For 32 years a teacher at King James I Grammar School, and the man who tried to teach the column the forward roll, Lez Rawe has received due recognition with the MBE.

THOUGH the attempt inevitably ended in an ungainly heap on the gym mat, the persevering Lez Rawe deserved a medal for trying to teach me the forward roll in the first form. All these years later he finally has his MBE, services to the community if not to the clumsy. "The MBE's a lot better than the NBG," he muses.

It was a recognition which almost went unrecognised for all that, the New Year honour gazetted as John Leslie Rawe and thus almost pseudonymously subsumed amid the small print.

"They call me John Rawe at the hospital and I still have to think twice," says Lez. "If no-one else gets up, I know it must be me."

Rawe deal? Not while there's an old boys' network...

He was Lez, Lez with a great Zorro among zeds, even back in those wet eared days at King James I Grammar School in Bishop Auckland. He's Lez even now in the phone book, was Lez to his parents, although it almost didn't work out that way.

"They couldn't decide what to call me, so they put some of the possible names into a hat and democratically pulled out Roland," he says. "My mother said she wasn't having Roland, so that's how I became John Leslie."

He was born in Toft Hill in 1920, attended for seven years the grammar school at which subsequently he taught for 32, left 27 years ago and wonders when he gets to retire.

Now the old school's a community college or some such and last year they named the new dance studio after him. "What a hoot," he says, "I was always far more at home on the football field than the dance floor."

"Two left feet," affirms Betty, his wife of nigh on 62 years.

He played Northern League football and club cricket, was a wartime RAF sergeant and for 51 years, has been an accredited Methodist local preacher on the Bishop Auckland circuit, after a probationary 13 as a "helper".

He formed Bishop Auckland's talking newspaper for the blind, turned half his garage into the studio, and has helped raise countless thousands for charity - not least through the crib which every Christmas, carols outside Morrisons. "I only did what needed to be done," he says, a man practising what he preaches.

On Betty's 75th birthday he was told that he had cancer of the colon and on Christmas Eve five years ago, that he had cancer of the liver, the surgeons who removed two-thirds of the diseased liver never previously having performed the operation on a patient so old.

They not only filmed the surgery, but the tennis match when Lez, aged 81, returned confidently to the courts.

He gave up last year - "those two cancers sorted things out a bit" - but retains his racquet.

Now he and Betty approach their 85th birthdays, she slightly older - "I'll be a toy boy for a month," he says - the MBE unexpected icing on the cake.

The letter was marked OHMS and confidential and one or two other things, rather like his call-up papers had been. "I thought they must have the wrong feller," says Lez.

"We didn't even tell the bairns," says Betty. "We didn't want them to be disappointed if it wasn't Lez after all."

His nominators, he discovers, were "three close friends" whom he declines to identify. His diary remains full, his health "good enough for a year or two yet".

Still lean and athletic, one of life's ready rollers, he could still be a punitive hand with the size ten gym shoe, supposes that he if he taught today he'd end up in jail.

"I enjoyed the school and I enjoyed my job, but I'd like to think I could do things better if I had my time again," he says.

Fast forward, the MBE will be presented in the spring. If ever a man deserved a medal, it's Lez Rawe.

DE-TRAINED at North Road, now £3.10 from Bishop, we enjoyed a pleasant couple of pints - and a little innocent earwigging - at the Railway Tavern in Darlington, opened in 1827 and reckoned the first pub in the world to bear the name.

The only female present had to leave to clean out the "animals" - three rats, a snake, a tarantula and a scorpion.

The scorpion was a bit of a bad tempered beggar and had particularly to be avoided when it stamped its foot; the snake was six feet long, called Sylvia and was lovely. All human life in this column, and now the other sort as well.

ANOTHER unheralded MBE, our flamboyant old friend the Rev Malcolm Stonestreet - described in the John North column 30 years ago as looking like a cross between Tom Jones and Len Fairclough - was also among the New Year honoured.

Malcolm, usually dubbed "dynamic" by The Northern Echo and by Another Paper as "a rural godfather in the nicest sense", was Vicar of Askrigg, in Wensleydale, for 14 years until 1982.

He also established the Askrigg Foundation, offering work for locals - some of them making Wombles on a sub-contract - and bunkhouse beds for visitors. "It's no good going on about all sorts of holy stuff if people can't afford to live here," he once said.

His MBE was for community work in the Eskdale area of Cumbria, from which parishes the old lad has recently retired.