Scroll back a couple of columns: we carried a photograph of the great Len Shackleton alongside Bishop Auckland football legends Bob Hardisty and Seamus O’Connell and, between them, Hartlepool boxing champion Teddy Gardner.

Behind the quartet stood a group of star-struck schoolboys: who were the kids, we wondered, and what the occasion – probably in the Bishop area – that brought them all together?

It’s been a sair fecht, as they say on the streets of Glasgow, and still not a jot wiser. Thanks to Brenda Regan in Seaton Carew, however, we know a lot more about Teddy Gardner and about boxing in Hartlepool, that most sportingly pugilistic of towns.

Mrs Regan kindly sends a slim volume called “Hartlepool Professional Boxers, the Golden Decade, 1945-55”, written in 1993 by local bus driver and boxing enthusiast Robert Smith.

Its reach is much greater than the one decade, however, recalling crowded venues like the Tin Circus on Lynn Street, the Bloodtub on Redworth Street – where boxers, it was said, might be hit by everything except the bucket – the greyhound stadium and the outdoor arena at the Engineers’ Club, where the apostrophe was moveable and the atmosphere electric.

The problem with outdoor events, of course, was that the Pool’s been known to get somewhat nippy of a night.

Smith recalls a 1951 contest at the dog track between Gardner and Charlie Bohbot, a Moroccan. It was May 7, still so bitterly cold that Walter Hazeltine, the promoter, put a couple of electric fires in poor Bohbot’s corner.

He retired at the end of the eighth, though whether hurt or half-perished to death is sadly not recorded.

The book also recalls renowned local fighters like Al Capone, which probably wasn’t his real name, and the wonderfully appropriate Johnny Basham (which almost certainly was.)

It was Teddy Gardner, however, who indisputably topped the bill in post-war Hartlepool.

Gardner was an amateur from the age of 11, trained by Teddy Baker, his uncle, and initially boxing as Young Teddy Baker. He made his professional debut in 1938, four months after his 16th birthday, and after RAF service in India returned ready for another fight.

Hartlepool, and the mining communities thereabouts, were quickly and enthusiastically behind him. When Gardner fought Danny O’Sullivan for the British bantamweight title at the Royal Albert Hall in 1949, a crowded special train left the town that morning.

“He lost the contest but won the hearts of everyone there,” says Smith. “The 10,000 crowd was treated to a magnificent display of craftsmanship, accompanied by frequent bursts of Blaydon Races which made the Royal Albert Hall rafters ring.”

Gardner had travelled the day previously, was introduced to “Cheerful” Charlie Chester on stage at the Palladium, lost in the ninth round and at midnight caught the train back with his adoring army. His net purse from the fight had been £46.

He gained the European flyweight title in Newcastle in February 1952 and just four weeks later, at the same venue. United the European, British and Empire titles with victory over Teddy Allen.

“This is not my night, it’s my dad’s. He’s lived a lifetime to see this,” he said.

On June 30, 1952 he retained the European title against Otello Belardinelli at the Engineers’ Club but, nine weeks later, lost the Empire title to Jake Tull, described as a Zulu, announced his retirement from the ring, returned his Lonsdale belt and went back to pulling pints.

He’d won 55 of his 66 fights, 12 with a knockout, and drawn three more.

As we observed two or three weeks back Teddy and his wife Ruth had run three pubs in Hartlepool, the Half Moon in Spennymoor and the Highland Laddie in Darlington. He threw in the bar towels at 50, stood as a Conservative candidate for Hartlepool council and died in April 1977, aged just 56.

Former Hartlepool Mail journalist Paul Screeton recalls being sent as a young reporter to the opening of a Lonsdale Belt at the Northern Gas showrooms in the town.

He found himself seated between Teddy Gardner and the lovely Maurice Cullen, Shotton Colliery lad and five-times British champion, who died in 2001.

The trio were asked if they’d like tea or coffee. “Haven’t you got gin?” said Teddy. It was 9.30am.

Jack Harvey, better known as Jack London, reached his peak just before Robert Smith’s golden decade, winning the British and Empire heavyweight titles from Freddie Mills in September 1944.

Even then, aged just 31, he was said to apply black dye to his bald patch before a contest.

The following year he lost both titles, at Spurs’ football ground, to Doncaster railwayman Bruce Woodcock in just the new champion’s tenth professional fight.

In May 1947, 5,000 crowded the Engineers’ Club gardens for a non-title fight with James Britt, twice as many locked outside. “Only the arrival of 150 additional policemen quelled the pandemonium,” Smith notes.

Brian London, his son, had moved with the family to Blackpool, where at 84 he remains. The man they called the Blackpool Rock also became British heavyweight champion and twice fought for the world title, losing to Floyd Patterson in 1959 and, 52 years ago this weekend, to Muhammad Ali’s third round knockout.

Asked if he could have done anything differently to get into the contest, London was unequivocal. “Yes,” he said, “I could have shot him.”

In Blackpool he became friends with England World Cup winner Alan Ball, when Ball managed the town’s football club, allowing the diminutive Ball to make a wholly affectionate reference during a sportsman’s dinner speech to Richmond Town FC.

“Brian London,” he said, “is the only boxer I know who has a cauliflower a**e.” It was the only time he swore.

Sadly, coincidentally, the funeral of George Bowes – another of the great Hartlepool boxing fraternity – took place last week.

George was born in High Hesleden, near the Durham coast, where old lads still rhyme his surname with “cows”. He worked down Blackhall colliery, lost a British and Commonwealth title fight to Johnny Caldwell in 1964, retired from the ring three years later.

“You have to be very special to win if you’re from the North-East,” he later, wryly, observed.

He won 42 of his 58 fights, seven by a knockout, became a Hartlepool-based trainer and was in the corner for champions like Billy Hardy, Stewart Lithgo and Maurice Cullen.

A biography, perhaps inevitably, had been called Battling Bowes. George was 81.

All we need know is to find out more about that photograph.