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The most recognisable face of Teesside's determination to continue steel-making .

Geoff Waterfield was chairman of the multi-union works committee and led the campaign to keep steel production going after Corus announced it was no longer viable to keep the furnaces burning.

It was to be a long campaign. When the prospect of finding a buyer willing to take on Teesside Cast Products seemed a daunting one.

Even when Corus' parent company announced it would the belief that this was not yet the end remained undimmed.

We may never know the full details of the hours of talks, phone calls, emails, and calling on favours that go on behind the scenes.

that emerged during the months of negotiations only hint at the work put in by the unions' task force to extend the life of the plant and help find a buyer.

But it worked. When it was announced steel-making on Teesside had indeed been saved, the relief was plain to see in the press conference given by Geoff.

Tributes have already started coming in for a man who had steel-making in his blood. His father and grandfather worked in the industry and he had spent 22 years of his own short life following in their footsteps.

"When I see a blast furnace, I see a thing of beauty" - Geoff Waterfield

There will be sadness on Teesside for his passing, sadness also that he would not live to see the day he had fought so hard for.

Steel production is due to start again this coming December. as saying: "When I see the first iron come out and the first slab cast that will be the time I can take a big breath at a job done. I have got to see it, know it is there, then I will really believe we have achieved it."

The first rule of researching any story in an archive is don't get distracted by all the other stuff you see along the way.

Sadly I nearly always fail to abide by rule no.1. And so it was this week when I immersed myself in the local newspapers of the 1870's.

I was looking for any reference to a magnificent example of our heritage (sorry - any detail has to remain under wraps for the moment) but every turn of the delicate original pages left me wanting to find out more about all the other stories I came across.

peace was occasionally disturbed by my gasps of horror. The Victorian journalists thought nothing of revelling in the gory details of executions, murders, train crashes and the like. All the ghastly facts are laid before the readers in evocative and florid language.

But I wanted to share with you an uplifting tale that drew me right into its dusty yellowing pages.

It relates to a rescue by British seafarers of a white man who'd been discovered living as an .

They had called in to an island off and saw that amongst the natives there was someone who was clearly European. All were naked and he conversed with them fluently in local tongue. They lured this man onto a boat and took him away at gunpoint "for his own good".

It eventually turned out he was a Frenchman called Narcisse Pierre Peltier, the son of a shoemaker, who as a cabin-boy was shipwrecked in the Southern oceans.

The French crew abandoned their cargo of 350 Chinese slave labourers to their fate and set off for the Australian mainland. Twelve-year-old Narcisse would have been left behind too but he jumped into the small boat with them.

After many days their rations ran out but they just made it to land where all the adults lapped up the tiny pool of water they found. There was none for the boy who was left to die as they set off by boat once more. When they found civilisation they reported the loss of the ship but made no mention of the cabin boy's fate.

What that cruel crew could not know was that Narcisse was found by aboriginals who rescued him and took him in as their own. For 17 years he lived as a native Australian before the British stumbled upon him and took him back to Somerset.

With ear and nose piercings and decorative scars to his chest, he was a real novelty. He started to remember the French of his birth, but assumed that his real family were now long dead.

He remembered fondly his adopted tribe and how they had universally treated him with kindness. How that contrasted with the selfish disregard of his fellow countrymen.

Quite how the could relate this tale under the headline "17 years amongst savages" I don't understand. Just who were the savages here?

But how uplifting it is that human kindness can be seen to come not from an imposed set of social rules on how to behave, but straight from the heart.

Last night I watched with increasing horror as communities in London were set on fire and looted. Less than two days earlier I had been happily walking around East London - oblivious to the rising tension.

That feeling of disbelief that fellow Britons are behaving so badly brought to mind the last time I felt so horribly disconnected from the actions of my compatriots.

It was during the Falklands conflict. I had been on a university course in such a remote location in Germany that there was no contact with the outside world for a whole week. It was just as the Argentinians invaded.

Without radio, TV or newspapers (and of course pre email/Twitter/Facebook or mobile phones) our small group of students had no idea that our home country was set on a path to war.

What we had missed was a week of indignation and of the day. It was with utter shock that I found family and friends who I had thought more on the pacifist and level-headed side were eagerly caught up in the "bash the Argies" fever.

It felt as though my own nation was baying for blood. Perhaps I too would have been, had I been caught in that heavy swell of national outrage.

I returned to Germany, where the school children I was teaching English to were perplexed. As descendants of those responsible for starting the they could not condone the invasion of another country nor could they approve of using military means to settle the dispute.

For me it was much more frightening. Take away the pros and cons of the conflict itself, what I had accidentally witnessed by being one step removed was a sea change in the mood of my own country.

It made me realise that given the right circumstances, lines you think we'd never cross are mere illusion.

Last night I was watching the TV news and .

It was tough seeing fellow countrymen trashing their own community. It was also difficult reading the many messages from those who wanted the army to move in and have the culprits strung up.

There is always a ray of hope. As well as more reasoned comments, a message pinged in from who was watching from afar, just as I was in 1982.

He is filming in New Zealand and wondering what on earth is going on in the motherland. At least he can monitor it in realtime. He picked up on a .

The speed and technology may have changed - but then, as now, you wonder how well you really know your own country.