Burning bright, the lady with the railway lamp....

MARJORIE STEPHINSON

Martyn meets Marjorie Stephinson, in the second half of Martyn’s chat with the famous broadcasting couple.

HAD Marjorie Helen Lofthouse had her own way — and it is difficult to imagine an occasion when this wasn’t the case — this formidable woman would never have met her soulmate Ken Stephinson.

For the teenage Marjorie was determined on a career on the boards, with RADA (the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts) on the horizon and but for the intervention of her equally formidable mother her life story would have been so different.

The French have a quite wonderful way of pronouncing formidahblay which imparts far more meaning into the word that we staid Brits could ever achieve.

I have chanced on a number of women in my life for whom this description would be applied but none have had quite the sheer fizzing charm of the Lady with the Railway Lamp who hosts charity garden parties for upwards of 200 in the former stockyards of Saddleworth Station.

The former waiting rooms and booking offices — a victim of Dr Beeching’s slashing axe in the early 1960s — are now her home and the gardens which were once rusting rail lines and hulking sleepers are Marjorie’s pride and joy.

Yet it could all have been so very different . . .

I need to transport you back a few years, to when Ken was a producer for the BBC, and had been moved to Oxford Road, Manchester, from his home town of Sunderland, and Marjorie had given up her teaching career to become a radio announcer (I have deliberately disdained the use of the word personality for fear of retribution).

Ken was living out of a suitcase and desperately searching for a home that geographically fitted with his need to work in the city yet was close enough to Leeds to entice Ms Lofthouse.

With her cultured tones and impeccable vowels, Marjorie, having been discovered by Radio Durham, was now a feature on Metro Radio in Gateshead and had started working for Radio Leeds.

Ken had begun a house search in Saddleworth and viewed a property close by the Navigation pub on the Wool Road close to the Diggle turn off. The owner, sadly, had changed his mind about selling but suggested a property close by which his sister was selling. . . Ken walked up the lane and came upon the railway station, converted into a dwelling, and was immediately inspired.

But he had considerable reservations that Marjorie would feel the same and it was with some trepidation that he walked her up the short pathway for her first view.

“I asked her to keep an open mind, that’s all,” recalls Ken of that first journey and it took all of his considerable powers of persuasion to get Majorie to accept even a short sojourn.

And so began a lifetime love affair with the property for the couple who have lived there for 33 years.

That was Ken’s second success for around the time he was settling into his new home he was planning a major programme for the BBC. He was asked to work on a project on railways of the world and was offered one of four projects, choosing, much to Marjorie’s chagrin, Great Britain.

“There was so much of the world to see,” says Majorie, still clearly exasperated after all these years, but Great Britain did give railways to the world and as a case study this was the classic story.

Ken needed a front man, a narrator, and having heard former Monty Python genius Michael Palin opining on his car radio that his “obsession” was railways Ken set about persuading the Palin, who has since become the accepted authority on travel programmes, to take up the pivotal anchor role.

“It wasn’t easy, he was so committed with other projects, but the subject was also a fascination and I had him hooked. He kept saying ‘No’ he was too committed but then, out of the blue, came a call from Michael saying he would accept the commission so I took a contract to his London home there and then.”

And so began a period of huge professional and personal satisfaction for a pair of peerless people who have made Saddleworth their home and whom the denizens of these valleys — notoriously wary of ‘comer inners’ — have taken to their hearts.

As Ken’s career mushroomed with series of stunning successes, Marjorie’s broadcasting flowered in parallel.

She began working for HTV West before rising to national prominence as a regular presenter of “Pebble Mill at One” on BBC 1, one of the national network’s flagship programmes and as one of the four-person panel of regular hosts her profile rose in stellar fashion.

“Jan Leeming had left and I had an audition and got the job,” Marjorie with as much controlled glee, almost a lifetime on, as she probably exhibited at the time. Such enthusiasm is a joy to behold and it is little wonder she was such an outstanding success.

Her list of successes is a veritable thesaurus of talent but her most visible work — if such a word can be attributed to radio — was surely “Women’s Hour”, a programme which has survived everything that this modern PC world can throw at it.

Yet such is the lady’s understated way, she never once mentioned what must have been two of her proudest moments, to be named runner-up in the Sony Radio Awards for the documentary “Leslie”, or receiving the MBE in 1990 for helping raise the profile of Britain’s small business community through of another of her myriad of production successes.

As I mentioned earlier, they never worked together. Their successes, and they were legion, were in parallel but they did work on similar projects, although entirely independently.

One such involved coverage of the troubles in Northern Ireland. Both spent time in that battle-worn province and on one occasion Majorie was having dinner in the officers’ mess, ahead of a tour of the city the following day, when the garrison was attacked.

“People were trying to get over the wall,” she recalled in the understated way with which Marjorie seems to treats just about everything. “We carried on eating our dinner.”

On returning home to Saddleworth Ken took delivery of her suitcase and noticed it felt rather heavy, and there was bulky object protruding ominously into the fabric.

Ken carried the suitcase into the garage and called the local police. “They sent along an officer, a young man who looked about 14 but was obviously older,” said Ken. “I asked him if anyone else was coming and he said ‘no., just me’.

“When he went towards the garage I couldn’t possibly let go alone so we went together and gingerly opened the case.

“We knelt opposite each other and began feeling our way into the case, without actually lifting the lid and our hands met on a wire. I asked him to pull it very gently. He did so and it came loose . . .”

“It was my Carmen rollers,” laughed Marjorie with a casual intervention of such stunning timing it is little wonder she was a such a broadcasting icon.

The pair had a bank of anecdotes that would have kept me there all day, all told with a gentleness of spirit that should be bottled, distilled and dispensed to the troublespots of the world.