Salut!

Wet chips and Wate-on

No bones were broken. I was left grazed and dusty, not bleeding. There was, unfortunately, no cause to stay off school and counselling hadn't even been invented.

But it was still a middlingly unpleasant experience, being pounced on in the dark, pushed and jostled by two or three other boys and left feeling sorry for myself on the ground as they ran off laughing.

My crime, aged all of 11, was to be caught in possession of grammar school uniform while carrying a briefcase that even a bunch of louts could see was probably on its way to or from a piano lesson.

If only they'd known how bad a grammar school pupil I was, how hard I was applying myself to the sort of under-achievement that could have only one outcome, explusion, they might have spared me. But no, at that moment on the path that leads down from the King Willie to the railway tunnel top in Shildon, I was a "grammar school snob" and that was reason enough for their half-hearted assault.