THE speaking circuit is an educational journey and, until I spoke in Hartlepool last week, I had no real appreciation of the vital role played by Scouts and Guides during World War Two.

The Guide International Service and Scout International Relief Service made good use of the practical and organisational skills of Scouts and Guides leaders to serve abroad, often in dangerous places behind the front lines, where they managed refugee camps and distributed food and clothing.

One of those who served with the Guide International Service was the remarkable Evelyn Phillips, now Evelyn Bantoft, who was in the audience last week at the Hartlepool Trefoil Guild, an organisation open to anyone who took the Guide Promise.

Evelyn is 95 now but still a regular at meetings of the guild. She had been a guide leader at St Aidan’s in Hartlepool and saw wartime service in France, Belgium, Holland and Germany. Indeed, she had just arrived in Germany when peace was declared.

“I was originally supposed to go to Greece but our boat got bombed on the way to pick us up,” she told me over a cup of tea.

“It was mainly relief work – giving displaced people food. Mostly, it was watery porridge because they’d had so little to eat that they couldn’t stomach much else to begin with. In Holland, they’d started eating tulip bulbs – that’s how hungry they were.”

Evelyn was among former members of the Guide International Service who were invited to Buckingham Palace, to be honoured by The Queen, a few years ago.

“Oh, it was wonderful,” she said with a big smile.

Evelyn, I salute you.

SOMETHING else I learned last week is that the principles of plumbing have come in extremely handy not just for sorting out non-flushing toilets, but the world of advanced medicine.

Last week, during Children’s Hospice Week, I interviewed Ian Bacon and his wife Angelina, who were the first to be referred to the new Butterwick Children’s Hospice at Stockton back in 1998. Their little boy Matthew died, aged seven, after being cared for at the hospice.

Matthew, of Darlington, had cerebral palsy and one of the conditions he developed was hydrocephalus – fluid on the brain. His dad, Ian, is a time-served plumber and he was proud to inform me that it was a plumber who invented a device for dealing with hydrocephalus.

To be precise, it was a hydraulic engineer called Stanley Wade, a friend of children’s author Roald Dahl, who was the inventor in 1962. Dahl’s son Theo had developed hydrocephalus after a car accident and the legendary writer set Wade the challenge of producing a device to drain fluid from the brain.

Working with neurosurgeon Kenneth Till, they came up with an ingenious “shunt” called the Wade-Dahl-Till (WDT) Valve – and they never accepted a penny profit for an invention that relieved widespread suffering.

A MOMENTOUS week dawns for Darlington’s much-loved Civic Theatre.

On Tuesday night, a gala evening will mark the temporary closure of the theatre for an £11m refurbishment before it reopens in autumn 2017 under its new – yet very old – name of the Darlington Hippodrome.

It will be a loss for a while but the investment – supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund – will be well worth it. Indeed, it’s great news for the town, alongside the soon-to-open multiplex cinema at the heart of the Feetham’s development.

Tomorrow’s gala night – billed as “a glittering evening of live music, comedy, magic, dance and entertainment – will be compered by Christopher Biggins and feature singer Mari Wilson.

Good luck also to The Northern Echo’s “Memories” man Chris Lloyd who will present the story of the theatre’s founder Signor Rino Pepi. Indeed, it was Mr Lloyd who was responsible for The Northern Echo review of my own performance at the theatre in 2012 when I played former Echo editor William Stead in Darlington Operatic Society’s production of Titanic, The Musical.

“Barron’s acting was more wooden than his chair,” went the review. Hopefully, Mr Lloyd will not be sunk by the same kind of cutting judgement.

Oh, and a final congratulations to the staff at the theatre who have worked so hard on giving the old Civic a fitting send-off. They have been particularly wise not to book Ken Dodd, below, for the gala evening – the workmen would never get in to start the facelift.

Can you imagine it?

“Come on, Doddy, time to get off the stage now - we’ve got work to do.”

“Hang on a minute lads - it’s only 2am.”

WITH excitement mounting ahead of the European Foootball Championships, I popped over to see my 84-year-old mum on Teesside last week.

“England are playing a friendly tonight,” she told me.

“Oh, who are they playing?” I asked.

“I think it’s a foreign team,” she replied.

I’M delighted to be hosting a few more shows on BBC Tees, including yesterday’s 12-2pm slot, and last week I was asked to take part in a “presenters’ photoshoot” at the station’s offices in Middlesbrough.

All the presenters had portraits done for use on the BBC Tees website. There was even a make-up girl, who told me that I needed the “second least amount of make-up”.

I was made up!