Hollow ring

London firm Gordon Dadds has won, without a shadow of doubt, this month's prize for most tenuous claim to fame.

Manchester firm Cobbetts, we thought, had it sown up by jumping feet first on to the Harry Potter bandwagon with a press release on its work in the sale of Moss & Co, the company which made the wands used in the recent film.

Big deal, you might say, but it is compared to the achievement of Gordon Dadds' newly recruited employment consultant Gillian Howard.

Of course, the only way to top Harry Potter is to invoke 'The Lord of the Rings', but is it really a huge claim to fame that Ms Howard once gave the Sampson Gamgee lecture to a medical society in Birmingham? The lecture was founded in the memory of Joseph Sampson Gamgee, a distinguished surgeon and the inventor of cotton wool.

But Mr Gamgee won more lasting fame, the firm is at pains to point out, as the source of the name for Frodo's friend, Sam Gamgee.