CUSHY Butterfield, it will be recalled, was a big lass and a bonny lass who liked a couple of beers, could be seen on Sandgate when the herring boats came in but came (by whatever pronunciation) from across the river in Gateshead.

Her song, famously filched to sell Newcastle Brown Ale - "It's a fine beer and a bottled beer with the North's biggest sale" - may be Tyneside's best known after The Blaydon Races itself:

Aa's a brocken hearted keelman and aa's ower heels in luv

Wiv a young lass from Gatesheed and aa call her my dove,

Her nyem's Cushy Butterfield and she sells yella clay

And her cousin's a muckman, and they caal him Tom Gray.

Though neither pretty nor perfumed ("like a bagful of sawdust tied round wiv a string") Cushy had at least one admirer - that poor, lovesick, caffy-hearted keelman.

She became so famous that she even merits a file in The Northern Echo library (listed under "D" for dead) and in 1988, had the bar on Newcastle Central station named after her. Our picture, coyly captioned "Miss C Butterfield", was the pub sign. Note the unblushing tattoo.

We mention all this following last week's note on "cushy", a colloquial term for a cow as well as a word meaning "easy" or "soft".

Where does that leave Miss Butterfield, asks Peter Sotheran in Redcar - was she simply a bit on the bovine side, or was Sandgate really Easy Street?

Today's column, in other words, is yet another Cushy number.

What's little remembered is that the song has a final verse, suggesting that the confused keelman might all the time have been taken for a trip along the Tyne:

Noo, aa hear she's another chap, an' he hews at Shipcote

If aa thowt she'd deceive me, aa'd sure cut me throat,

Aal down the river sailin', an sing "Aa'm afloat"

Biddin' adoo to Cushy Butterfield an' the chap at Shipcote.

Was Cushy Butterfield just a woman of easy virtue, or is there nowt so funny as folk songs? History doesn't tell us; Gadfly readers might.

PETER Sotheran is also much involved with the Sir William Turner Almshouses in Coatham, whose anniversary service was last Thursday evening - the same time as England played Portugal and Switzerland. In answer to the suggestion that they might have picked a better night, Peter's e-mail is succinct: "Presumably Sir Wm T's copy of Nostradamus did not include the schedule of football matches for 2004 when he elected to open the Almshouses on June 24, 1674."

SEVERAL other readers confirm that "cush" or "cushy" refers to cows - though not just in the North-East.

Ian Forsyth and Martin Snape, both in Durham and not for the same time on the same wavelength, independently recall a mournful folk song with the chorus "Cusha, cusha, cusha calling, ere the early dew was falling."

Adapted from a Victorian one-hit wonder, The High Tide on the Lincolnshire Coast, by Jean Ingelow, it was about a milkmaid who went out to bring in the cattle and floated home dead on the flood.

From distant childhood, Martin also recalls a nursery rhyme beginning: "Cushy cow bonny, let down your milk."

It is just as Ian Forsyth observes, they don't make 'em like that any more.

ERNIE Reynolds in Wheatley Hill offers a rather more delicate suggestion. "Ask any Desert Rat in the 8th Army about 'cush' and he'll remember it well. It was probably the first Arabic word he learned.

The second might have been shufti, as in "shufti cush", the most genteel English equivalent being "Dinah, Dinah show us your leg."

Some words may never have travelled beyond a single area, however. Ernie recalls that, while a fireman in Cyprus, the brigade had to be covered by the Army because of the Eoka threat.

After helping put out a blaze, he was eating an apple and asked one of the soldiers which part of Middlesbrough he happened to be from.

"How on earth do you know I'm from Middlesbrough?" asked the astonished squaddie, and was reminded that he'd just asked for the gorker.

The Boro, insists Ernie, is the only place in England where the apple core is known as a gorker. The rest of us, presumably, are just gowks.

SOME definitions are altogether newer. Lynn Briggs, now in Darlington but born across the great pond, forwards the winners of the Washington Post's annual word contest.

They include willy-nilly ("impotent"), flabbergasted ("appalled at how fat you've grown"), abdicate ("to give up all hope of having a flat stomach") and gargoyle ("an olive flavoured mouthwash").

The best remains "negligent" - "the absent minded condition in which you answer the front door in your nightie".

LAST week's column noted a train journey from Sugar Loaf station on the Heart of Wales line, thus increasing its patronage from 99 passengers a year to 100. Eric Smallwood in Middlesbrough suggests that we were keen to get out: Sugar Loaf has a vineyard, too.

AGAIN hit by power cuts in last week's storms, pub landlady Ann Kreft of The Bridge at Stapleton, near Darlington, told the Darlington and Stockton Times that it was "like living in the 16th century".

Her exasperation is understandable, her history more questionable. In the 16th century, they went to bed at sunset.

It's exactly 125 years since Sunderland-born Joseph Swan invented the light bulb. His home in Low Fell was the first in the world to have electric lighting, the second was Sir William Armstrong's Cragside at Rothbury, Northumberland.

Swan, later in conjunction with Thomas Edison, also opened the world's first electric light bulb factory at Benwell, Newcastle.

Memory, for some reason, suggested that he had Cockfield connections, but was luminously mistaken. Cockfield wasn't switched onto mains electricity until 1932; they'll get round to Stapleton eventually.

...and finally, the Gadfly column in the financial section of the Mail on Sunday - an altogether inferior, Johnny-come-lately sort of a creature - reports a lunchtime speech to the Institute of Economic Affairs by the Rev Dr Peter Mullen, chaplain to the Stock Exchange and sometimes saturnine columnist in these parts.

Peter was again looking on the blight side, his theme "The destruction of our institutions." Two of the 50 guests, including a fellow clergyman, walked out in protest. Another senior city clergyman said he "deeply deprecated" Peter's tone, Lord Howe - the former Tory chancellor - rose during questions and answers to object to his "unreservedly gloomy" world view.

"Lord Howe tackles the Rev Doom," said the MoS headline. We return, ever cheerful, next week.

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Published: ??/??/2004