The bouyant lady in Brian's life

Brian Stringer's a bit like that - enthusiastic, obsessive, refers to inanimate objects as females and confirms that she purrs like a kitten.

The 16-valve difference is that Brian Stringer, retired Merchant Navy engineer and ship repairer, knows - manifestly and magnificently - his arc lamp from his elbow.

The lady in his life is the Princess Royal, the Hartlepool lifeboat which between 1939-69 saved 94 lives. Now, thanks to Brian, she is back on Hartlepool dock, undergoing meticulous - regal - restoration and due next year to return to service as a floating museum.

She was built principally from mahogany, bronze and brass, weighed 21.5 tons, had 18 coats of paint - the same as a Rolls-Royce - mustered a crew of eight and could carry 120. She cost £10,175 in 1939 - today it would be £1m - and like Brian Stringer's passion, she was proudly and patently unsinkable.

He'd helped polish the brasswork as a little lad in old Hartlepool, once or twice begged a turn across the harbour, lost track of his Princess when she left Hartlepool for a round Britain tour - Orkney to Guernsey - of far flung lifeboat stations, until his eye was caught by a story in the Sunday Post.

The Lossiemouth lifeboat had been lost with all hands. The reserve boat sent in her place was the dear old Princess Royal.

Many years later he attended a meeting to discuss ways of invigorating the "Old Town", not to be confused in the eyes of its sterner citizens with the "West Dockers", the buccaneers across the Headland.

"There's still friction. I don't care what anyone says, it's still two towns," says Brian. "We go back to 640AD, they just stole our name."

At the meeting, in February 2000, someone suggested a ferry between "Old" and "West" Hartlepool. Immediately Brian - diabetic, arthritic, open heart surgery patient - both floated a possibility and launched his big idea. Why not bring home the Princess Royal?

"Before that, I'd just been sitting about the house, watching television or reading," he says. "Since that happened I've never had a moment. I just live, sleep and dream this boat now."

She, forever "she", was formally commissioned by Princess Alice, her Royal namesake, in 1941, but had already been involved off Redcar in the rescue of the first Spitfire pilot shot down in World War II. In January 1942, she rescued five men from the Sunderland-built SS Hawkwood, breaking up amid tumultuous seas off Hartlepool.

The boat received the RNLI's gold medal, one of only 39 ever to gain the VC equivalent. William Bennison, the coxswain, was also awarded the gold medal for his outstanding seamanship and courage. William Herbert Jefferson, the mechanic, received silver, the rest of the crew bronze.

It's retired Durham constabulary detective superintendent Keith Readman - whose wife is Jefferson's grandaughter - who put the column on the trail of Brian Stringer, and in the wake of the Princess Royal.

The boat was privately owned at Barry Island in south Wales - the graveyard, by coincidence, of hundreds of old steam locomotives. Brian persuaded them to sell for a penny (precisely) and the promise of a photograph of the re-launch.

"It's a gift to the people of Hartlepool," he insists. "We're just the idiots who are putting it back together."

It cost another £1,200 for the crane to lift it onto the low loader, but since then, he admits, he has become a veritable first sea lord among scroungers.

"To put it in blunt terms, I put the bite on people," says Brian. "My health isn't all that great but I can still talk, still do a bit of wheeling and dealing. We've had tremendous sponsorship in kind."

The National Lottery has declined to help, however - there could be funds for a static museum, but not for a floating tribute to a town's heroes.

Much the most potent evidence of his powers of persuasion is the Restoration Trust's Bond Street base, in buildings owned by the engineering firm Heerema. "They've been absolutely brilliant," says Brian, the Trust chairman. "They even pay our telephone bill."

The offices overflow with mementoes of Hartlepool's lifeboat past and with hopes, bright buoyant, for the future. Inevitably there is a monkey, too.

The boat, protected by a scaffold of plastic sheeting, sits out the back, painstakingly restored by a gallant crew of half a dozen volunteers. He, inarguably, is the helmsman, the life saver and the soul mate.

They'd hoped to re-launch last year, had contacted Buckingham Palace about an appearance by the present Princess Royal - "I had four calls from them in one day" - but quickly realised that the job was too big and the timescale too optimistic.

Already, however, she - Brian's Princess - is starting again to look shipshape, 4,000 nails hammered by hand into the deck.

"There's no room for modern technology in this operation," he says, although there will be room for a toilet, a 21st Century concession approved by the Historic Ships Society.

As surely as this one nears glorious completion, however, another lifeboat appears on the horizon. She is the Horatio Brand, Hartlepool's oar-powered boat in 1903 and now used as a houseboat near Lowestoft. Brian has already been offered it - her - but with the problem that the occupant has nowhere else to live.

"If only I could find another houseboat for him," he says. "It would be incredible to have two lifeboats back on station in Hartlepool, back where they belong."

The summer wine still flows, the glass half empty, and half full.

MORE wartime memories were stirred by the death at the weekend of retired farmer John Pigg, right, aged 83, who lived near the former Scorton Aerodrome in North Yorkshire. The aerodrome, five miles east of Richmond, became operational in 1939. Its Spitfires and other fighters played a key coastal defence role during the Battle of Britain the following year.

The Pigg family provided "dispersed accommodation" for American, Canadian and RAF crews. Young Johnny, it's recalled, introduced them to riding and other country sports in their spare time.

Though he moved to West Ayton, near Scarborough, in 1969, he returned to base on his 80th birthday in November 1998 to unveil a plaque alongside "Pigg's Whin", commemorating Scorton's gallant crews. The roadside memorial also marked the return of the site to woodand and agriculture - "from sword," says the inscription, "to ploughshare."

Mr Pigg had been a member of both Richmond Rural and Scarborough councils, was a leading show jumping judge and was awarded the MBE for services to housing. His funeral is at Hutton Buscel parish church, near Scarborough, at 2pm today.

NOW that the furniture men have been into GR Towers, what has become of Boris the Pig?

Boris, it may possibly be recalled, wore hunting pink, state-of-the-art Doc Martens and was ever immersed in a book called The Little Red Fire Engine.

Visitors to George Reynolds's opulent headquarters in Shildon could hardly miss him - George didn't take the top seat at boardroom meetings, the stuffed porker did.

Boris has also appeared on television ("410 times," says George, precisely) and in magazines like Vanity Fair and Pig Breeders Weekly.

Removed to Darlington, we can reveal, Boris will also take the chair when the football club's new stadium is completed in the summer.

"He was so full of hell when the Shildon company's new owners came that I thought he was going to go for their throats," says George. "I can assure everyone, however, that he hasn't been paid off, is warm and cosy again and will shortly resume his rightful place."

These days Boris is frequently seen in the company of a bear called Valentino - "a right bugger he is" - a Valentine's Day present from Mrs Reynolds.

The 65-year-old chairman declines to leave them together at night, however. "They have raves," says George, "when everyone else has gone home."

...and finally, Saturday's Guardian carried a questionnaire on Amanda Berry, Darlington-born chief executive of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, on the eve of BAFTA's annual awards - familiarly sub-titled the British Oscars.

"What is your greatest fear?" Failing. "What's your most unappealing habit?" Using ten words when three will do. You may or may not know the sort of thing.

After that, alas, things began unquestionably to go wrong.

Sunday's incessant rain reacted with the fire retardant in the 120 yard red carpet outside the Leicester Square Odeon to turn it into a mass of foaming clarts. Expensive shoes were ruined, frocks mockered, tempers frayed.

"Bubble Baftas" laughed the tabloids, and "Tipping Gown" and - of course - "The Bathtas." "A public relations disaster," commented the Telegraph, slightly more soberly.

Amanda, who takes personal responsibility for the event, had her first experience of cinema in the long-gone Zetland in Richmond, where her father ran Richmond Cleaners and her mother a hugely acclaimed small hotel.

"You sat on the seat and clouds of dust came out," she once told The Northern Echo. "I was a serious asthmatic and would be in bed for a week after watching a film."

BAFTA officials have not been answering calls, save to reveal that they bought the carpet from someone called Frank - not, it is to be assumed, the ineffable "I Love Carpets, Me" gentleman on the local radio commercials - and that it has been cut up and dumped on a tip.

We must return, therefore, to The Guardian's antediluvian questionnaire, which also asked the poor lass what made her most depressed. The answer had just two words: "The rain."

Published: 28/02/02