ALL the obituaries to Terry's paid fulsome tribute to its influence on York, not to mention on the sweet tooth of the nation.

But its role in musical theatre was studiously ignored.

Until now. Watching a TV documentary about the making of Oliver! recently, a colleague heard a startling reference to Terry's.

Intrigued, the Diary did some digging and discovered that the former Bishopthorpe Road factory really was the inspiration for Lionel Bart's much-loved production.

Oh, and some bloke called Dickens.

Bart died in 1999, but we tracked down this quote by him about the origins of the show, posted on the website oliverthemusical.com: "Twelve managements turned it down after I began writing it in 1958, rejecting it as morbid.

"But it was a book I'd loved ever since I was a child, and I persevered. The image for the show came to me from a candy called Oliver that I remembered as a little kid. It was made by Terry's, and featured a child with a bowl asking for more."

Terry's Oliver Twist chocolate bar has not been around for some years. Can anyone out there help, and fill in a few details about this rousing treat?

WE thought our appeal for information on the rusty ring sent to us by the National Railway Museum had fallen on stony ground. This was a piece of locomotive history, we were told, connected to the forthcoming exhibition on the Flying Scotsman. But nothing more.

Then Andy Scaife rode to our rescue. "I'm probably far too late, and you will have been inundated I'm sure," he begins inaccurately, "but your 'ring' is almost certainly a slice of Scotty's 700-odd metres of boiler tube. What a good idea to slice up the discarded tubes during a boiler overhaul, and sell them to raise funds. If all the tubes were being replaced, then selling 700,000 one-centimetre rings at a fiver each would generate 3.5 million quid!

"That's assuming 700,000 people worldwide would WANT a rusty steel ring from an old Gresley A3..."

Andy does, and has suggested that the Evening Press auction it for the Guardian Angels Appeal. We're going to check out his answer with the NRM before taking him up on the idea.

Our man in the field, Dale Minks, has an alternative suggestion. "It's a souvenir table napkin ring - as used by the rusty, old and mucky British Rail wheel-tappers and shunters at the 'Gravy Spreaders' canteen on Leeman Road, York."

This, he insists, was "named in honour of the fag-smoking ladies who cleared the dining tables of crockery etc - and spread the new liquid table cloth".

MEANWHILE, Andy Scaife has given the Diary its first, and presumably last, award. His alter ego is York superhero Bicycle Repairman, and in that guise he attended to our own bike when the gears seized.

Subsequently Andy has awarded us the "Prof W D Forty Memorial Trophy of 2006, for the dirtiest bicycle it has been our misfortune to attend to this year.

"I realise that it is still January, but the awards committee (myself and the poor cleaner who has to scrub out our handbasin) have every confidence that nothing could possibly come our way to compete with the magnificently encrusted sculpture of cloying, dripping, festering black paste and slime that was presented to us for repair recently." A proud moment indeed.

Updated: 12:04 Tuesday, January 24, 2006