The missing debutramps have been discovered.

So have details about a travellin' man in last week's photo of a visiting star and a Free Press reporter.

Meanwhile, an artist and guest curator absent from London for many years has provided more information about a fine exhibition of historic photos. In other words, it's e-mailbag time.

Let's check out the debutramps first.

Last week's column was on Bob Hope's brief visit to London in 1941. The comedian stopped over at the airport on a flight from Toronto to Windsor, making what is believed to be his only visit here.

The Free Press gave big coverage to those few minutes when Hope was not in the air. The story makes a mystifying reference to the star arriving "without his debutramp girlfriends, Brenda and Cobina." The combination of "debutante" and "tramp" in the story obviously seems like wordplay. But I did not have a clue who the two debs might be. Help from readers in solving the mystery was requested.

Thanks to e-mails from a number of readers, it is clear the women mentioned are New York society debutantes Cobina Wright Jr. and Canadian-born Brenda Frazier.

One reader, Barry Norris, says Wright turned her deb-dom into a few film roles. She had a small part in the 1941 Betty Grable-Don Ameche film Moon Over Miami, in which she had a series of ridiculous lines to speak, Norris notes. She was on such radio shows as Burns and Allen, too.

Other readers were also able to point to trails of Frazier glory on Internet sites devoted to such minor celebrities. Net diva and debutante expert Blair Schulman says Frazier was born in 1921 at Quebec. She was on the cover of Life magazine as a debutante in 1938 and later was photographed by Diane Arbus. The deb was in her spectacular decline when Arbus immortalized her. Frazier died in * * *

Hope's "girlfriends" may have been AWOL that day. Still, the star had the company of two leading Londoners -- well-known Free Press reporter J. Burke Martin and a Trans Canada Air Lines staffer, the late Stan Blowes.

If the Blowes' name is familiar, it should be. Visitors to Stratford will recognize it in connection with a long-running travel agency and other businesses there. One of his sons, Ted Blowes, is a former Stratford mayor.

The Blowes family was in London during the 1940s, says another son, Bob Blowes of Stratford.

At the time Hope dropped by, Blowes was running the TCA operation in downtown London. During the war years, he was selling tickets from an office in the former women's beverage room at the old Hotel London.

The family lived at 25 Cartwright St. and 442 Queens Ave. in London. Bob Blowes attended Lord Roberts public school and London Central secondary school.

Hope wasn't the only celebrity who rubbed shoulders with Stan Blowes during his long career in the travel business. In his time, he met such big names as Mary Pickford and her husband, Buddy Rogers, Raymond Burr, Cuba's Fidel Castro and Haiti's Papa Doc Duvalier.

Born in 1909, Blowes grew up in the Perth County community of Mitchell. He moved to Stratford, in his home county once more, on March 31, 1949.

It was his 40th birthday and he was pursuing his life-long dream of running his own travel agency. The business is now owned by his son, Barry (Sam) Blowes.

* * *

Now, for an e-mail that helps me give credit where it's due for a display of fine London historic photos.

A Remarkable Journey: 125 Years, includes An Edwardian Family Album, a selection of 23 works by London amateur photographer Sugden Pickles taken in the early 20th century. It continues at galleries @ galleria at Galleria London.

In writing about these photographs, I never had the chance to talk with former Londoner Mary (Brown) Lofthouse, an artist and guest curator who helped bring the Pickles' photos to light.

Now I have heard from her.

Here's some of what Lofthouse e-mailed. "I was doing a community research project for the Fred Landon branch library . . . Les Pickles (the photographer's son) brought in this box of glass plate negatives he said he found in the attic that had been taken by his father, Sugden," Lofthouse says.

"I got someone to print off a few for me and used them in an exhibition at the branch called Looking for the Past, I think it was. (This was about 1977).

"Later, as a 'mature' student in the fine arts department at UWO, I got really involved in darkroom work and requested the Pickles family to allow me to try to print a series of the negs myself. It was a labour of love, believe me. Nobody else in the studio program was much interested in this area of work as it was considered more of an archival field."

Lofthouse says she was "just fascinated" with the Pickles works. "To me they were like opening a door on a domestic scene from years that might have been experienced by my own grandparents, for example . . . I loved what it revealed about the man himself -- that he took pictures of the inside of his house -- his pride in his garden."

Lofthouse now lives in the Orono area, east of Toronto. But she still remembers the magical family photos she first saw about 25 years ago.

"The more you looked at them, the more you were tempted to read into them, I guess. I hope I get to see this exhibition. It sounds worth a trip to London."

Definitely.

* * *

Not everybody has time to write. I never did hear back from the London Sports Council about my nomination of Lady Lilian (Ottaway) Beck for the London Sports Hall of Fame.

In 2001, I championed Lady Beck as a potential member of the hall's "legend" section because of her involvement in the equestrian world.

It was a regular thing for the Beck horses to triumph at Canadian horse shows during the first two decades of the last century. Internationally, Lady Beck's equestrian expertise as a rider and official was respected and she was the first woman to act as a judge at the National Horse Show at New York.

The nomination went in more than a year ago. Maybe the letter saying why Lady Beck didn't cut it as a 2002 inductee is in the mail or I just missed it. No problem.

Anyway, the hall is due to announce four new inductees later this week. My assumption is that Lady Beck will not be joining the hall's lone female inductee -- Olympic rowing star Lesley Thompson-Willie.

Best wishes to those men and women who make it.

Here at the Lady Beck fan club, we're working on gathering more information on this extraordinary Londoner, an equestrian, singer, social pillar and wife to Sir Adam Beck.

Lady Beck was definitely no debutramp.

But just as with the search for more on Cobina and Brenda, readers' assistance will be greatly appreciated in the quest for more information on the distinguished Lady Beck.