With Yarm Gala about to make a spectacular comeback, Echo Memories looks at the town and its past celebrations.

ON Sunday, June 22, Yarm Council will host an event which will celebrate the town's history and heritage and look to its future as it simultaneously steps back in time in order to revive a tradition last staged about 90 years ago.

The resurrected and muchimproved Yarm Gala, primarily sponsored by Hartlepool's Camerons Brewery, will feature a Victorian funfair, entrance to the famous town hall, a live music stage, street entertainers, taster lessons in rowing and canoeing, a parade of boats, a bell boat event and the Lions' charity fair.

Designed by Olympic canoe coach David Train, the bell boat is an innovative design in watercraft, which is aimed at removing people's fear of taking part in water sports and helping with team work and co-operation. It is a long-lasting, sturdy platform, a veritable floating classroom intended to introduce people of all ages to water sports.

Music - preferably, as in this case, live - is a prerequisite for any good gala and treading the boards in Yarm on this day will be bands for all tastes. Folk band Broad and Rossiter's Yarm Town Waltzers will rub shoulders with Tommy Wray's Senior Jazz Band, Jeans Goes Pop, the Baghdaddies, the Bob Fischer Experience and the scintillating Gypsy Jazz of Donnelly and Fisk.

Although there are several local venues for events, the gala's main artery is Yarm's ancient and now very famous High Street, having been voted by BBC Breakfast TV last month as the best in Britain.

The BBC's David Sillitto said: "We were looking for the high street that combined the best of old and new, your ideal of the perfect high street, and Yarm came out top.

"There is something distinctly different about it. You go down the street and you see The Electrical Goods Supplying Shop from 1948, and the butchers has been there since 1830, so that's something distinctive.

"Once your high street dies, then the connection with local people dies but that's what Yarm has got, and it's a growing, buzzing place."

Visitors to Yarm today often have great difficulty believing that this was for centuries a thriving port, the nearest on the Tees to the North Sea, and the lowest bridging point across the river. Although the 15-mile route from Yarm to the sea was long and tortuous, with vessels taking up to four tides over the journey and often running aground, it was not until the 18th Century that in 1771 a bridge was constructed over the river there.

Stockton also began to make a play for the Tees boat trade, an initiative followed in the 19th Century by the newly-created town of Middlesbrough, which eventually usurped both Yarm and Stockton. This was a cruelly ironic outcome for Yarm since it was in the George and Dragon Inn there, on 12 February 1820, that the principal moves to create the Stockton and Darlington Railway, which opened in 1825 and led ultimately to the expansion of first Stockton, then Middlesbrough and to the demise of the port of Yarm, had been made.

Perversely, although that line came almost to the River Tees at Yarm, there was no railway in the town until the new viaduct, with its seven and a half million bricks and 43 arches, was opened in 1852.

The first known bridge across the Tees at Yarm was built in about 1200AD and was replaced 200 years later by the stone one financed by Bishop Walter Skirlaw of Durham. Although now wider than it was in his day and much-repaired down the ages, it is still one of the principal bridges between Yorkshire and Durham.

Travellers used to have to pay a toll to use it and in former times it was traditionally closed between midnight on Saturday until midnight on Sunday.

Before 1825, throughout Sunday evenings, coal carts lined up on the Yarm side ready to cross the bridge at midnight to rush to collect coal from the Durham mines. The first to arrive there were the first to be served on Monday morning.

YARM Bridge has had an eventful existence, and even today vehicles occasionall y bum p into its parapet. In 1803, reported the Stockton historian Michael Heavisides, the narrowness of the bridge became too much for locals and travellers alike, to the extent that something had to done. They asked the magistrates of North Yorkshire and of County Durham to find a solution.

"The application was successful, and a sum of £8,000 was granted by the magistrates, " wrote Heavisides.

"On September 3 that year, the foundation stone of an iron bridge was laid consisting of one arch 189ft in len g th and 27ft in width, the structure to be completed in two years. The iron arch rested on two abutments of masonry, alongside and to the east of the existing bridge.

"The work was eventually completed, but during the night of January 12, 1806, the whole fabric, which weighed 250 tons, fell in. Fortunately, the old bridge was still intact and it was at once decided to widen it.

This was speedily carried out."

Earlier, in 1643 while the road across the stone bridge was still narrow, the Battle of Yarm was fou g ht around it. At that time the town had a garrison of several hundred Parliamentary troops, whose main job was to guard the bridge, the only crossing at that point across the Tees.

On February 1, a Royalist column was attacked and dispersed by the Yarm garrison but soon afterwards the king's forces took the town. A section of bridge that was damaged during these events was replaced for a time by a wooden drawbridge.

In his Rambles in Cleveland, published in 1901, Heavisides recalled his first visit to one of the several annual fairs which took place in Yarm, their importance being that they attracted visitors, and, therefore, money and trade to the town. He was, at the time, six years old and it was October.

"The High Street was packed from end to end with shows, roundabouts, cattle and sightseers gathered from all parts of the district. About that time one of the brothers Sanger appeared in a twopenny show, dressed as Hamlet, and performed several mystical tricks. The Whitsuntide galas, held in the lovely grounds of the Friarage for several years, were most enjoyable gatherings."

In his book, Yarm, Egglescliffe and Kirklevington from earliest times, Francis Gerard Owens lists the three old town fairs.

"The first was held on the Thursday before April 5 - Ascension Day - the second was August 2 and the third and most important, the October Fair.

The three-day fair was originally for only two days and a third was added after 1848.

"The October horse, cattle and cheese fairs were an important gathering time for North Yorkshire's agricultural interests, but the opening of Stockton's bridge was to cause a decline in the trade that the minor fairs attracted, causing them to die off before the 19th Century. Yarm's October Fair managed to attract plenty of custom."

Owens describes some of the attractions: "The fair attracted its share of travelling entertainers. These people would include jugglers, musicians and performing animal acts among their number. In later times, Yarm Fair was to suffer the same fate as the fair held with the Stockton Hiring.

"Everything would be taken over by fairground whirligigs, sideshows and other amusements. Large machines would fill whole sections of the High Street. Their loud music would blare through the night, annoying locals and probably frightening the livestock, the reason for the fair's existence."

Yarm is an attractive and historic town in its own right but will be particularly deserving of a visit to this year's gala.