ECHO Memories was delighted a couple of weeks ago to be able to name Lucy Hood (ne Proud) as the face of Lingford's. Her picture, tripping merrily over some stepping stones carrying a basket of heather, was on millions of baking powder packets and magazines.

The picture was painted following a photographic session with Lucy in about 1904, when she was about 18 years old, at the stepping stones across the Wear at Harperley.

This week, we can go one better. Today, we reproduce one of the photographs from that original session.

Lucy, who died in 1969, but whose son John still lives in Bishop Auckland, is on the right of the picture with her basket. On the left, is Sarah Elizabeth Laidlow, whose granddaughter has kindly allowed us to use the picture. Sarah Elizabeth ran the post office at Harperley Station. The young girl in the picture is believed to be a cousin of Sarah.

l With thanks to John Askwith of the Weardale Railway Trust for his help in finding the picture.

Ruth Payne was a packer at Lingford's famous baking powder factory in Bishop Auckland, from when she left school in 1923, until she retired in 1968.

She stands head and shoulders above the other Lingford's workers on the picture of the 1947 company outing to Scarborough - she can be seen fifth from the left on the back row - because she was 6ft 1in tall.

Ruth also stood head and shoulders above the other workers because, in 1933, she won the annual prize for being the best-turned-out girl in the factory.

This was one of Lingford's many employee-friendly ideas to encourage better working conditions and improve morale. Ruth won a quite splendid silver manicure set which included a powder bowl, scissors, nail file and tweezers in a presentation box.

Ruth, who lived in Bishop Street, Bishop Auckland, died in 1971, aged 63, and her presentation box is treasured by her nephew, Norman Cook, who lives with his wife, Joyce, in Bishop Auckland.

In the centre of the front row of the picture is Ernest Taylor, the general manager of Lingford's from the early 1930s to the early 1950s, who was responsible for introducing many of the employee-friendly policies.

He was born in Newcastle in 1894, and at the age of 18 was managing a jewellery shop in Bath. During the First World War, he served in one of the Gloucester Regiments in Egypt, rising to the rank of captain.

He then worked for a fruit importer in Newcastle, but when he was on holiday in the South-West of England heard about a vacancy at a Bishop Auckland baking powder manufacturer.

And so he wound up at Lingford's, and lived at Wolsingham.

Mr Taylor had an inventive mind - it was he who decided that Lingford's should make camouflage nets for the Second World War effort. He also invented board games. Milestones, a family fortunes-type affair, went on sale in this country and Starluke, which was about planets and stars, was successful in France.

He died in 1968 and his eldest daughter, Joan Connacher, still lives in Crook.

Eileen Hauxwell, from Stapleton, was on the Scarborough outing, and remembers it as the longest day. From Bishop Auckland, they caught a train to Darlington. Their carriages were coupled to a train to York where they were fastened to an engine that pulled them into Scarborough. Fine. Except that on the way home, at York station they were accidentally coupled to an engine that pulled them to Leeds and not Darlington. They didn't arrive home until 4am. Bishop police had had a busy night going around all the homes of Lingford's employees informing loved ones that they were safe and sound, but slightly lost.

Herbert Lingford was the third Lingford to run the firm, and it was he who cropped up on the news pages of The Northern Echo a couple of weeks ago when his 167-piece silver cutlery service sold at auction for a world record £52,000.

The service was made by arts and crafts specialist Omar Ramsden, who died in 1939 leaving his widow in difficult circumstances. Herbert, who lived at Lancelands near Cotherstone, knew the family well and offered to buy the service.

Echo Memories has been inquiring about Herbert's death, and many readers have called to explain. It seems that he went missing over Easter weekend in 1950. Staff and friends were organised into search parties and he was found three days later in a wood near Barnard Castle. Pills were apparently involved.

Kenneth Lingford was the fourth family member to take charge of the firm, and it was he who closed it in 1973.

His great love was flying, and in those days there were airports at Croft and Greatham, Hartlepool, where he could indulge himself. He also made model aircraft at his home in Witton-le-Wear.

Jim Blumer, the Darlington photographer famed for his Eye in the Sky from the Past series in The Northern Echo, flew with Kenneth in an Auster Autocrat plane. "He was a brilliant pilot," he recalls, "but he could be most uncommunicative if it was a subject that he didn't want to talk about, and all he did want to talk about was aviation."

All the Lingfords were devout Quakers, which meant they were pacifists. Kenneth was unable to fight during the Second World War. Instead, he served as a test pilot in the Middle East. Because he was testing to find defects in the planes, this was often just as dangerous as being a fighter pilot.