Unhappy Christmas

Peter Lax, a joyful man who devoted 50 years to Billingham Synthonia FC and had also been an adept wicket keeper/batsman, has been lamented in the Backtrack column. His funeral, a wonderfully affectionate occasion, was last Thursday.

Peter was also the English language’s most formidable assailant since Stanley Unwin, the difference being that Unwin did it deliberately.

“Do you have Rington’s?” Pete inquired of the tea ladies at Newcastle Blue Star. “At our place, we use Typhoid.”

Strictly in alphabetical order, though there are those who would suppose it a case of ladies first, some memories of the other three follow.

Though I only met him once, and in slightly improbable circumstances, there’s also a footnote on Sir Patrick Moore, who joined the others in the stellar firmament.

DOROTHY Howard was a cook in a convent – fibbing about your age clearly regarded as a female peccadillo and not a mortal sin. The sisters’ embrace was mutual.

It was not that, however, for which she will most greatly be remembered.

Chiefly she was an old school barmaid and loquacious landlady, known as a relief licensee throughout the North-East – “me and my little suitcase” – but best remembered in Darlington and for a 1970s sojourn at The Commercial, in Shildon.

She was there for three years, so greatly flexible (shall we say) about closing time that the lads formed an escape committee — there was talk of a tunnel – in an attempt to be home before breakfast. It didn’t always work, not even when they contemplated a helicopter.

She didn’t much enjoy Shildon, though. “I remember going back to Darlington – broke, out of work, no home, but I was singing as I walked along the street because I wasn’t in Shildon any more,” she said on her 80th birthday, New Year’s Eve 2010.

She will be remembered with much affection, despite that heretical observation.

A headmaster’s daughter, she was for 11 years from 1956 the cashier at the fondly recalled Majestic Ballroom in Darlington, 12/6d a night and loved every boy-meets-girl minute. Mostly, however, she will be pictured behind the bar – bright and blousy, warm and welcoming, interested and irreverent. Damn near perfect, in other words, and wholly different from most pint pullers today.

One of the grandbairns knew her simply as Nana Pub.

“You go into a bar and it’s as if you’re invisible,” she mused on her birthday. “The barmaids just keep on talking to one another, even when they’re serving.”

So it’s not just me and you, then.

Managers were scorned similarly.

“If you see them at all,” said Dorothy, “they’re dressed like they’ve been cleaning the drains”.

Sam Howard, her late second husband, was the most dapper man in Darlington. Dear old Dorothy never had a red hair out of place, either.

At 67 she became a waitress, a job application perhaps helped by the fact that she told them she was 52.

The Carmelite convent followed.

In her final years she lived in a town centre flat, her bedroom overlooking the Quaker cemetery. “I can go to bed next to some rich men. It never happened when I was younger,” said Dorothy, incorrigible and inimitable to the last. Her funeral is at Darlington crematorium at 10.15am tomorrow.

AN improbable impresario, Bernard Pentony ran the Eastbourne Methodist Youth Club Go-Go Dancers – you read it correctly – in the 1970s and 80s. They entertained thousands, raised large amounts for good causes, appeared at least twice at the Royal Albert Hall, but were neither traditionally nor very obviously Methodist.

Eastbourne Methodist Church, it should be made clear, is in Darlington.

It no longer has go-go dancers.

Bernard had been a member of the RAF Regiment drill team and a police officer in Worcestershire before pitching up in Darlington, where he worked at Paton and Baldwin’s.

He was a football referee, an ardent Liverpool supporter – which should not, not now, be held against him – a man of bright ideas and burning enthusiasm. Several times he covered the 42-mile Lyke Wake Walk to raise funds for the group, several times organised New Year’s Day dips off Redcar and was first to put his toe in the water.

A little closer to the Methodist norm, he even gave up beer for a month, disappointed only to lose four pounds.

Eventually they simply became the Eastbourne Generation Dancers – some sort of fall out with the church, I forget the details – but remained perfectly in step.

Bernard married Pauline Bennett, 24 years his junior, the dancers’ leader and chief costume maker.

Though they divorced, they remained good friends. He was 79. His funeral is at 1pm tomorrow, at St Herbert’s Church, in Yarm Road, Darlington. CHARLIE Westberg was The Northern Echo’s chief photographer when I became news editor in 1978, and had been for getting on 20 years. A generation apart, we’d sometimes fight cat and dog.

Among the bones of contention – as dog, if not cat, might suppose – was that Charlie and others in the photographic department always went home for lunch. He was not to be disturbed.

Today’s newsdesk denizens might find it equally odd that, in 1978, the news ed and his deputy spent most lunchtimes in the pub.

Charlie died last week, his funeral at Darlington crematorium at 1.15pm today. He was a great professional, an impeccable administrator and, happily, we became friends.

It was back in the early 1970s, memory suggests, that he had a queer turn while on holiday in South Africa. A coronary bypass was deemed necessary, Charlie’s heart – metaphorically and geographically– very definitely in the right place: the South Africans were pioneering such treatments.

He lived to be 91. As folk these days suggest, it’s amazing what they can do.

SIR Patrick Moore, the great astronomer, came only once within the column’s orbit.

That was back in 1983 when, part of the Ryedale Festival, he was playing the xylophone at a school near Helmsley.

He’d started playing when he was ten – “my cousin owned one” – became so expert that, like Bernard Pentony’s go-go dancers, he appeared at the Royal Albert Hall. Sir Patrick was probably more formally dressed.

We’d wondered if he’d play the Planets Suite. “Unfortunately no one’s written a xylophone part for it,” he said, cheerfully.

That story back in August 1983 didn’t carry a byline. All that might have identified it as one of mine was the Bonzo Dog-day suggestion that he was an urbane spaceman. Like everyone else mourned in today’s column, he was also a bright shining star.