Old, old story

Journalism’s byways, I’m in search of serendipity – that familiar contradiction in terms – or more accurately looking for a column. The North Yorkshire A1 is but a mile away, though nothing but a distant murmury.

Moulton’s the first village, the Black Bull – until recently pure pedigree, now sadly emasculated – still for sale at £300,000. Elsewhere, there’s new building, the site inevitably clarty. The builder’s name’s Mudd.

Moulton, as previously we have observed, also has Britain’s most literary bus shelter. Others offer no reading matter beyond the timetable.

When not vandalised, Moulton has a little library of second-hand books at 50p apiece, a notice advising that in 2012 the scheme raised £177 (and 41p) for village funds.

On January 4 they changed stock.

Now there’s a Dawn French, a couple of Dick Francis novels, a book called How to Live Successfully with Diverticulitis and its sister volume Coping with Diverticulitis. Since the buses are but every two hours, there’s time enough to browse.

Scorton’s two-and-a-half miles down the road, beyond that Boltonon- Swale. The hope is that Scorton village hall, now styled Joan’s Community Tea Rooms, will be open for lunch. It’s not, not until March 5.

Blenheim Close – “leading to Typhoon Close, Beaufighter Close and Spitfire Court” – recalls the wartime RAF station on the edge of the village.

The US Air Force also flew Black Widows from Scorton, though Black Widow Way may have seemed a little too arachnid for comfort.

A little further on, a stone tablet by the roadside marks Pigg’s Whin, the site of former RAF accommodation.

It was unveiled to mark John Pigg’s birthday in 1998 and to acknowledge the return, says the stone, of swords into ploughshares.

Bolton-on-Swale is best known as the resting place of Henry Jenkins, said to have died on December 9, 1670, at the age of 169, a longevity partly attributed to nettle stew. Old Henry was a vegetarian, and thus knew nothing of porky pies.

In biblical terms, of course, he was but a bairn. Arphaxad made it to 530, but still gave 400-and-odd years to Methuselah. Abraham became a first-time father at 100 – his wife Sarah being barely 90 – and, having clearly acquired a taste for it, was begetting like billy-oh long thereafter.

Bolton churchyard has a memorial to Henry Jenkins, erected in 1743, the leaflet in church is a little more circumspect. “Although such a long life is difficult to believe, there is no doubt that Henry’s life spanned a long period of English history,” it says.

There’s also a Henry Jenkins Society, committed to charitable works in the Richmond area.

The 14th Century church held its last service for a while last Sunday in order that restoration work might continue. The noticeboard promises that cold drinks are available. That not being the case, it was necessary to head back to Scorton for a pint in the Heifer – Holy Cow, appropriately – and a pie from the village shop.

They were clean out of nettle stew.

In total ten miles, about ten column inches and ten bob for a learned tome on diverticulitis. It’s what’s called walking the walk.

THE death of Sir Humphrey Potts, the High Court judge nicknamed Porridge Potts because of an alleged propensity for heavy sentencing, in turn stirs memories for Tom Dobbin.

Potts was a farmer’s son from Penshaw, near Sunderland. Tom was a journalist from Metal Bridge, that unimaginatively named little place near Ferryhill, spent 20 years in the 1950s and 60s on the case at Durham Assizes.

“In those days the biggest case list outside the Bailey,” recalls Tom, now 85 and still in Durham.

Humphrey Potts and Peter Taylor, a future Lord Chief Justice, were among a quintet of Newcastle barristers – James Chadwin, Wilfred Steer and Roderick Smith the others – known as the Lions of the North because of their legal voraciousness.

“For all that they were still really friendly and approachable,” Tom remembers.

“Humphrey would tip us off when something decent was coming up, Peter Taylor would give me a lift to Coxhoe on the back of his motorbike.”

Potts became presiding judge on the North-East circuit from 1988-91 but may best be remembered for his handling of the Jeffrey Archer perjury case in 2001 – “extremely distasteful”

he called it, before sentencing the Tory grandee to four years.

Porridge Potts had lived up to his name.

TOM and his press bench colleagues half a century ago also got on well with Peter Taylor, despite once coming pretty close to contempt.

It was a big case in which Taylor was still junior counsel. Though Tom’s editor had decreed that they should have mug shots of all concerned, Taylor declined on the grounds that photographs weren’t allowed within the court precincts.

“We remembered he played rugby, Gosforth I think, and used a photograph of him in his rugby kit,” recalls Tom.

The barrister duly confronted him.

Though Tom feared the worst, Taylor smiled. “I think you’d better have your photograph,” he said.

The sequel came many years later in Robb’s department store, in Hexham.

“This well-dressed chap came up to me and asked if I was still writing for the newspapers. I’d no idea who it was so asked him, as you do, how he was getting on himself.”

“Oh not bad,” said the stranger, “I’m still the Lord Chief Justice.”

LAST week’s piece on the caninefriendly Brandling Villa pub in Newcastle, where for £2.75 pet lovers can even buy a bottle of non-alcoholic Dog Beer, prompts an email and a YouTube link from Karl Coates. It’s of his mate Baz drinking the stuff – “very cruel but very funny” says Karl, and so it proves. Unfit for human consumption? “Quite disgusting”

says Baz. Karl Coates Art will find it on YouTube.

THE Rev Dr Mel Gray, a learned gentleman from Chilton, wonders about the origin of the phrase “a rabbit off.”

His father, Mel insists, was the only person he ever heard use it.

Could it be something to do with the practice of netting – or as the poaching fraternity might suppose, lamping?

An internet burrow reveals surprisingly little. Google “a rabbit off”

and the first hit is something to do with a music festival, the second’s from the Eating Owt column – no rabbit pie at the Three Crowns in Darlington – and the third asks “How do you tell a rabbit off?” which isn’t the same thing at all.

It’s all quite puzzling. The phrase is certainly much more common than Dr Gray supposes but why, specifically, should there be a rabbit off? Bunny peculiar, theories welcomed.