IN a corner of a Darlington home, a carrier bag of framed pictures has been collecting dust. No one knew what to do with it although they knew it couldn’t be thrown away. So there it stayed. So long, in fact, that they no longer remembered what was in it – although they still knew that it shouldn’t be thrown away. Eventually someone generously decided that Echo Memories should be invited to blow off the dust and rediscover whatever was in it before everyone forgot.

It is a curious collection of five old Darlington group photographs which, except the 1890 cricketers, appear to be connected to the Rise Carr Working Men’s Club in the north end of town. The club came into being in 1917 when it started meeting in the reading room at the Rise Carr Rolling Mills, and many steelworkers were its earliest members. The club moved just over the road to the Stag Hotel in Spring Street and then, in 1929, opened its large brick premises in Eldon Street, on the edge of North Park and just down the road from the Scala cinema.

The club closed in 2007, so perhaps these nicotined pictures once grace the wall in there?

The rolling mills itself was formed as Fry, I’Anson and Company in 1868, and went through a variety of names until 1935 when it acquired FR Simpson of Oldbury, Birmingham, and became known as the Darlington and Simpson Rolling Mills (DSRM). During the Second World War, it rolled sections for Nissen huts, armour-piercing shells, tanks and Bailey bridges, and was so important that Gracie Fields visited to boost morale in 1941.

After the war, it became part of British Steel. It gradually wound down during the 1970s and 1980s and its closure was announced, with the loss of 234 jobs, in October 1998, although Tata Steel still has a presence on the site.

Today’s pictures of the factory come from a 1932 brochure, which is in The Northern Echo archives, although our favourite story comes from 1970 when a nightshift was interrupted by a ghost. Initially, the spooky steelworker rolled up its sleeves and got on with some work on the production line, much to the perturbation of the living. They challenged it, causing it to jump onto a wall and threw a stone at them which the men returned with interest (there is some debate about who cast the first stone but that may be because we’ve only ever had one side of this story). The ghost then disappeared through the wall.

A supervisor told the Evening Despatch: "If it turns up again we can put it to work filing sheets."

It never did.