LOADS of people kindly informed us that the Home Guard were photographed – probably in 1940 – outside Mr Bland’s rounded garage on the Blackwell edge of town.
This was where the old Coal (Carmel) Road diverged from the Great North Road, which ran through the centre of town. Travellers on the Coal Road would have wished to avoid the tolls that were levied on goods going through the town centre and so their road skirted the edge of the town.
From 1833, the crossroads was joined by a third road;the newly-built turnpike from Scotch Corner that came over Blackwell Bridge.
A pub stood on this busy intersection. It was the Angel Inn, and the junction was known as Angel’s Corner. Its principal customers were the mule-train drivers; the men who led long lines of pack ponies, with coal in their baskets, from the mines of Durham to the industries of Yorkshire.
While the mule men slaked their thirstin the Angel,their mules roamed the fields of Blackwell, eating the grass.
The Angel closed in 1873, the railways having replaced the mule trains. The pub was converted into a school, firstly for servants and then for the village children of Blackwell.
In the first decade of the 20th Century came another change; horses were replaced by motor cars, which needed regular halts for engineering works and petrol filling. A Mr Bland converted the school into a garage, sellingTriumph cars and Cleveland petrol, and so today we know the area as Bland’s Corner.
Over the course of the 20th Century, many companies owned the garage, with the Cleveland Car Company flattening the old pub to open out today’s expansive showroom.
“Evans-Halshaw operates the garage today,” says Malc o l m Middleton, “but the ‘SHE…’ on the picture suggests that Sherwood Brothers may have occupied the site pre-war.
“I remember in the 1950s it was the premises of Tees Agriculture, a firm selling and repairing farm machinery. There were many agricultural machinery agencies in the area at the time, and now there are none. What happened to them?”
A NOTHER of the Dad’s Army pictures from Memories 103 showed the Home Guard jumping off a wall leading out of the Blackwell Hall estate into Blackwell Lane.
The picture is on today’s front cover.
The wall still stands, although Blackwell Golf Club currently occupies the land behind it.
Joan Denham lives just around the corner fromBlackwell Lane, and spotted her grandfather, father and uncle – all railwaymen – jumping from the wall.
Her father, Ken Leckenby, then 21, is leading the charge.
He’s in the centre, looking down at his dropped cap.
He was millwright based at Faverdale.
Although it was a reserved occupation, hewanted to fight and joined the Royal Electrical andMechanical Engineers (Reme).
He was a sergeant serving in Germany when the war ended, and he returned to the railways as a crane and chain inspector.
Joan’s grandfatherLeonard Dalby is third from the left climbing in a dignified fashion over the wall as befits a veteran of the First World War. His son, Kenneth, a Faverdale carriage-builder, is on the road at the right of the picture D URING the First World War, it was customary when a soldier won a bravery for his home community to have a whip round and present himwith an inscribed gold watch. Memories 103 asked if there were any such watches still around.
Lance-Corporal Alfred Bloomfield of the Durham Light Infantry appears to have been the first – perhaps only – employee of the Lambton estates to win a Military Medal (MM), and he was presented with a watch by the Earl of Durham.
Details of his bravery have been sentin by his son Eric, of Wolsingham, and the family still has the watch.
L-Cpl Bloomfield, of Fencehouses, won his MM in July 1918 for “conspicuous gallantry and coolness when you rushed a machine gun and captured it” at “Dickebusch”
– this is the Belgian town of Dikkebusseweg, near Ypres, on the Western Front.
His actions prevented serious losses to his company and resulted in several Germans being captured – “a heroic deed”, according to the Earl whomade the presentation in Burnmoor Parish Hall.
The estate employees had collectedmoney for the watch and the Earl and his wife, Anne, presented Alfred with a gold chain to hang it on.
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