In the dark over this white building on Albert Hill, Darlington

But it doesn’t say what it was erected for.

“I think it was a pub called The White House, and when it closed down in the early part of the 20th Century, I believe my late wife’s great-grandfather James Sheerdown may have been the last licensee,” says Malcolm Middleton. “The building was then taken over by the newly formed Albert Hill Working Men’s Club.”

In late Victorian times, there were definitely beer retailers occupying the premises. A beer retailer was lower than a licensed publican as he could only sell beer, not wine or spirits, and they could not be consumed on his premises.

In 1919, we believe the Albert Hill Club and Institute – the ninth working men’s club in Darlington – was formed in the building.

About 30 years ago, the club moved to new premises around the corner and since then the white building has had a variety of uses: it is now a shop and a gym.

But that still doesn’t explain what it was erected for back in 1865. If only buildings could talk because once there was a second plaque on it, perhaps explaining its purpose or revealing its name, but all the lettering has been chipped from it.

Can you tell us what it said or what this building really is?

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A COUPLE of weeks ago, we told that Thomas Barker, a St Helen Auckland pitman, was so scared by his encounter with the ghost of Mary Ann Cotton’s victims as he returned home on midnight on the day of her execution in 1873 that he refused to sleep upstairs in his bedroom.

READ THE FULL SPOOKY GHOST STORY HERE

Instead, he slept downstairs in what the Darlington & Stockton Times referred to as a “cheffionier” bed – until the ghost clattered about on the timber floor above his head “like a cat with cockle shells on its feet” so that he fled his cheffionier bed for the safety of a neighbour’s home.

But “cheffionier” is not in the English dictionary. Whatever is it?

“I remember during the 1950s visiting my grandparents’ one up, one down, terraced house in Darlington Road, West Auckland, where there was a bed in the living room which was folded up into a fairly tall, free standing cupboard,” says Mel Holmes in Bishop Auckland. “It was always known as the cheffionier.”

In a crowded pit home, having this sort of spare sleeping capacity makes sense, and since the 1760s, London firms had been making these “bureau bedsteads” – when they folded up, they were designed to look like a bureau.

Another piece of furniture is a chiffonier, which usually has lots of little drawers in it, so perhaps the outside of a folded-up bed was made to look like one of these.

In America, they call such things a “Murphy Bed”, apparently, after William Murphy who, in 1900, rented a one room apartment in San Francisco. He began courting a young opera singer, but the etiquette of the day prevented a lady from entering a gentleman’s bedroom. As William only had a bedroom, his ladyfriend could not call at his house, until he devised a bed that folded away into a cupboard so that she believed she was entering his living room.

He patented his “In-A-Door” bed in 1908 and his descendants still run the Murphy Bed Company.

Of course, many would consider a full-size fold-up bed to be a luxury. In really crowded pit homes, babies slept in a wooden drawer from a sideboard.

“Your story about the ghost and the cheffionier bed reminded me of a family story,” says Ian Wilson, whose great-grandmother, Annie Williams, of Brandon Colliery, was a well known spiritualist in the Durham coalfield .

“In the 1930s my father's family lived in the Sleetburn/New Brancepeth area where my uncle Raymond died around the age of 10 from diphtheria.

“The story was that my father, then a young boy, slept in the bottom drawer of a dresser. He awoke and saw his brother floating above him.

“He alerted his parents and my grandfather opened all of the doors and guided Raymond's ghost out through the front door.”

Any other stories of babies sleeping in drawers?

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