Will our plan finally take off?

Mynarski was a flyer. Though time wings heavenward with equal breathlessness, he is by no means forgotten here.

A Canadian, he was based at RAF Middleton St George - now Teesside Airport - on the night of June 12/13 1944, an air gunner on a raid on marshalling yards in France.

He died heroically, trapped in a blazing aircraft, shortly after saluting his friend and senior officer. In his native Winnipeg he is immortalised in numerous ways. In England he is almost unheard of.

The airport is being renamed. Betty Amlin in Sedgefield, herself married to a former Canadian airman, had suggested that instead of the prosaic and politically compliant Durham Tees Valley it should instead become the Andrew Mynarski Airport.

It was a brilliant idea, and so was at once shot down by those in high authority.

Like Andrew Mynarski, however, this is the column - and, it should be said, the paper - which doesn't give up without a fight.

Much operational planning has since taken place. Last Friday there was another meeting at the airport - VIP lounge, an' all - though no one thought to get the bottle opener out.

It's 60 years next month since Andrew Mynarksi won his VC. Former Canadian airmen and their families have a reunion at Middleton St George on June 11-13. Further news, good news, before then.

AS last week's column had foretold, we spent Thursday evening up in Stanhope, addressing the Women's Institute group and setting an additional competition.

What, we asked, would be the most appropriate collective noun for the maelstrom of motorcyclists in the dales?

They responded enthusiastically, collectively. A reverberation, a contamination and an explosion all inching up the decibel counter alongside a crescendo, a catastrophe and a clash.

(Older readers may recall the reusable phrase about clashing hissel' to death.)

A noisette seemed a little fanciful, an absence was wishful thinking, a hellfor came close.

In the end, both winners were alliterative, a bedlam and a blight of bikers. They have probably been called much worse.

SIMILARLY overpowered, Paddy Burton up on Stanley Hill Top suggests that AONB no longer means "Area of natural beauty" - as in the North Pennines - but A******** on Noisy Bikes.

Eric Gendle in Nunthorpe, Middlesbrough, is also convinced that the machines could be made quieter. "Did you not read the recent story," he asks, "when the police had stopped motorcyclists they thought were speeding and reported that a large number had illegal exhaust systems?

"It is highly unlikely that they were fitted to make them quieter, much more certain that they wanted them to go even faster and to hell with everyone else."

Martin Snape in Durham recalls that a post-war RAF colleague used the collective noun "a fart" of motorbikes.

"I shall not be surprised if this is too pungent for print, much less the Women's Institute," he writes, and thus underestimates us both.

WIs have long been throwing off their shackles; the North Yorkshire ladies of Rylstone simply took the divestiture a little further.

They are heroines, probably. The official competition last Thursday invited a limerick in tribute to the Calendar Girls, the winner from Frosterley:

Older members have grown pessimistic

New members are more realistic

They don't give a damn

That they make any jam

They'll succeed with their vital statistics.

Thus encouraged, Stanhope institute plans a 2005 calendar of its own - members against traditional dales backgrounds, waving the flag on Stanhope station, that sort of thing.

On the day of the first shoot, however, there was an unfortunate misunderstanding among some members - particularly the Over 80s - who thought that they, too, were being invited to leave little to the imagination and came (shall we say) prepared.

"I'm afraid to say," reports secretary and Methodist minister's wife Jill Hann, "that several went home quite disappointed."

*The calendar is likely to cost £1,000 properly to print, most of which they haven't got. The delightful Jill would much welcome a sponsor: she's on (01388) 528245.

THE front page story in Thursday's paper about the proposal to fit Scarborough donkeys with nappies had itself stirred memories of WIs (and probably of wherefores, too.)

Unforgettably addressing the institute at Brompton near Northallerton in March 1977, we had been told that retired travelling shopkeeper Edgar Hoare - who kept ducks and geese on the village green - had fitted the geese with nappies after similar bottom line complaints from the locals.

Mr Hoare, who had swum in the flooded village beck to mark his 65th birthday - at least until Mrs Hoare got wind of it - was nonetheless at a loss to understand the complaints.

"It's not as if it was bullocks, dogs or cats," he said. "Geese smell like honey."

It made a great story. The pictures, despite the most diligent inquiry, seem no longer to be extant.

REFERENCES these past couple of weeks to former Milky Bar Kid Gareth Watchman from Sedgefield - now a big lad of 15 - prompt Dave Smith in Ferryhill to recall a recent Sunday lunchtime jazz session at The Lord Nelson in Thornton Heath, near Croydon.

The chap next to him pointed towards the piano player, a chap in his 50s. "See him," he said, "he used to be a Milky Bar Kid."

It was possibly Terry Brooks, the first in 1961 of a veritable Kids' kindergarten - though Milky Bar came on the market in 1937 and still sells 100 million annually.

What did he look like then, we asked. "Like most jazz pianists," said Dave, "just hunched over his piano."

FOR reasons which perhaps need no explanation, this column has never - until now - possessed a dignity clause.

Last week, however, a letter from a local hospital radio station arrived, inviting "well known local personalities like yourself" to contribute towards a Desert Island Discs type programme.

It was addressed to Mr Ernest Amos - that being the first name in the "Northern People" guide - and began "Dear Ernest."

The hospital radio will not be receiving any further bulletins. Others can expect to hear more of the same next week.

Published: 12/05/2004