Memsfact

The Rapid was the first passenger paddle steamer from Newcastle to London. Its maiden voyage was on August 11, 1823, but bad weather forced her captain to unload his passengers at Whitby and turn back for the Tyne

The Woman Who Didn't Exist by Kath and Clive Richardson (Riverhead Books, £9.95)

THIS is an astonishing but true story about the other side of the war. On May 10, 1917, John-George Purvis, of Wylam Street, Bowburn, was killed when serving near Arras, on the Somme, with the Durham Light Infantry.

But this is not really his story. It is the story of his widow, Margaret, and of their four children who were left behind. Without a wage-earner, how was Margaret going to support them, particularly after she was evicted from their terraced home for non-payment of rent and finds shelter in an old army tent? Clearly, she needed money but with the children, aged from two to nine, how could she escape from maternal duties to spend time on a job? And what about herself as an individual – what about her hopes and dreams?

So she makes a truly shocking decision: she's going to get rid of the children. Not kill them, but she shifts one off to her father, deposits two with her sister-in-law and dumps the eldest in Durham with sixpence in his hand. As he hurries off in excitement to buy a bun from the baker, she turns and slips away into the Market Place crowd.

"She had real pangs of guilt," says the book, "but this was not a time to be soft, for she genuinely felt she had no other choice. She had to maintain a cold detachment in order to survive."

Authors Kath and Clive Richardson, former primary school teachers from Hull, have spent 14 years researching this story from their family tree and present it as a gripping, page-turning novel, full of uninventable twists – how did Margaret feel when John-George's closest friend from the trenches turns up unannounced, on leave. He was fulfilling his promise to John-George that, should the shell with his name on it find him, he would pass on his love to Margaret and check she was coping with the kids. Coping? She'd given them away...

If ever fact was stranger than fiction, this is it.

BLOB The Woman Who Didn't Exist is available in bookshops like Waterstones, or the Durham Light Infantry Museum. Online it is on Amazon and it is on the authors' website, thewomanwhodidntexist.com, where it is £7.50 plus £1.25 post and packing. The authors are also available to give talks to local groups – full contact details on the website.

Life in the Northern Dales: Stories from a Farming Family by Frank Sanderson (CreateSpace, £10.99)

FRANK SANDERSON is a former professor of health sciences who is dedicating his retirement to researching and writing about the life and times of his family. This is his second book – it is the follow up to 2012's Life and Times in Victorian Weardale – and he started work on it in 1980 when he recorded his uncle Frank's reminiscences about his early years in the Durham dales.

Uncle Frank, who was born in Bedburn in 1904, was telling family stories from his formative years, stories which reached back to December 1834 when a young great aunt was burned to death while trying to warm up in her classroom in front of the Hamsterley school fire.

Reading about other people's family history can be boring, but Mr Sanderson widens the stories out and places them in the context of life in Weardale at the time.

And so we encounter Jack Marquis, who was connected to the family, running a grocer's shop in Hamsterley. In 1880, he caught a poor ten-year-old orphan boy, John Dove, stealing five pence from his till. He tied the boy's hands together, marched him through the village accompanied by a barking dog which jumped up and bit the youngster at least eight times. Bishop Auckland magistrates sentenced the orphan to be whipped with a birch rod – for stealing a coin worth less than £2 today.

In 1891, Jack Marquis committed suicide, leaving his wife Mary Jane with the shop and some property – an eligible widow. She married Matt Dodds, 11 years her junior, in 1905 and embarked upon a violent, drunken relationship which ended on February 20, 1908, with her dead in the fire.

Witnesses testified that she'd bought a gill of beer (two pints) at 8.30 that morning topped up with a shilling of whiskey at lunchtime, which might have accounted for her toppling into the hearth. So she was buried in Hamsterley churchyard.

But with rumours sweeping the dale, she was exhumed days later, and marks around her neck suggested she'd been strangled before her body was placed on the flames. Her husband was sensationally found guilty of murder and hanged for the crime at Durham jail on August 5, 1908.

Mary Dodds is still remembered as the woman who was married twice, buried twice and both her husbands were hanged.

With stories like this, one man's family history cannot possibly be boring, and so Mr Sanderson has produced a wonderful insight into Weardale life more than a century ago.

BLOB Life in the Northern Dales is available at the Weardale Gazette in Stanhope, the Teesdale Mercury in Barnard Castle, the Bowes Museum and Durham Cathedral. It is online at Amazon or can be obtained for £12, to include post, from the author by emailing fhsand35@yahoo.co.uk.

All Our Stories: Over a Century of Women Leading the Way by Girlguiding Durham South

IN 2010, Girlguiding celebrated its centenary by collecting memories and stories. Those that came in from the Durham South region were so strong that they've been put together in a beautifully-produced book with the help of the Lottery.

There are some inspirational stories about ordinary women achieving extraordinary things, not least Alicia Wilson, now 102 and born in Darlington, who volunteered for Guide International Service during the Second World War and found herself posted as a transport officer to a mobile hospital in Germany.

"Well, I had done quite a bit of mucking about with ambulances and I could drive," she says matter-of-factly. "I knew how to fill the tank." And off she went...

This spirit flows through all the stories right up to the most modern, told by Katharine Grabham, who runs a Guide unit in Durham, and whom guiding has taken around the world. She concludes: "I know that if I wasn't a Guide, I wouldn't have been to Mexico or Kenya, or enjoyed my time in Austria... I wouldn't have abseiled in the mountains or built a campfire in the snow. I can't imagine Guiding not being a part of my life..."

BLOB All Our Stories costs £10. Email dianeevans10@ntlworld.com for further details.

John Thomas Saunders – A Seventy Year Search for a Bishop Auckland Soldier’s Grave by Tom Hutchinson

THE author is a well known Bishop Auckland historian, but now in this A5 booklet he tells of his search for his uncle, who was shot by a guard on July 21, 1944, at Lamsdorf prisoner of war camp in Poland, and buried in an unmarked grave.

After nearly 70 years, Tom Hutchinson managed to locate the grave, meet the Polish family who for two generations had tended it, and, in October 2013, had a headstone installed over it. The dedication of the stone, in the presence of John Saunders' 91-year-old younger sister, Norah, enabled the family to at last have a kind of funeral for their loved one.

BLOB Available for £4, with 50p going to the Royal British Legion Poppy Appeal, from Cockton Hill News, Bishop Auckland train station and tourist information centre, and the Dales Centre, Stanhope and Evenwood News.

The Tyne-Tees Steam Shipping Company by Nick Robins (Coastal Shipping Publications, £17.50)

A WELL-ILLUSTRATED hardback book which charts the history of this shipping line from its formation in 1903 – it was the product of a merger of maritime companies based in Newcastle, Middlesbrough, West Hartlepool and London – until it was bought out by P&O for £5.6m in 1972.

It also looks back to the beginnings of those companies – as today's Memories Fact at the top of the page suggests, it wasn't all plain sailing for the early ships.

Indeed, the first problem the newly-merged company faced was on November 25, 1903, when its vessel the New Londoner rammed a fishing boat, Maggie Flett, in the Tyne. The Maggie Flett sank, three of her crew drowned, and the master of the New Londoner was blamed.

BLOB Available from Waterstones, WH Smith and all bookshops, or direct from the publisher, coastalshipping.co.uk

100 Years of Catterick 1914-2014 by Peter Fowler

THIS contains a timeline of Catterick Garrison's development throughout the decades, plus loads of very good photos. It is available on Amazon for £9.99, but, perhaps strangely, Memories managed to buy a copy from a hairdresser beneath Darlington's Covered Market.

Left for the Rising Sun, Right for Swan Hunter by Robert Turnbull (Five Leaves Publications, £6.99)

THIS little book looks at the history of the Plebs League in the North-East from 1908 to 1926. Its title reflects the only traditional choice available to most Tyneside working men 100 years ago – either the pit or the shipyard – and yet the Plebs League was formed to help them educate themselves and open up new choices to them. For further information, go to www.fiveleaves.co.uk

PLUS: Still available from the Echo Memories stable: The Road to Rockliffe, which tells of bankers, railways and dragons in the Hurworth area, and A Walk in the Park, which is the history of Darlington's South Park. Both in Waterstones in the Cornmill Centre. A History of the Darlington Denes is available for £4 from The Northern Echo's office in Priestgate, Darlington.