IT is 50 years since a previous occupier of the editor’s chair at The Northern Echo won a victory which forms an important part of the paper’s legacy as a campaigning newspaper.

A photograph of Sir Harold Evans – smiling, bespectacled, and youthful for an editor – looks down from the wall in my office.

One day in the early Sixties, Evans was moved by a single paragraph in a national Sunday paper to launch a campaign which was to save thousands of women’s lives.

Vancouver, in British Columbia, was expanding a programme to save women dying from cervical cancer. Evans cut out the paragraph, gave it to a Northern Echo reporter, and ordered him to go to Canada to find out more.

Clearly, budget controls were rather different in those days. The reporter made his journey, stayed in Canada for weeks of legwork, only to discover that the key to saving lives lay much closer to home.

In the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Gateshead, a gynaecologist called Stanley Way had taken 150,000 cervical smears since 1949 and found 601 showed early cancer. Minor operations on the women affected meant that none of them had died and 46 had gone on to have children.

Despite this breakthrough, the NHS rejected Way’s appeals to have his routine lifesaving tests adopted nationally.

Harold Evans was having none of it. He wrote impassioned editorials, enlisted North-East MPs to make demands in the Commons, and – after months of battering against the doors of power – The Northern Echo had its victory. Cervical cancer testing became an NHS service.

This week is Cervical Screening Awareness Week and here are some facts: l 20 per cent of UK women still fail to attend cervical cancer screening when invited.

l Cervical screening is estimated to save up to 5,000 lives each year.

l More than 3,000 new cases of cervical cancer are diagnosed in the UK each year and more than half are women under 50.

l Although very rare in women under 25, it is the second most common cancer in women under 35.

The Eve Appeal aims to raise the awareness of cervical screening and to encourage more women to attend. The organisation’s chief executive officer, Robert Marsh, says: “The earlier cervical cancer is diagnosed, the better the outcome will be. Screening is free and can save your life, so please pick up the phone as soon as the letter drops through the letterbox.”

Harold Evans did the hard bit 50 years ago. Now it’s my turn to keep spreading the word.

WEST Auckland is one of my favourite branches of the Women’s Institute.

Full of fun, energy and cheek, a visit to West Auckland WI is always enjoyable.

Before I stood up to speak last week, irrepressible president Juliet Metcalfe announced to the ladies that there would be a talk on Tudor costumes at the Gaunless group of WIs in September.

“What makes you call them gormless?” asked a puzzled member of the audience, who clearly felt the need to stick up for colleagues in the branches of Toft Hill and Witton-le-Wear.

MY thanks to Barry Anderson, of Spennymoor, who was the friendliest guard I’ve encountered in all my years travelling up and down the East Coast Mainline.

A former policeman, he loves his new life on the trains and it shines through in his customer care.

That said, I wasn’t that impressed during a trip to London with my wife last week when he crouched beside me and said: “You look a lot younger in your picture in the paper.”

FINALLY, spare a thought for the American family who boarded our train at York at 11am and contested a seat reservation in our carriage.

“This train’s going to London, your ticket’s for a train to Liverpool,” said the main in Coach C, seat number 42.

The train was already moving by the time the penny had dropped. Next stop London!

Good old Barry was swiftly on the case, working out how the husband, wife and daughter could get to the land of The Beatles by 4pm.

To be fair, they weren’t as bothered as they might have been.

“Hey, England’s only a small country,” said the mother.

She’s got a ticket to ride...