IT IS now three weeks since the column poked its head over the plum pudding parapet; the new year begins, if not with an apology, then on a prolonged note of regret.

There are four deaths to detail, five had not Fremmie Hutchinson - the veritable Speaker of the Houses of Parliament in Reeth - been sent off so handsomely on the news pages.

Two were dear old friends, a third a coalfield hero whom we knew only by association. The fourth was Ian Hamilton, a former Darlington Grammar School boy who became one of the country's leading literary critics and editors but whose passing would have gone unnoticed save for the vigilance of Tom Dobbin in Durham.

Tom spotted the expansive encomium among The Times obituaries, noted both the range and richness of Mr Hamilton's output and his very considerable thirst and concluded that - in the latter respect, at least - he was a man after the column's happy heart.

There is rather more to Mr Hamilton, but we shall come to it a little later.

FIRST to Arnold Pearson who, after Bomber Command action which won him both the DSO and DFC, gave a lifetime's no less outstanding service to this company's Northallerton office and to local government in North Yorkshire.

The branch office in those days was a cheerless hole above a butcher's shop, the smell of offal only masked by Arnold's cigars but the bleakness banished by his bonhomie.

He not only knew everyone but whom their mothers and grandmothers had married - a Clutterbuck, quite often - and could take half an hour to walk from the office to the Fleece, the sub-office, so multitudinous those anxious to acknowledge him.

"He was forever making funny little notes about people who wanted his help," recalls a former colleague. "He knew everybody and everybody knew him; more importantly, they trusted him."

The Fleece finally gained, just about the only matter on which he was reluctant to hold forth was the gallantry that had helped make him a Squadron Leader among men. As sure as powdered eggs, however, they didn't give those medals away with every fourth packet of chewing gum.

He'd dabbled in newspaper work before the war, returned to the inky trade with such accomplishment that "Tommy Dugdale" - by whom the egalitarian Arnold presumably meant Lord Crathorne - offered him a job on The Times, where he had connections.

He was content to remain in Northallerton, for years prolifically serving both the Northern Echo and the Darlington and Stockton Times until the staffs split, at home and ever helpful in that slaughterman's scullery of an office that under Arnold's all-embracing wing became social club and sanctuary, too.

Among regular visitors was Sir Tim Kitson, then the local MP, feet on the desk and brace of pheasants in a carrier bag. "Arnold treated everyone the same," it's recalled. "He was never overawed by those in high places and never condescending to the little people, either.

"He wasn't a softy, there were those he had no time for, but he was always ready to offer the benefit of the doubt."

He had been a leading county councillor for 30 years, a member of Romanby Parish Council for over 40, chronicled with such impeccable impartiality the proceedings in which he took part that none questioned the double jeopardy in so doing.

He was a reporter, he would say, not a journalist. Reporters told it like it was, though the tale is affectionately also recounted of the time when Arnold didn't tell it at all.

It was the magistrates' court, just before Christmas, a young defendant's first appearance and his family anxiously in attendance. They swore it would be his first and last; Arnold believed them. "Why spoil their Christmas?" he said.

He lived next to Northallerton cricket club, would stroll across the outfield for a pint and a potter round the domino board but, sadly, had been unwell for some time.

He died on New Year's Day, his funeral yesterday in Northallerton parish church. Per ardua ad astra, a bright star for ever.

IAIN Campbell's funeral was at Cheltenham on New Year's Eve, the day's racing on ice notwithstanding the head groundsman's MBE in that morning's honours list.

Iain was an outsize, ebullient and extravagantly generous Scot, who in the 70s and early 80s kept the Nag's Head in Sedgefield with such pride, passion and quirky distinction - and in partnership with Ann, his wife -that for several years it held a deserved place in the Good Pub Guide.

He'd qualified as a nurse, taken himself off to Canada, became personal assistant to John Diefenbaker - the Canadian Prime Minister - returned as an interior design consultant to Whitbread's brewery at Castle Eden before putting his inimitable brand on the Nag's haunches.

His French onion soup has still never been bettered, his steaks were a source of fierce pride and his draught Bass the stuff of late night legend, and of laxatives.

Iain was also an enthusiastic sportsman and helped organise the seriously belated testimonial for Middlesbrough FC greats George Hardwick and Wilf Mannion. Colin and Neil, two of his three sons, were outstanding ice hockey players; Glenn, the eldest, is now a London based photographer for a Japanese newspaper - "Europe region" - but seems to spend much of his time following under-achieved oriental footballers around England in the hope that one day they might get a kick.

Neil's up in the Wynyard world; Colin's in a wheelchair, victim of the merciless MS.

After Sedgefield, Iain and Ann had become stewards of a rowing club by the Thames towpath and had golf clubs in Hertfordshire and in Cheltenham. He was 67 and after the funeral we adjourned to the great Scotsman's local to drink to his memory - appropriately Castle Eden bitter, inappropriately £2.10 a pint.

SO back to Darlington Grammar School in the 1950s and to Ian Hamilton, stripped of his prefect's badge - it's said - for flogging door to door around Darlo an irreverent alternative to the school magazine.

It was called The Scorpion. "It's hard to think of him summoning the right sort of smile," observed his obituarist in The Independent.

"Famously tough, unimpressionable, even brutal," said The Guardian.

Son of a Scottish sewage engineer, he was born in King's Lynn in 1938, progressed to Keble College, Oxford, became an eminent editor, poet and critic, fronted the BBC2 programme Bookmark and habitually held court in a pub called The Pillars of Hercules, next to his little office in Soho.

"A bit of a hell raiser," says Tom Dobbin of the man who never drove, cooked nor paid his contributors, who drank to distraction, smoked high tar cigarettes while he ate and was said to be working on a way of smoking while he slept, was forever hard up, wary of women, supported Spurs and was so fanatical about Paul Gascogine that he wrote two books - Gazza Agonistes and Gazza Italia - in his salutation.

So whence does Tom draw his comparisons? This column has never smoked, nor supported Tottenham Hotspur, in its life.

Do any other Grammar School Old Boys have memories of the Hamilton Academical? Better still, are copies of the old school mag still in existence? Best of all, has anyone a copy of The Scorpion, that there may yet be a sting in the tale?

STORIES of selling scurrilous magazines around Darlington inevitably stir touch-wood memories of the only occasion on which these columns have fallen prey to the libel lion.

It was in the 1970s, involved an extreme left wing publication called Red Dwarf, a litigious youth (and his punitive parents) from the Newton Hall estate in Durham and, of all things, the Northern Echo Nig-Nog Club.

Perhaps, though, that's one for a less melancholy occasion - and after four funerals, next week's column, bless it, will finally have news of a wedding.