THIS week we've raided the packet marked "Darlington banks" in The Northern Echo's photo archive.
As ever, it is rather hit and miss in the archive with generations of librarians having their own ideas about how to file things – it probably doesn't help that decades of journalists have had their fingers in the packets, confusing the librarians' neatness.
There appears to be at least one really good story lost in the photo-archive: that of a bank raid up North Road in which a bank manager was shot. But dates and details have become lost. So if you can help with any of the stories connected to these pictures, please let us know: email chris.lloyd@nne.co.uk
This is what we call in the inky trade an early “graphic”. Nowadays you have clever computer programmes to superimpose information onto a photograph: back when this graphic made, all they had was a glue stick and a bottle of Tippex.
We reckon it is mid 1960s and we reckon that the photograph was taken on the corner of Albert Road and North Road, opposite where a little retail park has recently been created.
What drama, though, is conveyed by the pointers stuck on with the glue stick and you can follow the action through the dots of Tippex.
And you will, of course, know that Tippex, or Mistake Out, or Liquid Paper, or White Out, was invented by typist Bette Nesmith in Dallas to cure her typing mistakes.
She started marketing her invention in 1956, which was ten years before her only son, Michael Nesmith, found fame in The Monkees.
Anyway, who can tell us about the Great Albert Road Bank Raid?
This appears to be from the same mid-1960s Barclays bank raid as our big graphic. You don't see policemen on bikes like this anymore and you certainly can't get two tins of Farrows processed peas for 10½d as you could at L&N Stores.
The oldest picture in the packet is dated 1949 and shows cars parked outside the original Backhouses Bank, designed in the early 1860s by architect Alfred Waterhouse, on High Row.
This must be one of the first ATMs to be installed in Darlington.
It is dated November 28, 1969, and the cunning device is located in the High Row branch of the National Provincial Bank – now NatWest.
The first ATM – which stands for Automated Teller Machine was installed in the Barclays branch in Enfield, London, on June 27, 1967. Its first customer was Reg Varney, from On The Buses.
The art deco interior of the Midland Bank, now the HSBC in Prospect Place, which was completed in 1926 and here photographed in 1961.
This Lloyds Bank on Bondgate is dated 1925 in Roman numerals at the top, although we reckon it was completed in 1926 and the first occupant was a confectioner and tobacconist.
On the right is the butchers which belonged to Zisslers for 128 years until 1999.
Today, if you are lucky enough to find a bank clerk who is a real human being, you will find them hidden away behind a glass screen and you have to talk to them through a microphone.
Here, in the Prospect Place branch of the Midland in August 1961, clerks were sitting unscreened behind huge wooden desks.
What is the man closest to the camera wearing around his ankles?
We’ve heard people speak of the rooftop garden above Barclays Bank in High Row, but this is the first photographic evidence we’ve come across.
It is dated May 1976 and Pauline Moses and Jennifer Raw are tending the plants. We’d love more info on Darlington’s only town centre rooftop garden – is it still there, and if it is, what do they grow up there?
The caption attached to this picture says "the bus shelters in Tubwell Row which have been damaged by vandals, 23/01/64". It is filed under banks, though, because of the attractive view of the National Provincial on High Row.
Banks were once so keen on having local branches that they sent out trailers into communities where they had no bricks and mortar representation. Here, Midland turns up in Cockerton in November 1966.
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