Here we go again. Another bout of ritual BBC bashing.

T J Ryder (Letters, March 17) would have us believe the BBC is the voice of the Labour left.

Really? Labour lefties repeatedly complain it’s a mouthpiece of the right-wing establishment.

It’s neither. It sits in the middle and gets accused of bias from both extremes.

Alan Robinson, Holgate, York

Just play football

Watching some of the histrionics displayed by today’s football players - ie writhing in agony if an opponent looks at them the wrong way - I wonder how would they have coped with Norman Hunter, Billy Bremner, Nobby Stiles, Denis Law, Tommy Smith and their like.

I’m pretty certain they would have needed an industrial-sized box full of Pampers and a direct phone line to their mummies.

For God’s Sake, just play football. That’s all we want to see.

M Horsman, Moorland Road, York

York’s Trailblazers

I ENJOYED the article ‘Where are York’s Trailblazers?’ by Andrew Morrison of York Civic Trust (The Press, March 20). I feel several blue plaques coming on.

George Leeman has a big and bold statue but not a plaque as far as I’m aware. Lawyer, railwayman (a ‘trainblazer’, perhaps), Liberal politician, Christian, he was three times Lord Mayor of York and sat twice as our MP in Victorian times. Unlike his rival George Hudson he managed to emerge with more-or-less a clean slate.

There was disappointment when the former Airspeed building in Piccadilly was razed to make way for ‘Container World’.

I hope the civic trust will bear in mind the historic association with aircraft design and manufacture within the Bar Walls of York, including blazing the trail with the first British production aeroplane with a retractable undercarriage, in which author and aeronautical engineer Nevil Shute Norway was closely involved. Somewhere in the immediate vicinity there should be a blue plaque.

Then there are the remarkable Atcherley Twins, Richard and David, of Fulford. Their heyday fell in pre-WWII years when the RAF was sometimes termed ‘the World’s Largest Flying Club’.

For derring-do the brothers were hard to beat. Richard won the prestigious King’s Cup Air Race in 1929. In WWII he devised the important ‘Drem’ system of airfield lighting. Post-war they rose to very high rank in the RAF. Their family home of Fulford Villa was demolished decades ago to make way for flats. Their extraordinary story certainly merits a blue plaque.

Derek Reed, Middlethorpe Drive, York