SINCE a million housewives every day may pick up a can of beans and wonder what it's all about, we should at once make it clear that Henry John Heinz never did have 57 varieties. Not so that he'd noticed, anyway.

There were more than 60 - plum pudding, India relish, spaghetti, peanut butter, chilli sauce and celery soup - by the time, in 1896, that Heinz spotted a hoarding for "21 styles of shoes" and decided to add to it.

Fifty seven was simply a number that appealed to him: palace of varieties, it became one of the world's great advertising slogans.

HJ was a Pittsburgh brick maker's son, exploited the three-and-a-half acre horseradish patch in the back garden, thereafter never once lost the plot.

Soon he was selling horseradish sauce round the doors. It was the first Heinz product.

Now the varieties have risen to more than 5,700, the workforce to 50,000, the influence worldwide. Heinz is not just the world's biggest tomato processor but among the biggest producers of pet and baby foods. Baked beans came to Britain in 1928 and remain a national toast.

The mail address was PO Box 57, the telephone 273-5757. As recently as 2001, the company paid $57m to have the Pittsburgh Steelers arena renamed the Heinz Field.

The point of this rattle along Tin Can Alley? Today marks yet another birthday in these parts. Spice of life, we carry on regardless.

THOSE of that egregious age will well remember a group called the Tornadoes, number one in the August 1962 hit parade with a space odyssey called Telstar. The lead guitarist was called Heinz Burt, that's what stirs the sentient. Someone here insists that one of the original Tornadoes now keeps the little beacon light on the end of Whitby pier, but maybe he's simply off beam.

AMONG those with whom it might have been pleasant to share a pint on so joyous an occasion is the new Bishop of Durham, briefly in Darlington this morning as part of his getting-to-know-you tour of the diocese.

Tomorrow, he's in the Durham dales, Stanhope to Wolsingham, by Weardale Motor Services. We eagerly recommend it, an episcopal eye opener.

Heading up the dale one evening last week, driver clearly known to almost everyone, the bus from Bishop Auckland stopped unexpectedly at a cottage just outside Frosterley.

There, the driver alighted, went into the house and before continuing the journey, took the dog for a walk. On the grounds that the dog's need was probably greater than ours, he couldn't be faulted.

As the Rt Rev Tom Wright will in time discover, that's the way things are in the dale. It's to be hoped he will cut his cloth accordingly.

STILL hazy after all these years, we were taken aback on Friday evening by a call from a chap on Radio 4.

"We're putting out a programme on Sunday night about the 1983 Darlington by-election," he said. "Can you let us have any photographs?"

Perplexity followed. The photographs, he was obliged to explain, were for the inevitable accompanying website. By that time, everyone competent to send them had gone home.

The programme went out regardless. It was the election, it may be recalled, in which Tyne Tees Television presenter Tony Cook was hot favourite to win the seat for the emerging SDP/Liberal Alliance - until the moment he opened his mouth.

"A journalist who was hopeless dealing with the media," suggested presenter Steve Richards.

The other principal candidates were Ossie O'Brien, representing a Labour opposition led by Michael Foot in a campaign orchestrated by Jack Cunningham, and Michael Fallon for the Conservatives.

"You sensed you were a pawn in a very intense game," said Fallon.

O'Brien won a narrow victory over Fallon, Cook seriously tailed off. "It was almost the perfect result; it kept Foot in office," the Tory told Radio 4.

Labour had similar feelings. "You b******, you've saved Foot," a senior party figure told Cunningham as he returned, victorious, to the Commons.

The Conservatives, and Michael Fallon, won the general election a few months later. "Mrs Thatcher," said Richards, "was the true beneficiary of the Darlington by-election."

MICHAEL Fallon survived in Darlington until 1992. Five years later, he became MP for the safe-ish Sevenoaks seat, in Kent.

We'd drink with him on Friday evenings, the MP so generally shattered that on one memorable occasion, he had five pints and five Mars bars in an attempt to embody the bit about work, rest and play.

The pressure may be less now. A piece in last weekend's Mail on Sunday claimed that shortly before the Sevenoaks election, he'd paid £1.2m in cash for a house in the constituency and that he is now worth £2.94m.

He is also managing director and has a substantial share in the children's nursery chain Just Learning. Fallon on stony ground no longer.

THE Mail on Sunday also reckons that our old friend Hilary Armstrong, MP for North West Durham and Government chief whip, is worth £675,000. All subject to inflation, of course, but she's getting the drinks in next time.

SPEAKING of millionaires, as you do, a front page piece in the Sunday Times suggests that up to 40 per cent are dyslexic.

"A huge majority of Britain's estimated 5,000 self-made millionaires performed badly at school. Most people who have made a million have had difficult childhoods," it says.

On the desk, perchance, is a set of 1940s school reports. "Tries hard to get on but has poor ability...talks too much...not bright but apparently keen...poor attention but tongue well practised, seldom still."

The poor lad in question was George Reynolds, owner of Darlington FC and well known dyslexic millionaire.

...and finally, the beleaguered apostrophe tweaks its troubled tail once more. We mentioned it last week, the same day - as Alan Price from Wardley, Gateshead, eagerly observes - that an Echo television preview was headed "Every dog has it's day."

The problem's even older than we'd supposed. Arthur Pickering in Hartlepool points out that in a new Newcastle City Council book on George Stephenson, a contemporary engraving of the Stockton and Darlington Railway opening depicts "Train of waggon's crossing the turnpike road near Darlington."

Clarice Middleton in Richmond sends a Telegraph cutting about similar solecisms while Tony Fretwell, honorary secretary of the Coundon Society for the Prevention and Prosecution of Felons, forwards an Observer piece concerned that the apostrophe faces oblivion.

"Does anyone care?", it asks.

The Felons care so greatly that Gadfly, appointed by them as Keeper of the Queen's Apostrophe, is due to speak on that momentous subject to the 150th anniversary dinner on April 4, 2004.

Plenty of time to worry about that. We shall be 57-and-a-half by then.

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