Leonard Barras.

Late 1980's, night-time, abed and drifting, BBC Radio 4 whispering in the dark, I become aware of a soft spoken Geordie voice reading stories that seemed to weave themselves into, or out of, my dreams.
So much so in fact, I was never entirely sure I hadn't imagined hearing them.

The voice belonged to Leonard Barras and the stories were from his "Up The Tyne In A Flummox" collection.
Over the past few years I've been re-introduced to them, and more of L.B.'s writing, via Phil's Concert Bootlegs blog for which I am eternally grateful.
(It's worth having a good look at his 'Labels" list as it contains many, many obscure wonders.)

I can't say much about Leonard Barras the man as I know little more about him than what's written in his obituary from the Guardian newspaper.
So, here's what the article says:

 "The Guardian once called Leonard Barras, who has died aged 85, "a disgracefully neglected comic writer", while the Stage referred to him as "a Geordie Ionesco". Yet his talents were little appreciated. This was down to his total lack of ego. He had no desire for publicity and resisted being photographed. His work was also impossible to categorise - a homespun Geordie humour mixed with fantastical flights of fancy and surrealism (surrealism not being that strong on Tyneside). His unusual imagination contrasted with the mild-mannered, quiet man who spent his entire working life at Swan Hunter shipyards. He never lived outside the region.

Barras was born in Wallsend, the youngest of four brothers. He went to work at Swan's in 1942 as a clerk. Bad eyesight saved him from national service. He received a long-service watch from Swan's in 1967 but continued to work there for nearly 20 more years, by which time he was a chief clerk.

In January 1949, Barras began his weekly Through My Hat column for the Newcastle-based Sunday Sun. It was Beachcomber meets Flann O'Brien, with wild, absurd, hugely comic scenarios. He also wrote at this time for the BBC radio programme Wot Cheor, Geordie and began writing for the stage. Two of his plays, A Little Stiff Built Chap (1969) and The Shy Gasman (1970), were premiered by Alan Ayckbourn at Scarborough.

Along with Alex Glasgow and Henry Livings, Barras wrote for the award-winning Northern Drift programmes for BBC radio, and in the late 1970s he penned the BBC2 comedy series Mother Nature's Bloomers, starring Roy Kinnear. Iron Press published poems from this series in Hailstones on Your Father (1979). The TV series was as far from formulaic TV humour as could be. Barras was self-deprecating, saying of his humour, "the majority of people pass it by - like an accident in the street."

Bluebottles on My Marmalade (1982) and Up the Tyne in a Flummox (1987) both highlighted the exploits of his fantastical Wallsend characters, such as poet Herbert Mangle and butcher Arbuthnot Wotherfoot. Several of these episodes were also broadcast on BBC Radio 4. As he wrote of himself in the foreword: "All of his characters are ineffectual, maladjusted, repressed, unsociable and unloved. They are all himself."

Despite writing plays for Tyne Wear Theatre Company - Tight at the Back (1987), which focused on Wallsend Amnesia FC, and for Live Theatre, Come Snow, Come Blow (1988) - hilarious if unfathomable, Barras fell into obscurity. As his publisher, I challenged him to write a novel. The result was The Chocolate Cream Society (1997), a sustained piece of comic surrealism set in a fading shipyard, where one of the main characters is a talking ghost horse.

He carried on writing, regardless of recognition. Cloud Nine Theatre Company commissioned his last work, a half-hour absurdist play called The Purple Pullover, starring the same Herbert Mangle waxing lyrical on a bicycle. This toured north Tyneside last autumn.

No one wrote like Barras. Certainly, no creative writing course could produce his like. Many less original, less talented writers have captured much more publicity, something Barras would probably have seen as comically inevitable.

He was predeceased by his wife Edith, whom he had married in the late 1950s.

· Leonard Barras, writer, born February 13 1922; died January 20 2008"

I note, with some sadness, that my birthday is the anniversary of his death. :-(

On a lighter note, one of his stories led to the family cat being named "Rover".