A talking model butcher got Cromer Hospital's annual summer fete off to an unusual and popular start.

%image(14972009, type="article-full", alt="Cromer Hospital fete 2014. Picture: DAVE "HUBBA" ROBERTS")

'George', famous in Cromer as the boater and apron-wearing model outside Icarus Hines' butcher's shop, left his Church Street post and headed for the hospital fete on Saturday afternoon.

There, he held a conversation with 13-year-old ventriloquist Jack Gittins, from Leicester, winner of last year's Cromer Carnival junior talent competition.

'George told him he was very glad to get away from standing looking at people walking past,' said Mary Northway, chairman of Cromer Community and Hospital Friends. 'It went down very well,' she added.

The event raised about £3,300, the best total for many years, according to Mrs Northway.

%image(14972010, type="article-full", alt="Best-dressed teddy winner Eliza Dew receives her prize from North Norfolk MP Norman Lamb at Cromer Hospital's fete. Picture: DAVE "HUBBA" ROBERTS")

Attractions included a raffle, drawn by North Norfolk MP Norman Lamb, with a top prize of a champagne tea for two at The Ritz, which was won by a staff member from the hospital's renal dialysis unit.

The cash would help buy equipment which the NHS could not afford, according to Mrs Northway.

Recent purchases had included a cystoscope and monitor, used to look inside the bladder. The items had cost at least £30,000 and saved local people from a long trek to the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital for examinations.

Mrs Northway has appealed for people to remember the hospital in their wills.

She said legacies had fallen away in recent years, possibly because of the £ll.4m left to the hospital by heiress Sagle Bernstein in 2001.

But Mrs Northway said that cash had all been used to build the new hospital and funds were needed for equipment.

Mr Lamb will be supporting the hospital, and others, with a 100-mile bike ride later this year and Mrs Northway said the friends' group would soon start collecting sponsorship for him in the hospital foyer.