DOM Joly is described as a comedian and prankster. They thought he must be joking when last week he claimed a direct connection between Darlington – Darlington’s renowned Quakers, indeed – and Osama bin Laden. It appears that he wasn’t.

Joly, now 43, was born in The Lebanon to British parents. At the age of six, he told an audience at Stockton’s ARC centre, he attended Brummana High School, near Beirut, but wasn’t its best known old boy. That was bin Laden.

Brummana High School, known as BHS though presumably not to be confused with British Home Stores, was formed in 1873 by Elijah Saleeby, so heavily backed by funding from Darlington’s Society of Friends that it became known as the Darlington Station. To this day it retains its Quaker ethos.

The school’s own website names just one former scholar – ex- Lebanese president Emile Lahoud – but claims that old boys are “among the highest diplomatic, political, professional, business and artistic names throughout Lebanon, the Middle East and the world at large”.

Another website, however, confirms that several bin Laden family members attended the school. At least five former teachers and members of staff, it adds, confirm that Osama bin Laden was a pupil there for less than a year.

Dominic John Romulus Joly himself made the same claim on Loose Women on February 18 this year.

Some thought he was joking then, too.

It may not have embraced bin Laden’s formative years, but how different might the world have been, save for the generosity of Darlington’s peace-loving Quakers?

DARLINGTON’S Quakers always have been internationally minded. Back in 1854, the Napoleonic Wars imminent, three prominent Quakers – including Henry Pease, from Darlington – set off for Russia to plead peace with the Tsar.

One of Chris Lloyd’s admirable local history books recalls that they set off by horse-drawn carriage, then travelled by train from Düsseldorf to Berlin, covering 375 miles in 13 hours.

Pease, who founded Saltburn and built the Stainmore Railway from Barnard Castle to Tebay – both celebrating their 150th anniversary this year – was impressed by the train’s punctuality.

Thereafter the journey became yet tougher and more wintry. In Riga, the wheels were removed from the carriage so that it could be lashed to a sledge.

They arrived in St Petersburg on February 2, stayed for two weeks in Miss Benson’s Hotel – Miss Benson being a good Sunderland lass – were finally granted an audience with Tsar Nicholas I and told him that God wanted peace.

Though the Tsar replied that he himself wanted nothing more, the delegation left “with feeling of foreboding anxiety”.

As with the former pupil of Brummana High School, the rest is history.

BUS services have been hacked back, especially at night. Word is that darker deeds are yet to follow.

We’ve written before of the sporadic joys of the No 1B from Darlington to Tow Law, via North Bitchburn, Peases West, Sunniside and goodness knows where else and, last Friday evening, were again obliged to make the return journey.

Until April, the last bus back from Tow Law was at 9.40pm, with a connecting change at Crook. Now it’s an hour earlier, but with a change – and a half-hour wait – at Bishop Auckland.

So much for co-ordinated transport.

What if it’s dark and cold and you’re old and vulnerable? Bishop bus station, goodness knows, is a pretty desolate place at the best of times, much less getting on ten o’- clock on a winter night.

Thus it is, in an age where manned space travel is being abandoned because they’ve been there and done that, that in County Durham a 25-mile bus journey takes two hours.

NOT quite old, not really vulnerable, I bridge the half-hour wait with a pint in the nearby Bay Horse, Bishop’s oldest pub.

It’s now lively, youthful, dominated by the twin monstrosities of largescreen television and over-excited music machine played at a decibel level some of us consider unwelcoming.

None reacts, none seems barely even to acknowledge the cacophony, until the machine crashes into reverse, travels back 50 years and plays Cliff Richard singing Living Doll.

Immediately the whole pub joins in. Whether or not they believe it to be a commercial for inflatable sex toys is uncertain, but in such circumstances you still have to be hugely grateful for Sir Cliff.

IT gets better. Half way through Living Doll, about where he’s singing of doing his best to please her, a chap of 40-odd perches alongside to recall Shildon in May 1970.

It was the Urban District Council elections. I stood as a 23-year-old Independent and – honest – wiped the floor with them.

The chap’s heavily pregnant mum had been expecting him any moment.

Thus it was, he said, that I’d arranged a car to ferry her to the polling station. “It’s amazing to meet you after all this time,” he said, and the feeling was mutual. Amid all the Living Doll animation, however, I forgot to ask if his old mum had voted the right way, after all.

LAST week’s column noted a claim by the Reverend Dr Peter Mullen – in the Telegraph letters column – that at theological college they knew the toilet as the “summer chamber”.

It prompted a Hear All Sides letter from the ever-courteous Les Wilson in Guisborough, recalling BBC television presenter McDonald Hobley’s assertion that to friends it was known as the marble horse.

That, in turn, was an incorrigibly appropriate reminder of the one time I met Hobley, a continuity announcer at the same time as Sylvia Peters and Peter Haigh and charged with presenting the first party political broadcast.

The speaker was to be Sir Stafford Cripps. Despite wartime service with the Royal Artillery – during which he was involved in an aborted plot to kidnap Hitler – Hobley was nervous.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, “it is my great honour to introduce the Home Secretary, Sir Stifford Crapps.”

AS if things in the newspaper world aren’t malodorous enough just now, Bill Callen in Richmond spots this For Sale ad – under “Sports equipment”

– in last Saturday’s Echo.

Possibly, he surmises, the dung bells could be used to call the cattle home across the Sands of Dee.

ANOTHER example of the pre-existing condition that now blights the English language, Tony Callan, in Crook – different spelling from Bill Callen, but both with Irish roots – photographed a sign spotted near Backbarrow, in the Lakes.

Bill’s email’s dated July 8, sufficient time to steer clear. Very much later, of course, and it would have to have been a post-warning, and they’re not much good at all.

…and finally, a 24-word email from Councillor Bill Dixon MBE, leader of Darlington council. “Sorry I can’t answer my phone right now. Please leave me a message and the News of the World will get back to you,” it says. Whatever can he mean?