Baldasera Cup – stuff of legend and intrigue-is resurrected

 

From the archive, first published Tuesday 22nd Nov 2005

 

Much excitement in East Durham: the Baldasera Cup has been resurrected, restored and stands atop Dave Hasting’s television.

Though contested only by primary schools in Wheatley Hill and Thornley, the cup engendered all the passion of Sunderland v Newcastle, says Dave. There’s even a whiff of intrigue, but we shall return to that matter shortly.

The Baldasera family is the stuff of local legend, too. The column has told before how Arsenal player and future Darlington manager Eddie Carr took the great Denis Compton for a coffee at Arrisimo Baldasera’s café in Wheatley Hill, the queue seeking autographs stretching halfway to Shotton Colliery.

Dave Hastings was  member of the victorious Wheatley Hill side which in 1981 took the cup to Arrisey’s shop on the way back to school. “The great man kindly filled it with champagne, leaving 11 slightly inebriated ten-year-olds to go back to get changed.”

Angelo Baldasera, then 19, left a small village near Rome around 1900 to work for his uncle’s ice cream business in Hartlepool. He pushed a cart round the streets before himself opening an ice cream shop in Musgrave Street.

Later, says Margaret Hedley of Wheatley Hill History Club, Angelo realised that the East Durham miners were making good money and daily took a ten gallon barrow by train from Hartlepool to Thornley.

Eventually he opened shops in Wheatley Hill, Thornley and Shotton Colliery – “a really nice and generous man,” says Margaret.

Angelo had eight sons and two daughters. The boys are all dead, the girls – oldest and youngest of his children – survive. Rosalinda, 93, has long been Sister Loretta and is a nun at a convent in Gosforth, Mary, in her 70’s is still in Thornley.

Six of the boys worked in the family business. Joe became a consultant anaesthetist in Sunderland, his son’s a GP in Houghton-le-Spring.

“They were an extraordinary family and loved East Durham,” says Mary Baldasera, Joe’s widow. “I’ve never heard anyone say a bad word against any of them.”

Arrisimo, Arrisy in those parts, gave the Baldasera Cup to mark the Queen’s coronation in 1953. It was the most prestigious schools competition in the area, insists Dave.

It continued until 1958, then lay in a storeroom until restarted in the 1970’s by Alan Jackson – “widely regarded as the greatest teacher Wheatley Hill ever had.”

A few years later, says Dave, Thornley RC school were removed from the competition for “strange and still unknown reasons.” Left foot forward, perhaps someone can explain the mystery of faith.

At any rate, Dave and former Wheatley Hill team-mate Gary Anderson went on the trail of the trophy, found it in the back of a cupboard at Wheatley Hill school and have returned it to its original glister.