NEWLY created an MBE at the age of 92, the remarkable Canon Leonard Piper makes a heady admission in the Durham diocesan newspaper. Before the last war, he says, he and fellow curate Brian Canning would frequently fly a black shirt from the tower of St Cuthbert's, in Darlington town centre.

It wasn't some symbolic sympathy with fascism, however - Will Jordan, St Cuthbert's vicar, was a director of Darlington FC. His curates flew the black shirt, a sort of mourning prayer, whenever the Quakers lost.

"We weren't football fans ourselves. It was a bit of fun that's all," Canon Piper tells the column.

Canon Jordan had also played centre forward for Aston Villa. "He was an extraordinarily good chap," says Canon Piper. "He worked terribly hard, kept in touch with everything, approved with a chuckle almost everything we did."

Canon Jordan is also said to have installed Hensley Henson, the academic old Bishop of Durham, in the Feethams directors' box on match day while he himself attended to some pastoral duty.

Returning, Jordan asked the bishop how the Quakers were getting on. Henson barely looked up. "I don't know," he said, "but I understand from all this shouting that the so-and-so's must be winning."

Canon Piper - still regularly taking services, still driving, still looking forward to his weekly art class - came to St Cuthbert's in 1937, with responsibility for the new church in Blackwell. "I took the first service there, loved it, didn't really want to leave," he says.

On his honeymoon in Germany he had been awoken in the hotel room by Hitler's secret police, who mistook him for a spy.

He became Rector of Hurworth, and later neighbouring churches, in 1939. The previous incumbent had been there 33 years; Leonard Piper stayed for 34 and still lives in the parish.

For 47 years he was also an officiating chaplain to the RAF, at Middleton St George - formerly Goosepool - and at RAF Catterick.

Robert Williamson, St Cuthbert's present vicar, reckons the young curates must have had an amazing head for heights.

"There's a parapet and it's possible to get up there to fly flags, but I wouldn't like to think I was doing it myself," he says.

Mr Williamson, a Liverpool supporter, thinks he should also support Darlington. "I don't think," he says, "that we have any spare black shirts."

Canon Piper's MBE is for community service in the Darlington area, the investiture at Buckingham Palace in March. "Until I got the letter such an honour had never crossed my mind," he says. They'll be putting the flags out, nonetheless.

DISCERNING chap that clearly he is, Dick Bunker has noticed the occasional reference hereabouts to the Britannia - otherwise the Columnist's Rest - a pub which, from time to time, we frequent. Dick frequented it rather earlier.

The Brit is an unspoiled little place just off Darlington town centre, where JM Dent - publisher and founder of the Everyman Library - was born in 1849. Ten years later it became a public house, and right next to Temperance Place.

Dick, now living at Frosterley in Weardale, remembers it during the war when the long-time landlord was Albert Stevens and his barmaid, or housekeeper, was called Florrie.

It was, he recalls, a "gathering place for youngsters just earning their drinking spurs - mostly male, either young trainee firemen who wished to become engine drivers or miscellaneous workers at Goosepool Airport, as I was."

(The miscellaneous workers didn't include Canon Leslie Piper. "I don't even know where it is," he says.)

Dick and friends would gather in what's now the kitchen - much played piano, bench seats, cloth covered dining table, large range. Shorts were sixpence, no extra for hot rum with sugar.

Pat Kilfeather, landlord from 1969-94, reckons Albert Stevens must have been there for 40 years until the end of the war. His brother Harold had the Waterloo in the Market Place.

Dick Bunker would welcome any information on old Albert, and on the Brit. "It brings back memories," he says, "every time you mention it."

WHILST resolutely researching at the Brit, we learned that Jim and Margaret Carroll are leaving. Jim, chairman of Darlington LVA, hosted his last annual banquet (and bad head night) on Tuesday but is already working at B&Q in Stockton. He'll be on television next.

On such occasions warning bells clang. It is not cool Britannia (as Mr Blair would have it), rather it is good, unspoiled, traditional Britannia without muzak, menu or meretriciousness.

Would the pub company now send in a Brit squad? Would the haven go the way of all fleshpots or, worse, be knocked down completely as Cameron's proposed in 1975?

John Sands, chief executive of the Hartlepool based Pubmaster group, was on a train when feverishly we found him. "We have 2,000 pubs and it's one of my favourites. We have no intention of changing it or selling it," he insists.

"It would be a pretty hard pub to change, anyway."

One couple are showing "extreme interest", another three - all from the Darlington area - are being interviewed this week. "We are looking for someone who is compatible with it," says John. The sanctuary is safe with Mr Sands.

INSIDE story, and all that, a new permanent exhibition is planned on life (and other sentences) at Durham jail, built in 1810 and still withstanding.

"You get a real sense of history everywhere you go in here," says John Cavanagh, one of three prison officers researching the project.

Will it finally settle the argument, however, of who was the first inmate to go over the wall?

Genial John McVicar claimed the infamous honour in his 1974 autobiography, but - as a long gone John North column observed - he was simply the first to have it away from the high security E-wing.

The great escaper may have been Ronnie Heslop, Willington lad made good copy, who by the dexterous use of tea spoon and kitchen knife got through a ventilation shaft and over the Assize court roof in 1961. It earned him the nickname Rubberbones.

Two months on the run, Ronnie twice swam the swollen River Wear at Page Bank, near Spennymoor, in order to escape the constabulary and was put on 15 days bread and water when finally recaptured.

Was he, though, the first in 150 years to be up and over at Durham? "We haven't done much theory yet, I really don't know," says Peter Murphy, another of the officers' working party.

John North readers, of course, may be altogether better informed. A break would be appreciated.

OLD crooner George Brown from Whitby sang - still sings, probably, he's only 89 - of Johnson's ha'penny ducks. Was it the only song ever written, wondered last week's column, which contains the word "ineffable"?

"Shame on you," writes Janet Pears from Middlesbrough, a note echoed by Harry Brook in Crook.

They refer, of course, to Robert Grant's wonderful old hymn O Worship the King - the sort of thing, Harry recalls, they used to belt out every morning at Wolsingham Grammar School.

O measureless might, ineffable love,

While angels delight, to hymn thee above....

The curious thing about "ineffable" - which means indescribable - is the strong suggestion that it should be an antonym. Chambers Dictionary will have nothing of it, however. The effable word has been deleted altogether.

...and finally, an e-mail from former Hartlepool United FC chairman Garry Gibson, once high profile but latterly beneath the parapet. Tonight, however, Garry makes his television comeback - in the audience for Question Time (BBC1, 10.30pm). "I shall be wearing my best pink shirt," he promises.

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