EAGLE-EYED Hugh Mortimer was passing the parade of shops at the Darlington town centre end of Coniscliffe Road when he noticed that renovation work had revealed a sign from the past.
The modern newsagents’ sign, advertising an obscure national paper called The Times, had been removed, and the painted name of an old occupant had appeared: “J Fraser Murray & Son”.
Can anyone tell us who J Fraser Murray was and what line of business was he in?
The Coniscliffe Road shops with the garage on the left and the Chesterfields flats in the background. Picture: Google StreetView
This little run of shops with the car showroom beside has always been a source of interest. The parade where J Fraser Murray sold his wares is the oldest building on this corner, and we’ve always fancied that it was connected to Joseph Pease’s Southend mansion (now Bannatyne’s hotel) over the road – perhaps a couple of estate workers’ cottages at the mansion’s rear gate.
Just before the First World War, the corner was sold for development, and Dr Frederick Pridham bought it. He was new to town and was going into partnership with the established Dr Donald Sinclair.
Chesterfield, on the corner of Coniscliffe Road and Stanhope Road, Darlington. Picture courtesy of the Darlington Centre for Local Studies
Chesterfield in the late 1990s shortly before its demolition
On the corner, Dr Pridham built a large surgery and house which he called Chesterfield as it had been while working as a newly qualified house surgeon in Chesterfield hospital that he had met his wife, Ida, the theatre sister.
Ida gave birth to their first child in Chesterfield (the house) in 1915, and Dr Pridham then joined the Royal Army Medical Corps. At Ypres, he was caught in a gas attack and invalided out.
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He recovered in time to be back at work in Chesterfield in 1918 when the post-war flu epidemic ripped through the area. Dr Sinclair himself was laid so low by infection that the Echo’s sister paper, the Evening Despatch, reported his death. He recovered, became deputy mayor and a keen historian of the town.
But his infection left Dr Pridham to treat all the patients on his own. At first he had a pushbike to take him out to Croft and Aldborough St John, but when patients in the Yorkshire Dales called for home visits, he bought a car – a Bellsize Bradshaw.
An early Belsize, similar to the one owned by Dr Pridham
This impressive vehicle, built in Manchester from 1921 to 1925, needed an impressive home, so at the bottom of Chesterfield’s garden, we believe Dr Pridham built what is now the car showroom beside J Fraser Murray’s run of shops.
An advert from 1922 for a Northallerton garage selling the very model, the Belsize Bradshaw, that Dr Pridham had
Dr Pridham, who was the first senior surgeon at Darlington Memorial Hospital when it opened in 1933, suffered badly from the after-effects of the war and he died aged 58 in 1947.
His replacement in the Chesterfield practice was Dr John Scott Kerss, a Scottish doctor who had received an MBE for his service during the Second World War on the north-east Indian frontier. He moved into the upper rooms of Chesterfield – it had seven bedrooms upstairs and three consulting rooms downstairs – and he continued the practice’s motoring tradition.
The launch of the Morris Mini-Minor in August 1959
In August 1959, the Morris Mini-Minor – later known simply as the Mini – was launched and within a month or so, Dr Kerss became the first person in Darlington to own one of the revolutionary small cars. He paid £375 for it.
And, apparently, crowds would gather outside the garage to see him cram his 17½ stone frame into it.
We think in the 1960s, the practice sold off the garage and the cottages. The garage became a petrol filling station and the cottages a parade of shops – perhaps that is when J Fraser Murray set up.
In 1982, the doctors decamped from Chesterfield to a new, purpose-built surgery in Denmark Street, from where they still operate, and in 2002, Chesterfield was demolished and replaced by the block of flats that is now called Chesterfields.
So the shops and the garage are about all that remain of the motoring doctors from days gone by.
The shopfront, photographed by Hugh Mortimer, has now been covered over again
READ MORE: MEET THE IRISH DOCTOR WHO SERVED THE DURHAM COALFIELD FROM THE START OF THE NHS
- If you can tell us any more about this corner, especially about J Fraser Murray, please email chris.lloyd@nne.co.uk
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