Poetically intrigued, the column discovers a patrician Dean of Durham, who far from being a one-poem wonder, was the author of hymns and detective stories and reputedly the first cricket novel.

IT is not just because of its first word - though the first word is mightily persuasive - that we are entranced by a poem forwarded by Tim Grimshaw in North Shields.

Called "In Shabby Streets", it was written by CA Alington to mark Coronation Day 1937 and formed the preface to the Shell Guide to Co Durham, published 43 years later.

Tim's impressed, too. "Was he a one poem wonder?" he asks, and before attempting to answer that question, let us consider In Shabby Streets in all its refulgent glory.

Shildon, Spennymoor, Shiney Row,

Pelaw, Pity Me, Seldom Seen,

What have you got today to show

What have you done for your King and Queen?

The flags are flimsy, the streets are shabby,

With mean low houses of cold grey stone;

But which of the guests that throng the Abbey,

Paid for his flag with a meal foregone?

Paper streamers and cheapest cotton -

Sign enough for the world to know

That you in London are not forgotten

In Shildon, Spennymoor and Shiney Row.

Would you choose the Mall with its crowns and gilding

If you were King, or if you were Queen,

Or a paper flag on a lonely building

In Pelaw, Pity Me, Seldom Seen?

There is something of John Betjeman about it, is there not, though Betjeman was just 31 and Cyril Argentine Alington 64 on the day they crowned King George VI.

Alington was also the cricket-loving Dean of Durham, said by Sir Alec Douglas-Home - his son-in-law - rarely to have processed down the centre aisle of the Cathedral without first considering whether it would take spin.

He also had a penchant for chewing daisies, Durham's choristers commandeered to collect them. "We discovered later they were a mild narcotic, perhaps he had toothache," recalls Alan Oyston, a wartime choir boy at Durham.

The boys got to walk his dogs, called Mu and Pu - "He said it was Mu because it was a gift from the Mothers' Union and that the reason for Pu was obvious, and it was."

Born in 1872, Alington was headmaster of Shrewsbury School from 1908-1916. Neville Cardus, later a legendary cricket writer, became both cricket professional and headmaster's secretary.

Thereafter he became headmaster of Eton from 1917-33 before coming to Durham and remaining until shortly before his 80th birthday.

Alan Oyston recalls a patrician cleric held in high affection by a generation of choristers. "He was a marvellous man, he really was, an aristocrat himself with a lovely aquiline nose, shock of snow white hair and club foot, probably from polio.

"He had a heavy, 15th century cope which is now one of the great treasures of the Cathedral, but Alington used it like a raincoat."

Far from being a one-poem wonder, Alington was a prolific writer of everything from hymns - his best known is Good Christians All, Rejoice and Sing - to detective stories like The Nabob's Jewel and Archdeacons Afloat and a history of Durham Cathedral. He is also reputed to have written the first cricket novel.

Though his son had been killed while serving with the Scots Guards, the scholarly Alington also preached in 1947, in German, to a crowded cathedral of PoWs awaiting repatriation.

"It was a wonderful sermon of reconciliation and hope," recalls Alan Oyston. "Given what had happened to his son, it made me very proud to be associated with the Cathedral."

Dean Alington's portrait still hangs in the study of the present dean, the Very Rev Michael Sadgrove. "I share in the general pride which Durham has for him, his hymns are still sung all over the world," says Dean Sadgrove.

At least three streets - in Durham, Billingham and Newton Aycliffe - are also named after him, as is the Alington House community centre in Durham.

Alington also founded the Friends of Durham Cathedral, its 70th anniversary marked last year with a tribute from Alan Oyston and his fellow 40s' chorister George Hetherington - "we were a bit like Morecambe and Wise," says Alan.

Irreverently, affectionately, inevitably, they called it Nice One Cyril.

IN Spennymoor on the rainy Coronation day of 1937 they entertained 4,000 bairns to tea in their school rooms because it was too wet to go outside. In Shildon, though never republican, they crowned their own king and queen - Mr J Nicholson and Miss Dorothy Bowes.

The following morning's Northern Echo recorded nothing of the flag waving in the other place, however. There wasn't much on which to hang bunting, or many to frequent Seldom Seen.

Among a celebrated tradition of Co Durham place names - Standalone and Notstandalone, No Place, Quaking Houses and Pity Me - Seldom Seen was a hamlet by the banks of the Wear, near the village of Newfield and in the district of Bishop Auckland.

The proximity of rather a lot of sewage works may have had something to do with its limited appearances.

Yet more inconspicuous, Never Seen stood a couple of fields away, prompting a still remembered doggerel among the local bairns:

Seldom Seen and Never Seen

Todhills Bank and Byers Green.

David Simpson, our resident expert on North-East place names, also reckons that there was a Seldom Seen in the parish of Forest and Frith - top end of Teesdale - but that's long disappeared altogether.

A 1950s map of the Bishop Auckland area includes both Seldom Seen and Never Seen, though by the 1960s edition Never Seen had lived entirely up to its name. Seldom Seen was gone a decade later, somehow subsumed by gravel workings if not by gravel ponds.

Further research by John Briggs in Darlington locates a Seldom Seen "community park" near Gateshead and, near Haltwhistle, a caravan park of the same name.

Newfield may have had the original Seldom Seen, however. After Dean Alington of Durham, it has been a pleasure to raise its profile.

MISSIONARY voice unsilenced, Bob Crowe and his troupe of travelling tenors played Hartlepool last Saturday. The audience was 97, which barely covered the cost of posters and flyers.

Bob, Hartlepool lad originally, is undeterred. "I never expected the reception we got. It was like a pop concert at the end, everyone screaming and shouting," he says.

They plan to return next year to both Hartlepool and Spennymoor, where another 90-odd music lovers turned out earlier this year.

"It breaks down barriers," he insists. "There'll be a lot more next time."

THE column played Hartlepool on Monday night, a women's group called the Cameo Club - and while not necessarily shouting and screaming, pretty appreciative, nonetheless. "You're a lot more interesting than the by-election," said one of the number afterwards. You take your compliments where you can.

WHILE the column emeralded around Ireland last week, the cream of the Irish press headed in the opposite direction for Tony Blair's Sedgefield summit with Bertie Ahern.

"Bernard Purcell in Trimdon", said the improbable byline in the Irish Independent, though there was just one touch of what the inky trade calls local colour.

"Mr Blair held an umbrella over Mr Ahern's head and ignored the overpowering smell of silage from a nearby farm."

Farewell then, Laurie Taylor

LAURIE Taylor, once a stylish, energetic and hugely respected feature writer on The Northern Echo and later chief press officer at Tyne Tees Television, has died suddenly, aged 75.

Laurie is probably best remembered hereabouts for his series Taylor's Trails, in which - everything from the Moscow Ballet to Sunderland FC - he joined people at work.

His younger son Simon recalls the occasion when Laurie was on top of the pyramid in the White Helmets motor cycle display team from Catterick when it collapsed, the photographer to blame as usual.

"Dad was all right because there were plenty of people to fall on, but I think there were a couple of broken ankles."

He was also the proud possessor of the world's most extraordinary eyebrows, great hairy caterpillar things of which Shakespeare wrote overwhelmingly in Henry V and inherited by his son and granddaughter.

After working on newspapers in the North-East, Laurie joined the Daily Herald in Manchester before returning to the Echo.

He died at a 75th birthday celebration for long-serving former BBC man Tom Kilgour, with whom he had grown up in Jarrow. He had celebrated his golden wedding in April.

"He was a good friend and a dear man, a hell of a worker and a person who never had a bad word about anyone," says former Tyne Tees colleague George Romaines.

Laurie's funeral in Sunderland on Monday was attended by many former colleagues from written and broadcast journalism, including former Tyne Tees head of religious programmes Mazwell Deas, now reckoned around 90. We will all remember him with great affection.

....and finally, someone has left a copy of a new book called The Ambassadors' Secret, a biography of the painter Hans Holbein. It's not the subject but the author which draws attention, however - some feller called John North. Since painting isn't within this column's frame, it will go to the first art lover to ring (01325) 505085 with Holbein's nationality.