Of cappuccinos and kings in Bishop Auckland

Starting at The Mitre pub – the three storey building on the right of the picture selling William Younger’s beer – and heading towards the town centre, John remembers Bruce’s wallpaper and paintshop, Julia Stephenson’s wool shop and Pederson’s record shop.

If you’ve got very good eyes, you will be able to make out a large “Raleigh Cycles” sign hanging off a wall. It was Frank Whitwell’s cycle shop – “they also sold Dinky toys and Hornby dublo trains”, says John.

“Over South Church Road, there was Rossi’s cafe,” he says. “They sold fantastic ice cream. It was a great place for young teenagers to meet up, and it has very special memories for me as I was being served at the counter as news came over on the transistor radio that JF Kennedy had been assassinated.”

That would be November 22, 1963 – 16 months after our picture was taken.

“After Rossi’s, we had Peter Pell’s tailors and Page’s dress shop, and then the large building in the distance was the Kings Cinema, which also housed a cafe and library.”

The Kings cinema – some people spell it with an apostrophe, some people spell it without; some people call it Kings Hall Cinema, others call it the Kings Cafe and Cinema – is one of Bishop Auckland’s great lost buildings.

It was originally an assembly hall that was converted into a cinema in 1902. It was converted for a second time and ready for opening at Christmas 1914. Unfortunately, the seats were not delivered on time, so it opened with planks to seat its 1,300 patrons.

In 1947, the Kings was taken over by the Newcastle chain of Essoldo cinemas. This chain was formed by Soloman Sheckman, who bought his first cinema, in Sunderland, aged 15. When he died in 1963, he had more than 160 of them across the country. He started calling his cinemas “Essoldo” at the start of the Second World War: “Es” came from his wife, Esther; “Sol” from his own name, and “Do” from his daughter, Dorothy.

The Bishop Essoldo shut in 1960. Brough’s refitted it as an early supermarket, then it became an auction house before it returned to the supermarket business. With each change of use, another bit of the cinema was demolished until finally the facade came down in, we think, 2001.

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“As a junior reporter with the Echo and Despatch, I spent three teenage years from 1957 covering South-West Durham, working from the Echo office which was on the left of the Newgate Street picture, about 70 yards down from the Mitre.

“I used to lodge in the pub which was run by two very famous licensees, Billy and Bessie Maben, and it was a social haven for many local personalities. I did not have to go far to meet some notable people.”

Bob continues: “Even further down, you can just make out on the corner opposite the Eden Theatre Rossi's coffee shop, another favoured meeting place.”

So that’s a second mention for Rossi’s cafe, which was started before the First World War by Gennaro Rossi. He was one of the wave of Italian ice-cream immigrants who made a living providing a little exotic luxury in practically every hard-pressed North-East town.

According to Hugh Shankland’s book, Out of Italy – The Story of Italians in North-East England, Bishop alone had ten Italian cafe-running families: Bonini, di Palma, Gabriele, Panicca, Panzieri, Rea, Rossi, Santi and, of course, Zair, who featured in Memories 213.

Rossi’s cafe, also known as a “temperance bar”, was established in the former Waterloo pub on the corner of Newgate Street. Frequented by the theatre stars appearing over the road, it was a glamorous place. Even when the Eden went into decline, it prospered in the teenage era of Beat music, pocket money and jukeboxes.

Memories thinks that the cafe and theatre were demolished in 1974 as part of the South Church Road widening scheme, although Rossi’s relocated to the Market Place until the late 1990s.

Edmundo “Eddie” Rossi, son of Gennaro, died aged 90 in 2011.

ERIC BROWN wondered whether he might have been at the wheel of the Ford wagon which was pictured delivering to Bishop Auckland market in 1966. Eric now runs a petfood warehouse in Peel Street, but in those days his family business, C Brown and Sons, was a fruit and veg wholesaler.

“There were lots of us back then,” says Eric. “There must have been 15 or 20 wholesalers between Darlington and Spennymoor – six in Bishop alone. My father was up at the Newcastle fruit market in Eldon Square at five o’clock in the morning. That’s how they fed Bishop Auckland, but all that’s finished now.”

And then he says one word: “Supermarkets.”

If it is Eric at the wheel of the wagon, he would have been 17 and delivering to stalls run by Winnie Wright and Eric Webb.

The fruit and veg came from the docks at Hull and from local farmers as well as the Newcastle market.

And bananas came from Jamaica. Very green, they were shipped from the Caribbean into Liverpool docks and then by train direct to Bishop Auckland station. From there, they were driven down to Peel Street where both Browns and a rival fruitier, Harrisons, had banana-ripening houses. The bananas were hung up (the last time Memories touched on this subject some years ago, lots of people told us of the exotic spiders that fell out of the unripe hands), and gas was slowly released to encourage them to turn yellow.

Then, in those pre-refridgeration days, the bananas were distributed to shops and markets across Weardale.

“We finished in fruit and veg on the day Asda opened 12 years ago,” he says. “It was one of my better moves.”

He’d started in petfood with a ton of budgie seed that, literally, flew, and then his father-in-law, a keen pigeon-fancier, talked him in to dealing in pigeon corn. Although that market no longer has the wings it once had, Browns still imports three tons of pigeon corn a week from the Continent and sells it across the country.

And so the fruit business that Eric’s grandfather, Charles, founded before the outbreak of the Second World War in an old fish shop in Coundon Gate is now a thriving pet food dealership.

THE Auckland archive in Memories 225 triggered many memories for Tony Larkings, who lives off Bone Mill Bank in Bishop Auckland (yes, until the mid 19th Century, there was a bone mill at the foot of the bank, powered by the River Gaunless, grinding up animal carcases to make fertiliser).

He remembers Murthar’s fish and chip shop, run by sisters Mary and Lena, at the top of Newton Cap bank; he remembers the snack bars in the sheds in the market place – one Hull’s, the other Terry’s.

And, having grown up in the shadow of the Newton Cap viaduct, he remembers the trains which mainly in his day served Brancepeth colliery. But the line also acted as a relief route when the East Coast Main Line was being repaired. This meant that without warning, all manner of exciting engines could suddenly appear on the viaduct.

“I was a trainspotter as a kid,” says Tony, “and I spent hours at the entrance to the tunnel by the viaduct. You’d be at home, hear the whistle of an express (which alerted the trainspotters to a mainline diversion) and dozens of us would come out and trainspot all day.”

BLOB If you have any memories or information related to today’s article, please get in touch.

IN one of the photos in Memories 225, a Messerschmitt three-wheeler could be seen parked in Bishop Auckland Market Place. This was an extraordinary vehicle, built between 1955 and 1964 by the German aircraft manufacturer.

“My brother had a Messerschmitt K200 in about 1957,” says Peter Tipper of Bishop Middleham. “It was not terribly comfortable, but it was warmer and drier than a motorcycle. It even had a heater of sorts, which was a pipe bringing warm air from the rear engine to the front – not very effective.

“It was powered by a 200cc Sachs two stoke engine with a power output of about 10bhp. The engine was operable in both directions of crankshaft rotation, so in theory it could go as quickly backwards as forwards. To go into reverse, you had to stop the engine and then turn the ignition key to the left which gave ‘reverse rotation’. To go forward again, you stopped the engine and turned the key to the right.

“It had a top speed of about 60mph and it did about 45mpg. Steering was done by using something akin to a bicycle handlebar and was very direct, with about a 30 degree turn to go from straight ahead to full lock.

“It might not sound very appealing today but in its time it provided cheap, dry, economic transport.”