Is this farewell to Darlington's 100-year-old Scala cinema?

Once, in 1939, Darlington had more cinema seats per head of population than any other town in Britain and there was practically a cinema on every street corner – there were eight purpose-built cinemas and another seven venues which regularly showed films.

Now there is just the Vue multiplex.

The shells of five of those eight cinemas remain, although the days of the Scala in Eldon Street appear to be numbered. Darlington council has received a planning application to demolish it and replace it with 12 affordable homes.

Eldon Street, off North Road, Darlington, in February 1972. In the centre of the picture on the left of the street is the Scala cinema. On the left of the picture nearest the camera is the Rise Carr Working Men's Club

The Scala was Darlington’s fourth purpose built cinema when it opened on March 17, 1913, in the golden age of the silver screen. The first cinema, the Empire in Crown Street, had opened in 1911 followed by the Arcade in Skinnergate in August 1912. Then came the Court Kinema in Skinnergate on February 11, 1913, followed by the Scala a month later and the Alhambra, on the Gladstone Street corner on March 22, 1913. An extraordinary boom.

The Scala was initially known as the Eldon Street Picture Hall – it was renamed “the Scala” in the early 1920s. It had 600 seats, and the Echo said it was “a finely-built structure” that was “elegantly decorated” and had been entirely constructed by local labourers. It was designed by local architects, Hoskins and Brown.

It had a stage that was 25ft wide and 9ft deep, and it had two dressing rooms which were used by occasional variety acts.

Little Mary Lawson, “the Scala Pet”, (above) must have used those dressing rooms. She was born in 1910 in the Eastbourne area of town and her first break, aged five, was singing and dancing on the Scala’s stage when the film reels were being changed. By the age of 12, Mary was starring in the west end of London; at the age of 24, she was starring in her first Hollywood movie. It was called Falling in Love, and she was visited in the film studio by tennis star Fred Perry, who had just retained the men’s title at Wimbledon. They fell in love and became engaged, and although the media scrutiny of their trans-Atlantic relationship meant it only lasted eight months, they were the Posh and Becks of the pre-war years. Sadly, Mary was killed in an air raid on Liverpool when she was only 31 in 1941.

Mary Lawson, the Hollywood moviestar from Darlington, who died aged 31

READ MORE: THE FULL STORY OF LITTLE MARY LAWSON: FROM PEASE STREET TO HOLLYWOOD

The Scala closed on April 28, 1962, with its last film being Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, a comedy starring Doris Day and David Niven.

There is a suggestion that during its last years it was part of the Essoldo chain of cinemas, based on Tyneside, but it appears to have been owned by the Weightman family right through from 1913.

It was run as a bingo parlour until 2014 when it converted into a snooker and pool hall. Soaring energy bills snookered that enterprise and it closed on August 29 last year.

Demolition now seems likely but a little bit of the flavour of these silver screen days will remain.

The Scala was built to cater for the working class railwaymen who lived in the terraces around it, and their big night out at the movies would have been completed with a taste of luxury: fish and chips.

We reckon that there has been a chippy alongside the Scala since opening day, and although it was closed for a decade, it reopened last year as Mr Chippy (which, incidentally, gets the Memories seal of approval).

In the years after the Second World War, this chippy was run by James W Kitching. He was frustrated that his customers only turned up at movie-time, meaning his fishfriers stood unused most of the day.

During this downtime, he started frying crisps in them, and Kitching’s crisps became a local delicacy – they sold for 3d a packet in the South Park tea room. They had a distinctive taste, as Mr Kitching fried his crisps in cooking oil and his fish and chips in beef dripping in the same frier. Therefore, the first fish of the evening tasted of crisps and an early batch of crisps – all plain in those days, although perhaps with a wrap of salt in the bag – had an unexpected waft of beef dripping to them.

In this country, crisp production was almost entirely in the hands of Smiths Crisps, founded in London in 1920, until just after the Second World War when there was an explosion of crisp makers – it was the golden age of the golden wonders.

In 1947, Tudor Crisps were formed in Newcastle and Golden Wonder in Edinburgh, while in Leicester, Henry Walker didn’t start making Gary Lineker’s favourite brand until 1948.

Michael Owen with a waxwork model of Gary Lineker, and a packet of Walker's crisps in 1998

So Mr Kitching was at the cutting edge of crisps, and he moved from the Eldon Street chippy to a proper crisp factory in Oxford Street, off Northgate, in the early 1950s. In 1960, he was gobbled up by Tudor which itself was eaten up by Smiths in 1961, which was eventually swallowed up by Walkers in 1989.

However, the regional identity of Tudor survived for several decades. In 1962, Golden Wonder introduced the first flavoured crisp – cheese and onion – and Smiths responded by trialling its first flavour, salt and vinegar, in Tudor crisps in the North East. When the region’s tastebuds approved, salt and vinegar went national in 1967.

The Tudor adverts of the late 1970s (above), featuring a newspaperboy with a pronounced Geordie accent, were filmed in Gateshead and launched a thousand catchphrases – well, at least three.

They were “a canny bag of crisps”.

They were “crisps that’re really worth their salt”.

And, faced by the prospect of delivering newspapers to the top floor of the 280ft Derwent Tower, nicknamed the Dulston Rocket, without a lift and with only a bag of crisps as a reward, the young lad happily says: “For Tudor, I’d climb a mountain.”

The Tudor name disappeared in 2003, long after Mr Kitching, the crisp king of Eldon Street, had had his chips.

The Derwent Tower, or Dulston Rocket, starred in the Tudor crisp adverts but was demolished in 2009 in Gateshead

READ MORE: THE FULL STORY OF THE DARLINGTON ABC

THOSE cinemas in full: Empire (1911), Arcade* (1912), Court* (1913), Scala* (1913), Alhambra (1913), Majestic* (1932), Regal/ABC* (1938), Regent (1939). * denotes cinemas which at least partly survive. Other venues showing films: Central Hall, Larchfield Street Drill Hall, Mechanics Institute, the Picturedrome in Gladstone Street, the Astoria/Assembly Hall in Northgate, and the Hippodrome.