Gagging for news about the Gaggia

The photos have caused us to reminisce about Bishop’s four cinemas – the Eden, the Hippodrome, the Odeon and the Kings – which led Alistair Clarke to remember Cooks Yard, which was slightly south of the Kings. It was named after the newsagents who had their shop at the top of the yard on to Newgate Street.

“You went up an alleyway about 25 yards long off Newgate Street and my grandmother lived in the only cottage in the yard on the left,” he says. “It went up to Kingsway, where the dole office was.”

Mr Clarke also remembers stories about the building of the Odeon in Tenters Street in 1938. “There was a great deal of controversy because it was built by Germans on quicksand,” he says. “They had to pour loads of material in to stabilise the ground enough to get the foundations in.”

They must have done a good job because Bishop Auckland’s only skyscraper – Vinovium House – was built in 1971 beside the Odeon.

Mr Clarke was also interested in our 1973 picture of Gaggia coffee machine in Rossi’s cafe. “I had a secondhand shop at the top of Railway Street and Horace Rossi asked us to have a look at the machine which had been playing up for years,” he says. “It took a full week to strip it down, and there must have been four inches of lime around the heating elements, which was why it didn’t work very well.”

He concludes by saying that, as a regular in the cafe, he’d be interested in knowing the name of the young lady in front of the Gaggia.

The wonder of Echo Memories is that its readers can always be relied upon for an answer. “The lady in the coffee cup picture is Lynn Hamilton, who would have been about 14 in 1973,” says Tracy Hardy. “When she left school she went to work at Boothroyd opticians as a receptionist a couple of doors up from Rossi's, but we lost contact.”

MR CLARKE’S mention of the Odeon brings us to this picture, which shows a strange publicity photograph taken in the cinema’s foyer in about 1950. The more you look at the picture, the better it becomes.

For instance, slightly out of focus in the top left hand corner is a complaint that there was 7d tax on a 1s 6d cinema seat. This tax, introduced in 1916, was controversial right up until its abolition in 1960. With the silver screen the most popular form of entertainment around the time of the Second World War, it was also a very lucrative tax: in 1945, Britain’s cinemas took £115m at the box office of which the Treasury claimed £41m in tax.

Now, look at the chap second from right with balloons on his head, lashings of eyeliner on his face, who is wearing a striped dress which is open at the chest to reveal his ill-fitting bra. Even in the best cross-dressing spirit of British pantomime, this is rather odd.

Indeed, the five-year-old boy in the bottom right hand corner appears extremely, and understandably, concerned by it all. That boy is David Graham, whose wife Evelyn has kindly sent in the picture. David's mother, Florrie, worked as a cleaner at the Odeon and he just happened to be there when a photographer arrived to capture the balloon-and-bra man.

The Odeon shut in 1983 and was demolished in 1994.

“IT was a pleasant surprise,” writes Graham Harland from Barton in North Yorkshire, “to see in Memories 225 a picture of my sprightly 53-year-old father, Bert, of Harland Bros market gardeners, setting-up his stall on Bishop Auckland market in August 1968 in the rain, box in-hand, probably muttering under his breath about people who had nothing better to do than take photographs.”

He may also have been muttering about the array of no-parking signs and cones on the pavement opposite his stall.

“I can't remember if they were the scourge of the traders or for their benefit: probably the former – things don't change,” says Graham.

The Harlands’ business began in the 1930s in Castle Gardens at Walworth. “The family lived in part of the castle for several years until it was requisitioned by the army during the Second World War,” says Graham. “There were about 2.5 acres of walled gardens with heated walls, espaliered pear trees and box hedges. The entrance was on the back road to Cockerton. There are now some residential developments on the site, but I believe there is still a listed greenhouse there and some old variety apple trees.

“There were four brothers in the business and their main outlets were two markets at Darlington, two at Bishop Auckland, plus Barnard Castle on Wednesdays, and some private customers. They ceased trading in 1985 when Bert was 70, but he actively gardened at home in Darlington for another 22 years before he died in 1997.”

AND there will be more Bishop Auckland memories in future weeks. Many thanks to everyone who has been in touch.