PRETTY generously, the company wanted the column to fly last week to America. Cautiously consulted, the Good Doctor reviewed recent medical history - an ABC of DVTs - and reached for his tranquillisers. We took off for Scotland instead.

Before catching up with the good ship John H Amos and the day she was chased pell-mell by the coastguard down the Tees, therefore, a word from the West Highland Free Press.

Among Skye's many splendours, the Free Press was last week defending a Scottish minister who'd called the CBI chairman an "English prat".

The exception, presumably, was not so much to "English" as to "prat", defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as "a person of no account, a dolt, fool or jerk" and said first to have been used in that context by Melvyn Bragg in 1968.

Last Tuesday's Daily Telegraph, coincidentally, also reported concerns among members of the Cialis family that a new anti-impotence drug was to carry their name.

The Telegraph was unsympathetic. "Their children will certainly suffer no more in the playground than generations of Cowards, Trollopes, Hoares, Crappers and Pratts."

THEN there are the Nutters, four still in the Darlington area phone book and heaven knows how many more grateful to have marked their coupon with a cross. We wrote about them many years ago, one a Darlington golf professional. Without exception, they took it handsomely.

Perhaps their forebears were foresters. The greater debate, in any case, concerns Thomas Crapper.

Contrary to popular toilet training, Crapper didn't invent the WC, was no more a knight than Geoffrey Boycott - his fellow south Yorkshireman - and didn't even bequeath his name as one of the English language's more egregious eponyms. He was a plumber, however, a sanitary inspector to the crowned heads of England, is buried next to W G Grace and the subject of a biography unsurprisingly entitled Flushed With Pride.

"He didn't invent the WC, but he perfected it," says the delightful Dulcie Lewis from Carperby, in Wensleydale. "He worked long and hard on his one way cistern. You could sit there and see the name 'Crapper' on the ironwork above your head."

Dulcie, who talks and writes on matters lavatorial, even recalls that the great man's telegraphic address was "CrapperChelsea" and rather wishes that she couldn't. "I wish I knew about the big things in life, cosmology and physics and so forth," she sighs. "All I know is stuff like the telegraphic address of Thomas Crapper."

The name, she supposes, was purloined by visiting Americans, translated by Plumbing and Mechanical magazine as "first world war doughboys" - slang for US infantrymen.

Thomas Crapper and Co now make "extraordinarily authentic" Victorian sanitary ware. Crapper, as if you didn't know it, is everywhere.

DULCIE Lewis, bless her, awaits the imminent publication of yet another book, this one an A-Z of English traditional medicines and medical myths. "There's a picture of an enema machine which gentlemen used to keep in their libraries," she enthuses. "It's absolutely wonderful."

NOT quite the same area, but we may as well get out of the way the report in last Friday's paper - Friday the 13th - spotted by Janet Murrell in Durham.

Reproduced right, it concerns the opening by Sir Arnold Wolfendale on October 2 of an observatory at the Washington Wildlife and Wetlands Park. Janet knows the former Astronomer Royal. "Fortunately," she adds, "he has a good sense of humour."

THE John H Amos, once a paddle tug on the Tees, steamed back into the column's consciousness two weeks ago amid our hyperbole of headlines. "Rusting relic Amos must be scrapped", a long gone sub-editor had written, and the sentiment doubtless echoed through the North.

It's for entirely different reasons, however, that Ron Young recalls our nautical but nice namesake. Ron, now 60 and still in Stockton, became at 22 the old tug's youngest ever engineer, one of a crew of six. "She was a joy to work on, the best boat I ever knew," he says. "She only had a small boiler and could be a pig to fire - you needed a good fireman - but you could spin her round on a sixpence. There was another tug and we'd have races up the river. I still love that old boat, I do."

It's a river race of a different sort for which he most vividly remembers John H Amos, however.

"I was standing on the jetty one day when I saw the Tees customs launch chasing her up the river like a bat out of hell. The crew were throwing overboard bags full of booze, cigarettes, the odd watch - we weren't talking drugs then - in the hope that the paddles would grind them to the bottom. Unfortunately they were in hessian bags and the customs men were just scooping them up as they followed. It was hilarious to watch, like something from a Carry On film."

The customs took the John H Amos to the jetty - "they went through her for three days" - and the smugglers to the polliss.

In the fullness of time they appeared before Judge Clifford Cohen - like his learned daughter Myrella, remembered with mixed feelings by the region's wrong 'uns - who decided that a substantial fine would suffice.

One of the motley crew protested that he couldn't afford to pay it, prompting Judge Cohen to ask if his wife had a fur coat. The defendant replied that she had. "She doesn't now," said Judge Cohen.

The John H became a floating nightclub, an enterprise which sank swiftly, but still, just about, rides the waves. She's resurfaced on the Medway, in Kent, where a new owner hopes to restore the Amos elan. Like the rest of us, says Ron Young, he awaits a little something from the Lottery.

SPORTS page headlines, congenitally cliched, stick most indelibly in the memory if only half-decent.

Clive Sledger in Aldbrough St John recalls "Kitchen sinks Rovers" - the scoring saboteur was Peter Kitchen, the victim Doncaster Rovers - whilst Neil Mackay in Lanchester remembers "Queen in brawl at Palace."

It was pugnacious Scotsman Gerry Queen, of course, 101 appearances for Crystal Palace between 1969-71.

Roger Mason, an emissary from Essex, saw a television interview several years ago in which former Daily Mirror editor Hugh Cudlipp claimed his most cherished headline followed a boxing match involving an inadequate American called Lee Oma. Oma was brought over to fight a British champion, showed little ability and less courage and left, amid a barrage of booing, on a stretcher.

The Mirror's back page headline had three words and 11 letters: Oma Coma Aroma.

THERE is much else, including some well remembered school songs which must await another airing. Finally, though, a cutting from Tom Dobbin in Durham concerning Sark Show.

"The Mardon Trophy Cup was presented by Mr Denis Norris for the cow with best udder, in memory of Mrs Frances Pittard Norris."

Sark of the covenant, the column returns next week.

Published: 18/09/2002