JOURNALIST and spy catcher Chapman Pincher, who died last week aged 100, had several times featured hereabouts – not least after catching a British record rainbow trout, 20lb 5oz, when he was 91.

The Northern Echo:

“It was a series of flukes, typical of a life which has been one long lucky streak,” he told the column.

Then known as Harry, Pincher was a Darlington Grammar School boy whose father managed the Theatre Royal, owned a couple of sweet shops – “I used to stuff myself sick with chocolate” – and later ran the Comet pub in Hurworth Place.

Over the years we’d recorded his prowess both at school cricket – “mostly ducks, but once a glorious 23”– and at the debating society.

School magazines recorded that he lost the proposals that “Masters really do know more than boys”

and, no less surprisingly, that silent films were better than talkies, but was victorious in opposing the motion that prefects should have fags.

The late Denis Towlard, a Queen Elizabeth Grammar School contemporary from Thornaby, kindly explained that “fags” was unlikely to have referred to a clandestine Woodbine behind the bike shed.

Similarly illicit, but probably not publicly debated at the QE, Pincher’s memoirs also revealed that – “never one to miss an opportunity”

– he had lost his virginity at 13 after finding the housemaid “in an inviting position” in his bedroom.

The exercise was furtively repeated over many months. Even then, said Pincher, he appreciated the value of keeping a secret.

HE’D fished enthusiastically as a youngster, on the Tees across the road from the pub, his first catch a quarter pound roach.

“There was always someone coming in to see if I was going rook shooting or ferreting or fishing. My childhood couldn’t have been more idyllic,” he’d recalled back in 2005.

The rainbow trout was landed on the River Kennet, near his grand home in Berkshire.

Outside it, a notice warned that the occupants were “a lovely lady and a grumpy old man”.

Wearing waders, he was in the middle of the river. “I was just amazed at its size. I knew it was quite long, but I had no idea of its depth.

“Fortunately for me and unfortunately for the fish, it insisted on going upstream and got caught up in lots of weed.

It took me 100 yards upstream, against the current, but it tired itself out.” The trout, suitably smoked, made a starter for 26 guests at a dinner party.

A fortnight after the column revealed that it wasn’t just mole catching at which Pincher was adept, he hooked a page in the Mail to write about the one that didn’t get away.

“We fishermen are modest about our achievements, so I have remained silent until today,” he wrote.

The column supposed it to be journalistic licence. “At 91,” we added, “you’re probably entitled to it.”

THE archive also reveals that Pincher, himself a keen shot, contributed in 1989 to the autobiography of Sir Joseph Nickerson, who owned large shooting estates in Swaledale, but may better be remembered for his part in an unfortunate incident in Teesdale five years earlier, when inadvertently peppered by William Whitelaw.

Willie was mortified, Sir Joseph gracious. Captain Mark Phillips, another contributor to the autobiography, wrote of Sir Joseph’s renowned hospitality – which recalls another incident, back in Swaledale in the 1970s.

It was the beaters’ end-of-season bash at the Buck Hotel in Reeth.

The column, the most improbable of shotgun marriages, found itself invited and turned up with a photographer.

Trouble was, no one had told the aristocratic Sir Joseph, who – among much else – owned the Cherry Valley Duck company in Lincolnshire. He appeared at the ballroom door, summoned a flunkey, ordered that we be “sent off with something for our trouble”.

If you can’t join ’em, beat it, we bagged two Cherry Valley duckling vouchers instead.

WAY back in 1989, Pincher had written to Hear All Sides – his letter headed “Mystery of the x-ray woman” – seeking help with a new book, one of the 38 he was to write.

He recalled a fairground act at Darlington Carnival, circa 1930, at which a fully clothed woman was subject to what the barker insisted were x-rays.

“No screen separated her from the audience. There was a loud whirring from behind the curtain and slowly the woman’s clothes, hair and skin disappeared into a fuzzy outline while all her bones, pink with blood in them, became clearly visible.

“After two or three minutes, the whirring ceased, the bones faded and the clothing and features slowly reappeared.”

Eminent scientists had assured Pincher that x-rays would have killed her. Later he’d read in the Echo that the sideshow had been banned – in Sunderland, he thought – for being too dangerous.

“If it was a trick, it was the best I ever saw,” added Pincher, himself something of a man of mystery.

Former Showmen’s Guild chairman John Culine can shed little light, irradiated or otherwise. “Before the war they used to have a whole row of that sort of thing at the Town Moor Hoppings, lion tamers and all sorts,” he says.

John, meanwhile, hopes to publish before the end of the year a history – “dressed up as a novel” – of his Spennymoorbased fairground family.

What goes around comes around, as a showman might suppose? “It mightn’t be a Chapman Pincher,” he says, “but I’m hoping that lots of people will enjoy it.” THE Daleside Inn (nee Nicky- Nack guest house) is at Croxdale, barely a mile from the Culines’ permanent pitch. It was there last Friday that mourners raised a toast to the marvellous Sam Stoker.

Durham Crematorium had overflowed, too, Sam’s coffin sprinkled with holy water. “I’m sorry it can’t be anything stronger,” said Fr Simon Weymes.

The Backtrack column has recorded Sam’s passing, peacefully while watching the test match and with a winning betting slip in his pocket.

He’d played Minor Counties cricket for Durham, been a senior man at Durham University, loved – in no particular order – family, friends, fags, beer, whisky, cricket and the horses. A Browney boy originally, he’d walked with kings, but (as Mr Kipling had hoped) never lost the common touch.

Mark, his son, observed in his eulogy that his dad had drunk three times more ale than anyone else, smoked four times as many tabs and ate more saturated fat than all of the rest of us put together.

The theme was picked up from the reading by Fr Weymes. The place prepared in heaven, he said, would have a bottle of beer, a packet of fags and a pile of ironing. Sam was very good at ironing.

Mark also recalled that his dad had wanted “one hell of a send-off ”.

Though Sam might have raised an eyebrow at the Coffee Republic stall dispensing from the pub car park – should coffee be allowed at wakes?

– it’s much to be hoped that we gave him one.