SINCE the route is becoming circuitous, and since there are extraordinary things still to tell, it is best to essay a literary short cut. The story so far:

July 18. Innocently enough, David Armstrong in Redcar wonders if anyone knows the score of a song much loved in his early days at Durham Rural District Council: "I must stand and face my lover, with a short shirt for a cover..."

July 25. Eric Smallwood can't sing the shirt song but recalls that on his long gone first morning in Middlesbrough Council's engineers' department, he was issued with pen, pencil, ruler and the complete words of the Ballad of Eskimo Nell. The internet version of the bawdy house epic shivers to 67 verses, including references to cayenne pepper and the Canadian Pacific Railway. "Nell," the column observes, "was clearly a remarkable lady."

August 1. After Eskimo Nell, the Ball of Kirriemuir - that saucy Scottish sonnet of the four and twenty virgins - is reprised, plus The Mighty Quinn (another Eskimo), Anthony Quinn (an actor), the mighty Wyn Davies (a Newcastle United footballer) and RAF Cold Hesledon, near Seaham, where Nell was nightly serenaded. There is a suggestion that the Ballad might have been one of Rudyard Kipling's; the Good Ship Venus appears mischievously on the horizon also.

August 8. RAF Cold Hesledon proves to have been a Cold War underground radar station - "the Menwith Hill of its day". Noel Coward is proposed as Nell's narrator, as is Robert Service, a Yukon poet, who also wrote The Shooting of Dan McGrew and the Cremation of Sam McGee.

Now, passions stirred, read on...

ROBERT Service was born in Preston, Lancashire, travelled the world, emigrated to Canada in 1894, immortalised the Klondike Gold Rush and wrote 50 collections of verse.

"He was not a poet's poet," recorded a 1958 obituary in the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph. "Fancy Dan dilettantes will dispute the description 'great', but he was no poor, garret-type poet, either."

Dan McGrew alone earned him half a million dollars, though in Britain his best known work may be The Cremation of Sam McGee, and that one struck it rich as well:

There are strange things done in the midnight sun

By the men who moil for gold

The Arctic trails have their secret tales

That would make your blood run cold;

The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,

But the queerest they ever did see

Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge

I cremated Sam McGee.

Last week's column chimed, at any rate, with 85-year-old Mrs Myra Bell in Peterlee. She has a Canadian copy of the poem, vividly illustrated by that country's best known, best selling and most decorated artist. He's called Ted Harrison, and he's a miner's son from Wingate, Co Durham.

Ted Harrison, known to his folks as Eddie, was one of twins. Algar, his sister, became a much-loved health visitor around Wingate. They will be 75 on August 28.

Ted played beneath the pit heap, watched Hopalong Cassidy on the Saturday afternoon matinee at the Palace picture house, acknowledged - perhaps with hindsight - the bleakness of his childhood environment.

"The Pearly Gates themselves would have appeared drab in such surroundings," he writes in a foreword to Sam McGee.

He went to Wellfield Grammar School, West Hartlepool Art College and Durham University, taught in Middlesbrough, travelled, met his wife Nicky in Malaya, answered in 1967 a Times Educational Supplement advertisement for a teaching post in the Yukon.

"Weaklings," it stipulated, "need not apply." He got the job on the strength of it, fell in love with the husky landscapes that stretch white-clad and pristine towards the Beaufort Sea, painted and popularised them extensively, established the Wingate Arts Company in loving memory of the village back home.

His life story has been made into a film, he has several honorary degrees and is a Member of the Order of Canada, the country's highest civilian honour.

His work, with due acknowledgment to Norman Cornish - the pitman painter of Spennymoor - is vibrant and highly colourful. "The Yukon," he wrote in Sam McGee, "has fulfilled all my expectations."

THE Harrisons, sadly, live in the Yukon no longer. Nicky - "my fairy princess" - has Alzheimer's disease; they have moved to the more temperate climes Victoria, British Columbia.

"I became of necessity her closest caregiver," he records on the British Columbia Alzheimer's Resource Centre website. "She desperately clutched at the vestiges of her memory, seeking to retain them, but they eluded her.

"I too felt myself sinking into the quicksand of her disease, and at times almost gave up hope."

Though he has been much helped by the Alzheimer's Resource Centre - "when I thought the sun was setting, it began to rise again" - his fairy princess is now cared for in a nursing home. A Ted Harrison print is on sale to raise funds for the Centre. It's called "Walking Alone".

THERE is more, great drifts of it, not least the image-altering claim by long serving former Shildon councillor Walter Nunn - who celebrated his diamond wedding at the weekend - that he can recite Eskimo Nell in all its fulsomeness.

A sound man, Walter, but not - we'd supposed - given to such frippery.

"I once did it by heart to a car-load on a journey between Durham County Hall and Sedgefield council offices in Spennymoor," he recalls.

"The journey's about a quarter of an hour. We spent another 20 minutes in the car park until I'd finished."

John Briggs in Darlington not only recalls a 1973 Hollies song called 'The Day Curly Billy Shot Down Crazy Sam McGee', but also sends the words. Curly Billy Silly had a colt he called Filly.

Robert Service might turn in his grave.

Paul Conroy of the glorious Grey Horse pub in Consett reports that Mighty Quinn was runner-up in his "Name That Beer" competition last year - "Michael Quinn was the pub's first recorded landlord, mentioned in the 1871 census, along with his wife, six children, serving maid and six lodgers, all Irish."

Eddie Walker from Stockton, familiar for 35 years on the North-East folk music scene, insists that it was Sam McGee and his brother Kirk who helped form the Grand Old Op'ry in the 1920s - them and Grandpa Jones and a matriarch called Minnie Pearl who wore a hat with the price tag hanging down and may have been the model for Granny in the Beverly Hillbillies.

"You'll never find a North-East connection in that lot," insists Eddie.

Knowing our Gadfly readers, however, he is almost certainly mistaken.

Other matters must wait, including the invitation from the Rev Tony Buglass in Pickering to enter the arcane world of text messaging - several shortform versions of The Lord's Prayer have thus winged their way - a curious entry in last week's Court Circular about Prince Philip's visit to Teesside and some further reminiscences about the underground movement that was RAF Cold Hesledon.

The ever-alert Tom Purvis in Sunderland signs off this week's edition, however, with a neat link between Robert Service - with a smile - and the column's mote and beam fondness for chronicling the inky trade's more persistent solecisms. It may serve as an epitaph to this one, and perhaps to all the others:

I have no doubt the devil grins (wrote Service)

As seas of ink I splatter

Ye gods, forgive my "literary sins",

The other ones don't matter

Published: Wednesday, August 15, 2001