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Lord Horatio Shagg-Pyle

Two hundred and odd years ago, (at about the same time that Napoleon Bonaparte was bundled onto a Royal Navy frigate and carried off to St Helena), Lady Agatha Shagg, the large-bosomed heiress to the legendary Shagg Mine diamond pit in South East Africa, was married off to Lord Humphrey Pyle, a somewhat eccentric Earl who owned much of the bottom part of Yorkshire. 

This illustrious union created the Shagg-Pyle dynasty which subsequently went on to wreak havoc throughout the British Empire from Simla to Quebec. 

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The family's most notable scion was almost certainly the erstwhile explorer Colonel Lord Horatio Shagg-Pyle who, having been  kicked in the pharaohs by his former chum, Lord Caernarfon, subsequently devoted his life (when he wasn't having a stiff one on the terrace of Little Hope Manor) to the search for the long-lost Shagg Mine which had fallen into the hands of a rather ruthless local chieftain in 1875 and had subsequently been reclaimed by the jungle and had disappeared from every atlas on the planet...

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Thus far Horatio had only made it as far as the outside privy, but he was confident that once in Africa (and with the help of twenty torch bearers) he'd blaze a trail which would be seen from Tooting Broadway...

Thus far Horatio had only made it as far as the outside privy, but he was confident that once in Africa (and with the help of twenty torch bearers) he'd blaze a trail which would be seen from Tooting Broadway...

Someone had heard a wine bottle being opened in Halifax again...

Apparently, he was aerating the trout...

"Victory at all costs!" Churchill had thundered at a packed House.

In Little Hope, the cost was "Four pints of black market milk, please!" signalled to the milkman, whose horse was nibbling away at Lady Shagg-Pyle's privet...

The news was terrible, Three Nuns now cost more than twenty Camels...

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