TRANSLATED from the Church Times to this singularly secular space, last week's column told - among much else - of the Vicar of Helmsley's unhappiness about the "huge and hideous" black marble altar which dominates a side chapel.

It has been there 100 years, drawn from Helmsley railway station by eight oxen, unsuccessfully resisted by the Archdeacon of Cleveland. If you want it removing, the then incumbent had told him, then provide the oxen yourself.

David Wilbourne, Helmsley's present Vicar, wants to turn the side chapel into a hospitality area. He faces an opponent far more formidable - and considerably older - than the venerable Archdeacon of Cleveland.

Led to the altar, Basil Noble read the column, saw the photograph, recognised an unmistakably handsome piece of Frosterley marble. "I was shocked," he said, and the fax which followed was a masterpiece - frosted as well as Frosterley, gentlemanly and therefore Noble.

"The Vicar of Helmsley evidently has no idea what a treasure he has," Basil wrote. "It seems he wants to scrap it to make room for perhaps a burger bar.

"Fortunately he has no jurisdiction over Durham Cathedral, Bombay Cathedral or the many local churches which are proud of their Weardale heritage."

Thereafter he offered a text from Ovid for Mr Wilbourne's edification, and for his next sermon. It was a Basil Noble classic.

A former Royal Artilleryman, retired chartered surveyor and familiar figure around Darlington, he is also a leading Conservative. A 1978 profile listed Margaret Thatcher among the people he most admired - "intellect as well as beauty" - and included magic among his interests. We meant to ask him about that.

He was also a freelance writer of much style, his Northern Echo assignments in the 1980s ranging from the Labour party conference in Blackpool - "what a shame having to work at your time of life," the waitress at the Queens Hotel observed - to tracking Arthur Scargill at Easington.

At Blackpool, he also covered the Gay and Lesbian rally - "the lesbians' struggle is the miners' struggle," said Mick McGahey - at Easington he found Scargill unexpectedly personable.

"He seemed a nice sort of fellow whom you could welcome to a Saturday morning four-ball," wrote Basil, a former captain of Blackwell Golf Club.

He'd also been sent to Toxteth, when the Liverpool suburb was much troubled, and went three days unshaven beforehand. "I bore a passing resemblance to Yasser Arafat wearing a cloth cap," he insisted.

His best known campaign, however, has been for Frosterley marble, quarried in Weardale - and possibly Teesdale - from the 12th Century until 1914 and still occasionally unearthed.

On Tuesday we invited him to put on the kettle, strolled up to the gentle end of town and found the Noble household in a state of some disarray: they'd delivered the Daily Mail instead of The Northern Echo. "Eighty pages and all of them rubbish," said the splendid Mrs Noble. They get the Telegraph, too, perhaps out of personal as well as political loyalty since in 1989 the paper paid him £250 for a piece on Frosterley marble headlined "Nanki-Poo syndrome frustrates Frosterley".

It was a reference to the Mikado. It was also a great deal more than ever he'd have had from the Echo.

He'd become interested in it around 30 years ago after hearing of an altar at St Cuthbert's church in Darlington - "Frosterley marble seemed bizarre, almost a contradiction in terms" - discovered that, whilst not strictly marble at all, it was formed from 325 million years old fossilised remains of when much of the North-East was under water.

"I went up there, saw a chap sitting on his hunkers and asked him about Frosterley marble. He didn't know what I was talking about."

Though there were examples both in the dale and in the Chapel of Nine Altars in Durham Cathedral and several much further afield, Frosterley parish church itself was virtually unmarbled.

In 1986, Basil heard about a church in Gainsborough, Lincs, where the black marble font had been removed and apparently buried in the graveyard. With eventual permission, he hired a JCB and made further excavations.

Only the base was found. When the remainder was discovered months later - "a pretty horrid sight at the time" - the Vicar took the font cover to be a coffee table.

Basil persuaded Tilcon to loan him a lorry, took it all back to Durham, spoke of his find at a public meeting in Frosterley village - "I was received rapturously," he says, with uncharacteristic immodesty - and persuaded them to find £3,000 for its restoration.

The font now stands at the front of St Michael's church, Frosterley, the old one is at the back. Basil, unsurprisingly, thinks it's a thing of beauty. "There are those who say the other one's a bit like a weighing machine. It's all a matter of taste."

Job done, he is now helping form a National Milestone Society which has an inaugural meeting later this month. Another milestone, he will be 88 in November. "I try to keep up-to-date with things. I don't want to be seen as an old fogey," he says. "There are still quite a lot of milestones around here, especially on the Darlington to Northallerton road, but we are losing such a lot to road widening and dual carriageways that they are becoming endangered.

"It's just my attempt to do something. I don't think it matters how old you are, I never think you should give up."

A LITTLE less frequent these days, Basil Noble was once also a frequent correspondent to Hear All Sides. It led to an unlikely friendship - though a doubtless holy alliance - with the Rev John Stephenson.

John, vicar of the colliery parish of Eppleton, Hetton-le-Hole, was a yet more prolific writer, a left winger and pacifist, with views wholly opposed to those of the Conservative gentleman from the west end of Darlington.

Whilst Basil Noble believed Mrs Thatcher to be both intellectual and beautiful, for example, John Stephenson thought her a "dangerous woman with unchristian beliefs".

Readers railed regularly. "Ridiculous prattle...left-wing claptrap...name and address supplied."

Formerly a Church Army captain, he had been curate at Spennymoor and Byers Green before moving to Eppleton in 1979 and declaring it a nuclear free parish. He also self-published numerous slim little volumes like Muldoon's Pit Black Army, Sermon on the Pit Heap and the King Jonty Book.

Basil bought the books, liked them, corresponded with the vicar, bought him a bottle of sherry for Christmas, met him on several occasions. Their correspondence, like Mr Stephenson's to The Northern Echo, ceased several years ago. Now 66, he retired in 1996 and lives in East Herrington, Sunderland. Though affected by an accident which knocked him from his bike he now professes himself in top form.

It is as far, however, as we are able to go. Mr Stephenson says he is not planning a comeback and "certainly not" in The Northern Echo. "I got enough in 1990-91. I was crucified. I have nothing further to say, thank you."

Then gently, pacifically, he replaces the receiver.

POMP and circumstance - the train's almightily late - we are approached on Darlington station by Mr Eddie Grainger from Middlesbrough, a knowledgable regular contributor to Cycling World.

His latest article is on the composer Sir Edward Elgar. "Did you know," asks Eddie, "that Elgar had two bikes?"

The first, he insists, was bought in 1900 and called Mr Phoebus. The second, bought in 1904, had two gears. (It wasn't, presumably, called Mr Phoebus.)

What's more, adds Eddie, Elgar gained the inspiration for Land of Hope and Glory - the first of the Pomp and Circumstance marches, written exactly a century ago - not from the Malvern Hills as popularly is supposed but from the up-down motion of his velocipede.

He demonstrates animatedly on platform one. "Land-of-hope-and-glory..."

We have consulted several biographies, none of which mentions that Sir Edward got on his bike to compose the great anthem of patriotism.

It is revealed, however, that Sea Pictures - which he composed in 1899 - is a "song cycle for contralto and orchestra". Perhaps that's what Eddie meant.

A train driver finally having been found, we head to Redcar to address the Cleveland Retired Men's Association. Though one or two are still retired - that is to say, they're asleep - they prove a friendly, receptive crowd.

Particularly we are taken by the Association's watchword - "Change is inevitable...except from a vending machine." Immutable, the column returns next week.

Published: Thursday, October 04, 2001