Who is Cynthia? What is she?

Primarily the column concerned Charles Simon, the former Darlington repertory company manager who later helped Mrs Dale keep her diary, still smokes 40 Dunhill King Size a day and at 91 has more work and more energy and a finer voice than most men half his age.

More of the splendid Mr Simon a little later. ("It was 40 Players when I knew him," says Audrey.) She also draws attention, however, to a long and very carefully forgotten entry in the c.v. of David Kirk, the Darlington GP's son also featured hereabouts last week.

Mr Kirk, who in the early 1950s had run a repertory company in Durham, became a distinguished actor and director - but for a season in 1958 played "Cynthia", the speechless stooge to cobblestone comedienne Hylda Baker.

Hylda was 4ft 9ins, looked not a tittle bigger, writhed like a bucket of worms and lied inveterately and involuntarily about her age. Cynthia, played over the years by several different men, was always over six feet, a great, gauche, gormless gargoyle who carried a histrionic handbag and never, ever, said a word.

Hylda would gaze upwards at her with something - mute point? - approaching affection. "Oh she knows, yes she knows...."

(John Briggs, our man with the voluntary computer, hasn't so much surfed the net as sailed a bathysphere through it in the hope of finding an illustration of Cynthia and Hylda together. Still nothing has surfaced. Even now, a picture would greatly be appreciated.)

Though Cynthia afforded his television debut, Mr Kirk seems not entirely to have appreciated the break. Promoting an Agatha Christine thriller at Darlington Civic Theatre in 1966, he wrote to The Northern Echo's editor pleading that she be dragged out no longer.

"This brief excursion into variety followed a financial disaster in the straight theatre. I have taken care to have no similar disasters and prefer to let my past remain past." It didn't work. "Cynthia's back in town", proclaimed a Northern Despatch headline when he returned two years later. These days he is more relaxed about it, even essays a Bolton clog dancer's accent - more sinned against than Cynthia, no doubt.

He'd met Hylda, successfully transferred from music hall to television, at a show business party. "She looked all the way up at me, said she was going to need a feed at the end of the following week and asked if I'd like to give it a go. My attitude was that I'd do anything once."

They finished on the end of one of Blackpool's incomparable piers, embarked on a variety tour and between Leeds and Sunderland Empires appeared on the fifth ever Sunday Night at the London Palladium.

"I remember sitting in my dressing room thinking that I'd been an actor for eight years without making the limelight and had been in variety five weeks, hadn't uttered a word and was at the London Palladium," he says.

He'd met his wife at Durham, their daughter named Gay after the comedy The Gay Dog. Times, and meanings, change. "She arrived on the Friday of the very best week we ever did in Spennymoor," he once recalled.

His time as a Baker's boy also included seven episodes of Be Soon - another catchphrase - her first television series.

He left - "I wouldn't say it was frustrating, there were just other things I wanted to do" - to form a repertory company at the 900 seat Theatre Royal in Blyth, confident that in 1958 it was just what Northumberland colliers wanted. He has long been in London.

Hylda, all prim and malaproper - so excited, she said, that she could have a coronary trombonist - became yet more famous. Born in Bolton in 1905, she learned Lancashire clog dancing, made her stage debut at Tunbridge Wells (very red rose) and after spells as a buttonhole maker and fish and chip shop assistant (Plodders Lane, Farnworth) found a notoriously neurotic niche.

She also had parts in films like Oliver, Up the Junction and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, the last two (for some reason) as a back street abortionist. "People keep asking me for my address," she complained.

Her biggest success, however, was in a sitcom called Nearest and Dearest, the story of Nellie Pledge, would-be queen of Colne, and her family of preserving cases.

In 1978, yet more improbably, she and the equally unadulterated Arthur Mullard reached 22 in the hit parade with a version of "You're the one that I want", from the film Grease. They appeared together on Top of the Pops, Hylda's ensemble of black leather and blonde wig earning bookings on the gay club circuit. Cynthia is unlikely to have approved.

Even then, however, Alzheimer's disease was leaving its insidious imprint. Hylda, never good at making friends, died alone in a mental hospital in 1986, fewer than ten people at her funeral. The Good Old Days had been the best; she probably knew that, too.

AUDREY Thompson, still in Darlington, was Charles Simon's secretary ("and dogsbody", she says) for eight years of repertory. She even tells the story - a long one, alas - of the night he sacked Glenda Jackson.

Harrison in those days, Audrey was also there in 1946 when fire destroyed almost everything they'd built up at the old Temperance Hall in Gladstone Street. "We put on a show that night in the Mechanics Hall, then moved to the Co-operative Hall and up to the Royal Astoria.

"Even now I hear voices on television and recognise them from rep in Darlington. I saw Charles 20 years ago in The Importance of Being Earnest at the Civic. He hadn't changed a bit."

There has also been a voice-mail message from Charles Simon - perhaps best remembered as Dr Dale - himself. Five minutes after our conversation, he said, he'd had a call inviting him to film a commercial in Los Angeles. The plane left at eleven o'clock the following morning.

"People still seem to remember me," said the great old stager. "This business of ours really is quite extraordinary."

A CALL, too, from our old friend Tom Peacock - former probation officer, victim supporter and still roaring Lion. Tom had bought Charles Simon's house in Abbey Road, Darlington - the posh end - when finally Simon moved south in 1960. Cost 40 years ago of a smart house in the west end? £2,400.

KEN Rowland, the champion fund raiser about whom we wrote on May 25, is recovering from a queer do (to use the medical term) involving pulmonary embolism, a condition with which the column is uncomfortably familiar.

Once a Shildon lad, but latterly a Peterlee policeman, Ken has raised more than £385,000 in 14 years by flogging specially designed tie pins.

"Even when he went into hospital, he was going round the beds selling pins," reports Muriel Graham, his mother-in-law.

Ken, 56, is presently confined to his own bed after an operation on Monday, though things are looking brighter. "He's canny," says Muriel, and probably says it all.

How Comet took off and other retail tales

THESE days it's hard enough to lunch, much less launch. For that reason, the column's regrets have been sent to the Dalesman Publishing Company for a little do today.

It's to promote the second volume of How It All Began in Yorkshire - like how Armitage's Seeds grew from a stall in the Beast Market in Huddersfield, that sort of thing.

George Hollingbery sold "accumulators" for early wirelesses, changed from Comet Battery Services to Comet Radio Services when the mains chance arose and begat a chain of Comets visible all over the country.

Michael Marks was a penniless Polish Jew who landed in Hartlepool, moved onto Stockton and finished in Leeds where the "original penny bazaar" was set up on a trestle table in the market. Then he met Tom Spencer.

Wm Murdoch Morrison could barely rub two pennies either, his grocery shops enjoying only limited success until 1961, when his son Ken bought the former Victoria Cinema in Bradford for £1,100 and turned it into a supermarket; Wm Fortune made his name (and a few bob) selling salted bloaters before kippering came to Henrietta Street, Whitby, in 1899; French monks grew liquorice around Pontefract (otherwise Pomfret) from the 11th Century, but it was 1842 before George Bassett - "wholesale confectioner, lozenge maker and British wine dealer" - came along.

Then there was William Barker - just Williams, it seems - whose famed department store in Northallerton is celebrating its 125th anniversary.

Born in 1868, William was apprenticed for six years to John Oxendale's drapery - no wedlock, holy or otherwise, no card or dice games, no smoking, no taverns, no playhouses - and eventually became a partner.

The store became Oxendale and Barker, then just Barkers, with no apostrophe to suggest how singular it has all become.

Mr William would still cycle down there as an old man; they left a duster out for him, and he always imagined a use.

The book's beginnings are altogether less humble; they reckon it'll be a liquid launch, too. One for the road another time.

How It All Began in Yorkshire (Volume 2) by Maurice Baren. (Dalesman, £10.95)