Music, pictures and words will raise funds for The Witham, in Barnard Castle

DALES vet Neville Turner is inviting supporters to an evening of music, pictures and words to help raise money for The Witham.

Mr Turner will present a selection of the most popular musical finales from the presentations he has given during the past four decades.

Now retired, he has presented hundreds of slide shows to dozens of different groups throughout Teesdale and beyond based on his working life and his love nature.

He carried a camera with him wherever he went and was able to capture the life of a vet, hill farmer, and the natural history and landscape of the dale.

The slide shows evolved as time went on and he incorporated a musical finale into each of them.

For many years these musical items were “hit and miss” affairs, because they depended on Mr Turner learning by heart each bar of music and the precise order of slides.

He would run the music on a cassette recorder and switch slides at precise points in the musical score so that with a bit of luck, the last slide coincided with the last note of the music.

“The musical finales were always a great success, and with the advent of digital imaging and laptop computers, they became much more refined,” he said.

“There was no need to learn the notes and change the slides manually. All this could be programmed into the computer.”

For the past 21 years, Mr Turner has been given a global platform on which to give his presentations. In 1996 he was invited to give his slide shows on the QE2 on an Atlantic crossing from New York to Southampton.

“Speaking to 30 friendly faces at Stainton and Streatlam Women’s Institute is one thing, but speaking to a few hundred strangers on a luxury cruise ship is another,” he said. The engagement must have gone well, as he was invited to repeat his performance on another QE2 crossing of the Atlantic.

This was the start of a long and varied career as a cruise-ship lecturer.

Mr Turner said he really enjoyed telling his audiences about the beauty and culture of the dale, and the audiences, in turn, loved hearing about Teesdale.

He said he was delighted to accept an invitation to do a fundraiser for The Witham and came up with the idea to present a selection of popular musical finales.

While most of the shows have a local connection, some have an international flavour, incorporating pictures from his cruises to St Petersburg, Oslo, Barcelona, Madeira, and Corsica. The music, too, is varied. Winter in the Dale is accompanied by the appropriate part of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.

Listen to the Band features pictures of Middleton Band, and goes well with a rousing version of Rossini’s William Tell Overture.

A World Tour in Fruit and Vegetables features colourful markets, and runs along with a lively ragtime tune played by the Chris Barber Jazz Band.

“Since there will be lots of anecdotes about my travels, and tales of how some of these slide sequences came about, I have called the show, Music, Pictures, and Words,” he said.

It takes place at 7.30pm on Wednesday, October 4. Tickets are £5.