ONE of the many wonderfully trivial items that has been occupying our attention recently has been the picture of the Bishop Auckland lamplighter, Tommy Kirkbride, tending to a lamp in January 1964.

He is winding up the clockwork motor which turned the gaslamps on and off.

Robin Hind of Sadberge recognised the clockwork motor – because he has an identical tucked away safely at home.

“It’s an absolute cracker,” he says. “I worked for the Darlington Armature Winding Company, in Valley Street, and must have changed this one at some time for an electric one.”

It is made by the Horstmann Gear Company of Bath for the Newbridge Company – as practically all such motors were. Gustav Horstmann emigrated to this country in the 1850s from Westphalia in Germany, and established a clockmakers in Bath. When he died in 1893, he had more than 100 clockwork patents to his name.

His sons took on the business and in 1902 invented a clockwork gas controller for the Bath streetlamps, and they established the Newbridge Works to make the devices.

Their big break came, ironically, with the First World War. Towns which didn’t control their gaslights with Hortsmann motors imported similar mechanisms from Germany, but this trade obviously came to an abrupt end in 1914.

With no German competition, Horstmann cornered the British market – although presumably because their name sounded too Germanic, they started calling themselves Newbridge.

And so their devices came to control gaslights across the country, needing to be wound up every week or so by the lampman and adjusted as the seasons changed.

“I can remember the Darlington man,” says Robin. “A little chap, he went around the streets on his bike with his ladder over his shoulders.”

However, as the lamplighters must have known, time doesn’t stand still, and the advent of the electrical motor in the 1960s called time on their clockwork occupation.

BARBARA LAURIE, in Bishop Auckland, was one of many to get in touch about the lamplighter. “When I was a little girl, old enough to play out but not allowed to wander far, the coming of the lamplighter was the sign to go home,” she says. “We would watch him climb his ladder – resting on the two short arms at the top – and poke his stick with the red light in it into the bottom of the lamp - and then it was time (in theory at least) to go in.”

Excellent, but the real reason Barbara got in touch was because of our gutter journalism.

You will remember that in Memories 285, we were very excited to spot a Lingford, Gardiner iron drain in Kirk Merrington. Lingford, Gardiner, of course, were the ironfounders from Railway Street, Bishop Auckland, who built everything from locomotives to bicycles to horse troughs and drain covers.

However, Lingford, Gardiner made their last loco in 1931 and then folded.

Their works were extensive, and the foundry part of the business, which was on the site now occupied by Asda, was taken on by Robert Wilson’s forge. This included the extremely exciting work of producing drains.

Barbara lives in the Dene Hall Drive area of Bishop, which was built in the late 1940s. The local Labour MP, Hugh Dalton, who had also been Chancellor of the Exchequer, had been busy enticing factories to his constituency and the middle management needed houses to rent, and so Dene Hall Drive was filled the gap.

Best of all, the roads in Barbara’s area of town are drained by grills which bear the cast iron legend: “Wilson’s Forge (1929) Ltd, Bishop Auckland.”

And if that wasn’t exciting enough, George Wright of Sadberge sends in a picture of a metal drain inspection cover outside the Buck Inn in his village.

“It has my name on it,” he says, proudly. “I don’t know if I was named after the drain cover, or it was named after me.”

Unfortunately for Mr Wright, we fear he must have been named after the sanitary inspection cover. George Wright & Co was founded in 1856 in Queen Victoria Street in London and was described as an “art metal worker, marble decorator and marble importer”. Mr Wright’s firm was still in business at the same address in 1900, but then fades away. We guess, therefore, that the drain cover was installed at the Buck long before our Mr Wright came on the Sadberge scene.

If you know of a piece of gutter metalwork that tickles your fancy, please send us a picture of it!

JUST off the B6302 between Ushaw Moor and Esh Winning is a new development called Hareholme Court. It was built on the site of Hareholme Farm which is where one of the 19th Century ancestors of Lesley Pearson, of Brandon, laboured before he found more lucrative work in the collieries.

Mr Pearson was intrigued by the name of the farm, and then he spotted that on the coat of arms of Ushaw Moor College, which is less than a mile from Hareholme Farm, there are three hares. Could the farm and the college have a harey connection, he wondered?

The college traces its beginnings to William Allen, a Lancashire Catholic who was forced from this country by the Protestant Elizabeth I – he later helped arrange the Spanish Armada in the hope of overthrowing her.

In 1567, at Douai in northern France, he formed a college so that other English Catholics ex-patriates could complete their education.

The college was forced to leave France during the revolution of 1795 and it found a new home at Crook Hall, near Durham City. Construction of a proper home for it began at Ushaw Moor in 1804 and in 1808 a college dedicated to St Cuthbert opened.

The college badge tells all that: the cross of St George to represent the English Roman Catholic martyrs; the cross of St Cuthbert to represent the patron saint, and the three leporine creatures from the coat-of-arms of the founder, William Allen.

Three rabbits, or hares, is a fairly common religious symbol, using with the animals spinning round and sharing their ears which are at the hub of the motif. In Christianity, the three represent the Holy Trinity.

But whether there is any connection between the hares of the college and Hareholme Farm we cannot say – can you?