WITH his head buried beneath a large black hood, the photographer in a back yard in Bishop Auckland was only looking at the three generations of Italians in his viewfinder. There was the rounded dumpling of grandma Columba with her smiling face, the debonair Sam with his slicked back hair and moustache, and the little Julio in his tunic, sucking apprehensively on his fingers as his grandma’s steely grip on his wrist kept him in place.

The Italians in the viewfinder were undoubtedly fascinating, but the photographer may not have known that beneath his feet was the Doctors Tunnel – a dark, haunted place that still fascinates Bishop Auckland today.

The tunnel was filled in 30 years ago, but the Zair family of Italian extraction still runs a cafe in the historic building that the photographer was using as a backdrop.

The first of them to come over in the 1890s was Spranza Rea, on the right of the picture. She came from the Arpino region of central Italy when she was 16 and worked in a cafe on the seafront at Scarborough.

She made a connection with Sam Zair, on the left of the picture. He, too, was from Arpino – a fairly poor agricultural area which exported many enterprising people to the North-East – where he had grown up as an orphan. The Ross family from Spennymoor seem to have taken pity on him and brought him to south Durham.

Sam met Spranza and they settled in Fore Bondgate, Bishop Auckland, where they established a cafe/confectionery/ice cream bar. Spranza’s parents, Columba and Joseph, came over to help with the cafe which had Joseph’s name over the door (see today’s front cover picture). Spranza’s sisters, Phyllis, Annie and May, came too.

They rented a portion of the building which had once been the Shepherd’s Inn. As Memories told last week, in the 18th Century, the Shepherd’s was extended so that it became Bishop Auckland’s premier meeting place. It went upwards, so patrons could relax with a drink in one hand and binoculars in the other and watch the horseracing on the Eleven Arches site across the Wear; and it went backwards, until it encroached over an ancient footpath. There was such a fuss about the encroachment that the pub’s owners tunnelled under their extension so the public could still use the old right of way from Finkle Street to Newgate Street.

The Shepherd’s now boasted Bishop’s largest assembly room for public meetings and dances, and rooms could be hired – magistrates held their court in one room; Roman Catholics worshipped in another, and a doctor held consultations in another. Wealthy people who had a doctor’s appointment would enter through the front door on Fore Bondgate; poor people who couldn’t afford much treatment turned up on spec and waited out the back in the tunnel, moaning and groaning from their ailments. The tunnel became known as Doctors Tunnel.

Bishop Auckland Town Hall was built in 1861 with bigger assembly rooms, and the Shepherd’s went into decline. In 1891 it was bought by coachbuilder Thomas Farr – whose coachworks were behind it – for £6,200. This considerable sum, worth nearly £700,000 in today’s values, suggests a considerable acreage of town centre land came with it, along with pews in St Andrew’s church at South Church and St Anne’s Chapel, in the Market Place.

As the Shepherd’s declined further, Mr Farr split it into two. One part, with the large danceroom, was called Ye Oakland Inn – known locally as “the high steps” due to the way it was accessed. The other part he let to the Italians to establish their cafe.

Over the years, Memories has written a lot about the late Victorian influx of Italians who worked strikingly hard to establish a fingerhold in their new country. The Zairs were no exception, traipsing through the streets of south Durham in first their horsedrawn carts and then their rudimentary motor vehicles, selling the ice creams that they had been up early to make to their “secret recipe”.

Sam Zair – who had the brilliant slogan “Oh! Mammy! It’s Sammy” down the side of his wagon – was followed by his son, Julio. It was they who bought the premises from Mr Farr: Sam the ground floor in 1939 and Julio half of the old upstairs assembly room in 1961. Today, of course, a third Zair generation – another Sam – runs the cafe on the site.

The Zairs used to make their ice cream in one of the outbuildings on top of the Doctors Tunnel. By the 1970s, the streets beyond their back wall were decaying. They area had become known as Farr’s Yard, after Mr Farr’s oily coachworks, and the council had a depot, plus tax workers had their offices in prefabs. In the late 1970s, Vinovium House – Bishop’s skyscraper – was built for the tax workers, and Farr’s Yard was cleared in preparation for the Newgate Centre. A Compulsory Purchase Order was slapped on the Zairs’ outbuildings, including the Doctors Tunnel.

“There were about ten steps down into the tunnel and it was about 10ft long with another ten steps up the other side,” remembers Sam Zair. “When it got dark, it was pitch black down there and we played tricks on people.” In fact, his father’s ice cream trade provided a perfect prop for a spooky shenanigan.

“On the left hand side as you went down the steps there was a hump in the wall and we used to say that the doctor was buried in there,” says Sam. “We got monkey’s blood and poured it down the hump and said it was the doctor’s blood...”

The concrete hump can still be seen at the foot of a wall behind the cafe but the tunnel is long gone. “I was there when they filled it in with tons and tons of concrete,” says Sam. “It must have been 1981 to 1982.”

John Alderson of Fir Tree, Crook, has also called Memories this week. He worked for G Stephenson, builder and contractor, which cleared Farr’s Yard and filled in the tunnel.

“It was June 1981,” he says. “Our orders were to fill it solid with concrete so there was no chance of it ever collapsing, and it took a full day to fill in – we poured extremely wet concrete in and used a long concrete vibrator to get all the air out.”

The concrete vibrator clearly did its job as there is no sign of a subterranean passage behind Zairs’ cafe. The road is perfectly smooth, although there is a strange hump in a wall which, if you are lucky, still oozes blood – strawberry flavoured blood.

The Northern Echo:

Columba Rea outside what is now Zair's cafe in Fore Bondgate, Bishop Auckland

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UNTIL the 1830s, the few Roman Catholics in Bishop Auckland had to travel eight miles to Croxdale to worship. However, in 1840, as Irish labourers came to work in the growing south Durham coalfield developed, the Catholics rented the assembly room at the Shepherd’s Inn for mass.

The following year, they moved to Peacock’s Yard in High Bondgate and then, on October 13, 1846, they opened St Wilfrid’s Church, built for £1,000 by the Newcastle architect Thomas Gibson.

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AMONG the ice cream makers from Arpino who settled in the North-East were Alex Martino, the “iceeeee, very, very niceeeee” man in Darlington, plus the Gabrieles of Bishop Auckland and the Grecos of Middlesbrough.

Wikipedia says that today in Arpino there are 210 families with the surname Rea and that most of the British Reas descend from them. These would include Joseph and Columba Rea of Bishop Auckland and, presumably, guitarist Chris Rea of the lemontops shop in Redcar.

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The Northern Echo:

WE are very grateful to Sam Zair for showing us his family photos and deeds. Perhaps the most startling revelation from his documents is that the little snickleway leading from Fore Bondgate to North Bondgate is properly called Cockshaw Nook. Can there ever have been a better name for a passageway than Cockshaw Nook?

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AS the map above shows, the ancient footpath ran from Finkle Street through the Doctors Tunnel and then turned 90 degrees along the rear of Newgate Street. After another right angled turn, it ran through a yard and out onto Newgate Street through an archway. At the top of this archway was the naked cherub (below) who featured in last week’s Memories as Bishop Auckland’s answer to Brussels’ Manneken Pis statue.

The Northern Echo:

Many callers (thanks to them all) said this yard was home to Hubbard and Simpson, who started in the mid-1920s as housebuilders. When Jack Simpson, son of a founder, took over in the 1950s, he concentrated on joinery.

Robert Wilson started as an apprentice in 1967 and worked for seven years until Mr Simpson retired.

In Robert’s day on Newgate Street, there was Sid Abbott’s tobacconist on the left of the archway and Timothy White’s on the right.

“In the yard there were three workshops on the left hand side and a larger machine shop on the right. It had circular saws, mortise machines, splindlers and planers.” An electric motor powered a huge belt than ran around the workshop, including underground, driving every machine.

The big question, though, is does Bishop’s cherub (which has an unfeasibly big head and sturdy neck for such a delicate body) widdle on passers-by like the statue in Brussels.

Says Robert: “I served my time there with a joiner called Norman Lee and he would always say when it was raining hard: ‘Don’t hang around here or you will get wet off him’.”

Perhaps he was just taking the...