ONCE more to the land of her father's, Blessed Serendipity for once seeming not to have packed her red spotted handkerchief and tagged, talismanically, along.

Though we combed the Milford and West Wales Mercury, the Narberth and Whitland Observer and the County Express and St David's City Chronicle, nothing during last week's holiday in Pembrokeshire appeared to suggest the slightest North-East connection.

The June issue of the Roch and Nolton Round-Up, a four page parish magazine, was even obliged to use some exceedingly whiskery jokes in order to fill the little available space, thus giving new meaning to the silly season.

Still, its editor is Mr Harry Evans. The gentleman will doubtless go far.

SO it seemed, at any rate, as we headed back north. Not even the uplifting information in the window of the Tenby Observer about Frank B Mason - like The Northern Echo's own Harry Evans, an indomitable champion of Press freedom - seemed to offer a link back home.

The Observer's little emporium is across the road from Tenby railway station. Nose to the glass, we were only there while awaiting the 17.42 to Pembroke Dock.

Then we read in Monday's Echo of the antediluvian antics of Barnard Castle Town Council. Serendipity squared, much of the information which follows has been supplied by Tenby Observer manager Clare Townend, whose mum still lives in Low Coniscliffe, between Barney and Darlington.

Frank Mason was a former seafarer and local entrepreneur whose interests included the bathing machines on Tenby beach. His father had founded the Observer in 1853, from the early days meeting problems with the local council.

Though the mayor insisted he was "favourable" to a free Press, he objected to "persons making their grievances known through that medium". Complaints should be taken to the authorities, said the mayor, and not exposed in print.

Frank took over in 1881, in time to feature in The People's "Gallery of Modern Day Heroes" after rescuing six people from drowning.

In January 1907, when one of his reporters was ill, Mason himself decided to cover Tenby town council - under the byline of Tatler - and was unimpressed with what he found.

The meeting, he wrote, had been conducted in an "extremely perfunctory" manner, complaints were smothered, talking was "a little promiscuous" and a councillor's comments "ludicrously nave".

Tenby council responded in time honoured fashion - they banned him, ostensibly on the grounds that he couldn't write shorthand. He brought his own chair to the next meeting - shorthand for "Sod off" - and was again excluded.

Mason was enraged, obtaining a temporary High Court injunction. It wasn't a matter of whether he had shorthand, said the wise old judge, but whether he could transcribe his notes thereafter.

A full hearing found for the council. Newspapers' attendance at council meetings wasn't a right but a privilege, said the judge, and died 24 hours later.

Mason lived to fight again. He was not, said the Observer, a man to take advice from a "small town clerk", or probably even quite a tall one. The Western Mail said that Tenby council had been made a laughing stock by almost every newspaper in the land, Lord Northcliffe organised a fighting fund, a councillor said Tenby had become "notorious throughout Britain".

Under intense pressure, Parliament passed legislation in March 1908 allowing Press and public the right to attend all council meetings. That freedom was extended in 1960.

By that route to Barnard Castle, a town council of much the same size and enlightenment as Tenby's in 1907 and where moves are now afoot to prevent members from talking to the Press after decisions have been taken.

"It's not a case of trying to create any sort of gagging of the Press," insists Geoff Bosworth, the town clerk. Almost a century after Frank B Mason struck a vital blow for democracy and freedom, the proposal has come - honest - from barmy Barney council's modernisation committee.

A CAMPAIGN of an altogether lowlier nature, but as the Gadfly column played some small part in reawakening interest in Doggarts stores - once familiar throughout the North-East - we are delighted to have been invited this afternoon to the preview of the Doggarts exhibition at the Discovery Centre in Bishop Auckland Market Place - across the square from the family firm's fondly remembered headquarters and open to the public from 10am tomorrow. More shop talk, with luck, next week.

FLIGHT of fancy, probably, we fell in the Britannia to discussing the origins of the word "spuggie", a North-Eastern sparrow. (A speug may be a Scottish sparrow.)

Most dictionaries ignore it, though the Oxford reckons that the original word was "sprug", citing Sir Walter Scott's Guy Mannering in 1815: "John Wilson was a blustering kind of child, without the heart of a sprug."

Mr John Briggs recalled that in his Sunderland youth, one of the more frequent visitors to the magistrates' court was a diminutive gentleman who answered to Spuggie Purvis - "took about 30 pollisses to lock him up," he recalled, with an endorsement on his journalistic licence.

John also remembered an unsteady regular at the Sunderland bar, whose 100th appearance was marked by the celebrated Judge Myrella Cohen with a whip-round.

Judge Cohen, who died three years ago, aged 74, was the first woman barrister in Newcastle, the second Jewish woman to become a QC and at 44, the youngest judge in England.

Reckoned the best man among the lot of them, the learned judge would probably also have known how the spuggie came by its soubriquet. For the moment, we shall just have to wing it.

SIGNING himself "True British patriot", a Barnard Castle reader returns the Echo story and photograph showing the Woodham Warriors American football team from Newton Aycliffe setting off to fly the flag for the UK in the European championships.

Unfortunately, it's the Union Jack they're flying, and it's upside down. "I would hope that both they and their teachers would learn better next time," he says.

Anne Gibbon in Darlington returns two recent cuttings - both from the Echo and both talking of straightjackets, and of working in them. ("Yes I have got something better to do, I have the house to rewire," she pleads.)

The word, of course, is "straitjacket", as in dire straits. Like the upside down national flag, a straitjacket is a sign of distress.

...and finally, we returned from holiday to another eBay acquisition: a hollowed-out coconut won at Shildon Show in August 1922 and sold by someone in Richmond, North Yorkshire. It has been lacquered, hinged, dated, mounted on little wooden legs and is now home to this office's plentiful paper clips.

Miracle of the electronic age, it cost just 99p - but as coconut stall holders, Shildon lads and Mr Frank B Mason would all no doubt aver, shy bairns get nee sweets.

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