The goings-on in Darlington's first cocoa palace

There will be literally thousands of books on offer on every conceivable subject under the sun.

From a Memories point of view, the most interesting items are to be found in a collection of Darlingtonalia, which was put together by a grammar school old boy who rose to become big in the world of finance. He died last year in Scotland, and now his collection has come back home for dispersal.

There are pictures, prints and pamphlets, including the 350-line poem about the Polam Hall Christmas Tree party of 1861, which we featured in Memories 659, our Christmas edition.

There is a book about the Marley family of Ingleton, and a cuttings book of early 20th Century newspaper adverts placed by Bainbridge Barker, Darlington’s premier department store in Skinnergate.

A 1920s advert for Bainbridge Barker showing their classic, and rather grand, department store on the corner of Skinnergate and Blackwellgate in Darlington

Fascinatingly, there is an 1848 coloured plan of Henry Pease’s Westbrook gardens, which he developed as young man at the foot of the coaldrops off North Road before 1835. He had walks winding their way along the banks of the Cocker Beck, a couple of ponds, a summerhouse, a vinery and even an engine house which was next to a bath house. There is a suggestion that Henry, who was born in 1807, lived in a cottage in the gardens before he bought the Pierremont mansion in 1845 and moved up in the world.

Some visitors described the gardens as “large and beautiful”, although his father, Edward “the Father of the Railways” who had a tendency to grumpiness, dismissed them as “Henry’s folly”.

Henry Pease's engine house and bath house on the edge of his gardens in Westbrook

On the 1848 plan of Westbrook gardens, this building is called “Garden House”, above. It leans against the wall of the 1825 coal drops. Part of Garden House still survives in the back lane behind Westbrook Villas, where it is known as the “tallyman’s cabin”, as shown left. It is said to have been where the coal depot manager sat and watched coal being delivered by trains from the Stockton & Darlington Railway at the top of the wall and then collected by carters from the foot of the wall for transport into town. The tallyman is believed to have counted up how much coal each merchant was taking away, but it was clearly an attractive building in Henry Pease’s day. Below, as it looks today - it was in the 20th Century Anty Richards' ice cream factory

An extraordinary summerhouse that Henry Pease had in his Westbrook gardens in Darlington in 1848

The plan represents a lost moment in time because, as Henry turned Pierremont into the “Buckingham Palace of the North”, he sold off the gardens and from 1855 to 1871 the most fabulous collection of Victorian villas was built on top of them.

Another eye-catching book is Random Drawings of Darlingtonian Doings, which is a selection of sketches by John Dinsdale capturing the events in the town in 1879.

Dinsdale seems to have been a local man, and in 1880 he produced sketches of Durham regatta followed in 1881 by sketchbooks of Whitby and Scarborough, before he went to London to produce books of theatrical sketches. His drawings featured in magazines like the Illustrated London News, the Graphic and Punch, and he had quite a following in the Girl’s Own Magazine.

Darlington library has a copy of his 1886 book, Sketches at the International Exhibition Liverpool, and believes that he died back home around 1889.

John Dinsdale's drawing of Darlington's first cocoa palace, a curious-shaped building on the corner of Melville Street and North Road. Cocoa palaces were all the rage in the 1870s and 1880s as the temperance movement marketed the fashionable taste as an alternative to beer. Darlington soon had five palaces, but they quickly faded away

In Darlingtonian Doings, he sketched townspeople at the opening of the first cocoa palace in North Road, taking part in the sports day at Feethams and swimming, sweating and exercising in the Turkish Baths at the top of Bondgate.

Inside the Turkish Baths at the top of Bondgate in 1879. The baths had opened in 1877 and John Dinsdale’s picture shows the pool in the cellar. The building is now a continental supermarket, but the last time we looked into the cellar, you could still make out the tiled shape of the pool. Below: The baths in the 1940s

It, too, is a revealing snapshot of a lost time showing how people lived in days gone by.

The book fair on May 11 in the sixth form college on Vane Terrace runs from 10am to 4pm. Admission is £1.

At the sports day at Feethams, before a huge crowd with other drawings showing a packed grandstand, a penny farthing cyclist comes a cropper. In the background, John Dinsdale has drawn the town clock and St Cuthbert's Church