ON the western edge of Stockton stands a remarkable, symmetrical art deco building that is now apartments but which started life in the late 1930s as the Daylight Bakery.
As the top of the building says, this was Ralph Spark & Sons’ business – and we stumble into them as they were one of the main advertisers on Darlington buses in the 1950s.
Ralph was born in Stockton in 1860. He trained as a grocer and confectioner and in 1880, started his own bakery on Bishopton Avenue on the family farm – butter, cream, milk, eggs and curds for the cheesecakes were all produced on the farm.
In 1900, he opened his first shop on Yarm Lane in Stockton; by 1914, he had four branches; after the First World War, he spread to shops in Darlington, West Hartlepool, Thornaby, South Bank and Middlesbrough.
In the 1930s, Ralph, who was mayor of Stockton in 1920 and 1936, called in Middlesbrough architect Robert Ridley Kitching to design a model bakery, dedicated to health and efficiency, on the site of the farm.
Kitching, who was mayor of Middlesbrough in 1943, designed hundreds of buildings across the Tees Valley. His office, known as Kitching Building, in Albert Road in Middlesbrough is a strange looking thing and has recently been restored.
The Kitching Building of 1936 in Albert Road, Middlesbrough, was the office of architect Robert Ridley Kitching. Picture: Google StreetView
Unfortunately, Ralph didn’t live to see his new Daylight Bakery completed, as he died in 1939, and it didn’t open, under the control of his sons, John and George, until 1940. The large factory was fronted by the art deco office block which was faced by cream and green tiles. The offices, as well as four houses on the site for key members of staff, were heated by hot air from the bakery’s ovens.
The Middlesbrough Evening Gazette was delighted by what it saw when the bakery opened: “In this brilliantly lighted factory there are chopping machines, dough-mixing machines, and indeed, mixing machines of all sorts, which do their chopping and assembling on a grand scale.”
The reporter was impressed by the machines which covered chocolates and other coatings onto the confectionary, and he said: “But the most impressive features of the whole building are the automatic ovens, which deal in turn both with bread and cakes or pastries and biscuits.
“Truly enormous areas of space are occupied by the preparation for the vast output of white and brown bread necessary in an industrial district like ours.”
Sparks was now operating on an industrial level: it had 380 staff spread across the bakery, 15 shops and four cafes in the Tees Valley. The model bakery included a laundry for the linen used in the cafes, a joinery department which produced and maintained all of the shops’ fixtures and fittings, plus a garage and mechanics department for the Sparks’ vans – as well as keeping the shops supplied, the vans were a notable feature doing home deliveries.
And the icing on the top of the bakery’s cake came on June 6, 1956, when it was visited by the queen.
The Sparks family sold the business to Rank Hovis McDougal in 1970, and then in the late 1970s, a 29-year-old Scotsman came to work on the delivery vans. He’d left school at 15 with no qualifications, joined the Royal Navy, drifted down to Jersey where he’d met the Stockton lass who would become his first wife. She brought him to her hometown to get a proper job, and while he was working at Sparks, he spotted an ice cream van for sale. He bought it for £450 and set himself up in Yarm, acquiring more vans. He sold out in 1986 for £26,000, founded a nursing home business in Darlington which he sold in 1997 for £26m. Then he moved into children’s nurseries and health clubs. Now he is worth about £462m and he once lived in Darlington’s first £1m house, as you’ve already seen. The Sparks’ bright spark was, of course, Duncan Bannatyne.
It's him again: Duncan Bannatyne in what seems to have been his first picture for The Northern Echo, taken in his Quality Care Homes office in Darlington in August 1992
The bakery closed in 1985, just as Bannatyne’s business was taking off, and stood empty and decaying until 1994. The factory was demolished and replaced by housing, but the office was saved by being converted into apartments. It now must be one of the Tees Valley’s most individual, even iconic, buildings.
The last of the Sparks who ran the bakery was George, who died in 1996 aged 102. He’d been wounded in the First World War at Ypres and could remember how his career started by delivering hot cross buns to the shops on his bike.
L With thanks to David Mackintosh of Norton, and the Cleveland & Teesside Local History Society website.
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