“I REMEMBER it because just as he took the picture, I went over on my ankle and that was me finished with football, at least for the day,” said Graham Beadle, now 58. “It was very painful.”

“I’m the lad on the ball,”

said John Maughan, 59. “It looks like I’ve got it pretty well under control.”

There is some debate about who is in the picture that appeared in Echo Memories a fortnight ago. It was taken in Bishop Auckland in July 1960 and all the claims and counter-claims have us in the difficult position of having to referee a match 50 years after it took place.

But Graham and John appear to be the main players and, according to Robert Atkinson, of Middlestone Moor, Geoffrey Holdsworth is the little blond lad out on the right wing.

There is no debate about where the match was played: in South Terrace, with Flintoff Street running off to the right at the top of the picture.

Many, many people have been in touch about this location – thank-you, one and all.

Graham lived in Durham Street and remembers going with his mother to visit her friend in South Terrace. He even remembers the clothes he was wearing – corduroy shorts and an elastic S-buckle belt.

John’s childhood home was two streets away in Frederick Street, so South Terrace would have been a natural playground for him.

Both men still live in Bishop Auckland, although John has worked as an electrical engineer in Nigeria, Algeria, Dubai and the Falklands in between time.

Les Keeble was one of many to point out that the picture was taken at the rear of The Northern Echo office that still fronts Newgate Street. He suggests the picture may even have been taken by the Echo’s legendary Bishop photographer, Bill Oliver.

Peter Gallagher also has a memory about the office. “I remember helping to unload parcels of the Northern Dispatch sent from Darlington, for onward delivery to places like Witton Park, Auckland Park, Coundon, and Eldon,”

he said. “The Echo office had a small printing press in that office, and the papers hot off the press in Darlington were run through the little printer so that the Stop Press and racing results could be added.”

Phil Graham, of Filmar Photography in New Coundon, lays claim to the bike in the picture.

“I was seven years old that August and remember visiting the street to see an aunt, Ruth Elliott, who lived in the house where the bicycle is propped against the wall – it may even be my bicycle.”

Nearly all of this area has been cleared, although the street names remain. Many, like South Terrace, are self-explanatory, but can anyone say who the first Flintoff was?

Nowadays, Hogan’s pub is at the Newgate Street entrance to Flintoff Street. It was built in 1903 as the Mitre (as in the Bishop’s hat).

Adrian Andrew, whose grandma Kitty Burns lived in South Terrace, was more interested in the door to the back yard behind the footballers.

“I took pieces of paper into there for her to this bloke,” he said. “Lots of other kids would be running in and out, and it was only later that I found out I was putting bets on the horses for her.”

His eye was also drawn to the warehouse on the left of the South Terrace and Flintoff Street corner.

“This guy would take you in there into a dark room and then he would put the light on and there would be all these bananas hanging from the ceiling in varying stages of ripeness,” recalled Adrian.

This was Harrison’s purpose- built banana ripening warehouse, said Eric Brown who lays claim to the Bedford van parked outside for his grandfather.

“These streets were once the fruit, flower and vegetable market of south Durham,” he said. “As well as Harrison’s, there was Rhodes in Peel Street and my grandfather’s firm, C Brown and Sons in Chester Street.” Chester Street is a couple of hundred yards from South Terrace.

“The bananas would come in at the railhead, where Morrisons supermarket is now, in heated trucks from Liverpool, and they would be dead green, and we gassed them until they came ripe,” said Eric.

This picture, of course, is from the pre-supermarket age, before the days of huge refrigerated lorries that drive perishables through the night on motorways.

Back then, things were more local, and Bishop Auckland was the distribution centre for all the corner shops in Weardale.

Nowadays, Eric runs petfood distribution companies from his grandfather’s warehouse.

“All Havens Horsefeed in the UK comes from the Netherlands through us,” he said. “I still tell people that Bishop Auckland is the centre of everything, but they don’t believe me.”