Tales of school life

FOR nearly 100 years, it offered a “sound, progressive education from four to 18 years and prepares pupils for a useful life in an academic or a practical sphere”.

Looking up Durham Road into Bishop Auckland Market Place in the 1950s. Many of the trees to the left of the road were in The Mount’s garden that ran down to the river and the white building on the left which had been Ferens’ flour mill

Bobbie Kelly was a weekly boarder there for four years, going home to Darlington at weekends.

“What memories the photographs brought back,” she says. “I started at the school on September 17, 1947, at seven years of age, and I loved it. I didn’t have any homesickness.”

She boarded in buildings around the Market Place, and remembers going through the front door of the older of The Mount’s two buildings.

“There was a large tilefloored cloakroom,” says Bobbie, who now lives at East Ayton, near Scarborough.

“On the right, a door led into the kitchen, there was a stone staircase leading upstairs, and on the left was a corridor into the main (posh) entrance into the hall.”

The Bishop of Durham – Alwyn Williams in Bobbie’s day – popped over from Auckland Castle to take assembly every Friday.

“The rear garden of The Mount was quite large,” she says. “Just below the sundial, you went through a small glen to a lower area that reached down to the river, and beyond that there was Ferens’ flour mill.”

In its heyday, The Mount had 200 pupils, but when it closed in July 1963, with the retirement of headteacher Miss Muir, its role was down to 50 girls.

TONY DUFFY, of Bishop Auckland, has a remarkable connection to our Page in History from February 2, 1953 (Memories 164).

The rear of the 1873 part of The Mount with a sundial in the garden

The whole of that front page was given over to the terrible storms that were lashing Britain – 531 people died.

The biggest loss of life in a single episode in that infamous storm was the sinking of the roll-on/roll-off ferry, Princess Victoria, off the western Scottish coast.

The vessel left Stranraer at 7.45am on January 31, bound for Larne, which was only 20 miles away in Northern Ireland.

At 8.20am, six miles off the Scottish coast, huge waves damaged the stern doors so that they were no longer watertight.

By 9am, the steamer, operated by British Railways, was listing at 35 degrees and out of control. By 12.52pm, she was on her beam end, and at 1.15pm, preparations began to abandon.

The Echo’s front page reported that the captain of the steamer, run by British Railways, had gone down with his ship at about 3pm, his hand held in a salute.

When every one of the 128 passengers and 51 crew was accounted for, it was found that 133 had drowned, including Northern Ireland’s deputy prime minister and an MP.

Only 44 survived – and none of them were women or children, as the lifeboat they had been on had been dashed to pieces against the side of the stricken steamer.

The Princess Victoria

Tony probably slept through all this drama. He was only three at the time, and, after a rough overnight crossing on the Princess Victoria, was on a train from Stranraer to Bishop Auckland.

He was returning home with his parents from a trip to see his grandmother in Belfast.

“My dad was going to Singapore with the RAF, and my gran wanted to come with us on the Princess Victoria from Larne to Stranraer, and then she would return to Belfast alone on the next crossing,” says Tony.

“When we reached Larne, we persuaded her not to embark as the weather was getting worse. It saved her life.

“As it was, we were on the penultimate voyage. The sea was rough and it was a difficult crossing. The chief stewardess had to look after me as my mother was seasick during the crossing.

“When we landed at Stranraer, we continued by train overnight and reached Bishop Auckland the next day where we heard the news that the Princess Victoria had sunk, and the stewardess who had looked after me had gone down with the ferry.” DANNY SIMPSON of Crook, now in his eighties, was delighted to read about the Eimco Rockershovel in Memories 164.

The rockershovel was the extraordinary contraption that worked in ironstone and coal mines.

It picked up the stone that had fallen from the face and then flung it over its shoulder into tubs which could be pulled to the surface.

The Echo’s front page report from February 2, 1953

“He worked at Mainsforth Colliery at Ferryhill from 1956 to 1960 and used to drive the Eimco Rockershovel,” says his daughter-in-law, Sharon.

“He particularly remembers the time it ran over his foot and split his toe open.

“It was a memorable drive back to Crook at the end of his shift – first gear all the way home!”

IN Memories 164, we were in Barnard Castle market on Harland brothers’ stall in the early 1970s when Mrs Norman Field, of Lartington Hall, pulled up in her chauffeur- driven Rolls Royce. She wound down the rear window and demanded service.

Several people have pointed out that this was Olive Field, a formidably eccentric widow with a boomingly deep voice.

“She lived out her days at Lartington Hall with several quaintly-named and generally ill-behaved dogs, a butler called Lancaster and a oneeyed, 50-year-old parrot called Horrocks that liked to slide down the bannister first thing in the morning,” said Mike Amos in 2002.

Her husband, whom she met on Lord Vesty’s yacht, was an Eton-educated scion of a family of American department store owners.

He moved to Teesdale for the hunting and the horsebreeding – he also owned Streatlam Castle.

Olive Field, with Lartington Hall in the background. For 27 years she was Master of Lartington Harriers

They were at the centre of the dale’s hunting social whirl, hosting Friday night dances at Lartington.

Mrs Field – councillor, magistrate and charity stalwart – would stride into the ballroom, blow on her hunting horn, and bellow to the dancers: “I hope you’re enjoying yourselves, but don’t throw your empty bottles onto my herbaceous borders.”

After her husband died in 1957, Lartington Hall slowly tumbled down around her but was still used by Yorkshire TV in the early 1970s for part of the Hannah Hauxwell film.

Mrs Field died, aged 87, in a car accident in Coniscliffe Road, Darlington, in which her driver and her nurse were also killed.

EILEEN TUNSTALL takes us back to the Darlington Co-operative store, which was in Priestgate until 1986 (Memories 155).

She got a job as a 16-year-old counter girl there in 1950 on £2 10 shillings-a-week – five shillings more than she was earning at Audrey’s fashion shop, in Northgate.

“There was a department for everything,” she says, “and I worked in the hardware department in the cellar.

“We sold wallpaper, paint, carpets, vacuum cleaners, manual washing machines, lawnmowers, firelighters, nails by the pound, and Sangral, which was fertiliser for the garden.

The Priestgate Co-op, which was demolished to make way for the Cornmill Centre in the late 1980s

“There was also a snack bar down there which used to get packed out – it was famous for its toasted teacakes.

“The sweet shop was on the opposite side of the road where Latimer and Hinks solicitors is now.

“I remember the day sweets came off ration, there was a massive, massive queue, and they had to close not long after they had opened, such was the demand.

“Sweets then went back on ration until they could make enough to go round.”

Perhaps the most famous part of the Co-op was the dancehall on the top floor.

“I went twice a week,” Eileen says.

“Ernie West’s band supplied the music, and even lads who couldn’t dance gave it a go, especially the last waltz – they got to ask if they could take you home!”

RECENT Memories have been reporting on the closure of the last Cleveland ironstone mine at North Skelton.

Eileen Tunstall (nee Mafham) in the centre with fellow Priestgate Co-op shopgirls Jean Arthur, left, and Ellen Coleman, right. The picture was taken in Penney’s Yard, which ran behind the Co-op stores in Darlington

Film footage of that last day is available on the North-East Film Archive website where a 1932 film entitled Cleveland: From Raw Material to Finished Product has just been discovered.

It was made by Dorman Long and Company about its operations in Middlesbrough, and it features footage in North Skelton as well as Eston and Kilton.

The archive is at northeast filmarchive.com

THE Darlington Centre for Local Studies, in the Crown Street library, is holding three Patons and Baldwins open days at the end of February. On display will be photo albums, newspaper cuttings and memorabilia linked to the huge post-war woolmaking plant that employed 3,000 people at Lingfield Point. The displays will be up from Tuesday to Thursday, February 25 to 27, and people will also be encouraged to leave their own memories.