ATTEMPTING to put together a case for the "deconstructed scone", a Seaham Hall Hotel delicacy which none has yet been able to explain, last week's column also noted that "deconstructed romaine and goats' cheese salad" was available in other posh establishments.

Romaine is a type of lettuce. The singer George Romaine, still affectionately remembered from the early days of Tyne Tees Television, was advised to change his name from Romaines because it struck a more sophisticated note.

George was, and happily remains, a Shildon lad. Beryl Wilson, now in Darlington, suggests that he wasn't the first entertainer from that promised land to suppose that there was quite a lot in a name.

William Denham, her great grandfather, was born in Shildon in 1850 and worked down the pit before he was 11.

Matthew, his eldest son, took to the boards as a conjuror, comedian, ventriloquist and accomplished pianist under the stage name Matt Vesper.

"Vesper" means evening, vespers an almost forgotten part of Church of England liturgy. "I think his sister Mary Ann suggested it," says Beryl. "She said he could be an evening star."

Beryl still has some of Matt's props, including stage money in the remains of an envelope addressed to the Putney Theatre. "Obviously he got about a bit," says Beryl.

His brother Jack went even further, became an "actorr dahling" (says Beryl) appeared regularly in repertory and changed his name to Vane Tempest. The aristocratic east Durham mining family of that name perhaps understandably taking umbrage, he became Maurice Tempest instead.

Beryl also has several photographs of Maurice, including one in which he essays a "fair impression" of Rudolph Valentino - "hair slicked back, smouldering eyes, shame about the ears".

Neither made the big time. Matt moved to Aycliffe Village where he died, aged 43, in 1929.

It didn't stop Mary Ann - "obviously Shildon's answer to Hyacinth Bucket" - from adopting a few airs and graces.

"She insisted upon her name being pronounced as Marry, made a point a learning three or four new words every day from the dictionary and of dropping them into the conversation around Shildon," says Beryl.

Mary Ann moved to Manchester shortly before the First World War, but it was 1939 before she married Ted Sidebotham who died - "inconsiderately" says Beryl - six months later.

Thereafter she insisted upon being addressed as Mrs Marry Siddybowtam. They can take the lass out of Shildon...

THE antithesis, as Mrs Siddybowtam might have said, is the column's old friend Trevor Shaw, an accomplished comedian and after dinner speaker.

Born in Cockfield and long in St Helen's Auckland, he was known in 1972 as Tony Peters, just another comedian trying hard to stand up for himself.

"I was at North Shields when word came that I'd be watched that night by Bob Deplidge, who had some of the biggest comedians around on his books," Trevor recalls.

The agent left after a few minutes, but also left his card. "When I rang him next day he said he'd heard enough, knew I could tell a gag, but thought the name was too clubby for the national cabaret circuit he wanted to get me into."

Deplidge suggested Seth Shildon. "He said he'd originally considered Sep Shildon, but people would call me Septic.

"I was a Cockfield lad and proud of it, nothing to do with Shildon. I just told him I hoped he knew what he was doing."

Deplidge did. Almost 35 years later, Seth Shildon remains in demand across Britain. The town counsellor was right all along.

ON the day after the IRA announced that its paramilitary activity was to end, Mr Briggs in the Brit made a disparaging remark about one Shildon lad - this one - in particular. He was about to get a well aimed beer mat around the ear - the standard punishment beating in those parts - when it was realised that Sue the landlady had replaced the lot with bar towels, a weapon altogether less offensive. Long may the peace initiative continue.

LAUNCHED next week, a book called Glory Days - Alan Adamthwaite's account of Bishop Auckland FC's post-war triumphs in the FA Amateur Cup - begins with an inscription as appropriate as it is familiar.

Oh! wherefore come ye forth, in triumph from the north?

It's the opening line of a poem about the Civil War Battle of Naseby by the first Baron Macaulay, he who supposed that an acre in Middlesex was worth more than a principality in Utopia.

Oh! Wherefore come ye forth, in triumph from the north

With your hands, and your feet, and your raiment all red?

And wherefore doth your rout, send forth a joyous shout?

And whence be the grapes of the wine-press which ye tread?

The Northern Horse was part of the Royalist army, seen off by a pretty bloodthirsty bunch of Parliamentarians. Macaulay even offers a local angle:

Down, down, for ever down, with the mitre and the crown

With the Belial of the court and the Mammon of the Pope,

There is woe in Oxford halls; there is wail in Durham's stalls;

The Jesuit smites his bosom, the Bishop rends his cope.

The north, happily, was soon triumphant once again.

THE Times letters page is running the perennial August debate over when a train is travelling "up" and when "down" - joined on Monday by the Rev Jonathan Jennings, formerly curate of Peterlee and of Darlington and now press officer to the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The complexity, says Jonathan - also remembered as a Radio Tees sports reporter - doesn't just end with the direction of travel.

"It is entirely possible, during engineering works, for trains to be transferred between tracks so that an up service travelling down south might be heading uphill on a down line at the same time as a down service travelling up north is heading downhill on an up line."

The resulting confusion, adds Jonathan - a proud father - can accurately be replicated with a wooden model railway and an excited three-year-old.

SINCE the Oxford Dictionary defines a hick as "an ignorant countryman, a silly fellow, a bobby" and supposes that the term is now chiefly used in the US, last week's John North column noted with some incredulity that an important document had been found in Hicksville, New York State.

It really does exist. Hicksville is 27 miles west of New York City, has a land area of 6.8 square miles and a population of 42,000 - 79 per cent white non-Hispanic - and an average age of 38.9.

More than a quarter of adults have a bachelor's degree or higher. Hicks from the sticks? No longer.

...and finally, it is not the usual pew leaflet but a flyer from Another Newspaper Group which is pushed into the column's hand as we await the start of evening service at St Andrew's, Blackhall, in east Durham.

The leaflet seeks casual distributors, usual stuff - "may be available across various geological areas". Clearly they serve a different stratum of society.

Much the same as ever, the column returns next week - plus la change, plus la meme chose, as doubtless they used to say in Shildon.

Published: 03/08/2005