ONE of Darlington's most famous names was "Anty Richards". It was above a little cafe close to the Railway Tavern in Northgate. I was always intrigued by it: was it a spelling mistake concerning someone's auntie or was Mr Richards troubled by pesky ants? All became clear when I discovered the phenomenum of the hokey pokey men - ice cream immigrants from Italy.

This Saturday's Memories (No 101, Oct 15, 2012) once again veers down the road of Italian ice cream makers, so, as a little background reading, I thought I'd post the story here of Angelo Rissetto - also known as "Anty Richards", the best known of Darlington's hokey pokey men. It's one of those stories I regularly return and add to. Sadly, the newest addition is that the cafe closed in 2004 (when the story below was written), was reopened in 2008 by a new owner under the Anty Richards name, but closed in about 2010, and now the name has gone for good.

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ONE of Darlington's most intriguing names is slipping away.

It is still there, but the cafe beneath it is boarded up.

For more than a century, it has refreshed travellers on the Great North Road, but now Anty Richards has stopped serving, apparently for good.

It is, in Darlington at least, the end of an era of Italian ice cream. Most 20th Century generations of Darlingtonians were brought up amid the cafes and barrows belonging to exoticsounding people such as Iannarelli, Diplo, De Luca, Rea, Martino and, of course, Anty Richards.

Anty was born Angelo Rissetto in Sheffield at Christmas 1868. When he was just a tot, his parents, Domenico and Maria, returned home to Italy, to Lavagna, near Genoa, then a poor fishing village on the Italian Riviera.

In 1882, Domenico - who described himself as a musician and farmer - and Maria decided to give a new life in a new country a second go, and returned to England.

Quite where is unknown, but in 1892 Angelo was married in St Margaret's Church, York.

His bride was Jane Moore, of nearby Speculation Street, and their first child, Albert, was born in the city in 1899.

Soon after, Angelo, Jane and Albert moved to Darlington, and took a confectionery shop in Westbrook Buildings, in Northgate.

This gargoyle-encrusted building, topped with a huge Angel of the Nativity, was the fantastical work of stonemason Robert Borrowdale, one of this column's heroes.

Like all good Italians, the Rissettos made their own ice cream. They had a factory tucked away in a wall behind Westbrook Villas.

Early in the morning, Icy Smith would deliver large slabs of ice from his factory on Stonebridge. The Rissettos - as time went by augmented by young Frederico and Cecilia - broke up the ice by hand and packed it with salt around the outside of an ice cream container.

Angelo poured fresh milk and broke fresh eggs into a metal pail. He whisked in custard powder, cornflour, butter, cream and two drops of vanilla essence until the mixture was too stiff to pour from the pail.

Then it was boiled up before being ladled into the ice cream container surrounded by ice.

Inside the container were a couple of blades. As the ice cream froze, Angelo would rotate the container so that the blades sliced up the frozen ice cream.

"I can still remember the smell of vanilla at the factory, " says Anne Bethal, Albert's daughter.

"It was absolutely gorgeous."

From the factory, the ice cream was cycled all over the town and surrounding villages.

Further afield, to places including Cleasby, Melsonby, Bowes and Barningham, Angelo took it on Bobby, his piebald horse.

THE First World War was not easy for Angelo.

Albert had a thumb bayonetted off while serving in the Durham Light Infantry on the Somme, and Angelo would have come under suspicion for being foreign.

His friend, Atiglio Giacinto, whom he had taught the confectioner's trade in Westbrook Buldings, had set up shop in Shildon's Main Street.

Atiglio fought in France with the East Yorkshire Regiment, but such was the suspicion of his Italian background that his wife, Norah - a Shildon lass - had to report every day to Darlington police station, carrying their baby.

Perhaps it was because of this that after the war, Angelo Rissetto decided to Anglicise his name.

His customers had always struggled to wrap their tongues around his Italian syllables, and had taken to calling him Anty Richard.

So he started trading as Anty Richard's Superior Ices.

In 1928, he moved over the road into the premises that still bear his name - although the apostrophe has disappeared.

He put a silver coin under the doorstep to draw the money in.

Angelo died in 1931.

Albert, his eldest son, went up to North Road shops to work as a slinger, and his second son, Freddy, took over the business.

It remained a family affair, with every generation and relative being roped in at evenings and weekends to help with the barrows and the stalls in the parks and the market place.

Freddy went off to fight in the Second World War, leaving his wife, Edna, to run the cafe.

Unfortunately, she received several hurtful letters about the family's Italian connections so, on the declaration of peace, they formally changed their name by deed poll from Rissetto to Richards.

Over time, pieces of their ice cream empire melted until the Northgate shop was left as the last to bear the famous name. Now it, too, has shut.

"It is sad after all these years, " says Elizabeth Richards, daughter of Freddy and granddaughter of the original Anty.

"But we don't attach any blame to the current owners.

It's not necessary for them to feel upset.

"That end of town is struggling, and with the current economic circumstances, it is just the way of the world at the moment."