Goal to name netball players

The school opened in Cleveland Avenue in 1913 but moved to the former Pease mansion of Carmel in 1955 which, under the comprehensive reorganisation of 1968, became Hummersknott.

One of the items in the exhibition is this picture of the 1958-59 netball team. Do you recognise any faces?

BY the wonders of email, this photograph, below, comes winging its way back from Canada to where it was taken.

It is in a family album that belongs to Marge Gillick and in the bottom right hand corner it clearly says “Northern Echo Photograph”.

The caption in the family album says: “This is for you Auntie. I’m famous!”

But Marge’s family has no connection with the North-East – other than a family member, possibly Blanche Parker, once appeared in the hallowed pages of The Northern Echo.

The picture seems to have been taken in the 1920s in a children’s home, and we guess that Blanche, in the white dress, is with some august guests: there’s a mayor with his back to the camera, a distinguished- looking gent, possibly an MP, enjoying a joke, with Saddam Hussein looking over his shoulder.

Can anyone shed any light on it?

BILLY BEAN, you will remember, was the pre-Second World War Darlington builder who named a street of houses after his Portuguese holiday.

That’s why the Eastbourne area of Darlington has an Estoril Road, Estoril being the name of a port near Lisbon, as Memories 192 explained.

The Bean story rang a bell with Wendy Acres, who remembered that the Darlington Festival for Performing Arts has a trophy called the Brian Bean Memorial Trophy. Her records show that it was presented in the 1930s by WH Bean Esq – that is our builder Billy’s formal name.

Wendy discovered that Mr Bean was married in 1923 and his first son, Brian, was born in 1924. Sadly, this boy died aged four years and ten months in 1928. It would appear that the grieving father presented the trophy to the festival to keep his young son’s name alive.

Brian is buried in West Cemetery alongside his brother William, who died in 1986 aged 59.

We don’t know what became of Mr Bean himself.

MEMORIES 192 also told of the First World War diary of Dr Hensley Henson, the Dean of Durham, which is being updated on Durham Cathedral’s website almost daily.

In August 1914, Dr Henson was motoring this way and that, speaking at recruitment meetings and visiting the coast where soldiers were digging in.

This chimed with Dave Charlesworth, who is doing his own war research and has just discovered that Dr Henson unveiled the Tow Law war memorial before a large congregation in the Church of St Philip and St James on July 22, 1921.

“He clearly was a very well ‘motored’ man of the cloth for his diary entry for that day says: ‘I motored to Tow Law. There I had tea with the eccentric vicar, Espin, and then dedicated a war memorial in the Parish Church.’”

Memories 192 also told how, 100 years ago, The Northern Echo published patterns for a “soldier’s nightcap”. It urged the womenfolk to join together and sew these bonnets together so that the men in the trenches might get a decent night’s sleep.

However, after a week of exhortation, the Echo fell strangely quiet, perhaps because the design of the nightcaps covered a soldier’s ears so the enemy could creep up on him and take him by surprise.

In his diary 100 years ago tomorrow, Dr Henson gave short shrift to such schemes. It would appear that the dean had motored up to the Old Elvet building that featured in last week’s Memories and had then written:

September 14, 1914

Sir Frank Brown asked me to come to the Shire Hall at 4pm. I went and wasted an hour in talking about the organization of sewing meetings in the county!! The plain truth is what nobody dare state, though the military authorities come as near stating it as they decently can, that this great outbreak of feminine activity since the war began is mainly troublesome, &, so far as its output is concerned, mostly superfluous.

It is well worth keeping an eye on the dean’s diary in the WW1 section of durhamcathedral.co.uk