THE female figure representing Industrial Organisation, swathed in her long, white flowing dress, looks down on the massed ranks of the working men of Bishop Auckland – in their caps and their aprons – and points over her shoulder to the next generation of children happily skipping around a maypole.

“Workers of the world unite,” says the slogan below her. “You have nothing to lose but your chains.”

Next week, the banner from the Bishop Auckland branch of the National Union of Railwaymen will take centre stage when a new heritage project is launched.

It was made in 1914, the year after the union was formed, by George Tutill and Company of London – the famous bannermakers whose work is carried aloft by the miners at the annual Durham gala.

This, though, is one of only three railway banners known to exist in the country.

It is going on display in the Four Clocks Centre – a community centre on Newgate Street, based in a former Methodist church which was also built in 1914. You can tell which one it is because the four clocks on its tower look down on the four corners of the town.

It is an appropriate place to have an exhibition which includes the industrial history of the railways, because directly opposite it are the workshops of an old locomotive-builder, who had an interesting sideline for a while building early bicycles.

The company in question was Lingford, Gardiner and Company, which was established in Railway Street in 1861. The first half of its name came from the famous baking powder family, founded in the same year in the town by Quaker brothers, Joseph and Samuel Lingford, to make a raising powder from their secret recipe powder.

It is believed that the Lingfords provided the money for the venture, while the railway brains came from John Gardiner, who had been an apprentice to Timothy Hackworth at the Soho works in Shildon.

The firm was set up to meet the needs of the local collieries by repairing machinery and locomotives. It quite quickly expanded along Railway Street, and took on a large railway forge which is now the site of the Asda supermarket. This enabled it to do castings, both for the collieries and for local roads – we believe there are still quite a few Lingford, Gardiner & Co manholes and drain covers in the area (if you’ve got one in your street, or you spot one while you’re out walking, whip out your phone and email chris.lloyd@nne.co.uk a picture of it).

In the grandly-named Auckland Engine Works, the company – which described itself as “builders, hirers and repairers of locomotives” – would take in old engines from the collieries, and if they couldn’t be repaired, cannabilise them until they had a new engine.

Then, in the 1890s, the company branched out into a new mode of transport: the bicycle. At the Auckland Cycle Works, in Railway Street, it produced a range of spring-framed bicycles called “Rational Umpire”. This curious name was a phrase used by the American founding father, Thomas Jefferson, so how it came to be applied to a bike in Bishop is anyone’s guess.

And so to the obvious question: does anyone have a Rational Umpire tucked away in the back of their garage? We’d love to see it, if you do.

Rational Umpire bikes seem to have lasted until the outbreak of the First World War. After the conflict, the Durham coalfield began to contract, throwing Lingford, Gardiner into financial difficulties.

The company’s last locomotive was sold in 1931 for £1,100 to the Kettering Furnace Company, and then it collapsed. Liquidator MV Summerson, of Coniscliffe Road, Darlington, was called in and oversaw the dismantling and disposal of all its machinery – Wilson’s Forge, for example, took over on the Asda site and became a big business until it closed in 1997.

Although, Lingford, Gardiner has been gone for best part of a century, its workshops in the Railway Street area are still in use by car companies and paintshops, and its drains still collect water. And you can still see the cutting in which its little siding ran – it is an overgrown, litter-filled depression now, still crossed by a footbridge near Asda, but along here Lingford, Gardiner and Company’s newly-cannabilised engines once made their first journeys into the world of the railwaymen.

MANY thanks to Michael O’Neill and Gerald Slack of the Auckland Railways Group for their help with today’s article. If you know have any more information about Lingford, Gardiner, please let us know. Michael’s research into the company is part of the exhibition in the Four Clocks Centre which is being formally opened by the Lord Lieutenant of County Durham on Thursday, and after that will be on display to the public.

STAYING in Bishop Auckland, last week there was the second of our articles on the Woodhouse Close Estate. It was built post-war on farmland which was peppered with pitheaps, three mineshafts, and a couple of rows of miners’ cottages.

“The pitheaps spread over about 15 acres, and the shafts were not very far apart,” remembers Alan Hicks, of High Etherley, whose father tended the farmland. “We used to throw bricks down them and try to work how deep they were from the length of time before we heard the splash at the bottom.

“The story at the time was that shafts were only capped – not filled in, because if they had done that, it would have flooded West Auckland pit, which was still working.”

This tallies with a story that Fred Colling, of Bishop Auckland, has sent in. He says: “In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I was a young technician working for the architect who had designed the hostel in Walker Drive. Hours before it was due to be handed over by the builder to the county council, one of the old pit shafts gave way very close to the corner of the new building, and it took Stivvies’ lorries countless trips to fill it.

“I dread to think of the consequences had anyone been in the vicinity of these shafts when they collapsed because I was told that they were hundreds of feet deep.”

JENNIFER PRIESTLEY emails about the days when she was Miss Priestley, a teacher at Cockton Hill School which in 1966 caught fire. “Half the school was badly damaged so half the staff, of which I was one, with half the pupils, were sent to the new Woodhouse Close Junior School which was still a building site.

“The new school had no books or equipment at that point so we all walked to our new seat of learning with just a jotter and pencil each.

“However, we had a new innovative head in Roy Thomas and even though I started there with 42 children in my class, I have happy memories of school outings, pantomimes, parties, jumble sales, sports days and many friendships. And I met my late husband there!”

Any other memories of the school fire of ’66?

LAST week, we were also trying to find out the derivation of both Wigdon Walls and Sloshes Lane, both near the Woodhouse Close. John Heslop in Durham nibbled, and he said: “Our milk used to be delivered by a Mr Thompson of Sloshes Farm, halfway between Low Etherley and Witton Castle gateway. I always assumed that "sloshes" referred to boggy land.”

Then John offers a truly startling revelation, triggered by last week’s On This Day – on January 30, 1933, we said, Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany.

“This prompts me to mention an entry in a 1938 Who's Who which I came across in Wetherspoons in Durham,” says John. The entry said:

HITLER, Adolf, Chancellor of Germany

since 1933; Fuhrer and Chancellor since 1934;

b. Braunnau a. Inn, Upper Austria, 20 Apr.

1889. Publication: Mein Kampf. Address:

Berlin W.8, Wilhelmstr. 77. T.: 11 6191.

“I'm amazed that his telephone number was included,” says John. Do you think if someone in Durham had called 116191 in 1938, the fuhrer would have picked up?