List of Peter Simple's Characters - Minor

Minor

• Prem Bakshi — Diminutive Pakistani triangle player in the Stretchford M.S.O.
• Sir Sid Ballpoint — "Supreme Manager-in-Chief of the British Underwater Motorcycling Federation". See also Trevor Dimwiddie.

• S. J. Barstow (1886–1929), the only hydro-electrical engineer to be a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Took part with D. H. Lawrence at a combined poetry-reading and hydro-electrical engineering demonstration in Oxford, where he was introduced to Lady Ottoline Morrell. His letters to Leonard Woolf requesting payment for repairs to a table lamp are profoundly moving and foreshadow his later suicide by auto-electrocution.
• Blazeaway — column's shooting correspondent. Lists bags of left-wing student, ecologist and social scientist, some of whom end up on the tables at the trendy West End restaurant Au Petit Coin Anthropophage.
• Dr Kev Burst — headmaster of Stretchford Comprehensive School. Runs extensive car-hire, pornography and other businesses with the labour and cash he extracts from his huge student community.
• E. S. Canister (1886–1980) — litterateur who was "the first to leave a rusting bedstead on the summit of Scafell Pike". His later works include "Vandalised Grand Piano and Two Tons of Toffee Papers on Ben Nevis" (1920) and "Four Tons of Miscellaneous Litter on the Sierra Nevada" (1927). Inspiration for the Friends of Litter.
• Jeremy Cardhouse — originally a "progressive" Conservative Party MP, later defected to the Labour Party and became a Peter Mandelson-worshipping Euro MP. Compared by A. N. Wilson to the present Conservative leader David Cameron.
• Dr Abdul Ngong Castrumba — "freelance, all-purpose revolutionary leader". Based on Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba and other 1960s revolutionaries.
• Chocolate Meringue Narthex — A highly successful rock group.
• Attila Craggs — ruthlessly resolute chief of the Television Licence Evaders' Liberation Army, or TELELA. Oversees his fanatical Telelistas from a secret hideout "somewhere in South London" and speaks a special and sometimes confusing dialect of commercial Spanish.

• Royston Cylinder — ambitious crypto-Marxist chief-of-staff of J. Bonington Jagworth, leader of the Motorists' Liberation Front.

• Mr Dis — taciturn, dark-visaged manager of the Home Farm on the Mountwarlock Estate. Expert in the growing of mandrakes.

• Senator Patrick Flannely — keen American supporter of the Irish Republican Navy (IRN).

• Ron Frabb — teen idol kept permanently drugged by his manager Cliff Rampton.

• Dr F. Gestaltvogel — Chief Consultant Psychiatrist at Nerdley General Hospital. Often gives expert advice in court cases overseen by Dr Ellis Goth-Jones, recommending abreactive therapy or EST for the accused and offering euthanasia at his own clinic if this fails.

• Ghoulman — chief warden of the safari park on the Mountwarlock estate, where he cares for the wyverns, basilisks, gorgons and other monsters and ensures that their incineratory or petrifactory powers are always working at their peak.

• Gjoq — Albanian au-pair of Mrs Dutt-Pauker. Forms a sometimes fractious anti-Stalinist alliance with Mrs Dutt-Pauker's Maoist grandson Bert.

• Jon Glasse-Derkeley — arts critic and "cultural entrepreneur". Chronicler of the Nerdley Scene during the 1960s.
• Len Gollip — General Secretary of the Associated Union of Hole-borers. Presides over record votes of up to 2,379,801 in union ballots, despite the Union having only 65,785 members, many now dead.

• Rev John Goodwheel — the "Apostle of the Motorways"; a good friend of J. Bonington Jagworth, he is "the motorists' padre" . Drives a mobile Romanesque cathedral.

• Goth-Joneses — nepotistic family in the Stretchford conurbation. Llewellyn Goth-Jones is a fanatic advocate of contraception, abortion and "universal sexual intercourse". Sir Aylwin Goth-Jones is "the genial, unpopular Chief Constable of Stretchford", fanatically devoted to the detection and arrest of drink drivers. Dr Ellis Goth-Jones, 59, is the chairman of Nerdley magistrate's court, overseeing cases initiated by Detective Sergeant J. B. MacKenzie of Nerdley Special Branch and receiving the expert advice of Dr F. Gestaltvogel. Dr Harry Goth-Jones is the vice-chancellor of St Oicks University in Stretchford, where "more than 105 per cent of entrants achieved honours degrees mostly in such subjects as skateboarding studies and Belgian pastry studies".

• Angelo "Tiny Tim" Grotto — weedy, sickly, near-dwarvish Mafia Boss. Wore an "outsize, steel-lined" fedora from beneath which his weak, watery eyes "missed everything". Feared by rival Mafia bosses Giovanni "Fat Face" Leoncavallo, Michele "Six Legs" Puccini, and Giacomo "Plastic Garden Gnome" Wolf-Ferrari.Was eventually slain by Francesco "Big Jock" Busoni with a poisoned 4-lb tin of his favourite sweets, Uncle Joe's Mintballs from Wigan, after a failed assassination attempt with an explosive teddy bear.

• Mr Grylls — former clergyman and authority on ecclesiastical law, now attends Ughtred St. John Mainwaring, the column's well-bred computer. Wears special uniform and forswears animal food while in attendance.

• Squire Haggard — hard-drinking, xenophobic and lecherous 18th-century squire and diarist, invented and written for the column by the humorist Michael Green. Always armed with a fowling-piece, he is the perpetual foe of "Whigs, Jacobites, Papists, Frenchmen and Scotchmen". Later portrayed in a Yorkshire Television / ITV series by Keith Barron.

• Mr. Harrison; kindly old shop steward at the panel-beating plant of the Boggs motor factory in Nerdley, where he supervises the three chums Jim, Fred and Rashid Patel.
• Supt. J.S. Harrogate — chief of police operations against the deadly Housewives' Clubs of the Stretchford conurbation. Is believed to write the anonymous preface to the Annual Directory of Typical Housewives' Fan Clubs of Stretchford (Viper and Bugloss).

• Rex Hickfield — journalist who describes visits to the ageing Oliver and Connie Mellors (née Chatterley), formerly of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover.
• Brian Hohenzollern — brilliant film director at Piledriver Films (cf. Hammer Films) whose series of horror movies star Bruce Braganza as Ludwig Wittgenstein, with co-stars Stan Bourbon Parma, Kay Wittelsbach and Ted Capet, costume research by Shirley Porphyrogenitus and music by Bing Karageorgevitch.

• Housewives' Fan Clubs — fanatical, schismatic and constantly battling fan clubs in the Stretchford conurbation. All are descended from the Our Jackie Kennedy fan club of the 1960s. Police operations against them are overseen by Supt. J.S. Harrogate.

• Clare Howitzer — socialist agony aunt. Based partly on Claire Rayner.

• Morag Ironheart — famous for her Clackmannanshire terriers, bred at her kennels at Brig O' Dread in their eponymous county.

• MacAnguish — Scottish head gardener on the Mountwarlock estate. In charge of the Great Garden of Terror and the Deadly Upas Tree.

• Detective Sergeant J. B. MacKenzie — star officer of Nerdley Special Branch who is continually making arrests on Kandahar Road while on "routine search for certain substances". See also Dr Ellis Goth-Jones.

• Ughtred St. John Mainwaring — column's well-bred computer. Has "carved mahogany case" and "subdued lighting as of finest wax candles". Easily angered by breaches of etiquette and protocol. Attended by the devoted Mr Grylls.

• The Master of Paddington — the name given by Peter Simple to the author of the (genuine) graffito "Far away is close at hand in images of elsewhere", which appeared on a wall close to Paddington Station.
• Dr E. J. Multimer — angry young astronomer and sex-pest at Stretchford. Based partly on Fred Hoyle.
• Elvira Mutcliffe — "Cleckheaton-born diseuse and devotee of solid pottery and eurhythmic dancing" who leads a well-respected witches' coven in the West Riding. On good terms with Satan, who often appears to her coven in the form of the Great Black Goat of Mytholmroyd, and guardian, with her chief warlock, Cllr Albert Gogden, of the Trilby Hat of Invisibility.

• Narcolept — column's boring correspondent. Reports tournaments organized by the British Boring Board of Control under Sir Herbert Trance.

• Rev Bruce Nethers — Vandals' Padre and incumbent at St Atilla's church. See Supergoth.
• Dr. Ngrafta — president of Gombola and the only African head of state who is both a witchdoctor and a graduate of the London School of Economics.

• Rev. Peter Nordwestdeutscher — mischief-making domestic chaplain of Dr Spaceley-Trellis, the go-ahead Bishop of Bevindon. Name clearly inspired by Canon Paul Oestreicher, 'veteran peace campaigner' and the sometime amanuensis of Bertrand Russell.

• Marylou Ogreburg — born in Dissentville, Ohio, now runs the "People's Bread and Marmite Street Dance Theatre Workshop" in London, giving politically awakening and socially relevant performances for ordinary folk unable to escape in time.
• Paul Ohm — "freelance technologist" who lives at Atomdene, Edgbaston and is building a nuclear accelerator in his garden.
• Gillian Paste — left-wing television producer and presenter of Sneer with Mother. Close ally of Mrs Dutt-Pauker.

• Cliff Rampton — pop music entrepreneur and manager of Ron Frabb.

• Redshank — the column's nature diarist. Chronicled the oddly incompetent bird the Dotterel and the doings of such characters as Old Seth the Wasp-Keeper.

• Rentamob (originally Rentacrowd) — mammoth consortium supplying semi-automated, slogan-shouting demonstrators wherever they are required. Was particularly in demand during the Apartheid era.

• Old Seth the Wasp-Keeper — preserver of the custom of "telling the wasps", whereby his charges are kept informed of "actual and grievous bodily harm, rape, fraud and the formation of new gangs of hooligans of ever-increasing ferocity" in his village. Author of Through A Waspkeeper's Window, Waspkeeping My Destiny and A Waspkeeper Remembers. Chronicled by the column's nature diarist Redshank.

• Peter Simple himself — benevolent landowner and upholder of the traditions of England. Family seat: Simpleham. Wealth: substantial but not excessive, deriving in part from slave-labour on South American latifundia. A regular reader of the Feudal Times and Reactionary Herald, from whose thoughtful leaders he frequently quotes. Protected by two giant bodyguards, Blohm and Voss.
• Ken Slabb — "bearded, grenade-draped" perpetual president of Stretchford Student Union.

• Len Spheroyd (1920–1976) — fattest fireman in history, at over thirty-two stone, and distant relation of Ron Spheroyd. Regularly late on duty due to non-stop eating of pork pies and carrying of other emergency rations, and found it very difficult to travel to the scene of a fire. Eventually achieved his dearest wish and extinguished a fire when he sat on his own dangerously burning chip-pan, but ruined chips and lost his own life.

• Ron Spheroyd — tuba player and union shop steward in the Stretchford M.S.O. under Sir Jim Gastropodi. Plays a fortissimo bottom B flat, signalling "All out", when a newly discovered Mahler symphony ("The Interminable" or "The Unendurable") has gone on for more than two hours. A soul-mate of militant British unionists of the 1970s and 1980s such as Mick McGahey and distant relation of Len Spheroyd, the world's fattest fireman.

• River Stretch — chemical-vapour-wreathed river believed to be "the most polluted" in Europe. See Stretchford.

• Stretchford — principal city of the Stretchford Conurbation. Famous, inter alia, for "lovely, sex-maniac-haunted" Sadcake Park, with its own council-employed naked sadhu, a permanently ineffectual football team, Stretchford United, and a vast network of fanatical, ever-battling Housewives' Clubs.

• Supergoth — column's vandalism correspondent. Covered the Stretchford Vandals' League and the exciting battle for league and cup glory between such teams as the Bog Lane Wanderers, the Soup Hales Iconoclasts and the Lampton Huns.

• Major E.J. Tannoy — "chief roarsman" of the Friends of Noise based at Pandemonium House.
• Royston Vibes — 18th-year sociology student at Nerdley University. Claims to be head of an Aztec community that conquered Nerdley in the Dark Ages and demands ever-increasing concessions and benefits from local government, including the inalienable right to commit human sacrifice on subsidized step pyramids.

• R. S. Viswaswami — naked Indian hermit, or sadhu, employed by the council to live on a lake in "lovely, sex-maniac haunted Sadcake Park", the famed "iron lung" of the Stretchford conurbation.