INTERVIEW fixed for last Friday afternoon, today’s column was to have been about Sarah Nattrass, who 23 years ago became a retained firefighter at Stanhope and has just been appointed assistant chief officer of Durham and Darlington Fire and Rescue Service.

The weather as wild as it was, they asked the day before that the chat be postponed.

Statistically supported, Durham fire brigade’s watchword is “Safest people, safest places". Their caution, of course, was wholly justified.

NOT having a Tuesday column the previous Thursday afternoon may not be supposed an emergency, but a bit of a beggar, nonetheless. Then the Royal Photographic Society’s magazine arrived.

In it there’s a seven-page feature on photographer Ian Wright’s work in editing and cataloguing a quarter of a million glass images – mostly of the rich and famous – taken on Cunard liners in the early 20th Century.

A former Northern Echo man, long in America, Ian has featured a couple of times of late. It wasn’t intended that he’d return quite so soon but – as may never have been said on Cunard – any port in a storm.

He’d already sent a selection of on-board images with a North-East connection, from Lord Gainford to Laurel and Hardy, but it’s Lady Sybil Eden – said to have been a society beauty – who most seduces.

Lady Sybil was the mother of Sir Anthony Eden, a future Prime Minister, lived with Sir William at Windlestone Hall, near Rushyford in County Durham.

“She bankrupted the family resulting in the downfall of Windlestone Hall,” says Ian, and may traduce her ladyship. We can find nothing by way of on-line corroboration.

In 1898 she had helped found the hospital in Bishop Auckland, chiefly for injured miners, which long bore her name. After World War 1 she was appointed OBE for nursing service with the Voluntary Aid Detachment at Windlestone.

Sir William was a renowned boxer and seems to have been quite a cove – “fought a prolonged guerrilla warfare with a world which rarely lived up to the standards he set it,” said Life magazine in 1943.

More notoriously, back in 1894, he had entered into a prolonged legal dispute with the painter James Whistler over a small portrait of Lady Sybil.

A fee had been informally agreed. When Sir William insisted on paying no more than 100 guineas, Whistler painted out Lady Sybil’s face. It ended in acrimonious litigation on both sides of the Channel, the artist coming second.

Whistler was also an author, perhaps his best known work called The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. In Sir William Eden Bt, he had made the most powerful enemy of all.

Second hand on Amazon, we have now ordered a copy of Sir Anthony’s biography, setting back the family fortunes by a penny. More on the Edens a little later.

VERBOSE as ever, the column a couple of weeks back pondered the locomotive with the longest name. The answered seemed to be 54 characters but has now been overtaken – fast line – by something much closer to home.

Phil Chinery, who first started these wheels rolling, discovers diesel electric loco 56312 – Jeremiah Dixon, Son of County Durham, Surveyor of the Mason Dixon Line USA. That’s a breathless 60 characters, and overtime for the engraver.

Dixon was a Cockfield lad, of course, now posthumously reversing the adage about a prophet not being without honour except in his own land.

Originally named for the Weardale Railway, the engine is now at a depot in Birmingham. “A bit far for shed bashing,” says Phil. Gricers will understand.

EDWARD PEARCE, a former Darlington Grammar School boy who became a pugnaciously polemical political journalist – and who himself tilted at parliamentary windmills – has died, aged 78. He lived in Easingwold, North Yorkshire.

Before moving to Darlington, his father had been a millworker in Oldham. Edward read politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford, spent five years lecturing at South Shields Tech and in the February 1974 general election was Labour’s man in Richmond.

He finished a distant third behind Sir Tim Kitson – at 87, happily still with us –and Elizabeth Graham, the Liberal candidate.

Subsequently he wrote for several national newspapers, including The Guardian, whose obit recalled when Pearce shared the Daily Telegraph’s parliamentary sketch writing duties with a colleague. When they were unable to agree whose turn it was, a Commons official had to break up the set-to.

“He displayed the aloof distaste of an intellectual for the everyday vulgarities of journalism,” the Guardian added (but then again, don’t we all?)

The on-line obit prompted further memories from fellow Queen Elizabeth Grammar School boy John Pearce, no relation. So short Ed’s fuse, he said, that he hit a school mate so hard it put him in hospital.

Others thought his temperament “idiosyncratic”. "The tragedy," said the Guardian, "was that usually he won the fight to be his own worst enemy.”

After the Hillsborough disaster, Pearce infamously wrote in The Sunday Times that if South Yorkshire police bore any responsibility at all, it was for failing to realise what brutes (from Merseyside) they had to handle.

History was to prove him utterly wrong.

THE estimable Gerald Slack, whose historical researches in the Shildon area have hitherto been largely railway related, makes a discovery which he says had “largely escaped public notice.” The music for Waltzing Matilda was written by a Shildon chap, too.

The column revealed as much in 2004 – pom and circumstance, we suggested – noted that a swagman was a drifter, a matilda a bedroll in which the guy kept his belongings, a billabong a watering hole and a jumbuk a sheep. “Waltzing” simply meant walking along a bush track.

GERALD has been much industrious. Bulch was born in Shildon in 1862, joined a brass band when he was 12, served his time at the wagon works but at 21 emigrated to Australia.

He wrote the tune, called Craigielee, for brass bands. It’s said to owe something to the well known Australian ditty Go to the Devil and Shake Yourself. The words were added in 1895 by a gentleman called Banjo Paterson who sold the rights for a fiver to the Billy Tea Company.

Bulch died in Sydney in 1930, without ever having returned to his native heart. His ghost may be heard as you pass by that billabong….

...AND finally, we noted a few weeks back a reader’s surprise at seeing the notice “No baguettes kept in this vehicle overnight” on the back of a Tesco van in Billingham. Brian Dixon expands the menu. In Darlington, says Brian, he often sees a car with the sticker “No red wine, cheese or baguettes kept in this vehicle overnight” – but that, of course, is a Citroen 2CV.

The column returns next week. Weather permitting, we shall have caught up with Sarah Nattrass.