Salut! North

Wheels of life

Most of us can remember the first vehicles we possessed. Not the Dinky toys, tricycles or bikes with dropped handlebars you had as a kid, but motorised road transport.

CN7480 was the registration number of the one and only car my father owned.

It was as if he had passed his test purely for the pleasure of being able to acquire and drive his big old Wolseley, not unlike the model shown, for a while. Having sampled the mixed blessings of mobility and breakdown, he was ready to move on to something else. Moving on, in dad's case, to the No 1 or Eden bus or, more likely, the Shildon AFC team coach (as secretary, not player).

On one Friday evening, we were meant to be driving down to London to see our gran - his mother - and possibly a football match while we were there. It felt as if we were embarking on a serious adventure.

Unfortunately, the Wolseley had other ideas. We didn't seem able to get farther down the road south from Drybourne Avenue, Shildon than to the railway crossings, also Shildon and barely half a mile away, before conking out.

Salut! North adds its Christmas greetings but not much else apart from a great archive

Salut! North is the Cinderella of the already modest household of the Salut! empire. For shaming proof of that, I needed only to check when the last new posting appeared here: the Christmas greetings of 2016.

But the seasonal message remains sincere, even if I cannot promise a stream of new material in the new year while also managing to keep a straight face.

Salut! North's Christmas Salutations

Salut!’s little sites – Salut!, Salut! Live and Salut! North - hardly amount to an empire, even once you add the much bigger and more widely read Salut! Sunderland

.

If I have been known to use the term, please be assured it was with light-hearted intent.

Hoping for a French Riviera toast to Shildon glory

Thanks to @Scally Car

Rather fancifully, I had hoped to interest my old newspaper, The Northern Echo, in this slice of nostalgia brought bang up to date by Shildon's night of potential glory. A win at Bedlington Terriers tomorrow evening (Wednesday) is all that stands between them and a first championship since 1940 in the Northern League, 126 years old and the world's longest surviving league after the Football League. The Echo declined, alternatively offering a little space for a retrospective that I fear I may have no time to provide. So I must keep my Echoes of the past for Salut! readers and for those who stray to the other places: Salut! Sunderland and Salut! ) ...

Greetings from Salut! North - alive if only just

Salut! North does not want to be left out of the merriment and wishes readers a happy, peaceful Christmas and a wonderful new year. Greetings extend to anyone who has strayed here from Salut! Sunderland, Salut! or Salut! Live. Enjoy the eccentric choice of a gallery of photos from the Royal Library of Denmark and feel free to explore the archive. If the North East of England interests you, you may like some of what you find on these pages ...

Woodbines, Shildon Tunnel and a boy's first kiss

Salut! North, I meant to say here, is not dead on purpose, just flagging a little because of other pressures on my time. Sadly, I got it wrong and said it at the main Salut! site by mistake. That should not stop this splendid tale by my friend Bill Taylor appearing where it was first intended. Look on it as a lovely piece of writing and reminiscence and also as part of Bill's untiring attempts to shame me into making Salut! north active again ...

I’ve never been one to flog a dead horse (actually, that’s not at all true) but trying to breathe life into a dead blog is a different matter.

And it’s probably appropriate that this attempted Kiss of Life involves a real-life kiss… no yearning after an unattainable girl in a bus shelter for me.

It’s also mostly set in Shildon, Colin’s hometown, rather than my own, Bishop Auckland, a good three miles away. Strange how great a distance that seems when you’re 14 years old.

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.