Choice titbits from the postbag

There were five viaducts on the line - a nine-arch stone one at Belmont, two timber ones over the rivers Browney and Dearness, and an 11-arch one at Victoria, Durham, which was identical to Newton Cap.

An article by the late Frank Hutchinson, for the Bishop Auckland Civic Society in 1985, says that the Newton Cap Viaduct has an estimated weight of 47,000 tons.

He says: "The Bishop Auckland town station was reached by a short tunnel under the Old Town Head, thus causing no interference to the roads above.

"It is not known how much coal or coke, or how many passengers, crossed the viaduct before the line closed in August 1968, but many still alive can remember when trains drawn by the Flying Scotsman and other famous engines were diverted over from the main line.

"At night and lit up, these memorable trains made a fine picture postcard."

By amazing coincidence, Jean Hardy, of Crook, found such a picture postcard at a collector's fair a couple of years ago, selling for £3. It was printed by Delittle, Tenwick and Co, of York, and probably dates from about 1910. She has kindly lent it to Echo Memories.

Mr Hutchinson continued: "After the war, there were packed trains of holidaymakers crossing the viaduct. They came from Tyneside and Wearside, on their way to Blackpool and the west. There were special trains for convalescent miners going to their home at Grange-over-Sands.

Best of all were the FA Cup Final excursions with Newcastle to Wembley in the early 1950s.

"It was a common sight to see the platforms crowded with Saturday shoppers and revellers who had had a night out in Bishop Auckland on market days.

Every compartment was full by the time the last train pulled out for Hunwick, Willington, Brancepeth, Brandon and Durham, and then the hissing gas lamps were turned off."

DURING the Depression of the 1930s, Durham County Council started an innovative scheme in which it gave unemployed men a five-acre smallholding and told them to support their families.

Such schemes were run at Escomb, Etherley and at Toronto, where 44 men, mostly ex-miners, were set up for self-sufficiency. The council trained them in poultry keeping, pig rearing, market gardening and growing plants under glass. It gave them £10 towards buying stock, and it equipped their smallholdings with £200 worth of equipment.

George Danson, who had been a farm equipment salesman before the Depression bit, was one of the small-holders.

He started in 1936 and lived in Addison Road, with his wife Phyllis and three daughters - the eldest, Joan, has sent in the 1938 Daily Express cutting about the scheme (below left).

The Daily Express was a little late on the scene, though, because in the summer of 1937 King George VI and Queen Elizabeth - now the Queen Mother - visited Addison Road to inspect the scheme.

Joan's parents loved their lifestyle. George Danson worked the land until he died in 1970, and Phyllis stayed in Addison Road until 1993. "She thought it was paradise," says Joan.

THREE weeks ago, we showed a picture of the Peckett steam engine named Toronto that worked at the colliery at Newton Cap.

Graham Redfearn, of Bishop Auckland, has been in touch to fill in its career details.

The engine, made in Bristol in 1912, seems to have moved from Toronto to Fishburn Colliery, which was also owned by the Stobarts company, after the General Strike of 1926.

Fishburn colliery had it rebuilt in 1938 at Tudhoe Ironworks. It was scrapped at Fishburn in 1957.

Graham says there was another engine operating at Newton Cap. It was an 0-4-0 saddle tank engine built by Manning Wardle in 1873 for the North-Eastern Railway (NER). The NER sold it in 1902 to Lingford and Gardener, of Bishop Auckland, who rebuilt it and sold it to Toronto colliery.

This particular engine seems to have worked in the Newton Cap brickworks and for much of its later life was owned by the North Bitchburn Fireclay Company, the company which reopened Newton Cap pit in 1937 to win fireclay to turn into bricks. The engine was broken up at Newton Cap about 1950.

LAST year, Echo Memories ran a short series on Darlington Club, when it celebrated its century. It was the first working men's club in Darlington.

With the help of the Lottery-funded Tomorrow's History project, run by Darlington library, the club has turned its year-long trawl for historical information into a book. Although the book is essentially about the club in Northgate, it also represents a history of the social lives of its members.

Copies of the book are available for the public to borrow from either the club or the library in Crown Street, Darlington.

LEONARD Winter writes from Palm Coast, Florida, in the US, after the January article on the listing of the Stooperdale railway offices in Brinkburn Road, Darlington.

Leonard started work there as a 14-year-old in 1932. He was in the accounts department and put in charge of a machine which printed out the names and numbers of all LNER employees in the North-East.

"What a wonderful building Stooperdale was," he says, "with those lovely revolving doors out front, wide stairways and hallways and spacious lifts. It really was great and it made you feel great working there."

Echo Memories has a wide international following, and its overseas devotees can now find it on the Internet at www.thisisthenortheast.co. uk/leisure/memories.

MARIE Bourn, of Darlington, points out that there was a railway line which ran to the rear of the Stooperdale offices.

"The line ended at a back entrance, complete with concrete platform," she says.

"This line was laid for the use of Sir Vincent Raven when travelling in the saloon coach which stood in readiness at platform three at Bank Top station."

Sir Vincent was the North Eastern Railway's chief mechanical officer from 1910 to 1917, and Stooperdale was grandly appointed when it was built in 1914 to suit a man of his grand importance (Italians came all the way from their homeland to fit the terrazzo marble floors).

During the Second World War, Miss Bourn says that five air raid shelters were built under the front lawns and flowerbeds of Stooperdale. It is understood that some of them are still intact.

In 1963, British Railways decided that all the formerly separate railway companies' pensions funds should be brought together under one roof and a huge computer was installed at Stooperdale for the purpose.

It was such an impressive computer, occupying the ground floor to the left of the entrance, that people came from around the world to see it in operation.

EARLY in February, Echo Memories told the fantastic tale of Ann Allan, the reclusive millionairess who lived in Wilton House, at the top of Nunnery Lane.

She also died in the house, suffering a terrible death after falling into her fire in the kitchen.

Wilton House was built for her in 1867 and is now a nursing home.

It is not the only reminder of her for, as Carol Hodgson, of Darlington, points out, there is also Wilton Lodge. It was presumably Miss Allan's gatehouse, because it has her initials AA on the side of it, along with the date 1868.

The lodge was derelict in the 1960s, but has since been modernised and extended.

FRANK Sanderson writes from Liverpool to reminisce about his grandfather, Moses Chapman (1894-1966), who lived in St Helen Auckland.

"Here comes Dr Bodie," he would say, as some "puffed-up" character came into view.

"Dr Bodie?, I'd ask. To which he replied: 'Aye, Dr Bodie. He thinks he's summat and he's nowt' . There were a few Dr Bodies in St Helen Auckland," says Frank.

A couple of weeks ago, Echo Memories told the tale of the magician Meurice Hiodini who, among other things, married a lass from Newton Cap.

Like Professor Hiodini, Dr Walford Bodie MD, the "Electric Wizard", appeared at the Eden Theatre in Bishop Auckland.

A Scotsman, his claim to fame was that he could pass 30,000 volts of electricity through his body, lighting up the lightbulbs that he held in his hands.

He boasted that he was the "Master of Electricity" and, self-effacingly, the "Most Remarkable Man on Earth".

He also claimed to be the "Bloodless Surgeon", because he would call ill people on to the stage, zap them with a few thousand volts and they would return to their seats cured.

The New Zealand rugby team, the All Blacks, endorsed his Electric Liniment Rub.

He came to Bishop Auckland about 1905 - before he was exposed as a fraud in 1909. Medical students rioted at one of his shows in Glasgow because they were concerned about his quack remedies. In the resultant court case, Dr Bodie revealed he had got his PhD by correspondence course and that the MD after his name actually stood for "Merry Devil".

The public, who had thrilled at his stage shows, realised that instead of pumping himself full of electricity, he had used static electricity which generated plenty of sparks and smoke, but was pretty harmless.

Bodie lost the court case, but it did not finished his career. He was a friend of the legendary escapologist Harry Houdini, who gave Bodie the electric chair used for the first execution in the US, in 1890. Bodie incorporated the chair into his act, and by 1922 he was claiming 240 million volts were passing through his body.

He died in 1939 - of natural causes, not electrocution - but his name lived on, in St Helen Auckland at least, for a good deal longer.

Published: Wednesday, March 20, 2002