THERE are only two days left to see the Flying Scotsman – the first steam engine to be officially recorded doing 100mph – at the Locomotion museum in Shildon.

Following last week’s Memories special on the Scotsman, Ian Wright in Las Vegas sent us a couple of stunning photographs of what many people say is the most famous locomotive in the world.

Ian’s grandfather, Ted, was a LNER engine driver, taking locos on the route of the Flying Scotsman between London and Edinburgh. He was also was secretary of the Darlington and District Cage Birds Society and of the Darlington Chrysanthemum and Dahlia Society, and it was he who loaned ten-year-old Ian his Kodak Box Brownie camera in about 1955 when the lad was still at Reid Street Primary School.

From there developed Ian’s lifelong love of photography. Ian started his career as a young photographer on the Echo, under legendary editor Sir Harold Evans, in the early 1960s.

In 1963, Flying Scotsman was retired by British Rail and destined for scrap, but businessman Alan Pegler bought it and took it to Darlington’s North Road workshops for an overhaul.

Ian – a keen trainspotter with his Ian Allan checkbooks – has pictures of the engine indecently stripped down and being repaired by men crawling through its nether regions.

He also has a stunning photograph of the finished Flying Scotsman, back in its LNER livery and numbered 4472, hauling a special to York. The picture was taken at the southern end of Bank Top station – someone can surely tell us about the signalbox on the right and the tank on the long legs in the distance.

“THE special edition was great to read and brought back happy memories of my mid-1950s trainspotting days,” writes John Rusby of Bishop Auckland, proving that if you want a mention in Memories it helps to be flattering.

“We often had Flying Scotsman’s sister locomotives passing through with the evening mail train, and we would go straight from school to see them,” he says.

“One evening, while waiting for the mail train to arrive, Flying Scotsman passed through the station on a diverted south bound train. The Northern Echo reported the next day: “Trainspotters eyes were out on sticks when Flying Scotsman passed through Bishop Auckland station."”

As every one of John’s trainspotting fellows would know, Scotsman is a class A1/A3, of which there were about 80 examples (they were built in Doncaster as Class A1s but were updated to be Class A3s). All but seven of them were named after famous racehorses.

“Us young boys admired their curved brass nameplates as they came through,” says John, who graduated from collecting train numbers to collecting railwayana.

“Attached is a picture taken at Chorley, Lancashire, about 15 years ago, of me with the nameplate for 60099 Call Boy, which I was offered for £3,000 but I declined, and I have kicked myself ever since as it would have brought between £12,000 and £15,000.”

Call Boy was named after the horse which won the Epsom Derby in 1927. The victory was its last race and it was put out to stud – unsuccessfully, as the poor chap had fertility problems.

MEMORIES 290 talked of the Argyll Nursing Home in Darlington where, in pre-NHS days, an expectant woman could stay and give birth for £13 2s 6d a week. The Argyll was in Cleveland Terrace a couple of late Victorian terraced houses, and the substantial properties in the town’s West End made them ideal for conversion into nursing homes.

Just round the corner at 142, Coniscliffe Road, for instance, was the Coniscliffe Nursing Home. “Miss Mary Potter, my great aunt, was the matron there,” writes Muriel McNamee from Stockton. “She began her nursing career at the Rutson cottage hospital in Northallerton.

“She took care of the more serious side of nursing, and her sister, Miss Rachel Potter, was in charge of the domestic side of the home.

“They ran it before retiring in 1947 just before the NHS came into being.”

EXACTLY 50 years ago this morning, excitement was mounting as kick-off was only hours away in the World Cup final at Wembley – “England’s greatest day”, as The Northern Echo’s back page correctly proclaimed it.

Yet the front page of July 30, 1960, didn’t have even the briefest mention of the match of the century. The main headline was “tighten your belts freeze” about Labour’s prices and incomes policy meaning there were to be no price or wage rises for the next year, and the main picture showed a lonely pony ahead of the Durham County Show as all the cows had cried off due to foot and mouth disease.

There was trouble in Nigeria and Rhodesia, and in Washington, Harold Wilson was delayed in meeting President Lyndon B Johnson in the White House by a “gun scare” – the British Prime Minister had to hole up nearby in the presciently-named Blair House until the drama was over.

In Rome, police had launched an anti-beatnik crackdown and had arrested “64 long-haired scruffily-dressed young men and women”. The foreigners from Germany and France were to be ejected from the country while the others were to be forcibly given a good bath. Probably.

The only mention of football on the front page that day was that “footballing knight Sir Stanley Matthews” was satisfactory after an hour-long emergency stomach operation that was required after a car crash.

The back page of that historic day is reproduced over the page…

IN our chronicle of cinemas, we have one left. So far in Darlington, we’ve had the Empire (opened 1911), the Arcade (1912), the Court, the Scala and the Alhambra (all 1913), the Majestic (1932) and the Regal (1938) – all purpose-built cinemas. Plus, we’ve had a variety of halls converted into cinemas, from Central Hall to the Lyric in Middleton St George, and we’ve had theatres, like the Hippodrome, also muscling in on the pre-war craze for films.

Finally came the Regent, a £20,000 super-cinema, which opened on June 5, 1939. James Cagney’s Angels with Dirty Faces was the first film.

The 1,050-seater cinema was in Cobden Street, off Yarm Road, where a care home is today. It served the Eastbourne area of town, and it looks as if it was so well lit up, it could have been seen from outer space.

“The striking installation of about 700ft of neon tubing outlines the salient feature of the building,” said The Northern Echo on opening day. “Twenty millimetre tubing is employed in vivid blue, bright green and intense red and the outlining is capped by a double-sided 36in sign reading “Regent” in intense red tubing.

“About 50ft of Osira fluorescent tubing is employed under the entrance canopy providing lighting of high intensity and warm tone.”

The colour scheme inside apparently achieved an “effect of intimacy” in the auditorium. According to the Echo, everything was in harmony with “graded tones of terracotta, peach and gold” – the gold-fluted pillars on either side of the screen; the stage drapings in silver-grey, old gold and green; the seats and carpets in old rose.

On opening day, the Echo noted that the Regent was the 19th cinema in the chain of Thomas Thompson of Middlesbrough. He was a Hartlepool shipping clerk who, at the age of 44, stumbled across a filmshow in Sunderland in 1907 and saw a commercial opportunity.

He opened his first cinema in a rented hall in Middlesbrough the following year and then, in 1910, bought the Middlesbrough Hippodrome after Signor Rino Pepi – the impresario who created the Darlington Hippodrome – had gone bust.

By 1927, Thompson had 28 cinemas across the North-East, 22 of which he sold to the Gaumont chain for £250,000 – the Bank of England Inflation Calculator says that this sum would be worth £14m today. Aged 66, you would think he was heading for an extremely comfortable retirement.

Not a bit of it. Having sold one chain, he started building up another, which included the Shildon Hippodrome, the Ferryhill Gaiety, the Magnet Picture House in Shildon, the Tivoli Electric Theatre in Spennymoor, the Majestic in Durham and, of course, the Regent in Darlington.

When he died in 1948, he owned at least 56 cinemas across the region and down the coast into East Anglia.

His company continued to operate the cinemas until about 1960s when the cinema bubble burst, punctured by the advent of the home television. The Regent was typical: in 1959, it was converted into a bingo hall – but the decline and fall of Darlington’s record-breaking cinemas is a story for another week.

There’s a brilliant website about Tommy Thompson put together by his great-grandson. It can be found at bugandflea.com