The designated driver being in Singapore, the bus service from Houghton to home not exactly frequent, the column missed the tribute night at Philadelphia Cricket Club to honour Malcolm Pratt’s 60 years service. It climaxed when the function room was formally named the Malcolm Pratt Lounge.
Harry Stott, known more familiarly as Harrystottle, was my first chief reporter – today he’d probably be called a line manager – in the Bishop Auckland office of the Northern Despatch, conveniently situated above a money lender’s. It was August 1965.
WIND Mill Methodist church, that great redoubt of the old religion, marked its 150th anniversary – what clever folk call a sesquicentennial – two Sundays back. Not many came.
TWO or three times in recent years we’ve reported from Barningham Cricket Club, in Teesdale, where biffing a six into the next county is made easier because part of the ground’s in North Yorkshire and part in Co Durham.
JIMMY SCARBOROUGH, one of that select band of Football League players to have borne the name of another team in the league – Alan Sunderland, Colin Blackburn, Jermaine Darlington, Ricky Villa – has died. He was 88.
THE BBC blanketed Bishop Auckland last week – day and night, television and radio, edgy perceptions of what’s now politically a marginal seat.
REPRISING all that’s said about new tune and old fiddle, one of the North-East’s best loved folk bands is celebrating 50 years of music-making.
Reflecting, as it were, upon a strange phenomenon – and not just sunshine at Consett – the column two weeks ago noted that spectators had to swap sides during an Ebac Northern League game up there after being dazzled by the glare from the synthetic pitch.
Almost 65 years after he became the youngest hat-trick scorer in Football League history – a record claimed later by Trevor Francis – Ken Chaytor was back watching his beloved Oldham Athletic last Sunday.
One small step for the Broomfield Runners, the group marking its fifth birthday will for the first time “take control” – provide all the volunteers – at this morning’s Northallerton parkrun.
