SPRINGING eternal, last week's column observed that the new sign at the Hope Inn in Darlington was out of both time and joint.

The 1976 original, rather ingeniously, had depicted Faith, Hope and Charity - the Gloster Gladiator seaplanes which alone offered Malta's air defence after Italy declared war on the island in 1941.

The new sign - sic transit gloria, Hope - depicts something most closely resembling a Sopwith Camel from the 1914-18 conflict.

Brian Madden in Darlington recalls that the Gladiators were found in crates and, as no one claimed them, assembled in two days. The Royal Navy then waded in, demanded them back, and had them stripped down again.

After much persuasion, they were given back to Malta's Airfix army and re-assembled inside 12 hours.

The pub, however, had been The Hope since the turn of the century, and thereby - suggested by David Bramley and confirmed by The Northern Echo's resident historian Chris Lloyd - hangs some equally inventive thinking.

A few hundred yards nearer the town stands St John's, the railwaymen's church. Up the road in the other direction was the workhouse.

Thus faith and charity already abided in Yarm Road. In the middle of them arose the Hope.

THE Hope, suggests aviation enthusiast David Thompson in Eaglescliffe, is by no means the only pub hereabouts with an aeronautical connection.

Billingham has both the Astronaut and the Telstar - probably dating them to the 1960s - whilst at Maltby, near Thornaby, the Pathfinders remembers a wing of Bomber Command which marked targets for following aircraft.

Thornaby itself has at least three pub links with its former RAF base - Spitfire, Roundel and Golden Eagle. The eagle, says David, was the RAF's emblem - though known to many erks as something akin to a kitehawk.

More of this in "Aeronautical Pubs and Inns of Britain" from Midland Publishing (£5 95) in 1996. Only Gadfly co-pilots, however, may be able to explain why a junior airman was invariably known as an erk.

THE scripture about Faith, Hope and Charity is from the 13th chapter of the first Epistle to the Corinthians. The Rev Paul Judson refers us also to the First Book of Samuel. Digressing as always, Saturday's At Your Service column wondered why so many Methodist churches were called Ebenezer. The recently closed chapel at Forest-in-Teesdale was the Ebenenzer, so is the chapel at Framwellgate Moor, Durham. There are many others.

Paul, a Church of England vicar in Sunderland, attended an Ebenezer Independent Methodist chapel until he left home - "my mother's family were among the founders in the mid-18th Century."

He turns instantly, therefore, to 1 Samuel 7:12, in which Samuel erects a stone after a particularly successful set-to with the Philistines - calling the stone Ebenezer, which means "Thus far hast thou helped me."

There's even an old hymn by Robert Robinson with the lines:

Here I raise my Ebenezer

Hither by thy help I'm come...".

"Why it should relate to Methodism in particular," adds Paul, "I've really no idea."

SINCE we have had a Church of England priest offering help on Methodist matters, here - this column is nothing if not ecumenical - is a Methodist minister on what might be termed Anglican affairs.

At Your Service the week previously had wondered if the familiar story about the parson, his velocipede and the seventh commandment - you know, the one that sounds like being grown up - was the only known joke about a vicar's bike.

It's not says the Rev Tony Buglass - born on north Tyneside, now superintendent Methodist minister at Pickering in North Yorkshire - who recalls the story about the village polliss who just couldn't stand the local vicar and determined to nab him for something.

Knowing that every day the vicar would ride his elderly bicycle full pelt down the hill, the polliss decided to jump out in front of him from behind a row of parked cars, demand that he stop at once and thus prove his brakes faulty and the bike unroadworthy.

Duly the plan was put into operation, the polliss threw up a heavy hand and the vicar squealed to a halt just inches in front of him.

"Rats," said the polliss, "I thought I'd got you that time."

"Ah but you see," said the vicar, "the Lord is always with me."

"You're nicked," said the polliss. "Riding with two on a bike."

ON four consecutive days last week, we had cause to travel from Darlington on the main east coast railway line. On all eight journeys the train was late, on almost all - the last trains home the exception - the train was seriously, stressfully and uncomfortably overcrowded.

Though passenger levels are said to be back to pre-Hatfield levels, it is now reported that GNER is to introduce further discount fares in June in a bid to cram even more passengers onto their services.

Doubtless it is an attempt to recoup some of their profits over the past 12 months, but at the expense of the passenger and of safety? How much more dreadful would the two worst east coast main line incidents have been had the trains been as full to suffocating overcrowding as they will be for most of flaming June?

STILL on the rails, passengers at branch line stations - Middlesbrough, for example - will be familiar with the "posh" tones of the announcer. The voice is computerised, apparently, though heaven knows how. In the Midlands, at any rate, the tone has been changed after complaints from travellers that the "plummy" announcer - not just plummy, but homogenised, poor little devil - had been mispronouncing local place names.

The same has been true on North-East branch lines for at least five years - particularly in the robo-pronunciation of Heighington, one of the birthplaces of the railways.

It properly rhymes with the opposite of low - and not, for heaven's sake, with what a horse has for its tea.

SOME overmatter: Mike Clark in Middlesbrough eruditely ends the "toerags" debate with a line from George Orwell's "Down and Out in London", published in 1935 - "the horrid, greasy, toe rags with which tramps tied their boots."

Bill Cross in Bishop Auckland comes late to the mondegreen party with memories of an American PoW friend who - "perhaps deliberately" - sang "Don't fetch me gin" instead of "Don't fetch me in." And a website on the blattaria - otherwise the cockroach, of which there are around 4,000 species - confirms that in the UK the little beggars are known both as black beetles and black clocks but that, as we first suggested, they are one and the same.

By whatever name, of course, not even their mothers could call them pretty.

...and finally, back to matters of religion. Leo Gooch, leading North-East Roman Catholic and co-author of the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle's 150th anniversary history, reports an interesting conversation in a perfume department at the MetroCentre.

Leo, from Wolsingham, was splashing on some of the free stuff when he heard a shop assistant's voice behind him.

"I'm sorry, madam, Eternity is for men. There is no Eternity for women." It's an interesting argument - "but I think," says Leo, "that the lady may have been mistaken."

Published: 30/05/2001