Fluff and nonsense

SO assiduously killing birds and stones that there may hardly be a curlew left flying up there, we spent a glorious Sunday on the North York Moors.

The At Your Service and Eating Owt columns will follow, as hand-inhand is their wont. Becoming embroiled in the tempestuous affair between HRH Princess Margaret and Group Captain Peter Townsend is altogether more unexpected.

Yet on a remote roadside above Danby, barely visible amid the grass and the accumulated garbage, a small plaque records the first German aircraft shot down on English soil during the Second World War.

It happened just north of Whitby on February 3, 1940, and it was the work of Peter Townsend, then a 25- year-old flight lieutenant based at Acklington, in Northumberland – the only North-East airfield not snowbound.

The Heinkel had attacked an unarmed trawler. Two German crew died, two others were injured; the plane crash landed at Bannial Flat Farm, just off the Guisborough road.

Townsend was a brave man and a true hero, not least in the Battle of Britain. In 1944, he was appointed equerry to King George VI, in which capacity he doubtless encountered the mischievous Margaret – barely half his age.

Despite the difference, and though Townsend would become divorced with two children, a secret romance flourished so greatly that, in the autumn of 1955, the princess announced her intention to marry. As the column’s old mother would still have said, there was a war on.

It was another age. Parliament, and much of the nation, was outraged.

On the evening of October 31, the BBC interrupted its programmes in order for John Snagge to announce that the marriage was off.

The princess said that she had decided to put the church’s teaching – “that Christian marriage is indissoluble” – and her duty to the Commonwealth above all else.

Townsend was banished to Belgium – air attache in Brussels – the Archbishop of Canterbury declined to give credit to the Queen’s sister.

“What a wonderful person the Holy Spirit is,” he said.

The crucial point, however, concerns the way that the romance was first suspected – by a tabloid journalist at the Queen’s coronation, 56 years ago this week.

Eagle-eyed, he had noticed Her Royal Highness brush a piece of fluff from Townsend’s jacket. The fluff snowballed, the scandal deepened.

Etymologically, at any rate, was HRH Princess Margaret Rose the very first bit of fluff?

No, rather regrettably, she wasn’t.

The term has been traced back to 1903, a reference to a young lady in a railway carriage. Equally sadly, its use is now said to be pejorative – sometimes applied to a woman of questionable morals, says one dictionary, “a girl friend seen as being attractive but intelligent,” says another.

Where Princess Margaret came in, it is impossible to imagine.

SO what of the veteran disc jockey Alan Freeman, invariably and approvingly known as Fluff and who died, aged 79, in November 2006.

Born in Australia, Freeman came to England in 1957, began broadcasting with Radio Luxembourg and in 1961 launched Pick of the Pops on the Light Programme. He later joined Capital Radio and was appointed MBE in 1969.

There was Fluff and nonsense there, too, not least because he revolved (shall we say) at different speeds.

The nickname, however, was straightforward. He’d once turned up for a show wearing a jumper that had attracted bits of white fluff in the wash (in which, eventually, it all came out).

SINCE last week’s column quoted Deuteronomy, a line from the Telegraph’s letters column in which someone recalls the MP and fraudster Horatio Bottomley – founder of the Financial Times – being visited as he stitched mail bags in Wormwood Scrubs. “Ah, Bottomley. Sewing?”

said his friend. “No,” said the disgraced MP, “reaping”.

NOW turned 80 and thus entitled to be incorrigible, Darlington councillor Peter Freitag rings to recall something similar.

As a young man, working for the family firm in London, he returned from a business trip to Sweden and presented his expenses.

His father queried them. “What about that new hat?” he said. Peter, anxious to get ahead, pointed out that he hadn’t claimed for the new hat.

“That’s what I mean,” said his dad. “If you aren’t cheating me, who else are you cheating?”

Peter remembers it affectionately.

“I had a good upbringing,” he says.

IF railways worked like airlines, offering the equivalent of frequent flier miles, I’d probably never have to buy a train ticket again.

At Darlington station, at any rate, the head lad invited me to look in on the extended tourist information room, opened last week. It’s all very impressive.

Mostly, appropriately, the leaflets are about the joys of North-East England.

Sunderland’s called A Breath of Fresh Air – “everything you need for an ideal short break” – Hartlepool’s swears you’ll be blown away by the town’s transformation.

Many others include a timetable for the Red Hall Rocket which – of course – is a bus service and takes up to 23 minutes from an outlying estate to Darlington town centre. Stephenson’s Rocket, perhaps.

Amid all the tourism delights, there’s a leaflet about something called the Great Crested Newt Project, run by Durham Wildlife Trust and Darlington Council.

We’ve mentioned these little beggars before, said to be endangered but – to judge by the number of developments delayed for fear of standing on their toes – simply everywhere.

The Darlington area is said already to have “many” sites, may even be the great-crested newt capital of Great Britain. Elsewhere, the leaflet concedes, they’re widely distributed.

Newt point, they’re set to take over the world.

SPEAKING of stations, and of Sunderland, we recalled a few weeks ago Dr David Jenkins’ vow never again to change trains at Birmingham New Street.

His views are echoed in Eleven Minutes Late – the title pinched from Reggie Perrin – Matthew Engel’s highly diverting new book on the state of Britain’s railways.

Though seriously unimpressed by New Street, Mr Engel also alighted at Sunderland station – or dungeon, as he prefers to call it.

“Sunderland,” he concludes, “makes Birmingham New Street seem like the Gardens of Arcadia.”

APROPOS of absolutely nothing, last week’s column suggested that nothing in the English language rhymed with orange, silver, month or purple. Readers think otherwise.

“No rhyme for orange?” queries Paul Dobson in Bishop Auckland.

“Just try asking Sean Connery what the plural of sporran is.”

Eric Gendle’s similarly helpful.

“Why not binge, cringe, fringe and whinge?” he asks, though it should be remembered that Eric’s from Middlesbrough.

James Pattison discovers the word Burple – “a discontinued drinks mix” – though the more obvious purple patch is hirple, said by the Oxford to be both Scots and north country dialect and to mean “limp” or “hobble”.

Pa Broon hirpled half the time, usually after unwittingly dropping a two shilling piece through a hole in his trousers into his shoe – but may Scots’ dialect be said to be part of the English language?

…and finally a first, a letter from No Place (which, as all oddity enthusiasts know, is near Beamish, in north Durham.) A charming letter, too, in which Ivan Stretton queries – among several other things – the column’s recent use of the term “any road”.

Born and raised in Nottingham, 45 years in County Durham, he not only claims the expression exclusively for the east Midlands but reckons never once to have heard it up here. “So how come a Shildon lad is using it?”

Back home, adds Mr Stretton, older folk would add the word up. “It meant that despite everything they’d already said in the story, what followed was what really happened.”

A swift survey suggests that he’s mistaken. While “any road” might be off the No Place map, it’s pretty familiar elsewhere in the North- East. Like everything else it’s a diversion, no more.