A LARGE wall clock is about all that remains of the North Road Locomotive Workshops in Darlington which, until their closure exactly 50 years ago, employed up to 4,000 men.

The clock, which governed their shift patterns, used to be above the arched entrance into the works, but now it hangs off the side of Morrisons supermarket in, give or take a few feet, the same place.

It was made by Potts of Leeds – a famous firm which has more than 1,500 clocks hanging in churches and on stations throughout the world. It is a firm that was founded by a Darlingtonian: William Potts was born in Salt Yard, off Bondgate, in 1809, and served his time as an apprentice clockmaker to Samuel Thompson on High Row. He finished in 1833, and had to set up in business away from the town so as not to compete with his master. He chose Leeds, and, appropriately for clockmakers, his firm still goes.

Dates for when the clock went up in North Road vary, from 1894 to 1903.

Gordon Best emails with two further suspicions about it.

Firstly, has there been just one clock on the side of the building for the past hundred or so years? Early pictures, like our Edwardian postcard, appear to show a clock with lighter numerals and a strange triangular hat above it. Later pictures show that the hat has disappeared and the clock seems to have a heavier face. Can anyone explain the difference, or tell us about the hat?

Gordon’s second suspicion concerns the coat-of-arms on the side of the clock. When putting up a clock, the North-Eastern Railway Company adorned it with the coat-of-arms of the town in which it is located.

But, Gordon correctly points out that the North Road clock has the arms of York on it – five lions on a red cross of St George. It is very different from Darlington’s arms which have Locomotion No 1, bales of wool and a rather soppy-looking bull on it.

Why the wrong town’s arms?

In Michael Potts’ book about Potts clocks, he says: “The large bracket for the clock was supplied by the NER and is similar to those used for drum clocks at the cab stand at York Station and for the platform clock on Stockton station.”

So was there a mistake, or did North Road just get one that was going spare at York?

WHAT else is left of these giant works which employed 4,000 Darlingtonians in the 1950s – at least ten per cent of the working population?

At the rear, on Whessoe Road, there’s an electricity sub-station near the new McDonald’s, and there are a couple of good-looking brick-built warehouses that are now used by secondhand car salesmen, plus there’s a curious chamfer on the side of Elegance House – a car parts business – which is where the railway spur line ran over the road into the workshops.

Best of all, there’s the toilets. They are a little block, with glazed tiles. Full of rubbish, they really should be a listed building as they are an appropriate monument to the town’s heavy industrial past.

THE engine of the moment, Flying Scotsman, has a North Road connection, as Memories 275 hinted. In 1964, it was saved from scrap by enthusiast Alan Pegler who bought it for £3,000 from British Railways, and then sent it to North Road for a preliminary restoration.

“After its overhaul at Darlington, the Flying Scotsman was ready to hit the rails again,” writes Martin Birtle from Billingham. “On May 9, 1964, it went from Doncaster to Edinburgh via the Durham coast line, passing through Stockton and Sunderland.

“My cousin John Hardy, who lives in Whitby, took this picture of the loco passing the site of the old Norton-on-Tees station.

“Scotsman stayed in Edinburgh for a week and while there did a round trip to Aberdeen, which was when the artist Terence Cuneo did his famous painting of the Flying Scotsman crossing the Forth Bridge with a little mouse sitting happily on the front of the loco.”

Memories plans to commemorate Flying Scotsman’s visit to the Locomotion museum in Shildon from July 23 to 31 with a spread of pictures. If you have any stories about, or photos of, the famous engine, please send them in.

MEMORIES 275 included plenty of pictures of the protests that took place against the Beeching-inspired closure of the North Road shops.

Amid the sea of faces on High Row on September 3, 1962, Christine Stocker was pleased to spot her father, Bob Railton.

“My father's family moved from Gateshead to Darlington in 1933 with the railways, my grandfather being a boilermaker at Stooperdale for many years,” writes Christine, on behalf of her sister Roslyn. “As it turned out, my father's future father-in-law had also been a boilermaker at Stooperdale around the same time until an accident forced his departure after losing an eye.

“My parents were married during the war in 1944 and I remember my mother telling me that at that time she was working at North Road Shops on munitions, making shell cases and tracks for tanks.

“After the war my father was demobbed after completing his National Service with the RAF in Norfolk and returned to Darlington and commenced employment at North Road Shops during the early 1950s as a signwriter and worked there until its closure. Fortunately, he managed to secure another job but I don't think he enjoyed it as much as his time at the shops.”

DENNIS HARRISON was one of many people who commented on the good nature of the 1962 protests against the closure of the North Road Shops. In all the pictures in Memories 275, there were no angry, snarling faces – everyone was smiles, having a good time, despite the desperate predicament they found themselves in.

Dennis also named the chap holding the “Beeching Public Enemy No 1” placard on High Row. “It is Jeff Matson from the paint shop,” he said. “We’ve been pals since we were teenagers. The son of a railwayman, he started at North Road from school, and finished his apprenticeship at the Derby Works.

“He ended his working life at Darlington council. Now in his seventies, he’s enjoying retirement.”

ONE of the cheery chaps on High Row was Edward Joseph Morrigan, who worked among the noise and the dirt of the shops for many years. He was spotted by his grandson Andrew Morrigan, who is a draughtsman at Mech-Tool – proving that engineering is still alive and well in the town.

Edward got his smiling face in Memories 275 twice – as well as being behind the horse on the front, he was on the inside where he was standing next to a lad called Stuart Carlson.

“I would have been 16 at the time,” says Stuart, “and I had been at the shops about six months. We were the last influx of apprentices, and when I was 18 I was transferred to Doncaster to complete my apprenticeship, only it was all diesel down there, no steam engines.”

He qualified as a fitter and spent much of his career working at the chemical factory at Urlay Nook. He also says that after the North Road works closed, a portion of the site was used to build steel-hulled boats.

ANOTHER of Memories 275 pictures showed a huge crowd in Darlington Market Place on October 2, 1962. The men are applauding speeches being made from the steps of the market hall.

Vince Horan from Shildon got in touch because he recognised many of the fitters who had gathered around one of the poles holding up the market canopy. He pointed out Scotty Neilson, Arthur Hoy, John Kay, Stan Coatsworth and Henry Wilson, who was well known for his chrysanths.

Vince, now 77, recognised them because, when North Road closed, many of them transferred to the Shildon wagonworks where he was a fitter.

On the day that the North Road closure was announced, The Northern Echo reported that there was cheering at Shildon because it meant the wagonworks had been reprieved, although Beeching said about 400 jobs would be axed there, too.

The Shildon men then supported their Darlington counterparts’ fight against closure knowing full well that they might be next.

Indeed, Vince was still at the wagonworks in the early 1980s when its closure was announced, and he remembers the protest marches then. One, he says, was held in the streets of Darlington and afterwards he was relaxing with a pint in a pub near the Market Place when in walked Labour leader Jim Callaghan.

“He was full of admiration for the Shildon lads in their persistence in trying to halt the closure,” says Vince.

Sadly it didn’t work. Shildon closed in 1984.

IN Memories 274 there was a fantastic early picture of the North Road railwaymen in their giant cloth caps. Fourth from the left on the front row is Jimmy McGuire and directly behind him is his father, Paddy.

Paddy was a bare knuckle fighter who came over from Dublin to work in the North Road Shops in Darlington.

Jimmy was the North Road timekeeper, and his work prevented him from going to the Second World War. Women came to work in the shops during the war, and he spotted Emily, the diminutive red-head driving the largest crane in the shop, known as “the Rolls Royce”, and they got married.

Their daughter, Beryl Aggett, says: “One night he was just finishing his shift when he heard a sound that he thought was cats. He went over to the back of the shops, and there was a baby, wrapped in blankets, placed near the wall.”

Nurses called the baby “Jimmy Sunday” in honour of the man who found it – but can anyone tell us what became of the foundling?

BLOB Many thanks to everyone who has been in touch following our articles on North Road.