Ginger group

"When I was young in the 1950s, I'm sure that I was a Wright's Ginger Nut. Either my friends give me a dirty laugh or look at me with sympathy. Am I correct that there was a Wright's Ginger Nut club?"

The nut's not hard to crack. Wright's biscuits were made in Rutland Street, South Shields, the famously curly-haired character in the logo drawn by Mabel Lucie Attwell - of whom more shortly - known as Mischief, apparently because of the habit of Tyneside ladies of looking into the pram to proclaim "Eeh, he's full of mischief, that one."

There were tens of thousands of nuts cases like Geoff - a ginger group, as it were. Does anyone still wear the badge with pride?

WAGON Wheels offered similar incentives to the children of the bulge years, though that may have been to collect umpteen packets in return for a jigsaw puzzle.

The still-familiar biscuits were introduced in 1948, apparently to coincide with the Olympia Food Fair and with the popularity of a film called Wagon Train. Sales are said more recently to have soared when the comedienne Dawn French performed a sketch dressed as a schoolgirl with a Wagon Wheel in her mouth.

The perennial allegation, of course, is that the Wheel's diameter has shrunk since those pioneering days - a claim which Burton's, the biscuit makers, deny. Probably through a spokesman.

It's due to childhood memories, they insist, of eating the same sized biscuit with a much smaller hand.

At 74 millimetres, the English Wagon Wheel is still 14mm smaller than its Australian counterpart. It's just that the English are thicker, that's all.

THE phrase about taking the biscuit - "usually through an act of impudence or effrontery" - has been around in England for exactly a century, says esteemed etymologist Nick Rees. In America they take the cake, instead.

One story, says Rees, is that the phrase was written in 17th century Latin against the name of a "beautiful innkeeper's daughter" - probably he meant an innkeeper's beautiful daughter.

"Ista capit biscottum" it said and, like Dawn French, doubtless she did.

YOU know, of course, the one about what a Frenchman has for his breakfast? Huit heures bix, of course.

MABEL Lucie Attwell, fondly remembered by many of advancing years, was probably the foremost children's artist of the 1920s - and for a long time thereafter. The first of the hugely popular Lucie Attwell Annuals appeared in 1922, the last in 1958. The age of innocence ended simultaneously.

Born in 1879, she disliked formal art school training and failed to complete two courses.

Thanks to her shrewd business sense - if it were Mischief making, it was certainly lucrative - she also designed posters, calendars, figurines, wall plaques and soft toys. "No British home," says one of the websites, "would be without an Attwell biscuit-tin money box."

She moved from London to Wiltshire and finally to Fowey, in Cornwall - where she died in 1964 and where there's a permanent exhibition of her work.

MORE ginger bread upon the water, we read while on holiday in the Shetland Islands - 14 per cent of Scots are members of the Red Headed League, more than any nation in the world - that the author Ginny Dougary has written a "choral piece" in praise of those so ruddily adorned.

Some call it auburn, some titian, others strawberry blonde. Some just call them names, freckless to the consequences.

"It seems that England may be the only country in the world to indulge in ginger baiting," she writes. "In the United States, red locks are something to be envied. The notion that someone could be bullied because of the colour of his or hair seems incredible to them."

The piece was performed last month at the Royal Festival Hall, coinciding with news of a Newcastle family which had suffered three years of abuse - and attacks on them and their property - because of their red hair. A council official had suggested that they invest in a few bottles of dye.

"As a ginger-ninja myself," adds Ms Dougary, ""I was appalled at the idea that the solution to being bullied should be to change yourself rather than to

correct the behaviour of your tormentors."

In another recent case, a ginger-headed waitress from Plymouth was awarded £17,618 after suffering "lewd and embarrassing comments" about her hair. Dave Kitson, the Reading footballer, has said that those who mock the colour of his hair are as bad as racists.

Written with the American composer MJ, the new work celebrates redheads from William Shakespeare to Winston Churchill, Oliver Cromwell to Woody Allen, Sarah Bernhardt to Kiki Dee.

There was also Ginger Rogers, of course, but that lady spoke for herself.

A NEW edition of the Good Word Guide has arrived - more words on the Word Guide next week - in which "ginger" doesn't feature at all and the only red alert is over the term "Red Indian", cross-referenced to "Native American". This, we are told, is now the preferred term "for a person descended from one of the indigenous peoples of the Americas". Red Indian and American Indian are "no longer considered acceptable".

THEN there's redandproud.com - a website proclaiming that they'd rather be red than, well, almost anything on earth.

"Our aim," says the rubric at the top - and a rubric was itself once written in red - "is to promote the lot of the redhead, whether in culture, art or sport."

Past winners of the Redhead of the Year award include former LibDem leader Charles Kennedy - latterly a little red-faced, too - television gardener Charlie Dimmock and actress Jenny McAlpine, her out of Coronation Street.

Anne Robinson's nomination prompted the production of special T-shirts - "Not a redhead? You are the weakest link."

This year's hot favourite - red hot favourite, it might be said - is Shotley Bridge lad and Durham cricket all-rounder Paul Collingwood, England's new one-day captain and, this week, an honorary fellow of Sunderland University.

If they've tried to bully Colly, it probably wasn't when he had a bat in his hand, anyway.

As they may say around the Scrabble board, there may be further red-letter days to come.

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