IT was 1974 and may have been a quiet day, as inevitably happened when responsible for five self-starting columns each week.

What was it like, we wondered back then, to live with the surname Nutter?

Almost half a century later, the former Mrs Kathleen Nutter has been in touch again to provide an update. “Bloody horrible,” she says.

“When I played bingo I wouldn’t even write my name on the back of the card, as you were supposed to, in case I won and they called it out. I’d have died.”

Back then we’d also spoken to Darlington golf professional Mike Nutter, who took an opposing view. The name, we speculated, might owe something to King Canute.

The Northern Echo: Mike Nutter

Darlington golf pro Mike Nutter with Henry Cooper

These days the internut knows better. The most popular theory is that Nutter is simply a corruption of the Middle English word for a goat herd though others recall that a “notere” was a clerk or scribe.

Notable Nutters have included a bishop, a cricketer, the mayor of Philadelphia, a film director and (perhaps more appropriately) one of the Pendle witches. Save for the golfer, The Northern Echo library gives shelter to just one, and he was chief environmental health officer of Teesdale District Council.

Kathleen – now 78 and in Leeholme, near Bishop Auckland – wasn’t always a raving Nutter, of course. “I must have been madly in love to have taken on a name like that,” she says though, even then, they thought about changing it by deed poll.

“It was 1963 and would have cost about £17. We couldn’t afford it,” she says.

After divorcing she legally changed to that of her partner, later her husband Peter, who died recently. Now her name is Mudd.

“I remember the solicitor saying that Mudd was even worse, but it wasn’t. Someone else said it could have been worse and could have been Shufflebottom, but there’s nothing worse than Nutter.”

Fred, one of her sons, changed his name to Mason. Gary, another son, is a builder from Ferryhill and very happy to be a Nutter – though his own son John, a world travelled tattoo artist from Seaham, changed his name to Anderton. “I think it was the name on his guitar,” says his dad, who’s 54.

Gary insists that he’s had no problems. “It depends upon the character, I can see fun in most things. There were maybe odd times but I was just a Nutter, that was my name. I have two other sons who are also quite happy with it. I’m quite proud to be a Nutter.”

Back to his mum. “He must be mad,” she says.

The Northern Echo: Faerie Deane

RUMMAGING amid memories of his youth, John Lampard in Wolsingham discovers a surreptitious document from his days, 1948-53, at Bishop Auckland Grammar School. It was the column’s alma mater, too.

Called The Faerie Deanes – a nod to the Faerie Queene, an epic 16th century poem by Edmund Spenser – it chiefly concerns Edward Deans, a headmaster who might most kindly be described as of the old school and, more pertinently, as terrifying.

Neddy Deans both walked and ruled with a stick, not usually the same one, and made a great impression upon many.

The poem – ingenious and lengthy, though by no means as long as Spenser’s – is sub-titled “Eddie’s progress, being the first of a series of complaints and protests against an administration of oppression.” One of many verses reads:

Enter ye notte the cancred town,

Or the Mount School wall yfere,

And visit notte the Gaunless faire

Or else thy backside will be saire.

The title page adds that it was “Published by certain democratic elements in this school and printed, on their behalf, anonymously.”

History, perhaps mercifully, fails to record whether Neddy Deans got to the bottom of the matter. Or, indeed, to that of its authors.

THE piece a couple of weeks back on former Sunderland South MP Chris Mullin, now a successful writer and enthusiastic gardener, recalled his modesty about any achievements while a junior minister in the Labour government.

A chapter in Hinterland, his autobiography, is called A Little Light Governing. At the Department of the Environment, he suggests, his greatest claim to fame was trying to cut leylandii bushes down to size.

Fellow columnist and ardent environmentalist Harry Mead believes that Mullin is being too self-effacing. It was he, Harry believes, who steered the bill banning speed boars and jet skiers – “hooligans to all true lovers of the Lake District” – from Windermere.

“Restoring tranquillity to England’s largest natural lake was one of the great environmental decisions of our time.”

No more than 10pmh, we have put this to the ex-MP, who now lives in north Northumberland. “I was indeed particularly proud of that,” he concedes. “The speed boaters were one of the mightiest vested interests I ever came across, exceeding even the fox hunters and the Masons, though there may be some overlap.”

That it fell to him, says Mullin, was because his “many superiors” had all previously expressed a public view. “I came to it with an open mind.”

BISHOP Auckland MP Helen Goodman, one of the opposition Brexit brigade, hoped in the Commons last week that departure from the EU might mean more bird-friendly street lighting. Right now, she told the House, the poor things were being kept awake and “had no energy left to mate.” Laughter ensued. Sadly, tireless investigation has so far failed to identify the MP who muttered that he, too, knew the problem.

...AND finally, that prolific writer Peter Mullen – pastor of this parish – has a new book called Memoirs of a City of London Vicar, chronicling his time in the Square Mile.

In it, he recalls being summoned to a nursing home where an ailing and elderly resident was expected to die within 24 hours.

Peter did what he could, offered the appropriate prayers and blessing but was nonetheless surprised to receive a call from the man’s wife to the effect that he was sitting up in bed and asking form something to eat.

“Thank you for coming,” she told the thaumaturge, “but please don’t come again.”