SPOORS’ ironmongery shop burned so hot that the flashing blue lights on top of a fire engine melted so that they looked like fried eggs, says Tony Larkings who was on the first engine to arrive at the blaze in Newgate Street, Bishop Auckland, in early 1973.

“It was a hot evening and it was just before or after 1700 hours, when the shifts changed, when we got the call,” he says.

The Northern Echo: The 1973 fire on Newgate Street, Bishop Auckland

The 1973 fire on Newgate Street, Bishop Auckland

“When we arrived at the scene, the building was heavily smoking from underneath the eaves but the flames hadn’t broken through the roof – but that happened almost instantaneously, and within minutes the heat was that intense that the fire engine had to be moved because the two flashing blue lights on the top had melted so they looked like two fried eggs.”

Spoors was formed about 125 years ago, and were a well known Bishop Auckland family – Ben Spoor was Bishop Auckland’s first Labour MP in 1918. By the time of the fire, their business had grown so that there was the shop on Newgate Street and a warehouse behind running through to Kingsway.

In the warehouse, all manner of explodable items were kept for sale…

The Northern Echo: The 1973 fire from Kingsway

The 1973 fire from Kingsway. Pictures courtesy of John Heslop

“There was an asbestos roof and it was flinging dust and debris everywhere,” says Tony, who had qualified as a leading fireman only a couple of weeks earlier, “and there were gas cannisters which were going 300 or 400 feet up into the air and banging back down.

“And they stored fireworks in a shop nearby. I remember the bangs and the crashes, and later in the evening, my wife rang up and asked me why there had been fireworks in the town centre because she had seen them from where we lived.”

The fire completely gutted the shop and the warehouse, and is one of the most memorable in Tony’s 30-year career.

Bigger blazes, though, included the one at Dryderdale, the Backhouse family mansion near Hamsterley, which caught fire soon after the 1971 Michael Caine movie Get Carter had been filmed there. That required five appliances to fight, but the big one was what The Northern Echo called “the Great Fire of Spennymoor” which required 22 appliances. It was on August 27, 1981, when the Thorn EMI factory caught fire throwing up a plume of smoke that could be seen 20 miles away.

The Northern Echo: Still from the film Get Carter shot near Hamsterley, County Durham, with Dryderdale Hall in the background

Still from the film Get Carter shot near Hamsterley, County Durham, with Dryderdale Hall in the background. The hall caught fire soon after the film was released