FRANK ATKINSON – the man who made Beamish – died on December 30 at the age of 90. The Northern Echo's archive is brimming with pictures of him creating the open air museum in the 1960s and 1970s.

The Northern Echo:
Frank Atkinson outside Beamish Hall in May 1971 - the month the museum opened

He was curator at Bowes Museum in Barnard Castle when, inspired by a visit to a Swedish open air museum, in 1958 he began pushing for the North-East to have a hands-on industrial-themed visitor experience to balance the Bowes' brilliant collection of French and Spanish paintings which obviously had to be kept beyond the reach of inquisitive fingers.

In 1965, he began a weekly column in The Northern Echo urging readers to clear out their homes and workplaces and donate period pieces to the collection he was acquiring at Barney. He wrote: "There are kitchen utensils, furniture, cheese presses, sickles, flails, farm carts, horse harnesses, shop fitness, smithy..."

The Northern Echo:
One of the earliest tableaux created at Beamish was this First World War butcher's shop, seen here in July 1968

He got the go-ahead to site his open air museum next to Beamish Hall, formerly the regional headquarters of the National Coal Board, in 1968, and he left the Bowes in 1970 to turn his vision into reality. It opened on May 4, 1971, and that year it attracted 50,000 visitors. Last year, it attracted 600,000.

"People don't label it a museum – I don't like the word anyway," he said when he retired in 1987. "They just call it Beamish, and everybody knows what they are talking about."

As Memories' tribute to Mr Beamish, here are a few of our archive pictures from those early days.

The Northern Echo:
"Tiny Tim", the nation's largest steam hammer, is now at the entrance to Beamish Museum. It started life in Darlington Forge, in 1883, and is seen here in Rotherham from where it was donprior to its removal to the museumated to the museum in 1966