A TROUBLESOME lot are the presidents of France. I generalise, of course, but it is no less than the duty of Past Lives to complain that they were making life difficult for D&S Times men as long ago as 1944 - and were still at it the other night.

Well, surely one's entitled to be miffed when told that Jacques Chirac's monopoly of the place means that a family celebration will have to be held elsewhere than at the intended hostelry down the road at ancient Aycliffe Village.

The 1944 contretemps was actually between a future editor of this newspaper and someone who was merely a French president-in-waiting. However, Capt Fred Hurrell of the Royal Marines, to be in charge here in the late 70s and now living in retirement at Richmond, was nearly run down in mid-Channel just after D-Day when a larger vessel swept dangerously close to his own command; he loud-hailered the intruder a piece of his mind before recognising a distinctive nose standing aloof on the offender's bridge. It was General de Gaulle.

De Gaulle was the also the agent of your columnist's embarrassment, in my own pre-D&S days. Told, as a cub reporter in the early 60s, to regale the populace of a Sussex market town with advance details of the visit of Le Grand Charles to the nearby home of Harold Macmillan, how was I to forsee that the limousine carrying president and prime minister would not take what everyone knew was the quickest route between Gatwick airport and Birch Grove?

So the prediction of the East Grinstead Courier (aircraft lands 2pm, ten minutes to inspect guard of honour etc) was that the odd couple would turn into the high street at about three. At 1.30 the first Francophiles started to arrive, by 2.45 they were three deep at the kerbside, the children carrying tiny tricolours.

By 4.30, angry callers at the front office were being fobbed off with a yarn about the Deuxime Bureau insisting on a diversion to Crawley for security reasons. I still maintain that, by going that way, past those high-rise flats, the president was put at serious risk. Also that the tetchiness brought on by the unnecessarily long drive gave extra vehemence to his "Non" to our Common Market application.

Via Crawley! I ask you. That was about as sensible as it would have been to drive Chirac not straight down Yarm Road from Teesside airport but through Haughton.

AH, yes, Haughton. Admittedly, there are probably shorter ways of returning readers to the village, now suburb, two miles from Darlington town centre, where we buried the painter William Bewick two weeks ago.

The question left hanging was what happened to the oil paintings and the series of cartoons (original sketches ahead of those paintings) which represented probably his greatest achievement as well as certainly his most bitter disappointment.

He spent four years in Italy executing a commission to copy Michelangelo's masterpieces in the Sistine Chapel, only for his patron to die before making the gesture that would probably have put Bewick on course for fame and fortune.

Sir John Lawrence, principal portrait painter to George IV, had intended to present the oil paintings to the Royal Academy to mark his 1826 presidency of that august body, but on his death the academy did not pursue the offer.

The four copies of the prophets and sybils were sold by the executors. All of them eventually fetched up in Bewick's home town.

We know that the 8ft by 5ft Jerimiah is at Darlington arts centre in Trinity Road, although not on show. Those of the prophets Daniel and Ezekiel, together with The Libyan Sybil, once hung in the billiards room of a "gentlemen's club" in Duke Street, says the booklet on Bewick written by Jean Kirkland and Michael Wood, but does anyone know what happened to them when that establishment closed a good few years ago?

Mystery also surrounds the fate of the 11 cartoons, which were the subject of a failed campaign by the Art Union magazine for them to be bought for the nation "for the benefit of British art students".

That plea, although in vain, speaks volumes for the high regard in which Bewick must have been held at that time, a decade before he decided to quit London and semi-retire, partly for health reasons, to Haughton.

So the cartoons were left on the artist's hands. At Haughton House he built a gallery for them and four years after his death in 1866, at a Darlington auction conducted by Thomas Watson and Sons (the name survives in the town today), they were bought by a dealer from Durham for a derisory £65 10s. They were immediately re-sold to the Dean and Chapter of Durham Cathedral.

Their monetary value did not even keep up with inflation during the following century. They spent many years at Durham university, although still owned by the cathedral, before being sent to a 1978 Christie's sale of English pictures. They failed to reach their reserve, but were sold afterwards for £250.

The 1870 sale was held soon after the death, childless, of Bewick's wife, Elizabeth. Considering that her habit in widowhood had been to give away pictures from Bewick's collection to friends - so annoying other relatives that, remembering how they had helped him during his early hard times, they began a lawsuit - there was a surprising number left.

The auctioneers were busy for two days selling not only his own works but also some attributed to Titian, Van Dyck, Rembrandt, Rubens and Velasquez; remember, though, that part of Bewick's considerable reputation rested on his skill as a copyist, especially of Rembrandt.

IF by 1850 Bewick was reconciled to not, after all, achieving great fame himself (at age 33, he had been spoken of as a likely future president of the Royal Academy), he was in that year in receipt of some reflected glory from a remarkable neighbour.

Neighbour? Well, the village of Elton, these days bypassed by the A66 near Stockton, was not that far away. There lived Mary Benton, born at Keverston, near Raby Castle, Staindrop, on February 12, 1730. She was 120 when Bewick painted her portrait.

She was said to be the oldest woman in the world, but I don't know how much longer she held the title.

At 118 she was still helping with the haymaking at Elton. Her hearing and eyesight were said to be perfect. She cooked, washed, ironed and didn't need spectacles when she sewed.

Bewick, whose original portrait of her went to a Robert Fox, of Westbourne Terrace, Hyde Park, and The Illustrated London News made an engraving from it, was mightily impressed.

Her memory was prodigious, he said, both of her early youth and "up to the present hour". She excelled at tales of the supernatural, claiming to have seen ghosts herself. Her own marriage had apparently been "unfortunate", but she was a great teller of love stories.

Now, we had a topical beginning courtesy of M Chirac. So too with today's ending. Mrs Benton had a "monomania" about the dangers of railways, said Bewick. As he left she urged him not to use the train, adding: "Oh, what a pity it is that Her Majesty should travel so much by those terrible railways with her bonny bairns."