Those who enjoyed the piece about Talbot Clifton, the Squire of Lytham, in these columns earlier this week, will forgive another dip into The Clifton Chronicle. It concerns how the one-time president of Royal Lytham had an electric organ installed in the hall of his house and how he would play it lovingly for hours at a time.

Typical of the squire, however, he found other, non-musical uses for it. Like the time he had as his house guest a relation to whom he took an intense dislike. Whereupon Talbot got up in the middle of the night, rushed down to the organ and began to play Nearer My God to Thee as loudly as he could on the trumpet stop.

It seems that the unfortunate guest was almost blown out of his bed with the sudden cacophony from somewhere below him. We are told that he left the house the following morning, pale and shaken.

Then there was the trip he took to the Monterey Peninsula, where he rode a horse named Guadeloupe - "he's a cannibal, but he's a winner" - in the first gentlemen's steeplechase held in California. After being thrown, he remounted and finished third.

John Kennedy's book tells us: "Talbot's horsemanship and fearlessness greatly impressed the San Franciscans, and the sight of him driving his four in hand coach, or drag, through the streets, was something they had never seen before. Stagecoaches and wagons yes, but not a private turn-out for pleasure." Wonderful stuff.