TWICE on Sunday to the village church at Middleton Tyas, the first occasion for the routine service (at which, equally familiarly, the preacher had a pop at the press.)

The second visit was for Professor John Oakley’s illustrated lecture on Flying Officer Peter Pease, a member of one of the great North-East families, killed in the Battle of Britain on September 15, 1940 and buried in the family grave at Middleton Tyas 12 days later. He was 22.

The second occasion draws a rather bigger congregation than the first, including several members of the Pease family. The collective noun may be a pod.

We told the story on August 18. John Oakley, a professor of law at the University of California, had discovered the story of Peter Pease almost accidentally and determined not just to find out more but to salute his heroism.

“I revere this man,” he tells the Middleton Tyas gathering, though as much quickly becomes clear.

His plans for a memorial plaque in St Michael and All Angels Church are on hold, however. The Church (militant here on earth) doesn’t easily allow such things – and certainly no photographic images.

“It seems to be a more complicated thing than I would have imagined,” Prof Oakley tells his audience, diplomatically.

His own images include The Northern Echo photograph of the funeral procession, through the avenue of lime trees to the church. Peter Pease’s sister alone is not in uniform. Patrick Hannay, her husband, had been killed over Dunkirk a few months earlier just three weeks after their marriage.

Seeking more on his subject, Prof Oakley has made five visits to England in the past year. This one has lasted seven weeks. This Sunday, exactly 75 years since they laid Pease to rest, he will again be at his graveside to lay flowers and to leave a framed copy of the proposed plaque.

Immediately thereafter he in turn will fly towards the setting sun. Back home there’s a book to complete on Peter Pease, on his fiancee Diana Maxwell Woosnam and on their friends and comrades in arms.

It will chronicle his belief that, crashing fatally to earth, Flying Officer Pease revved his engines one final time in order to avoid houses below. “I haven’t any contrary evidence, so I choose to believe that Peter was a hero to the last.”

SO the war went on. Nearly three years after Peter Pease died, a Wellington bomber crashed into Fremington Edge, high above Reeth in Swaledale. Two Royal Canadian Air Force crew died in the early hours incident; four recovered from their injuries.

More than 70 years later, there are plans for a plaque in their memory – though opinion’s divided on whether it, too, should be on the Edge or in the centre of the North Yorkshire village.

“Not many people would see it up on Fremington Edge. I’d pay for it myself in the village” insists former parish council chairman James Kendall, just five years old when the Wellington crashed into the hillside.

It was 4.40am on Sunday, May 30, 1943. The bomber crew, based at RAF Skipton-on-Swale near Thirsk, was returning from raids on Wuppertal and were believed to be flying low after becoming disoriented by bad weather.

“All the kids in the village were up there for bits of wreckage, everything from machine guns to bits of Bakelite,” recalls Mr Kendall. “A few days later the policeman came around and took it all off us again.”

Reeth was also the wartime base of a Reconnaissance Corps unit – known as the Reeth Battle School – commanded by Major James Parry, who brought his beagle pack on the train from Kings Cross to Darlington.

The column reported in 2010 that a plaque was finally to be erected to their memory in front of the Burgoyne Hotel – Mr Kendall’s preferred location for the second memorial.

“Most people in Reeth know more about the Hartlepool monkey than they do about what happened here in the war,” he said at the time.

The parish council is expected again to discuss the plaque at its meeting next Monday. “I’m sure we’re in favour of it, it’s just a matter of where,” says Mr Kendall’s wife Jennifer, now herself a councillor.

Sgt Fred Dingwall and Flt Lt Edwin Blight were killed and are buried in Ripon cemetery. Their plane, says an aviation website, was “totally smashed”. Small pieces of wreckage are still being found.

So why has commemoration taken so long? “It’s like everything else, everyone thinks that someone else is doing it,” says James Kendall. “If we don’t do something soon, there’ll be no one who remembers it at all.”

THE following day’s Echo had nothing of the tragedy on Fremington Edge. Like most others back then, the four-page paper accentuated the positive.

Five U-boats sunk in ten days (“Navy’s happy return to Dunkirk”), Wuppertal battered, Japanese annihilated.

Britain’s problems were reflected in little more than a Hear All Sides letter about the shortage of bicycle inner tubes and another, from a gentleman in Darlington, demanding to know how much petrol and rubber were wasted on Wings for Victory parades.

He needed to be careful. On page 3 we reported that Morris Traynier, aged 43 and from North Cowton, had pleaded guilty before Richmond magistrates to charges of making statements causing alarm or despondency.

Mr Traynier had been overheard saying that Britain was done for and that Mussolini was “the genius of the age.”

What may really have condemned him, however, was the observation that he’d “like to be the first bloke to put a rope round Churchill’s neck.” For careless talk he got three months.

THE column two weeks ago mourned the death of former Witton Park lad Ray Gibbon – policeman, politician and one-time Mayor of Durham.

Former Durham City Council leader Fraser Reynolds recalls the night that PC Gibbon was called to a punch-up at Framwellgate Moor Workmen’s Club, the combatants outside and with jackets off.

Both were from Witton Gilbert, where Ray lived. Rather than summon reinforcements, Ray stepped between them, said that if he had to sort it out he’d probably end up in hospital and suggested that since neither would want that to happen, there was a bus home in ten minutes.

The cooling off period was brief. “Aye, Ray, you’re right,” said one of the pugilists, shook the polliss’s hand and headed for the bus stop.

Fraser loves the story. “It sums up Ray’s ability to calm down things down, both in the council chamber and in life in general.”

THERE’S also a kind note from Margaret Gibbon, Ray’s widow. He was meaning, says Margaret, to ask about the phrase “My eye and Peggy Martin.” Well he might have done.

Though it’s possible that she was simply a second cousin of Sweet Fanny Adams, the lady – originally Betty Martin – has been in print since at least 1781. “Among the most puzzling phrases in the language,” concedes one of the etymological websites.

The most popular theory suggests that English sailors overheard the Spanish enemy invoking St Martin of Tours – “Mihi beate, Martine” – and lost something in the translation. St Martin is the patron saint of innkeepers and, curiously, of reformed drunkards.

All my eye and Peggy Martin? A way to remember a lovely man, anyway.