The name game

IT was just a twopence ha’penny line in last Tuesday’s “News in brief” column. Shildon Civic Hall was to stage a tribute band called Oasish. However they sounded, the name – like that of so many tribute bands – was ingenious.

Oasis, verdant, appear to have more admirers than most. There’s Noasis and Soasis, No Way Sis and – get this – Oasisn’t.

Abba simulate similarly – Bjorn Again, Swede Dreams, Abbaration, Abba-Cadabra and even Gabba, said to be an Abba hit in a Ramones style (and thus lost on old squares like me).

Many of the best are also the most self-effacing. John Briggs in Darlington modestly lists the Fake Clark Five, Fleetwood Mock, the Shamones, Phoney M, Nearvana and – of course – the Fab Faux.

Ed Waugh chips in with T-Rextasy, Def Leotard, No – a Yes tribute – and Dread Zeppelin. There’s a Jewish tribute act called Rabbi Williams, a North-East band called Bon Jordi, an Irish group who answer to Red Hot Silli Feckers.

Those who detect a whiff of Father Ted in the last one will also appreciate the band called Duran Duran Duran, which may or may not be a tribute to the batty Mrs Doyle.

David Walsh in east Cleveland recalls a poster for the Travelling Wheelbarrows outside a pub in Brotton – others have to make do with the Travelling Wilburys – and reckons he once saw a group called Once More Unto the Bleach.

“It was a lass and some lads doing Blondie turns. I think I saw them in Whitby once.”

Other favourites welcomed. The tribute to the tributes may play a little longer.

LAST week’s column clocked a van belonging to a Consett ironing company called Crease Monkeys. David Walsh also reports that his local shop in Carlin How is selling their celebrated bacon and sausage sandwiches under the name “Bun appetit”.

THE Times is running a national spelling competition for school pupils aged 11-12, the final to be held at the Leicester Square Odeon in June.

A press release announces that the regional heat has been won by Wolsingham school in County Durham, beating Nunthorpe on Teesside and Durham Johnston into second and third places.

“The Times Spelling Bee,” it says, “aims to discover the country’s best young spellers. The Times is a committed supporter of standards of English and is a respected commentator on educational matters.”

The teams showed off their mastery, adds the release, “by spelling words like museum and incompetant”.

Honest.

STILL with standards of English, a note arrives from Clive Sledger in Aldbrough St John, near Richmond. “Have you of all people,”

it begins, “fallen into the trap of describing travelling or itinerant craftsmen as journeymen?”

Well, yes and no. Last week’s column simply quoted someone else’s memories of his “journeyman” days and since the term has now come to mean any hired hand – usually with no great accomplishment – the poor chap could almost be right.

Originally, though – and as Clive points out – a journeyman was someone who’d served his time in a craft or trade and was qualified to undertake it for a day’s wages without necessarily going over the doorstep. It’s from the French jour, meaning day.

As the Oxford explains, a journeyman was distinguished on one side by an apprentice and on the other by a master. To become a master craftsman, a journeyman had to submit a high-quality example of his work.

Hence, of course, a masterpiece.

STILL snowbound, or at least digging a way out of the avalanche we started six weeks ago, last week’s column carried a photograph of a “splendidly English gentleman” in a leather cap, left.

The cap was said to be typical of those worn by gaffers down the pit.

The picture, we supposed, had been taken at Durham Big Meeting. So far, so good.

The quite heinous mistake was to suppose that Aubrey O’Brien – for it was he – was a morris dancer. Mr O’Brien is chairman of the Sword Dance Union, an altogether more dashing blade.

While he confirms that the cap in the picture is a mines’ rescue official’s headgear from the Twenties – and that leather caps were “a sort of badge of office” – he is anxious to step sprightly from comparisons with morris dancing.

Probably we should have known better because, wearing the John North hat, we’d talked to him just a month previously at the Dance England Rapper Tournament in Newcastle.

Morris dancers, he said at the time, were just a lot of old gadgees.

Aubrey expounds. “We are far superior to those who clash sticks, ring bells and wave hankies.

“St George would have had a hard, if not impossible, task fighting off the dragon with hankies.”

He’s from Lanchester, in north Durham, and – good bloke that he is – is prepared to accept an apology.

“Compensation for this affront can be sent in the form of beer tokens, in vast amounts, c/o the Black Bull.”

ONLY that lunchtime, coincidentally, we’d been discussing the origin of the word “gadgee” – however spelt – in the pub. It’s from “gorgio”, the Romany term meaning someone who is not a gipsy. Even when put to the sword, not many people may know that.

APROPOS of little, last week’s column pondered the origin of the phrase Heavens to Betsy.

Mrs J Munro in Sunderland supposes that it could be a reference to Betsy Ross, “who allegedly made the first American Stars and Stripes flag”.

Mrs Munro read that much in a quiz book, though American legend does have it that George Washington asked Ross, a Philadelphia seamstress, to make a national flag.

“Heavens to Betsy” was also a favourite phrase of another American, Snagglepuss, a Hanna-Barbera cartoon character described on one of the websites as “a pink anthropomorphic mountain lion”.

Much more frequently, however, Snagglepuss – a close associate of Yogi Bear – would exclaim “Heavens to Murgatroyd”. No one knows who Murgatroyd was, either.

TREVOR Wood was co-author with Ed Waugh of Alf Ramsey Knew My Grandfather, the hugely successfully play about West Auckland’s first World Cup win which finished last Saturday at the Gala Theatre in Durham.

Knotting two of today’s strands, his email recalls seeing at the Solfest in Cumbria a “wonderful band doing morris dancing versions of Seventies’ heavy metal classics”. The band was called Pale Lilac. “It took me a while,” admits Trevor, “to get from there to Deep Purple.”

LAST week’s note on the passing of Clement Freud reminded former Liberal Party national executive member Peter Freitag of the time that Freud simply got up and left a key meeting. “He announced that the Grand National was on, went away for half an hour and came back with a smile on his face,” says Peter, now 80 and still a Darlington councillor. Whatever people thought, he adds, the old hangdog smiled quite a lot.

…and finally, a line from St Cuthbert’s parish magazine in Darlington. What’s the capital of Iceland?

About ten krona.