'The day my grandmother saw a Zeppelin shot down over Hartlepool'

For example, Memories 444 back in October told of the First World War anti-aircraft station at Hunley Hall near Brotton, between Saltburn and Skinningrove.

During the war, the east coast was regularly attacked by German airships, most famously, on November 27, 1916, when Zeppelin L34 came over Hartlepool.

It was caught by the searchlights and hit by gunfire from the ground. Like some fatally wounded giant bird, it floundered around in the skies, throwing out bombs which killed two people and damaged a stand at the football stadium, getting lower and lower, until Lt Ian Pyott in his aircraft caught up with and fired new exploding bullets into its belly.

At about midnight, it flamed over the Headland and crashed fully alight about 800 yards out to sea. A couple of bodies of crew members were washed up six weeks later.

“My grandmother, Susan Hallimond Marshall, lived with her husband’s family at New Brotton, and the house had a great view as far round the coast to Roker,” says Tony Marshall in Darlington, the lockdown having given him time to correspond. “As a boy, I remember her recounting seeing the action taking place and the final moments of the doomed dirigible as it fell from the sky.”

At the start of the Second World War, the family moved to Coach Road, Brotton.

“This was such a good vantage point that two members of the RAF Volunteer Reserve were billeted with her,” says Tony. “These two young men manned a Lewis gun, which was mounted in the upstairs landing window and designed to engage any of the Luftwaffe’s stragglers escaping south, after attacks on Teesside.

Eddie Lilley at Christmas 1943 - he manned an anti-aircraft gun from the upstairs window of a house in Brotton

“One, Eddie Lilley, hailed from Oldham, and after the war started a very successful lighting supply business. My grandparents made him feel so much at home, that he often came back for his holidays and he kept in touch until his death.

“The presence of this light anti-aircraft position didn’t stop the area from being bombed - one landed at the other end of the Coach Road and I recall a farmer’s field between Brotton and Huntcliff that bore the scars of several large, deep craters well into the 1970s.”

Lumpsey pit, Brotton, which was so concerned by Zeppelins it had its own horsedrawn gun in the First World War

Brotton, of course, was an ironstone town. Its most important mine was Lumpsey, sunk in 1880 beside the Middlesbrough to Whitby railway line. It employed nearly 500 miners in its heyday in the 1920s, and when it closed in 1954, it was the end of ironstone mining in Brotton.

So concerned was Lumpsey about the Zeppelin threat during the First World War that it had its own six inch gun fixed to an old railway wagon. When a dirigible hoved into view, the gun would be put onto the railway and pulled by a horse out to the edge of Huntcliff from where it would take pot shots at the enemy.