What sauce

Like most people of taste, Jack enjoys a drop of brown sauce with his tea. The famous Chop Sauce, it says on the front of the bottle, is made by “Hammonds of Yorkshire”.

Yorkshire Day, Jack recalls, was celebrated on August 1 – “a promotion of Yorkshire products whose quality is due to their Yorkshire origins.

“No doubt it is because of that brand image that Chop Sauce is sold with the Hammonds of Yorkshire banner in large print.”

Turn to the back of the bottle, however. McCormicks (UK), the parent company, is based in Buckinghamshire.

Greater indignity, smaller type, Hammonds of Yorkshire sauce is “produced in Lancashire”.

In truth, it’s made in Littleborough, through which the Rochdale canal flows and which lies within Rochdale borough – home to such red rose legends as Gracie Fields, Mike Harding and meat and potato pie.

Doubtless there is an etymological argument – more certain yet, a legal one – to support such linguistic elasticity.

But as was said of a different product altogether: “I like your sauce.”

FROM yet further afield, John Heslop in Durham sends a photograph of a church noticeboard spotted by his daughter, Katy, in Holloway, North London – “not exactly in The Northern Echo catchment area, but it does grab you”. So it does. With or without images, more examples of the wit and wisdom of wayside pulpits much welcomed.

AH, but the column gets everywhere, like some of the pesky winged creatures which recently have been settling hereabouts.

Only last week we revealed concerns about the Blandford Fly, so called because it was discovered amid weed beds in Blandford Forum, north Devon.

It prompted an email from the Stokesley Stockbroker, who’d visited the town just the previous week. “I can report that locals regard the dreaded fly as not as common as it used to be, but still doubtless virulent,”

he says. More agreeably, the nearby Hall and Woodhouse brewery produces a bottled beer called Blandford Fly – “reputed to have a bit of a sting,” says the Stockbroker.

Particularly, however, he notes that the Anglican church in Blandford Forum, like most of the Georgian town centre, was built by the Bastard Brothers – “I kid you not” – a pair of considerable ingenuity.

Facing the need to enlarge the building, the brothers split it in half, put the eastern end on rollers and added a bit in between.

VERY much closer to home, we are taken by a Darlington council press release for yesterday’s Market Place tea dance.

Among the attractions, promised the release, would be free scones from Preston Villiers. If they’re half as good as the stuff made for donkeys’ years in Darlington by Prest and Villiers, the folks would have danced gaily indeed.

IF a funny thing happened at Blandford Forum, it certainly did – many years ago – at Billingham Forum. Fred Emney, a Lancastrian comedian and character actor described as “usually gruff”, was appearing in pantomime there. Hitherto his greatest claim to fame may have been as straight man to Pinky and Perky.

At any rate, they sent me to interview him. Gruff at the top, Emney proved as miserable as his characterisations.

His answers were monosyllabic, usually yes or no. With some exasperation, I finally asked him how he’d write about himself. “Fred Emney,” he said, “is a bigt, fat, badtempered, overpowering old sod.”

In the following day’s paper I wrote exactly that. At home, the telephone rang at 7.25am. “Emney here,” said the unmistakable voice. “Finest interview with me I’ve ever read.”

SCHOOL tripping down Memory Lane appears almost at an end, though John Baker adds a perhaps final recollection of the Bishop Auckland Grammar School special train to the 1962 Royal Show in Newcastle.

“The thing I remember about it is Lez Rawe (then a deputy head, still alive) confiscating someone’s ice cream at the station before we came back. I think he was a bit upset because Mr Fleming, the Latin master, had dedicated his day to Bacchus,”

says John.

At the Shildon v Spennymoor Town football match last Friday evening, meanwhile, I fall into conversation with the chairman of the 60-strong Oslo branch of the Scarborough Athletic Supporters Club.

Shildon’s merely a sideshow; he’s off to the seaside next day. So why choose Scarborough? “Easy,” he says in the impeccable English of most Scandinavians. “It’s where we used to go on the school trip.”

THE Royal Show was a guilt trip, too. Wretchedly, it may be recalled, we’d tipped thousands of agricultural leaflets over the city of Durham from the returning train.

Mary Hawgood is a former mayor.

“After all this time,” she says, “I think you may probably be forgiven.”

FINALLY, improbably, to the admirable Mr Tony Benn, reputed (irrelevantly) to be the first person in Britain to have had a telephone answering machine.

I’d interviewed him in Willington, ahead of the 2003 Durham Big Meeting – “if not a national treasure, he fears, then in danger of being seen as a benign institution.”

His diaries, at that time recently published, had described Gordon Brown as “unfit to run a corner shop.”

These days his targets are more comfortable. The younger bairn – an ever-more valuable recruit to the Gadfly Irregulars – notes in The Guardian a letter signed by “Tony Benn and 73 others” trying to start a campaign against Government spending cuts.

Among the others, notes the bairn, is Lee Jasper, joint co-ordinator of Black Activists Rise Against Cuts (Barac).

The bairn Googled Barac. None of the top ten hits concerned Mr Jasper’s organisation. The first, indeed, takes us back to dear old Stanley Hill Top, above Crook, where in the village hall on the last Thursday of the month meets the Bishop Auckland Radio Amateurs Club, or Barac for listeners on short wave.

“I imagine anyone hoping to find black activists rising against cuts will be disappointed,” says the bairn.

Barac’s successful Railways on the Air event, it’s broadcast, will again take place – spending cuts notwithstanding – on the weekend of September 25-26. Over and out.

A lasting opportunity

PIPE professionally in place, Prime Minister Harold Wilson poses with villagers in Rievaulx, North Yorkshire, during the 1966 General Election campaign – proof, at last, of why he became Lord Wilson of Rievaulx.

It’s puzzled political commentators for decades, and Gadfly readers for about three weeks. Now, the estimable Charles Allenby, from Swinton, Malton, digs out from his late mother’s scrapbook a cutting (right) headlined “Mr Wilson’s surprise visit to Rievaulx.”

The PM, it should be added, and his 13-vehicle motorcade. “I used to spend most of my holidays here as a child, camping down by the river,” he recalled. He’d been to an election meeting in Middlesbrough and was heading towards York when, apparently, he realised that Rievalux was nearby and decided there was just time to visit old haunts.

His ancestors, the cutting recalls, had lived for hundreds of years in the village. His grandfather was the Rievaulx cobbler, demanded with fellow village school pupils that they be given the day off in 1852 to mark the death of the Duke of Wellington and played truant when the headmaster refused.

The photograph was taken outside the house where his grandfather was born. He couldn’t get in because the occupants, retired farmer Arthur Robinson and his wife Mary, were away. “The lady of the manor offered my grandmother the tenancy of this cottage in perpetuity for £4 a year but the old lady couldn’t afford it,” he said before hurrying back to the hustings.

That the media were there to record the spontaneous occasion must simply be regarded as a portent of things to come. What yesterday was a surprise visit is a photo opportunity today.