A Christmas killing at Auckland was the "act of a madman"

At 7.55pm on December 23, 1922, Jimmy Fisher, 27, had been standing in the crowded street outside Messrs Bainbridge’s butchers’ shop, near the Wear Valley Hotel, when he was stabbed in the neck by an assailant unknown to him.

He screamed and fell to the floor, bleeding profusely.

His jugular vein had been severed, and although he was assisted to the nearby Lady Eden Cottage Hospital, he died at 8.15pm through severe loss of blood.

His last words to Nurse Ada Woolf were: “An Italian did it.”

Out in Newgate Street, a frightened crowd followed a man in a Trilby hat and long, brown overcoat, his hands dripping with blood, as he walked towards the town centre. He slashed out at Thomas Heslop, an engine driver of South Church, inflicting a wound to his cheek.

When the man in the Trilby reached Theatre Corner, which in those days was still occupied by the Eden Theatre, he was apprehended by two policemen, Supt Headen and PC Nesbitt.

 The Eden in Newgate Street, Bishop Auckland in January 1973. It was demolished the following year. The arrest took place on this corner

“On searching the man, the superintendent found in his pocket an open clasp knife covered with blood, both hands of the man being blood stained,” said The Northern Echo on December 28, 1922, as it reported on the inquest into the death of Jimmy, who had lived in Gib Chare.

The assailant was Dominico Santi, an ice cream vendor from Murton Colliery, who had come to visit relatives in Bishop. He had, said the superintendent, “a wild look”, and repeatedly said as they took him into custody: “Me murder poison.”

Santi was the brother of Giocondi Santi, ice cream vendor of Evenwood, and the Italian family were well settled in south Durham.

In subsequent hearings, Giocondi told how his brother had gone away to fight for the British army in 1917 and had returned a broken man.

He had been receiving medical help, but his behaviour had grown increasingly erratic. When suffering “malarial attacks”, he was violent towards his wife, Annie, who came from Willington.

Newgate Street, Bishop Auckland, in 1900

On December 21, 1922, Annie had left their home in Murton because she feared for her own safety. Dominico had become convinced that she was trying to poison him with a pork chop, and he told her he had a revolver in the house which was “for her”.

Everyone agreed, though, that Jimmy Fisher was unknown to anyone in the Santi family. Tragically, he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Although the jury at his inquest 100 years this week committed Dominico for trial for “wilful murder”, the coroner, JT Proud, was correct when he said the killing was an “act of a madman”.

The murder trial never seems to have taken place, presumably because of Santi’s mental health.

The Echo finished its report 100 years ago by saying: “The coroner expressed regret that the jury should have to investigate a case of such a nature at this season of the year. It does seem out of place, he said, that when peace and goodwill and friendly greetings are on everybody’s lips, that tranquillity should be upset by a grim tragedy like this.”

The Wear Valley Hotel in Newgate Street, near where Jimmy Fisher was stabbed, in 2002, shortly before its demolition

Alex Martino, a Darlington Italian ice cream maker, with his ice cream cart. Such men brought a taste of the exotic to the Durham coalfield

THE immigration of Italians into County Durham before the First World War is one of the many stories that fascinates Memories. They came from poor farming areas and brought with them the mysterious secrets of gelato. These secrets gave them a unique selling point and enabled them to set up ice creameries and cafes in practically every community in the coalfield – just as, in later decades, Chinese and Indian immigrants used the culinary tastes of their homeland to create businesses in their new country.

Many of the Italians who established themselves in County Durham were related.

In 2014, the former EastEnders actress Tamsin Outhwaite (above) appeared on the BBC’s genealogy show, Who Do You Think You Are? Her great-grandfather turned out to be Adelmo “Arthur” Santi, the ice cream vendor of Fishburn.

Adelmo came from Barga in Tuscany, where he was born in 1896. He came to this country in 1913 and tried to make a new life in Glasgow before settling in the Durham coalfield in the early 1920s – it seems more than a coincidence that there were already other Santis established in south Durham when he arrived.

His son Remo, who is Tamsin’s grandfather, was born in Bishop Auckland on September 2, 1924.

Another son, Henry, was said to have fallen off a rope swing and died and the family were too poor to pay for a funeral, so the miners of Fishburn rallied around.

Over time, Adelmo prospered in Fishburn – even though he and his eldest son, Peter, were interned on the Isle of Man during the Second World War because of their Italian roots – and by the 1950s, he was said to be the richest man in the mining village.

In 1952, he gave land which became a village playground and also a memorial to those who had died in the war.

Adelmo died in 1978 and his wife, Maria, in 1980, but he still has direct descendants in the area, and in 2008, his playground – officially known as the Fishburn Memorial Children’s Playing Field – received a £100,000 restoration.

Children playing in the restored Fishburn playing field in January 2008