THERE'S not room in my Saturday column tomorrow for this fantastic piece of trivia.

It concerns Sir Gervase Beckett who was MP for Whitby from 1906 to 1922. He gets a mention along with his wife, who The Northern Echo of 1909 called the Hon. Mrs Gervase Beckett. Given that although she was a woman, she had just opened Whitby swing bridge and had even been daring enough to make a short speech, I think that the Hon. Mrs Gervase Beckett should have been entitled to a name of her own. She was Mabel Theresa Duncombe, the daughter of the Viscount of Helmsely.

Anyway, the fantastic piece of trivia is that in 1923 the third daughter of Sir Gervase and Mabel, who was called Beatrice, married an up-and-coming Tory politician called Anthony Eden. He was born in Windlestone Hall at Rushyford in County Durham in 1897 and had unsuccessfully fought Durham for the Tories in 1922.

He was enconsed on his honeymoon with Beatrice when, on the second day, he heard that the winnable seat of Warwick and Leamington had come up. So he ended the honeymoon and dashed off to campaign.

This was one of the reasons that Beatrice came to dislike politics so much that their marriage broke down (another reason for their split was after losing two children in infancy a third was posted as missing during the Second World War, causing them understandable stress and strain). When Eden became Prime Minister in 1955, he was the first divorcee to enter No 10 as its resident.