In the next part of our ‘Stories from St John’s’ series, Tim Gray, organ scholar at St John’s from 1961-64, recalls the three happy years he spent at the college reading Classics and Music.
I was at St John’s for the three academic years 1961-1964, reading Classics and Music, and my subsequent career has been entirely in Music, teaching, lecturing and performing. My main instrument is the organ, and I was Organ Scholar at St John’s during my time in Durham, having lessons with the then organist of the Cathedral, Conrad Eden, eccentric, but very pleasant when you got to know him, and very helpful to me.
I spent three happy years living in the basement of Cruddas House, able to look out on to the river bank, with a coal fire to keep warm in winter! The coal shed was outside on the basement pavement. I remember particularly the colour of the bath water, full of peat, and a dirty brown, which left tide-marks around the bath when emptied! I see the tall chimneys are still there, but not, I suspect, the coal fires.
All the mines are gone, and the enormous Cathedral service each year, with the hugely impressive parade of the miners’ banners and bands. I remember being in the cathedral when it was absolutely packed to the doors, and the Dean called to people who were still looking for somewhere to sit, to come up and sit on the altar steps – something I have never seen before or since. Amazing!
And I shall always remember the huge procession of the banners, each with their accompanying party from that particular pit, and the sound of the brass band entering the cathedral, playing, if my memory serves me right, ‘Abide with me’. They were such emotional occasions, even for a raw undergraduate from the south, who had never been near a coalmine before coming to Durham – certainly an education in itself!
The new chapel beside Cruddas House was built in my time, where Harrisons installed a small new organ in the Gallery. I was lucky to be the first person to play it regularly. Sometime after I left came the return to Little St Mary’s as the college chapel, and what was the new chapel became the library, the organ being transferred to Little St Mary’s.
Now 60 years on from my sojourn in Durham, I still have one or two old friends from my time there. This summer, my wife and I moved to a new block of retirement apartments, not far from where we were living in Harrogate, where there is a growing community of similarly older people, and we have settled very well into a lovely apartment, all brand new. A good move, we think, before we become too old to manage such an upheaval again.
Tim Gray – Classics and Music, 1961-1964
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Images by Michael Barker
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