Peer review

“Hill Top” is Stanley Hill Top, of course, the wind-buffeted but muchloved settlement above Crook where the Armstrongs grew up.

Thus encouraged to ponder higher things, David Walsh revives the familiar puzzle of why former prime minister Harold Wilson took the title Lord Wilson of Rievaulx.

Born outside Huddersfield, Wilson had no known links with Rievaulx, that ancient abbey near Helmsley.

It’s puzzled political commentators ever since.

After much digging, however, John Briggs finds a possible – possible – answer in Fifty Facts about Ryedale. Many of Wilson’s ancestors were from those parts, it says, his great-grandfather the master of the Helmsley workhouse.

Thus disoriented, David adds a further riddle. Wilson, he says, insisted that the title should phonetically be pronounced Riv-ix, though all North Yorkshire calls it Reev-oh.

There’s a Rievaulx Road in Skelton, east Cleveland, where he lives.

“I’ve never heard anyone call it Rivix yet.”

SUNDAY’S 12-mile sponsored walk for Tow Law Football Club merely skirted the lowlands of Stanley Hill Top, up past the graveyard, along the old railway and a half-way swift one at the Black Horse in Waterhouses. It seemed imprudent to hang around, in any case: Waterhouses has an upcoming scarecrow competition. I might have won.

Sandra Gordon, the Lawyers’ chairman, dressed rather fetchingly as Cleopatra, complete with plastic asp, and didn’t look poisonous in the least. Kevin McCormick and Steve Moralee, treasurer and secretary, were Batman and Robert, or possibly Del Boy and Rodney. Someone else wore feathers and carried a snooker cue. He was John Parrott. If the question’s who do I think I am, as some Eating Owt readers presently suppose, the answer – of course – is Lord Muck.

JUST 100 yards from the end of the walk, the Chinese takeaway in Tow Law is advertising “battered Mars Bars” for 65p. Just the stuff to keep out the cold, no doubt, but it somehow sounds better when the Scots call it deep-fried.

Perhaps it’s global warming, but Tow Law can’t be all that bad, anyway. The pharmacist’s promoting treatment for malaria.

GEORGE Cate, meanwhile, insists that Stanley – Stanley Crook, as now some call it – isn’t the only south Durham village with its own peer of the realm. What about Eldon, he asks?

Eldon’s down the road from Shildon – hence, perhaps, the phrase about noblesse oblige. Sir John Scott, local landowner and the first Earl of Eldon, was Lord Chancellor in the late 18th Century, said to have encountered prejudice against “learned gentleman” – don’t we all?

– and to have been denied advancement.

The earldom was created in 1821, on the coronation of George IV.

George also notes that the new Eldon Colliery banner, paraded at this month’s Durham Big Meeting, carried an image of former local MP Derek Foster, now Lord Foster of Bishop Auckland.

Harold Wilson was on a great march of banners, but probably while still Prime Minister. Is the admirable Lord Foster, George wonders, the only peer to have his face on a new lodge banner?

As for the present Lord Eldon, who lives in Wimbledon, it’s feared that the County Durham locals may lack a certain deference. “Around here,”

says George, “he’s usually known as Scotty.”

IN much the same connection, last week’s column also observed that in the House of Lords there’s a door marked “Peer’s entrance” – what, they only have one? – and a gent’s that really is marked “Peers only”.

It prompts an email – the sender had best remain anonymous – that inside the single toilet cubicle serving Middlesbrough youth court is a notice exhorting “Would the last one to leave please turn out the light”. It is not exactly a multi-occupancy property, she points out. Perhaps it’s simply for those court short.

WING and a prayer, Phil Chinery in Darlington sends a cutting from the Sunday Post – not, for once, Oor Wullie – concerning the column’s constant battle against the Scottish midge.

A chap in London, it reports, has developed a new spray – called Incognito – which he reckons highly effective.

The Sunday Post supposes it timely – “the blighters are back in even stronger numbers.”

The paper sent someone to the banks of Loch Lomond to test it, together with a mobile phone said – rather like a dog whistle – to emit a frequency inaudible to humans but which makes midges run a mile.

The spray, it’s said, began to work “slowly.” The phone attracted midges like, well, bees round a honeypot.

The Postmen fled. In England it’s known as once bitten.

SAME paper, Phil also forwards a full-page ad for personalised car registrations. A4MOS, highlighted, is £1,500 + VAT. Who, one wonders, owns AMO5 – and how many millions might that be worth?

STILL looking over the border, Geoff Carr points out a mistake both in the news pages and in last week’s John North – quite likely in the golf columns, too. St Andrews, for which the Bishop of Durham shortly departs, is properly written like that.

However aberrantly, there’s no apostrophe. So how, correctly, should we be writing St Helen’s Auckland?

Geoff’s a retired dentist, BDS (St Andrews), probably should have been in the Cornish restaurant where Paul Dobson spots a sign – “Your patients is appreciated”.

From Darlington, meanwhile, Brian Jefferson sends a poster for a “young peoples intergenerational pie and pea’s quiz night” in aid of the “mayors charity”.

The poster carries the logo both of Darlington Council and of the Youth Service. “It makes me cringe,” says Brian, but adds a PS in his own handwriting.

“I wonder how many people notice or care.”

AN email arrives from Mr J D Baldwin in Scarborough following a column reference to that curious fish the woof, much enjoyed in those parts.

The woof, says Mr Baldwin, is neither dogfish nor catfish – as had been supposed – but the wolf fish, anarhichas lupus.

More fishy business, Mr Baldwin also notes that in Norway it’s known as the stone biter, that it’s on the Wikipedia list of “ugly” fish, that it’s a bottom feeder, can grow to five feet and that, like so many more, it’s at risk of being fished to extinction.

“A recent attempt to put it on the endangered species list failed, but I haven’t seen it in my supermarket for more than a year.”

The original article was on March 21, 2007. You know what they say about today’s news being tomorrow’s fish and chip wrappings? This may be the one that got away.