STANDING over 6ft tall, and smoking a cigarette with "a yard of ash hanging off", Stan Deere was not a man easily ignored - especially if you lived in The Groves, York, some years ago.

For Stan conducted his business not so much door-to-door as gate-to-gate.

He would open the gate that led into the back yard of Groves homes, yell out "Any scrap?" - no doubt to the surprise of those at home - and then move on.

Stan came to Larry Langhorn's mind after we asked for memories of rag-and-bone men, to mark news that the world theatrical premiere of Steptoe and Son was coming to York Theatre Royal.

Larry remembered Stan walking round York loading up his old fashioned pram with other folks' cast offs. He would wheel his haul round to Clancey's scrapyard: not such a journey when it was based in St Andrewgate, but quite a trek when it relocated to Murton.

"He was one of the best known regulars around York, especially The Groves," recalled Larry, 70, who lives at Clifton. "He knew his way around all the regular places. Everybody used to leave rags and scrap."

Stan, who died some years ago, even managed to heave an old car engine and gearbox into his pram once.

"They have all gone now," added Larry.

THE rag-and-bone team lodged in Malcolm Huntington's memory banks are the improbably-named Knocker and Noosey.

In the Forties Malcolm, a former Evening Press sports editor, went to St Clements Junior School in Ebor Street. And this pair were a well-known sight about South Bank in those days.

"We thought they were mother and son. They were very peculiar characters," said Malcolm.

"They had a little pony and trap and went around the streets around Scarcroft Road, Bishopthorpe Road and Cherry Street.

"They used to shout 'rag and bone, rag and bone'. They'd stop outside houses and people would come out with all sorts of things, pleased to get rid of rubbish in many cases."

It sounds suspiciously like early doorstep recycling to the Diary.

MALCOLM also responded to our piece last Friday in which an eye witness blamed the 1984 Minster fire on a power surge.

He recalled a story he broke a few years after the blaze when an altogether more sinister notion was suggested: arson.

Then Terry Earnshaw, commander of York Fire Brigade at the time of the disaster, felt it was started deliberately. First on the scene, he went onto the roof and found a door opened up there which he had never seen open on any of his many previous inspections.

There were other good reasons for his suspicions, which were soon picked up by the national and international media.

If this theory is right, there could still be someone wandering around York who nearly destroyed our cathedral. Sobering stuff.

Updated: 11:01 Tuesday, July 12, 2005