Past Lives

Belgium has Hercule Poirot. Stockton has John Walker, inventor of the friction match, and Thomas Sheraton, master cabinetmaker. Belgium has sundry Baudouins and Leopolds. Stockton has an eponymous earl, a former prime minister so grateful to the town for starting him on the political ladder that he changed his name from Macmillan. But from then on, in both cases, you're struggling.

Belgium is a lost cause. For the senior borough on Teesside, however, I can do my bit; indeed, already have done so, years ago, by pressing the suit of Doreen Stephens, chanteuse with Jack Hylton and Geraldo, to be more widely acclaimed in the realms of dance-band nostalgia.

Now opportunity knocks for Stockton to become a place of literary pilgrimage. Step forward, Joseph Reed (1723-87).

Joseph who? You know, the ropemaker who could also weave words fancifully enough to make a name for himself in London's theatre-land. But perhaps you don't know him. I didn't, until stumbling across him near the summit of some literary forays on to Roseberry Topping.

In a play with which Reed had some success at Drury Lane, a "boisterous and indelicate farce" called The Register Office, he tells the metropolis a tall story about the North Riding's 1,056ft cone.

He has Margery Murpoot, a country girl, say: "It is t'highest hill i'all Yorkshire. It's aboon a mahle an'a hauf heegh, an' ez caud ez ice a t'top on t'yattest daa i'summer; that it is."

Not the least interesting thing about Reed is that a few weeks ago he was the unnamed butt of laughter on Radio 4's Quote, Unquote programme. Having written a tragedy based on Dido (Christopher Marlowe did likewise 70 years earlier), he buttonholed Dr Johnson with it.

"I never did the man an injury," Dr Johnson lamented, "yet he would read his tragedy to me."

Hero-starved Stockton would be overjoyed if it could be proved that Reed coined a word which has enriched the English language. When The Register Office was revived at Drury Lane in 1768, seven years after the first production, the writer introduced a new character, Mrs Doggerel. Now, my dictionaries say the origin of doggerel (which in turn seems to have spawned "dog-Latin",) is unknown.

If Reed could be shown to have done a Sheridan, it would be splendid or, as Mrs Malaprop of The Rivals might say, splenetic.

Joseph Reed was born into a Presbyterian family in Stockton and not only followed his father into rope-making but also continued profitably in the trade throughout his life, alongside his playwriting, having moved his business and family to Sun Tavern Fields, Stepney, in 1757, ten years after first trying to break into the London literary scene. His wife was the daughter of a Stockton flax-dresser.

He had only a scanty education, always regarded himself as an amateur and when he was first published often described himself on his title pages as "a halter-maker". The Dictionary of National Biography says, however: "Like other self-educated men, Reed formed an unwarrantably high opinion of his own literary achievements. But he had a caustic wit and wrote with much energy."

In 1744, the Gentleman's Magazine carried his poem "in imitation of the Scottish dialect" to mark the death of Alexander Pope; the next year he printed, in Newcastle, a farce called The Superannuated Gallant.

Then, as now, the literati were often at each other's throats. When Reed made his breakthrough in London, it was with a burlesque tragedy in five acts called Madrigal and Trulletta. It was far too long and Reed foolishly blamed the producer for its failure at Covent Garden. Oliver Smollett condemned it and Reed replied in a fierce pamphlet called A Sop in the Pan for a Physical Critick.

The Register Office had two of its best characters suppressed by the stage censor but the original script was published and a rival dramatist was accused by Reed of stealing one of the censored characters and using her in his own play. Dido was put on at Drury Lane, with a prologue written by Garrick which made humorous mention of the author's halter-making.

But soon Reed had fallen out with Garrick; even so, he took the great man's side in some vicious mud-slinging - a literary spat which was part of the overspill, so to speak, from Love in the Suds, a scandalous work by another writer. The latter piece must have been a take on Love in the Tub, a play of a century earlier said to be the first English prose comedy; so today's tabloids did not invent the idea of cheeky headlines.

Our man certainly rubbed shoulders with some of the all-time greats of the English stage, even if he never quite made it himself. Mrs Siddons appeared at Drury Lane in his The Queen of Carthage, the Dido play re-named, which had involved Reed in yet another row when the same theatre earlier refused to revive it. There is also reflected glory from Henry Fielding, whose Tom Jones was adapted by Reed as a comic opera for Covent Garden.

The vindication of Dido/Queen of Carthage came in 1797, ten years after his death. His posthumous reputation might have been further enhanced if a plan by his friend, the literary antiquary Joseph Ritson, had not been thwarted. In 1792 Ritson had prepared the script for press and copies were printed that year but for some reason held back until 1808 - when, with publication imminent, they were all destroyed in a fire. They were never reprinted.

Who knows what might have followed if they had been. Why, today there might even be a Joseph Reed Street leading into the John Walker Square that was created a couple of decades ago in Stockton.

AS I was saying, I was scaling the literary heights of Roseberry Topping when Reed hove into view. Someone more illustrious there before him, however, was Daniel Defoe, who in 1726 added yet another name to the more than 20 by which the Cleveland landmark has been known over the centuries. He called it Roseberry Torp.

In the 12th century it was Odin's Hill, after the Norse god whose Old English equivalent was Wode - whence our Wednesday. By 1424 it was Osenbergh and in the 17th century Osbury Toppyne evolved by 1657 into Roseberye Toppin.

A 1610 translation of William Camden's Britannia, in effect a county-by-county guide book, written in Latin over the previous quarter-century, tells of many a "syllie soul, not without hazard of a breaknecke tumblinge", who climbed Roseberry to crawl through the eye of Willifryd's Needle, a precariously sited rock, now gone.

You could educate yourself on chippings from Roseberry, or at least win prizes in upmarket pub quizzes. There's the Odin/Wed-nesday link and now I am reminded (honestly) that the name of Westminster school headmaster Camden lives on in the Camden society, founded in 1823 to publish documents relating to the early history and literature of the British Empire. And astound your fellow trivia enthusiasts with the nugget that Camden's house in Kent was afterwards the home-in-exile of Napoleon III.

ROSEBERRY Topping, of course, is only a mile from Great Ayton and will certainly figure in the business of a local history society it is hoped will be formed there soon. Mr Dan O'Sullivan, secretary of the Captain Cook school museum in the village, asks fellow enthusiasts to come to the Friends' meeting house, High Green, at 7pm on Thursday, May 24, when the level of support will be assessed