FOR reasons to which we shall roguishly return, Mr Eric Smallwood in Acklam draws attention to the Ballad of Eskimo Nell - perhaps the most infamous ice maiden of all, though "maiden" may in this context be considered figurative.

Eric began work in 1968 in the engineers' department of Middlesbrough council. On the first morning he was issued, like every other engineering oik, with pen, pencil, ruler and a copy of the bawdy house ballad.

"I'm not sure that I did much with the pen and pencil, but Eskimo Nell passed the first half hour quite wonderfully," he recalls.

Like the Loch Ness Monster, the Ballad of Eskimo Nell is something of which everyone has heard but few appear to have seen. Eric has long since forgotten the words but remembers that Berkeley Square crept in somewhere, though not as in nightingales and Vera Lynn.

The Internet, incorrigibly, offers an unexpurgated version - 67 verses of the saga of Dead Eye Dick and Mexican Pete with a warning that, if easily offended, search elsewhere.

It will not be necessary here. Berkeley Square is mentioned but in passing - "it may be rare in Berkeley Square, but not in the Rio Grande" - and there are also references to cayenne pepper and the Canadian Pacific Railway. Nell was clearly a remarkable lady.

Middlesbrough council spokesman Mike Clark says: "Our engineers have always had a literary bent. The pen and ruler have been replaced by new technology; I really don't know about Eskimo Nell."

ALL of which leads as surely as night follows day - except in the Arctic summer - to the subject of famous Eskimos.

Nanook was from those parts, of course, and a website lists "masters" of art and sculpture like Tiktak, Kavik and Arluk.

After dear old Nell, however, the best remembered may be The Mighty Quinn - hero of a Bob Dylan composition that became a number one hit for Manfred Mann in January 1968.

Remember it?

Ev'rybody's 'neath the trees

Feeding pigeons on a limb

But when Quinn the Eskimo gets here

All the pigeons gonna run to him

It would not, of course, be the first Dylan song brazenly to embrace a narcotic sub-plot though Lynn de Prator in the pub once tackled Manfreds' lead singer Mike d'Abo who resolutely denied it.

If The Mighty Quinn wasn't into drugs, however, then what on earth is the Rambling Man on about this time?

ESKIMO Nell was also a championship winner at Crufts and is the name, for reasons unimagined, of a particularly difficult climbing route in Lancashire. Mr Smallwood's reverie - now it can be told - was occasioned by passing reference in last week's column to a ditty beginning:

"I must stand and face my lover

With a short shirt for a cover..."

David Armstrong in Redcar had been trying to recall the full text, much recited by a former colleague in the long gone days of Durham Rural District Council, and may or may not be grateful for a contribution from Jim Swindale in Fairfield, Stockton.

Mr Swindale, a newcomer to these fruitful acres, suggests that the next lines were:

"Then I ran home to my mother

With me gloves in me hand and me hat on one side."

It was a song, he says - "and not many people know this" - written at the time of the Great Clothes Shortage of 1910.

There followed, of course, the immortal Edwardian lines:

"In nineteen hundred and ten

The women ran after the men

They had no shimmies

To cover their jimmies

In nineteen hundred and ten."

Mr Swindale is being written to.

Exposure to such elements takes us back to last week's column - if not to Eskimo Nell then to the word "nesh", which is not to be confused with "Nash".

The Nash, in parts of Co Durham at least, are the gentlemen from the Ministry who take unfair exception to having gainful employment whilst on the sick. More euphemistically the Department of Social Security, they will in certain quarters forever be the National Insurance.

Though sometimes the result of its being starvation, "nesh" - according to the Oxford Dictionary may mean anything from "delicate" to "soft in texture or consistency." It was even used (in Latin) in the Lindisfarne Gospels, the bit about John the Baptist not being clothed in soft raiment.

Asked not to put the word "nesh" into context but to name some famous Eskimos, Mr Allen Nixon - the Stokesley Stockbroker - simply responds with the unhelpful joke about why Eskimo fishermen are always so cold.

It is because they can't have their kayak and heat it.

AS we have previously remarked in these journeys down what was once Apostrophe Avenue - now widened and cambered to become Grammar Grove, or maybe even Syntax Street - the ever-present danger is outlined in the seventh chapter of the Gospel according to St Matthew:

Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam, that is in thine own eye?

Ken Orton in Ferryhill Station, for example, sends whence it came the Echo headline "Return of farm markets are welcomed" - singular subject, plural verb.

"Even at school," he writes, "no one of my generation would be allowed to get away with such slipshod grammar."

Alan Archbold in Sunderland did a geographical about turn on reading in Saturday's paper that Hexham MP Peter Atkinson would spend his holidays touring "the UK and Scotland."

"I know these wealthy Tories tend to go to posher schools than those attended by the sons of Pennywell shipyard labourers," writes Alan, "so have I been misinformed about the UK constitution for more than 40 years?"

The Rev Peter Elliott takes exception - righteous possibly, rightful certainly - to a caption in Saturday's At Your Service column that attempted to use "Reverends" as a sort of plural adjective. "English adjectives do not have plural forms," he says.

Tom Purvis in Sunderland opens a different can of worms: the North Yorkshire village of Thornton-le-Beans, featured hereabouts last week, was hyphenated in the column but not on the road sign - we cling to the former - whilst from the same root, Bryan Pringle is trying to find a list of English and Anglo-Saxon names in the Domesday Book. Can anyone help?

The serial offender among this week's solecisms, however, is the noun "expatriate", against which all of us transgress most shamefully.

The paper did it again last Wednesday in the opening words of a report on moves by Newcastle and Gateshead to gain European Capital of Culture status in 2008. "Ex-patriot celebrities are receiving postcards letting them know what is happening back home...."

"All is now clear," writes Martin Snape from Durham. "Ex-patriots are evidently people who are no longer proud if their country."

The Guardian, among other publications, now runs a daily "Corrections and Clarifications" column. Perhaps the Echo should produce something similar. It would simply be called Mote and Beam.

INSEPARABLY, the column's favourite words are euphony and serendipity. Prof Ian Kennedy, author of last week's report into the Bristol heart deaths, may not necessarily have meant it, therefore, when he said that the threat of being sued was entirely serendipitous.

Nor, perhaps, did that magnificent malaprop master Bobby Robson - manager of Newcastle United - intend what he said on Radio Five Live on Tuesday. "He," said Bobby, "is a different class of fish."

....and finally back to Eric Smallwood, who before beginning a close acquaintance with Eskimo Nell was taught by Neville Whittaker at the Hull School of Architecture.

Mr Whittaker, as last week's column coincidentally noted, became director of the North East Civic Trust. Eric particularly remembers that he always had a lighted cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth, an extraordinary length of ash hanging precariously from the end.

"Whilst giving a water colour wash demonstration, however, he had the habit of dropping fag ash onto the paper.

"It was yet another, but rather different, depth of 'effect'."

Neville Whittaker, he adds, was a very nice chap. So, of course, is Eric Smallwood. His reward, all 67 verses of it, is already in the post.

Published: 25/07/2001