THERE was a strange chimney in the background of last week’s picture of the men at West Auckland engine shed in 1960.

‘IT is the works tower scrubber at Fielden Bridge gasworks, which was used for the removal of ammonia and tar vapours from the gas,” says Charles Lilley, of Nunthorpe, who helped prepare the plant for demolition in 1967.

Memories 119 featured Gasworks Bank in Richmond and explained how, in distant days, coal was baked at 1,350 degrees in large retorts for ten hours so that it gave off gas.

This coal-gas was pumped, bubbled, washed, scrubbed and purified in a variety of processes to remove the impurities so that it was ready for household use.

Most towns and villages a century ago had their own gas company – Memories 123 told how in 1879, Witton Park’s gasworks exploded, burning about ten men, two of them so severely they died.

In Bishop Auckland, the gas company was founded in the late 1830s. Its gasworks were originally to the north of the town’s railway station but in 1878, a larger works was built in the Tindale Crescent area.

It was supplied with coal by a branchline off the Bishop Auckland to Barnard Castle railway.

In 1893, the company took over its equivalent in Witton Park and then in 1907 bought out the West Auckland and St Helen’s Auckland Gas Company.

The gas industry was changing: small local companies were being taken over by regional concerns.

In 1935, a mains pipeline was laid from Brancepeth Colliery, where coke oven gas was made, to Darlington. Smaller pipes connected Bishop Auckland, Spennymoor, Crook and Willington to the mains. The local gasworks became the place to store Brancepeth’s gas in gasholders and to clean it for domestic use – in the mid-1950s, there was an explosion in Bishop Auckland’s purifier box (if anyone knows the date, please let us know).

As the nationalised gas industry became truly national, small town gasworks were gradually demolished in the 1960s and 1970s, although there is still a gasholder just off the newish by-pass.