THE Northallerton archive in Memories 365 included a photograph of a family group standing outside their shop, Wright’s confectionery, somewhere in the town. Thanks to everyone who informed us that it was the building to the south of Lewis and Cooper in the High Street which is now occupied by Caffe Nero.

Pearl Lynas got in touch because the photograph, taken in 1910, shows her family. Her father, Victor Lewis Marshall Wright, is the little boy on the left, and his sisters, Ivy and Violet, are with him. The ladies on the top step are Pearl’s great aunts, Miss Sarah Jane Wright and Miss Emma Mary Wright, who ran the shop.

And Arthur Peacock, who lives near Middleton Tyas, got in touch because his family took over the shop from the Wrights in the 1920s. Indeed, Arthur lived the first seven years of his life in the flat above the shop.

His mother, Marjorie Alice Whitfield, ran it with her sister, Winifred Pamela, and so it is their middle names that are on the board over the door where it says “AP Whitfield”. As they were trained bakers they could correctly be called bakeresses although the proper, if ancient, word for a female baker was baxter. Anyway, as bakeresses, they installed ovens in the cellar and turned the shop into the Thornton Cafe which they named after Thornton Watlass where they had grown up.

They leased the shop from the Barker family of haberdashers across the road, and in the late 1930s they didn’t renew their lease but instead concentrated on their families.