Warm welcome for Aubrey, the toast of Shildon

"THE year 1953 was important for me," said Aubrey Clethero. "It was a Coronation year, they climbed Mount Everest, Stanley Matthews got a cup final medal, Gordon Richards won the Derby, I passed my driving test, bought a car, got to the cricket festival at Scarborough, where the Aussies were playing, and started my cricket watching career – so it was an important year.”

1950 was nearly as important. That was the year Aubrey, 82, bought his first toaster.

And his last toaster.

It’s still toasting, making it the oldest working household electrical item in the North-East – unless you have a gadget still going after more than 60 years.

Aubrey popped in to the Echo offices the other week when his current car, a Mazda 5, was being serviced.

He brought with him a lifetime of memories.

He was born in 1928 in Shildon. When he was 16, he started at Shildon Works as an apprentice joiner. Having qualified, Aubrey got a job with the corporation, and in 1950 he was building council houses when he was approached by a man with a tasty proposition.

“He was Fred Muggeridge,” said Aubrey.

“He was starting doing contract work for Shildon council and was closing his electrical shop, MKH – Muggeridge, King and Hodgson – which was somewhere in Church Street.

“He said ‘do you lads want any electrical items?’ “My father always had a toasting fork and nearly every piece of toast got burnt on the fire, so I said we could do with a toaster.

“I would have paid three or four pounds for it.”

It was the best thing since sliced bread.

It is a Hotpoint Glass Sided Turnover Electric Toaster.

Aubrey knows because he still has its original box.

“I have two slices of toast with my lunch – I don’t have toast for breakfast – two or three times a week, and it sits on the table where I have my food.”

Aubrey has toast with macaroni cheese or a poached egg.

“But I don’t have the poached egg on the toast because I don’t like wet toast,” he said. “When I have beans on toast, I have the beans in a soup bowl and I eat them with a spoon so the toast doesn’t get wet.”

Do not scoff at Aubrey’s toast-making particularity.

Echo Memories comes to work every morning on two slices of artfully toasted white bread. Consumption cannot begin immediately after the toasting process.

The toast must be allowed to cool to the point of being cold. It is an abomination and an affront to Nature for butter to be allowed to melt on toast. With melted butter on it, toast ceases to be toast.

It becomes an unappealing bready sludge.

However, we will allow that toasted teacakes or hot cross buns are perfectly palatable when eaten warmly toasted. This may have something to do with the presence of currents.

Anyway, Aubrey has had two pieces of toast three times a week, 48 weeks of the year – we’ll allow four off as Aubrey likes to visit friends and relatives and follow Durham Cricket Club – for 60 years.

Always show your workings: that’s 2x3x48x60.

Which equals 17,280 pieces of toast.

Surely a world record.

And only a couple of cable replacements.

“People say to me that I could afford a new one, and it is a bit scruffy, but there’s no good cleaning it up because it won’t look as old,” said Aubrey.

A HISTORY OF TOAST
TOAST comes from a Latin word “tostus” meaning parched, or “torrere” meaning to dry with heat.

Before the advent of the toaster, primitive societies, like those in Shildon, used a toasting fork or a hot hearthstone. More advanced peoples invented the castiron bread-holder. This looked something like a mantrap. It was hinged so that it held a piece of bread over the flame.

With the application of electricity in a household setting, the British firm of Crompton and Company patented The Eclipse toaster in 1893. However its heating elements tended to melt and as few houses used electricity for anything other than lighting, it was before its time.

There are no known surviving examples of The Eclipse.

Toasters were one of the last kitchen gadgets to be electrified because of the difficulty of inventing a suitable heating element.

Thomas Edison and Joseph Swan had invented a wire that would burn brightly in a vacuum – the incandescent lightbulb – but a toaster requires the heat source and the bread to come together in the open air.

Therefore, Albert Marsh (1877-1944) of Illinois is considered, by this column at least, to be The Father of Modern Toast. In March 1905, he patented nichrome – an alloy of nickel and chromium that was perfect for a toaster.

Two months later, Marsh’s friend, George Schneider of the American Electric Heater Company of Detroit applied to patent “an enclosed toaster using a suitable resistance wire”.

The fate of this invention is not known, so the first commercially successful toaster is the D-12 which was patented by Frank Shailor of General Electric in the US in July 1909.

British toasterinventors appear to have been rather tardy.

Hotpoint – the manufacturer of Albert’s toaster – was formed in 1911 and in 1920 went into partnership with General Electric to introduce the toaster to the British market.

Should you wish for any further historical toaster-related information, visit the Cyber Toaster Museum at toaster.org.

AUBREY CLETHERO first contacted Echo Memories after our difficulties differentiating 1960s Ford Populars from Ford Prefects. Aubrey is as particular about his cars as he is about his toast.

His first car, he reminisced, was an Austin 10, built in 1946, bought by him in 1953 – that important year – for £350. It’s registration number was EWY 471 – WY for West Yorks.

“It was about clapped-out,” he said. “I used up all I had in the bank and my father paid for the insurance and my mother paid for the road tax. We got it home but I couldn’t take it out because I couldn’t afford the petrol. I had to wait for the next pay day.”

HAVING shown off his car pictures, Aubrey delved deep into his bag and brought out a fascinating selection of April 1920 pictures which belonged to his uncle, Thomas Saunders, who worked at the Shildon Works.

The first works were established in the countryside at New Shildon by the Stockton and Darlington Railway(S&DR) in 1825. It was a repair and maintenance shed near the foot of Brusselton Incline, near the Masons’ Arms level crossing.

Timothy Hackworth was in charge, and most of the repairs were done overnight as the S&DR’s first four locomotives – Locomotion, Hope, Black Diamond and Diligence – were required to work during the due.

In his spare time, Hackworth built engines: the Royal George (1827) and Sans Pareil (1829). In 1833, the S&DR formed a company to formally construct and repair engines at Shildon – this is regarded as the start of the works, and its first engineshed is now part of the Locomotion museum.

Shildon grew and grew until January 1, 1863, when it opened a branch in Darlington. This was the North Road Shops, staffed initially by 150 Shildon men.

From that day on there were fears about Shildon’s prospects, but it continued to expand until July 8, 1935, when it was cleared of all its engines. It stood empty for a few days before beginning a new phase: the construction and repair of railway wagons.

It survived railway nationalisation of 1948, and it thrived after the rationalisation of 1962.

Fifteen out of British Rail’s 31 rail workshops were closed; Shildon got £17m investment.

But on February 17, 1983, British Rail Engineering Ltd announced that, in its 150th year, the Shildon Works were to close. They duly did on June 29, 1984, and the heart was torn from the town.