A photograph of the Stockton Annual Crusader Camp near Great Ayton in 1970. The Stockton Crusaders were a Christian boys youth organisation which met on Sunday afternoons at Stockton Baptist Tabernacle.
Photograph and details courtesy of Ian Bell.
Picture Stockton Archive
A Pictorial History of Stockton-on-Tees
Picture Stockton Archive 
I was in the crusaders in the forties, run by Alwyn and Geoffrey Harland at their office on the high Street and on Finkle Street. The summer camp was at Low Mill in Farndale, it’s still one of my favourite places. We slept in the village hall and lived on toast and porridge. The best days of my life.
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I was in the Crusaders in the 1960’s and we met in Dovecot Street. As well as ‘Rip’ Kirby the other leaders I remember were Dave Wilson, Alwyn Harland and Alan ‘Dizzy’ Bowman. Dizzy was interested in railways and used to take some of us trainspotting in a beat-up land rover and also an old van with no seats in the back. The summer camp was always a highlight and I recall going to East Ayton near Scarborough and Whorlton near Barnard Castle. We travelled there on a Stockton corporation double decker.
Nice to see messages from Colin Buckley, who lived in the same road, and also Bob Easby.
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I attended some of these meetings in the 60s, but not at the tabernacle. If my memory serves me correctly, it was somewhere in Dovecot Street in the vicinity of the Friends’ Meeting House. Most of us went there so we could go to the football sessions in midweek. The leader, I recall, was a guy called ‘Rip’ Kirby.
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I also attended the crusader meetings on a Sunday afternoon or a short time in the early sixties and can confirm the meetings were held probably upstairs in the friends meeting house, certainly next to what is now the Dovecote Arts Centre
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If it is the same Rip Kirby he worked in R&D at Head Wrightsons. When I worked for him we had to make a scale model of a cupola for melting plg iron which we had difficulty lighting. He asked me to look into from the top to ascertain if anything was happening, at that moment a flame shot straight up and singed all my hair at my forehead. It was my treasured Tony Curtis fringe which most of us sported at the time. He was a great larger than life character and was full of apologies for the incident.
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