IN recent weeks some of your correspondants have suggested the new Millenium Bridge should be named after Lord Ashton instead of the late Princess Diana, because she never visited Lancaster. How petty and mean they are. Lord Ashton made a fortune from paying starvation wages to his workers and ruthlessly suppressed trades union activists. When the first Labour Party candidates were successful in Skerton he moved from Ryelands House to Ashton Hall, Stoday, thereby escaping the stench of his own mills.

He ruthlessly controlled the town council through his stooges, and when his parliamentary candidate looked like losing he blackmailed the town charities (essential before the welfare state) and townspeople, by threatening to disassociate himself rom the town. Only pressure by his wife prevented him from carrying out this threat. The Ashton Memorial is a tribute to a great lady, but her husband was a ruthless manipulator who drove out competing industries, encouraging a low wage, low skill economy which still lingers in Lancaster. He was a political turncoat who bought his 'peerage'. Compared to him, other Lancaster philanthropists Storey, Gregson, Coulston and Helm were saints in shining armour. Their story is dispassionately revealed through newspapers of the period and their papers. So Princess Diana never came to Lancaster in her short life. Queen Victoria came only once, but she merited a statue, and the reliefs around it and on the town hall depict worthies who were probably only dimly aware of Lancaster. Diana's work for landmine clearance alone is worth a statue in every town in the land. Do not Lancaster soldiers risk injury and death in Kosovo etc. from these evil weapons of random destruction? It is, I agree, a disgrace to name the bridge after Diana, it is a cheap and empty gesture typical of the late unlamented council. She deserves at least as much recognition as Eric Morecambe, emperor of mirth. They can't afford a statue for Princess Diana, and do not recognise her merit, for she did more to shake up this monarchy than many a republican. Is it any wonder she never came here?

Norman Gardner,

Oxford Street

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