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NEWCASTLE JOURNAL - 16.4.04

Some time ago, I wrote about walking a stretch of the old Wannies Line from Redesmouth to W.Woodburn. I wondered if there was anybody left who had worked on the footplate on this twisting bit of ‘road’ and the name ‘Isaac Elliot’ cropped up. I went to see him in his cosy home at Kirkwhelpington. Isaac is a fresh faced and lean man of 78 who looks very fit – probably due to a working life of fresh air and exercise. Most of his life he has worked in the Forestry, but in his early days he worked as a fireman on the Wannies. He reckons that he is the sole survivor of that way of life.

During the Hitler War he joined the Navy and did a 6-month gunnery course at Portsmouth. After D Day the Navy decided that it had more recruits than it needed – it had expected more casualties, so at morning parade, the men were told to ‘number off’ all those from 10 to the right were told to fall out and prepare to join the Army. Thus, totally unexpectedly, he spent the next 4 years in the KOSB. This included 3 years in India. He was demobbed in 1947 and joined the, as it was then, LNER, working as a cleaner in the Redesmouth Sheds. This was the normal path to the footplate and meant that all footplate men had a sound knowledge of the internal intricacies of a steam locomotive. It also meant leaving his home at Knowesgate at 2.30 AM to bicycle to Redesmouth for a 0400 starting time in order to have the engine steamed up for 0630. Isaac remembers the engines as type J21 and J36 – some of them were 60 years old, but were so well built and reliable that they never had a spanner on them apart from their annual overhaul. To ease the burden of the long bike ride he took lodgings in Bellingham. Isaac progressed from Cleaner to ‘Fireman as required’ and then to full time fireman.

The first train out was the 0630 – Redesmouth to Scots Gap. The exception was a Saturday night ‘special’ from Hexham to Kielder and back. This would mean getting back to Redesmouth at 0130.

I asked him if it was hard work stoking for the twisting incline from Woodburn to the Wannies top. He shrugged and said that important thing was to have enough water in the tender for the climb. If the water did not reach the safe level in the boiler the heat from the firebox would melt out the lead safety plug, the fire would be drowned and…Oh Calamity! This never happened with Isaac. He worked with several different drivers. The same crews worked this bit of line, to and fro, for all their working lives – Redesmouth, Woodburn, Reay Halt, Knowesgate, and Scots Gap for an 8-hour day. On the last run back to Redesmouth for the day, the Fireman would try to run the fire down as low as possible, for the simple reason that he had to empty the firebox every night with a long handled shovel. It is small wonder you never saw a fat fireman.

Did he never get bored up and down the same track every working day? I Isaac shook his head:

“A steam engine is a living thing and every trip was different”

My thanks to Isaac Elliot for a look back at a way of life that we shall never see again and my thanks to Mrs Elliot for her delicious scones.

Last week I mentioned a trip to Cornwall. I forgot to mention a serious defect in Cornish habits. Like Northumberland, Cornwall is a famous stock rearing area and yet the average Cornish butcher seems incapable of producing good beef. I was taken out to lunch at an hotel and chose beef off the joint. The joint looked good, but the meat was inedible. It had obviously not been hung properly. A Northumbrian butcher who did not hang his meat would soon be out of business. On my return to the North, I consulted my mother, who struggled with Cornish butchers for a fair slice of her life, she said that ‘twas ever thus – the Cornish do not hang their meat. In this they are as one with the French and the Irish. I suppose it must be something to do with the Celtic fringe. I once had the honour of judging at the Royal Dublin Show (I do not know if it is still Royal, but it was then) and lunched in the Judges’ Dining Room. I chose beef. It came with a mountain of boiled potatoes and tinned peas. The beef was burned black and I am only exaggerating a little when I say that I could have resoled my boots with it. I could not get my knife into it. But, I was told, that this was the way the Irish like their beef, so it was not for me to complain. I remember thinking that this was a poor advertisement for one of Ireland’s major export products. There is nothing wrong with Irish or Cornish beef on the hoof – it is just that the slaughtered carcase is murdered by the bighted butchers. Stick to the pasties in Cornwall, is my advice. I love a good Cornish pasty.

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NEWCASTLE JOURNAL - 9.4.04

To Cornwall – the land where I was bred and buttered. The purpose of my visit was to speak at the East Cornwall Hunt Dinner. I would not normally travel such a distance to do something that terrifies me, but it was Cornwall and the man who asked me was a man I have known all my life – we came from the same tiny village on the Fowey River. It used to a dear little village and totally self sufficient, with all its needs contained in house – blacksmith, baker, shop, no less than six cider presses and four farms. Its main link with the outside world was a one-coach branch line; to catch a bus, you had to walk three steep, uphill miles. The branch line has now gone, but it hardly matters, as there are now no aboriginal people left in the village. It has become a geriatric ward for people from London and Birmingham, who are all multi vehicled. They all wear fisherman’s hats and garnseys to show how local they are. It is the same sad old story that is being repeated all over Britain – the Abos are priced out of their own age-old breeding grounds. My old friend had worked all his life as a Farrier and a very good one too. He managed to buy a derelict farm on the edge of Bodmin Moor and has done it up quite wonderfully (helped by the fact that he has his own granite quarry on the farm).

It was a full house for the dinner, which was very well done and I must say that the audience was wonderful and laughed in all the right places. A special day’s hunting had been laid on for the next day, out on Bodmin Moor. I would like to be able to wax lyrical about the beauties of the Moor, but, as it was shrouded in fog, all I could see was the next granite boulder, with which the Moor is studded – the ones I could not see, I ran into (I had been lent a quad). As I was going to Cornwall, which is kissed by the Gulf Stream, and there fore has a sub-tropical climate, I had left my thick clothes in Northumberland. This was mistake. Bodmin Moor has its own special climate. Many people asked me if the Moor was similar to the Cheviots? I said that as far as I could see (not far) it was not, but it did seem to have a very similar climate – how I longed for my thick coat and waterproof breeks. It was dreich. Perhaps it was fortunate that there was little or no scent. If hounds had really run, it would have been impossible to keep in touch. However, that is hunting. Apart from the hypothermia, I thoroughly enjoyed my visit.

I suppose I cannot really blame Virgin trains for having a window shot out with an air-rifle in the purlieus of Birmingham, although I suspect the perpetrator to have been a disgruntled former passenger. The chaos that ensued when we had to swap trains at New Street had to be seen and heard to be believed, especially as contradictory instructions had the mob rushing from one end of the platform to the other and then all trying to get on the wrong train and having to be shooed off again. Ah well; all part of the rich tapestry of life, through which Virgin trains run like a golden thread.

There came a strange tapping noise on the window of my office, which perplexed me somewhat, until I found the cause. A pair of Blackbirds has nested for some years in a bush below the window. This year they discovered their own reflections in the window and decided that these must be intruders coming to pinch their nesting site. The occupiers would stand for hours on the windowsill trying to fight off the squatters. Since my return from the West all has been quiet, so I assume that the hen is now sitting, victorious, on her eggs.

Gleanies (Guinea Fowl) are very common on Cornish Farms. They are very good eating – a fact with which all foxes heartily concur. One of my hosts had a flock of gleanies, but the foxes used to mop them up when they strayed into the fields until there was only one left, so what he has done (clever this) is to have several wooden cut outs of gleanies made and painted. These now stand on the lawn beside the house and the remaining gleany spends all the daylight hours with the cut outs – as do the Rhode Island Reds. I have never seen this done before, but there you go – you learn something new every day.

Cornwall is bursting with wildflowers and the Rosydandrons (as an Irish friend calls them) and Camellias are in full bloom. Spring is sprung. Northumberland is threatening snow and sleet on high ground – it would not be Spring up here without a ‘lambing storm’.

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