HOW much does it cost to have a baby? Nowadays, of course, delivery is free on the NHS, but back in 1950, it cost Sybil Lupton £27 3s and 10d to give birth to Tina.

And she had to bring her own soap, Vaseline, Dettol and talcum powder, and even a “sanitary belt”, although we’ll probably gloss over that.

The birth took place in the Argyll Nursing Home in Cleveland Terrace in Darlington’s West End, and Sybil has kept all of her paperwork. It is in a small envelope and looks more like a receipt for a weekend in a seaside bed-and-breakfast than for bringing another life into the world.

“She was overdue so they had to blast,” says Tina. “They gave her all sort of things, like pills that were black on the outside and made her go deaf.”

Perhaps that’s why the bill for her stay in the Cleveland Terrace home includes a charge of 6s 4d for “chemist’s accounts”.

After two weeks, with a baby under one arm and her purse £27 lighter, Sybil was allowed to home, and she probably left feeling that medical science had advanced enormously since she had come into the world 27 years earlier.

“She was born in 1923 in the back bedroom of the Half Moon pub in Northgate, which her parents ran,” says Tina. “The midwife put her at the end of the bed and told her mother that she was going to die because she only weighed 4lbs.

“But she’s still here at 92.” And she’s still living in Coatham Mundeville where she was landlady of the Foresters Arms from 1958 to 1979.

The Argyll was briefly mentioned in Memories 285, and it was one of several similar institutions that in the 1940s and 1950s were based in the large Victorian houses of the West End of Darlington. At 142 Coniscliffe Road was the Coniscliffe Nursing Home (matron: Miss Rachel Potter), and at 41 Cleveland Terrace, Barbara Miller ran the Cleveland Nursing Home.

The Argyll was started in the 1920s by Sister Isobel Lyle Yates in 24, Cleveland Terrace, and by the 1940s, it had grown into two houses at 52-54 Cleveland Terrace. The matron was Aileen F Beatty.

But the Argyll did more than just deliver babies. Both Joan Young and Mary Everitt recall having a routine childhood operation there.

“In 1950, when I was five years old, I had my tonsils taken out there by Mr Monro,” says Mary. “I remember sharing the downstairs front room with two other children who were in for the same operation.

“It was the days before modern anaesthesia, and I remember that mask putting me out – and the diet of ice cream afterwards!”

Ice cream, which slides smoothly down the de-tonsiled throat, is the post-operation meal of most children who’ve been treated in this way.

These nursing homes were presumably a leftover from the days before the NHS. Since 1933, when the Memorial became the town’s general hospital, Darlington had a specialist maternity hospital at the converted Greenbank mansion, but it, like the private homes, had to charge for its services. Two-thirds of babies in the 1940s were therefore born at home where it was cheaper to call the midwife as labour was beginning.

The NHS was itself born on July 5, 1948, and healthcare became free at the point of delivery. This caused the medicalisation of birth, and since 1975, about 95 per cent of all arrivals have taken place in hospital.

The advent of the NHS caused the death of the private nursing homes – all had gone by the end of the 1950s. The Argyll became offices for Co-operative Insurance and was then re-converted into two terraced homes, as it had been in Victorian times.

“THANK-YOU for printing my favourite photo of very happy times,” wrote Barbara Lambell in response to Memories 287.

The From the Archive section contained a selection of almost random photographs that Darlington bookseller Jeremiah Vokes had acquired over the years – the photographs were used as bookmarks and got forgotten about when the book was moved on.

One of those pictures featured two couples standing proudly beside their cars outside a co-op.

The first indication of the location of the co-op came from Roslyn Lee who phoned to say that the house at the back of the picture was 23, Hunstanworth Road in the Cockerton area of Darlington.

“My nanna, Elizabeth Raper, had 13 children in that house, and we used to get butter and sugar from the co-op on pay day,” she said.

Then Barbara wrote her letter. She had taken the picture in the summer of 1964. Her parents, Tom and Madge Lambell, are standing with their red Riley 1.5 – “I learnt to drive in that car so I remember it well”, said Barbara – and next door neighbours Stella and Richard Dent, and their daughter Avril, are standing with their blue car.

“We were about to set off together on holiday,” said Barbara, “to Fort William in Scotland, although we did it in easy stages, stopping at Loch Lomond. The weather was perfect.”

The Dents ended up in Australia – Avril came back to visit last year – and when the co-op closed more than 20 years ago, it was converted into a house, but Barbara’s still in the street that she has graced for nearly 80 years.

THE story so far: it is 1936, and Darlington has been truly, madly, deeply in love with the silver screen for a couple of decades. Cinemas had sprung up all over the place, the most recent of which was the Majestic in Bondgate; buildings, such as the Central Hall and the Hippodrome, had been converted to show more films.

But then in 1936 came the big one: Union Cinema Company, which had 250 cinemas across the country and had signed up the biggest screen stars to visit them, wanted to build a “super-cinema” in Bondgate to seat a whopping 2,036 people.

When the Majestic had opened four years earlier, it had been billed as a “cinema-deluxe” and seated 1,600. Nothing, thought the cinema-goers, could be any better, but then came the prospect of a super-cinema.

The Ritz, as the newcomer was to be called, was to be built on what is now The Art Shop and the derelict yards and slums behind.

The application appears to have been popular among the love-struck people of Darlington, who wanted a super-cinema, but not among the owners of the other cinemas.

When the council rejected the application, the Union appealed to local magistrates. The other cinemas hired the town’s top solicitor, JD Latimer, to represent them, and he did the maths. He said the eight venues permanently showing films in the town had between them 8,635 seats; times that by the number of performances a day (three) and times that by the number of days in a cinema week (six).

Therefore, he said, Darlington had 156,000 cinema seats a week, more than enough for the adult population of 33,000. The town didn’t need any more.

But, said the man from Union, there were queues outside most cinemas on a Saturday night – clearly the town did need more.

Ahh, said Mr Latimer, such a theory is dangerous because for the rest of the week the other cinemas will have no custom and thus will go bust and so by building more you will end up with less. And then he said: “In building a football ground, one does not arrange it for a cup final. One arranges it for everyday attendances at the club.”

If only such advice had been heeded in the town when a plan was put forward to build a 25,000-seater stadium for a club with an average attendance of 2,200.

Such advice was heeded in 1936. After a long deliberation, the 19 magistrates, headed by the mayor, rejected the application.

Union was defeated. The Ritz never left the drawing board. The other cinemas celebrated, and today cars park in Bells Place behind The Art Shop because no one yet has worked out what to do with the derelict land.

But Darlington’s love affair with the cinema was not over. Indeed, that very year in Middleton St George, a Victorian village hall which had doubled as a Catholic church was converted into yet another cinema. Rakes Hall was converted into The Lyric, which had a further 236 cinema seats, and when the Second World War broke out, was so crowded with airmen from RAF Goosepool that there were queues down the street.

And, of course, Darlington town centre wasn’t finished yet. Two more cinemas would be built before the love affair began to fizzle out, but they are a story for another week…