IT was only a gentle Sunday stroll followed by a pleasant little lunch, but the piece a fortnight ago on the excellent Station House Team Rooms at Thorpe Thewles continues to lead us down all sorts of improbable paths.

There is royalty and rumpty-tumpty, adultery, intrigue and even a special guest appearance by the former Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles. Thewles gold, it is not the sort of thing usually served up by the Eating Owt column.

Thorpe Thewles is near Stockton, and also near Wynyard Hall, the former family home of the Londonderrys. That little wayside station, we'd suggested, was where Edward VII alighted on his frequent trips to take the Londonderry air.

It was also at Wynyard, as last week's column almost supposed, that the Court Circular was issued from a private house for the first time since 1625. We shall take the circular route a little later; the beds need airing first.

Edward, otherwise Bertie, had been a Wynyard regular since the 1880s, when Prince of Wales. Princess Alexandra, his wife, usually accompanied him.

By the time of his accession, however, it wasn't the Queen who stepped down onto the Thorpe Thewles red carpet but Mrs Alice Keppel, the king's mistress - some say his "favourite" mistress.

Brazzened fond, as they used to say in Shildon, she was even included on the extreme left of that sombre faced group photograph in last week's column.

Mrs Keppel, 29 years Bertie's junior, was said to possess alabaster skin, blue eyes, chestnut hair, large breasts and a vivacious personality. Apart from that, no one could understand what he saw in her.

She was also the maternal grandmother of the present Duchess of Cornwall and the great grandmother of Judith Keppel, the 58-year-old garden designer who in November 2000 became the first person to win the top prize on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire by virtue of guessing that the British king who married Eleanor of Aquitaine was Henry II. "Rather an attractive woman but quite formidable," recalls David Walsh in Redcar, by which he means Judith Keppel and not (necessarily) Eleanor of Aquitaine.

Whether or not Henry II also had a mistress with the same name as a sand dancer is not generally known.

Though Bertie's affair was common knowledge, and the aristocracy in general were at it like better bred rabbits, there were those who still haughtily disapproved.

Asked why he spent so much time at Wynyard - and we are again grateful to the estimable Bob Harbron in Norton-on-Tees - he replied that at Balmoral that "damned John Brown whispers to Mama" and at Windsor the "frocks" spread the word like others passed the port.

"At Wynyard," the king added, "I can live the life of a gentleman, having as much rumpty-tumpty as I wish and no one gives a damn."

Mrs Keppel, it was said, not only shared his bed and accompanied him around Europe but helped him choose presents for his wife, who collected pieces by Faberge when not staring at the walls.

Perhaps it was catching (as it were). David Walsh also recalls that Labour prime minister Ramsay MacDonald found rather more than the Palladian architecture of interest on his visits to Wynyard.

Sheep as a lamb, David also reckons that when the pro-German Londonderry invited the German ambassador to Wynyard before the war, he also took him to a service in Durham Cathedral.

Unfortunately one of the hymns was Praise the Lord, Ye Heavens Adore Him, which shares a tune with the German national anthem. The ambassador leapt to his feet, right arm raised, and had forcibly to be urged to resume his seat.

But back to Bertie, and to Wynyard's wicked ways. The last time the court had met in a private house, says Ron Tempest in Thorpe Thewles, was at Wilton - Wiltshire, not ICI - in 1625.

In 1903 it was a meeting of the Privy Council, called to confirm Charles Londonderry as Lord President in Balfour's government.

Like Bertie's late mother, very likely, Sir Almeric Fitzroy was distinctly unamused. Clerk to the Council, he grumbled at having to make a 24 hour train journey for a meeting which lasted ten seconds.

To Lady Londonderry's great excitement, the king confirmed that the announcement be headed "At the court at Wynyard", though the following day's Northern Echo carried nothing of it.

Instead we reported that a 22-year-old Middlesbrough woman had been charged with attempted suicide and told to mend her ways, that a tramp had been fined five shillings at Richmond for stealing a battered umbrella and that vegetarian cyclists were riding for a fall.

Alexandra, the queen, remained so outwardly understanding of all this that when Bertie was close to death she summoned his mistress to the king's bedside. Mrs Keppel knew the way already.

THOSE great, grim faced photographs were a common feature of Wynyard life: the Victorian hall had a fully fitted photographic dark room, rediscovered many years later.

Peter Taylor in Elwick, Hartlepool, sends extracts from The Londonderry Album, a 1978 volume of photographs reproduced from the original glass plates.

The large group was photographed at the 1903 gathering, the alluring Alice coyly on the extreme left of the front row.

The earlier photograph is from the 1880s, the Prince of Wales - rather resembling the present Bishop of Durham - with the Marquis and Marchioness and Alexandra. "At that time," says Peter, "his taste in ladies was rather more conservative."

RICHARD Thurston in Stockton recalls that the Duke and Duchess of York also stayed at Wynyard, calling at Thorpe Thewles, on the occasion in 1893 of the opening of Ropner Park in Stockton.

Richard's a cricket man. The park, he says, was built on the ground of Stockton Cricket Club, forcing the move to the present site.

The visit excited two tightly packed pages in the North Eastern Daily Gazette. What on earth would they have made of Wynyard's Wicked Ways?

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