Best of British

IT'S three years since last we visited British West Hartlepool - or at least, the debate over that puzzling prefix. Bob Harbron in Norton-on-Tees reopens it. Until their marriage of inconvenience in 1967, there were two towns - West Hartlepool and what became known as "old" Hartlepool. "British" West Hartlepool was by then familiar.

Some blamed the comedian Jimmy Edwards, a 1950s radio sketch supposedly called Night Train to British West Hartlepool. Others supposed the culprit to be the band leader and request programme presenter Victor Sylvester - "British Honduras, British East Africa and British West Hartlepool."

The column concluded, however, that the originator was probably Benny Hill, with a line about Fred Clockenlocker of British West Hartlepool in an unsung record called Transistor Radio.

Bob Harbron gives talks to schools. Visiting a "Victorian" day at Stranton school in Hartlepool last week he again stumbled upon the famous phrase. His mother was born in Hartlepool in the late 1890s. It was there that he first heard it in the 1930s, he says, when Benny Hill was but a bairn.

"The only theory I can offer is that a lot of Lascar and Chinese seamen lived in the Middleton area, alongside the then-busy docks," says Bob.

Wouldn't that have made it Oriental West Hartlepool? The best of British may yet be to come.