The Ray Mallon of his day

MORNING, all. Cleveland police, it is reported, are to return to the days of Dixon of Dock Green, of friendly bobbies on the beat if not to the avuncular clip around the ear.

Funny how no one ever talks of returning to the days of Fabian of the Yard.

Det Chief Insp Robert Fabian was a proper polliss - that is to say, he existed. The television series, 30 half-hour episodes screened between 1954-56, was not just based on his casebook but featured his little cameo appearances at the end of each episode.

Bob Seton, the actor who played Fabian, was said to be a real smoothie. Poor Fabian, by contrast, showed only why he'd have been wiser to let up his clear-up figures do the talking.

"After the debonair Seton, he was jarring and awkward," says one of the websites. Like Dixon, Fabian was screened on Saturday nights, after what apparently became known as the "toddlers truce". There was even an episode about a planned bombing of Piccadilly, though it was screened only in America.

The series, adds the website, "promoted a post-war reconstructive ideology explicit in the moral tone and documentary aspects".

Scotland Yard's finest managed it all while wearing a trilby hat and gabardine raincoat and smoking a pipe, something for which these days he'd get six months. As Cleveland police would doubtless have it, he was the Ray Mallon of his day.

CHARGED with finding a North-East angle in a 50-year-old television programme, Lynn Briggs - half of this column's research team, as admirable as they are unrewarded - cracks the case in no time.

Subsequently familiar supporting actors who helped put the Fab into Fabian included Kenneth Cope, Noel Howlett, Betty McDowall and, less well known but unforgettably named, Gladys Boot, from Darlington.

Born in 1890, Gladys was 50 when she made her stage debut, in The Quiet Wedding at Jesmond Playhouse. She became leading lady with the Liverpool Repertory Company.

She appeared in Maigret and other well-remembered television programmes, on stage in Pygmalion and in films from Your Money or Your Wife to The Gipsy and the Gentleman, in which - rather curiously - she is said to have played Mr Mutimer. In Fabian episodes, she played both Lady Franchard and Mrs Ransome.

Not even the persevering Mrs Briggs - to whom best wishes after yesterday's little op - can find an Internet photograph of Gladys Boot. She has, however, discovered an image of something called a "Gladys Boot vase."

It is no doubt one way of ensuring that your memory flowers forever.

SO could Gladys Boot be any relation to Henry Boot, whose engineering company has long been hammer and tongs in Darlington? The Boot, almost certainly, is on the wrong foot.

Henry Boot was a Sheffield farmer's son who set up a one-man business in eighteen-hundred-and-long-gone. It became a major manufacturing, house building and development company, the Montrose Street plant but a small cog in the wheel.

Apart from a few complaints of noise, it seems to have led a pretty undisturbed existence over the years. The cuttings file does contain, however, the happy story of how, in 1984, factory manager Carl Coleman bought the 32-strong workforce a barrel of beer after they'd gone 18 months without an accident.

That's them - see main picture - rolling out the barrel outside the Glittering Star in Darlington. Safety first, there was no work next day.

WHAT really brought all this to mind was an invitation to speak, on September 29 at the Joiners Arms in Hunwick, to the north-west Durham branch of the Fabian Society.

The Fabians, who sound slightly hugger-mugger but are doubtless wholly committed to open government, are a left-of-centre think-tank affiliated to the Labour party.

The Oxford supposes their original allegiance to have been to Fabius Maximus, right, a Roman general famed for avoiding confrontation by delaying tactics. The Fabians wanted revolution, but only the day after tomorrow.

These days the Society's website talks of their "analysing the big challenges facing the UK and the rest of the industrialised world in a changing society and global economy" and of "exploring the political ideas and the policy reforms which will define progressive politics in the new century".

It seems likely that they've mistaken me for someone else entirely - though the column has spoken to the Fabians once before, 14 years since in the back room of the Cattle Mart, a pub in Tow Law.

There were all the usual recollections - about WC Hall and Ron the Rottweiler and good Lawyer lads like that - but precious little, as might be imagined, about global economy and progressive politics.

The best story came from someone else, about Captain Scott struggling across the Antarctic before at last planting the flag at the South Pole. His feet and fingers are near-frozen, his body wrapped tight with furs, his triumphant words recorded for posterity.

"By Gad," says Scott, "but the bugger mustn't half be card at Tow Law."

A MEMENTO, and a mystery. Attending the annual reunion last Friday of Bishop Auckland FC's all-conquering team of the 1950s, amateur international inside forward Derek Lewin produced a Post Office telegram sent to him, as captain, before an FA Amateur Cup tie at Barnet.

Characteristically concise, it's from Wilf Dodds, Shildon-based secretary of the Northern League. But what's that little cipher - DL 15 - after the address?

DL15 is now Crook, DL14's Bishop Auckland and DL4 is Shildon. Postcodes were said to be an invention of the 1980s - but could it be that they were around 30 years earlier? Perhaps someone can crack the code?

...and finally, our man in the ministry reports that today is the occasion of one of the Church's lesser-known red letter days. It's proclaimed outside St John's in Newcastle city centre: "The beheading of John the Baptist, Wednesday, 9am." Our man's a little worried: "It's to be hoped," he says, "that they form an orderly queue."

www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/ features/columnists/gadfl