Bishop Auckland writer Wendy Robertson fondly remembers a feisty woman who was at the heart of her local community

Writers across Bishop Auckland and South Durham will be mourning the recent death, at more than 90 years old, of Doreen Howe of Bondgate, Bishop Auckland.

A member of both Bishop Auckland and Crook Writing Groups, Doreen was a woman for whom the term "feisty" was invented.

A tall, elegant, charming woman, always immaculately coiffured, she was often to be seen, even in recent days, making her way down Newgate High street, meeting and greeting many Bishop Auckland people, among them grown-ups who had known her since they called in Howe’s shop for fish and chips as children.

She loved Bishop Auckland. She was often to be seen sitting on one of the benches in Newgate street, having conversations with Bishop Auckland people of all ages.

My husband called her the Duchess of Bishop Auckland. He occasionally joined her on the bench to reminisce about the intricate history of the town – the Market Place, the council, the war, the legendary football team, the palatial Co-op, the ways of her own community of Bishop Auckland traders.

More recently she spoke of the welcome advent of philanthropist Johnathan Ruffer, of Auckland Castle, who arrived to rejuvenate the town a year or so ago. Always forward-looking she told me he was "an angel sent to save us".

Coming here from Sacriston – her grandfather was station master there – Doreen’s parents had opened the shop in the 1920s as young marrieds and Doreen helped in the shop from when she was 14, becoming her dear mother’s right-hand woman and spending a lifetime behind the counter of Howe’s immaculate fish and chip shop in historic Bondgate.

Her parents built the business starting from a small pavement shop. Her father, a skilled cabinet-maker, extended it and eventually developed the house next door into their own residence. The doorway and hall into the house was a side alley that he incorporated into the house to extend its footprint.

Doreen lived in this immaculate house to the end, and would tell you the tale of how her father had converted a virtual slum into an immaculate jewel of a house. She was still living there when just after Christmas I last had tea and cake with her. She pointed out a part of the wall which had been built over a medieval door which still existed, complete with key, behind the plaster.

Doreen lived and worked in Bondgate all of her life, but she was not confined. Her life was filled with travel and adventure. Always immaculately dressed, she holidayed in Europe just after the war dressed in outfits made from Vogue Patterns bought at Woolworths on Newgate Street. Later, she went on cruises all over the world and visited New Zealand, Australia and the US. Fearless and resourceful, she mostly travelled on her own.

She loved the going to the Town Hall (only a small walk away from her house), and went to many of the music and drama events as well as special groups that the Town Hall catered for so well. It was there that I met her when she retired at the age of 70 and joined my writing group, The Wear Valley Writers.

Never having written before, she proved to be a witty and talented writer, writing consistently well off-the-cuff as well as bringing in poems she wrote at home. She loved to write. Much of this writing consisted of warm, kindly, very witty observations of Bishop Auckland people, past and present.

Some of these poems found their way into The Northern Echo, a paper which was her daily bible and her connection with the wider South Durham world. She gathered together small collections of her poems and published them with Snowball’s Printers of Spennymoor.

Her last business venture, just last year, was working with an artist to produce her poems as illustrated Bishop Auckland cards which went on sale at the Town Hall and the nearby Art Gallery (another of Johnathan Ruffer’s initiatives.) "Doreen enhanced the lives of everyone she came into contact with," said Gillian Wales, retired manager of the library and art gallery.

If she hadn’t been a member of a successful trading family, Doreen would surely have been a headmistress, a hospital matron, of a novelist of some repute. But it’s our good luck that she remained here to spend her long and interesting life as Miss Howe of Howe’s Fish Shop, Bondgate, Bishop Auckland. Truly a Duchess.

Doreen's funeral is at the Wear Valley Crematorium (Coundon Road, DL14 RNR) at 2pm, on Thursday, February 23