Lights, lions and dart-spitters

It wasn’t always like this. In fact, this picture shows former Durham County Council electrician Jim Hughes installing what are believed to be Durham City’s first communal Christmas lights – in 1974.

“There weren’t any proper facilities to put them up,” remembers Jim, 86, of Haswell Plough, whose son, Stephen, was the North-East Labour MEP for 20 years. “We had to drill holes in the walls and put in anchor bolts to hold up the straining wires, and then the cables went on top of them.”

As you can see, there were no sophisticated snow-like effects with Durham’s first lights. They were just a string of coloured bulbs across the street.

They didn’t even flash.

A consortium of shopkeepers had collected money to buy the lights and then asked the council to install them. Jim, who worked for more than 20 years down Thornley colliery before retraining as an electrician, put them up from North Road to the top of Silver Street and Saddler Street and Claypath.

But they seem only to have gone up outside those businesses that had put money into the communal pot. Those that had refused to contribute were left in the dark.

LAST week, Memories readers were regaled with the story of Frank Charles Bostock, the world’s first lion tamer who was born in 1866 when his parents’ touring menagerie was in Darlington.

Frank followed his parents into the Big Top, and at the end of the 19th Century, had established Bostock and Wombwell’s menagerie as the biggest, best and most exciting of all the animal freak shows in the country.

In the 1890s, Frank went to America to become famous as “the Animal King” with his lion-taming act, leaving his elder brother, Edward, to successfully run the menagerie around Britain.

The First World War caused travelling menageries to be disbanded – one unfortunate elephant was sold to work for a Sheffield steel company. After the war, menageries were considered old hat and a new form of peripatetic entertainment – the fairground – took to the road, with exhilarating mechanical rides often augmented by an exhibition of human curiosities.

The only large scale menagerie to survive the war was Bostock and Wombwell’s which continued until 1932.

So, asks Brian Gargate in Aycliffe Village, could Bostock and Wombwell’s have been the menagerie that visited Bishop Auckland in the 1920s and was the backdrop for one of his father’s favourite police stories?

PC William Gargate was serving in Bishop with a PC Robinson who, one dark night, was doing his duty and “feeling door knobs” in an alley behind Newgate Street – he was checking that all was safe and secure.

As he made his way down the alley, PC Robinson realised his lamp was reflecting off something strange at the bottom. Bravely, he ventured to the end of the alley where, to his surprise and consternation, there was a large, fully grown, male lion.

Fortunately, it was a large, fully grown but very placid male lion so PC Robinson removed the belt from his overcoat, put it around the lion’s neck, and said: “You’re coming with me, sonny.”

He led the lion round the corner to the police station, which was in Upper Bondgate. Fortunately, the lion came quietly, and PC Robinson was able to place it under lock and key in the prisoner’s exercise cage in the police yard.

“Next morning,” says Brian matter-of-factly, “a man from a circus or travelling menagerie called and took the lion away.

“I wonder if anyone has a record of a circus or menagerie being in Bishop Auckland in the latter half of the 1920s?”

FATE has forced Darlington Football Club into many moves recently, and its prized possessions have followed it. When those possessions were recently moved to the rugby club at Blackwell Meadows, where the team will hopefully be playing next season, this brilliant picture appeared.

Glen Bowes, who works in the club shop, has kindly passed it onto Memories because no one knows who it is.

The photograph is framed, is nearly two feet tall, was once screwed to a wall and says simply on the bottom: “Footballer, 1914”.

Can anyone tell us who he might be? Does anyone recognise if the picture was taken at Feethams? All clues and thoughts gratefully received.

PETER BAKER from Gainford takes us to task for the unjustifiable assertion in last week’s Memories that Darlington’s Carmel Road derives its name from the word “coal”.

He writes: “Having lived in Darlington from 1946 to 1953 and in Gainford since 1986, I am quite familiar with the roads and lanes in the west of the town – they used to be good for courting!”

He rightly points out that until recently there was a Carmelite nunnery in the area, and it gave the streets leading to it their names: Abbey Road, Nunnery Lane and, of course, Carmel Road.

However, we still believe that the route of Carmel Road is a coal road – a track from the collieries of south west Durham to Yorkshire. The men leading trains of ponies laden with coal would avoid going through Darlington town centre where they would have had to pay a toll. Instead, they skirted round on Carmel Road.

IN Memories 200, we told of the Court cinema in Darlington’s Skinnergate where, just after the Second World War, there was a magnificent line in interval entertainment. A target was lowered in front of the screen and a man from Bishop Auckland with big lungs took up his position in the front row of the balcony.

He placed darts in his mouth and spat them over the heads of hundreds of spectators in the auditorium towards the target. He invariably hit the bullseye.

David Walsh in east Cleveland suggests this highly skilled individual wasn’t quite as unique as we suspected. In fact, he may have been one of the last in a long line of “puff-the-dart” men.

At the start of the 19th Century, puff-the-dart seems to have been a well-established public house and parlour game. You placed a dart in a blowpipe and then puffed it at a target – a series of concentric circles – on the wall. The winner was the person who made the highest score with the fewest puffs.

Puff-the-dart lost its popularity towards the end of the 19th Century for a number of reasons. Obviously safety issues arose when men, their enthusiasm stoked and the accuracy diminished by the consumption of large quantities of beer, were spitting sharp pointy things around crowded pubs.

There are also said to have been fatalities when, instead of puffing, people sucked, and the dart got stuck in their throat or windpipe causing a nasty death.

And then at the start of the 20th Century, the French popularised the idea of simply throwing darts at a board, doing away with the blowing aspect of puff-the-dart and producing the pub game that we recognise today.

So puff-the-dart became a fairground curiosity, a freakish form of entertainment.

The very last of the puff-the-dart men was Ron Dart. His real name was Ronald Tomlinson, and he took up puffing at the age of 12 after his father caught him puffing a cigarette. To divert his son, old Mr Tomlinson, who had lost his arms during the First World War, taught him the art of sideways dart-spitting: the dart was placed sideways in the mouth and somehow propelled forward with great accuracy – Ron could spit a dart into the neck of a bottle from a distance of 50 yards.

He became famous in the early 1950s, about the same time that our man in the Court was entertaining the Darlington cinema-goers.

The high point of Ron Dart’s career came in 1965 when he appeared on prime time BBC1 television in Billy Smart’s Circus. He died in 2005 of, ironically, lung cancer.

MANY thanks to everyone who got in touch regarding Darlington cinemas. We aim to do a cinema special edition in a few weeks.

Readers are often very complimentary about the hours of research that go into compiling Memories, and while that is true, sometimes things just fall into place.

For example, the Court cinema opened on Wednesday, February 12, 1913, so we were looking in The Northern Echo of that date for any pictures that might illustrate this article – as you can see, there was a nice one of the interior to help you conjure up a mental image of the great dart spitter.

Even more appropriate, though, was another story in that day’s paper. “Mauled by lioness”, it was headlined. “Sensation in a menagerie in South Shields”.

Captain Pazarno of Chipperfield’s Franco-British Menagerie had been attacked on the Monday by “the untameable lioness Norma”, who six years earlier had killed her previous trainer in Hull.

Normally, said the Echo, Norma was “morose”, but in South Shields she had been in a “bad temper”, and the second time Capt Pazarno had entered her cage, she had clawed him on the back of the head. A local doctor stitched and bandaged the brave captain up, and he returned to the cage for a third time.

Nothing happened, but on his fourth visit of the show, Norma leapt on him and tore his coat.

So perhaps PC Robinson was very fortunate to stumble across such a docile lion down an alley in Bishop Auckland.