MORE than anything in recent years, last week's column on the passing of Tony Hawkins was warmly acknowledged. Tony's family, unfortunately, were less enthusiastic. Any distress is much regretted.

The shortest message - three words, ten letters - concerned the late night incident at Brussleton Folly in which Tony and I were mired in mud whilst trying to push George Reynolds's van out of the morass.

"The wheels span like Peter Mandelson," we wrote last week. The rebuke, immaculately typed but irritatingly anonymous, is not for the reference to Hartlepool's beleaguered MP but for the archaically inaccurate past tense.

"Shame on you," it says.

FROM the obituaries column of the Darlington and Stockton Times, we note the passing of Mr Vincent Singleton, aged 77 - a quiet man in a cacophonous world.

Though we had never met, Vince Singleton was clearly someone after Gadfly's own peaceable heart.

He not only hated excess noise but devoted his engineering and scientific skills to eradicating it. The silencers on all British Airways Concordes were of his design; so are the huge sound dampeners at the Royal Albert Hall and the suppressors in many submarines.

Fittingly, perhaps, he never talked about his achievements. Born in Lancashire, he was a wartime RAF pilot, worked in Middlesex but moved to Darlington to be nearer Jo Robertson, his daughter.

His secretary's office was totally sound proofed, at the foot of the stairs - to which Lancastrians are so often figuratively drawn - an automatically closing door separated him from the noise of three growing children.

"He was an extraordinary and a marvellous man but sometimes it could be quite hard to live with," Mrs Robertson tells Gadfly.

Like all reasonable people over the age of 12, her dad also detested muzak in pubs - "couldn't abide it," says Jo - and would probably give a similar ear bashing to local commercial radio and the jingle jangling man who loves carpets.

Mr Singleton was also obsessively punctual and became cross with those who weren't. "We often told him he should have been a time and motion man," says his daughter.

"He would arrive at my upholstery workshop in Darlington at exactly ten past 11 every day and if I wasn't there would demand to know why."

Though he mellowed with age and with grandchildren, as no doubt shall we all, there was a final irony in Vincent Singleton's death.

The homily by one of his nephews lasted so long that, if not exactly late for his own funeral he was certainly late for the cremation. The cortege had to wait half an hour for a slot.

Jo reckons that her father would now see the funny side. "At the time he'd have been absolutely livid."

PROBABLY it was the peace and quiet which most attracted Hannah and Ernest Armstrong to Witton-le-Wear, especially since Ernest was so immersed in the hurly-burly of public life.

Probably it was why Hannah was so reluctant to leave their lovely bungalow, named Pennywell after their Sunderland roots but a little more tranquil than Wearside.

Ernest, who died in 1996, was MP for North West Durham, government minister, Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons and a former vice-president of the Methodist Conference. He was also a well remembered footballer, spectator and referee on Stanley hill top and for 15 years president of the Northern League.

Hannah, who has died aged 90, was his constant support and encouragement, always there at Pennywell when he sheltered from duty's relentless round.

In every sense she created a home for them; on every visit you could feel it. Her funeral is at Witton-le-Wear on Saturday.

A READER points us both towards the "Information Darlington" boards on the town's railway station and to the bus departures case outside Hogan's pub, 50 yards away.

"A great advertisement for integrated public transport," he says, by which - it transpires - he means that the case is completely empty.

As for Darlington's tourism department, the posters are mainly about the railway festival, last September. Nothing at all appears to have been happening after November, almost four months ago.

Since it's hardly a good first impression, maybe it should be renamed Out of Date Information Darlington, instead.

TOURIST information may be even more perplexing in Washington, population 70,000, where 700 road signs identify districts by number, not name.

The comedian Joe Longthorne, Hull lad, apparently had much fun at the system's expense at Sunderland Empire the other night. Why is District 9 next to District 4, that sort of thing. They reckon he was brilliant.

Now, however, there are signs of a change of heart. Consultants have been appointed to devise a better way of getting from A to B, or 1 to 3 (as the case may be). The numbers' number may be up.

Both encouraged by the news and armed with an A to Z, the column set out the other day to walk from the Post House Hotel - on the town's south-western fringe - to Albany, north of the centre.

An hour later, and without thanks to the plethora of "No pedestrians" signs, we were a mile further away from Albany than when the ill-fated expedition had started.

Were it not for PC56, serendipitously encountered, the muse might still have been going round and round. To him, if not to Washington's pie-eyed planners, a commendation is in order.

RECENT notes on race names - last Friday at Southwell offered the Incredible Shrinking Man Handicap, the National banana Bred Day Fillies Handicap and the Terminalia Stakes - prompted Stephen Gilmore in Sedgefield to contact the marketing men at Wolverhampton.

"In particular," wrote Stephen, "my local paper has queried the I'm Too Sexy Handicap on February 8."

It was because on that date in 1991 Right Said Fred had a number two hit with I'm Too Sexy for My Shirt, they replied, though the record books reckon it was July so don't put your shirt on it.

Thanks also to the readers - not least John Egglestone in Blyth and Clive Sledger in Aldbrough St John - who have confirmed that Southwell, in Nottinghamshire, is correctly pronounced Suth-ell.

It's England's smallest city - "little more than a village" says Clive, who attended agricultural college there.

John Egglestone, often in those parts as a union representative of Boots, isn't so much bothered how they pronounce it as irritated by the locals' insistence on calling folk "Me duck." A disgusting habit, he says.

Arthur Mee, incidentally, said that Southwell Cathedral was set in "a quietude of loveliness." Vince Singleton would doubtless have approved.

* And finally, a note from Mr S Kelly in Norton, Stockton, not only adds fuel to the little fire we've been burning in memory of Berriman's chip van in Spennymoor - more later - but draws attention to the latest Gadfly impersonator.

This one's from the financial pages of the Mail on Sunday, an ugly looking creature which cannot possibly bear link or resemblance to the original.

As with earlier charlatans, this suck-it-and-see impostor should be approached with caution. The genuine article returns next week; for the moment the span is spun.