Row over how to pronounce Yorkshire birthplace of Labour's Iron Chancellor before Rachel Reeves

Fleetstreet legend and Mirror columnist, Paul Routledge, sends gentle tales from his West Yorkshire allotment, Mrs R’s pantry and his local, the Old White Bear. This week, Paul visits the birthplace of Labour's first Iron Chancellor for a book launch

It takes something unusual to fill a library hall in Keighley on a rare sunny afternoon. But here we are, gathered under an imposing mural of the Rubhaiyat of Omar Khayyam, to hear about the region's most famous son.

Not that many people remember Philip Snowden, first (and last) Viscount of Ickornshaw in the village of Cowling, North Yorkshire, and Labour's first Iron Chancellor.

He died in 1937, reviled by his party for joining the Tories in the National Government of the thirties but praised as a patriot by the money men. Ring any bells?

The occasion is re-publication of Snowden's controversial autobiography, almost as vitriolic as Boris Johnson’s, with a new introduction by history writer Alexander Clifford.

Political controversy apart, the greatest dispute is how to pronounce the old villain's birthplace. Locals call the former weaving village in the Pennine foothills Coh-ling, to rhyme with bowling. Not Cowling, as with how-now-brown-cow.

The name has nothing to do with cows. It's Coll's Ling, old English for Coll's hill, or tribe, depending on your preference. And villagers call themselves Cowin'eeaders.

Visiting speakers at our event, including a labour historian who kept this hat on throughout the proceedings, found it hard to get their heads round this semantic difficulty, and persisted in mispronouncing the name.

For many years, I lived just across the field from Snowden's birthplace in Middleton, a straggling hillside row of stone cottages, all alike but uniquely different. A beautiful sight from my front door at Gill Top.

Cowling today does little to celebrate Snowden. There is a tree in the village, and his ashes, with those of his wife Ethel, are scattered on Ickornshaw moor, where a suitably stern cairn commemorates his love of his native land.

The discussion grew too arcane even for me, author of eight political biographies, and I had to get home to make the tea.

Nobody mentioned the fact that the real Iron Chancellor was Otto von Bismarck, autocratic 19th century ruler of Germany whose foreign policy was known as “blood and iron”.

You heard it here, but don't tell Rachel Reeves.