Salut! North

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! ) ...

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 club trip

By neither appearance nor disposition was Ernie Randall an obvious choice of secretary for a workingmen's club in the North East of England. When he opened his mouth, any lingering doubt vanished.

How could a Cockney, let alone one who had never clocked on for so much as a single shift at Shildon Shops (the railway works) but was the cutting room manager at the Northern Clothing factory, occupy such a position?

But he did, for several years. He did the job not only diligently and with obvious enthusiasm but, so far as I ever heard, with some distinction.

Despite being a Londoner and having a white collar job, he was a good club secretary, and he even had Club and Institute Union honours to prove it.

Aces and diamonds in the heart of clubland

At workingmen's clubs dotted around the country, and in particular in the North East where every self-respecting town had at least one, a tradition took root in the late 1960s that may have been the inspiration for pop tribute bands.

Years after the hits dried up, British and American pop stars and groups would pop up in such institutions, providing welcome distraction for small town club goers if a slightly sad flipside to fame and fortune.

It is fair to guess that the high points of the careers of Bobby Vee and Del Shannon, pictured together above with due thanks to Bobby's web site, were not their separate appearances at New Shildon Club.

These were men who had been right at the top of their game, each with a string of hits many of us had listened to on crackly Radio Luxembourg reception under the blankets. What they made of Redworth Road and the railway crossings is not, so far as I know, recorded.

But I bet they both took away particular memories of their evenings there.
Del Shannon's encounter with the admirable but sometimes unbending nature of the WMC movement - I speak with affection since my late father was a long-serving secretary of the Old Shildon club - actually made the national press.

The Daily Mirror, possibly only in its northern editions, ran the story of the great man's arrival at the front door as that night's star turn.

"Where are your club cards?" growled the steward on duty at the entrance.

"But I'm the artist who's appearing here tonight," Del protested, perhaps struggling to suppress that famous falsetto from Runaway.

The steward was not impressed. "Aye," he said, "they all say that. As far as I am concerned, if you're not a member or an affiliate, you're not getting in unless someones signs you in."

Scraps of memory, memories of scraps

No one would raise an eyebrow if you said you'd bumped into a man from Delhi while in an Indian restaurant in Richmond, or Darlington or Shildon (unless they knew the only "Indian" restaurants in the town in question were actually Pakistani or Bangladeshi).

A chance encounter in Delhi with a couple from Swaledale, when ushered to their table for dinner, is slightly more unusual, especially if you then discover mutual acquaintances and even friends.

But what are the odds against sitting on the back of a bus in Jaipur and finding that the woman nearest to you not only comes from the same small North Country town but lived in the next street to your own?