Dolly girl

Each morning at 7.50, every evening at ten past five, she’d stand on her front doorstep eagerly to greet their bus.

On Christmas Eve, 1948, the bus stopped on its homeward journey, the 60 men alighted and presented her with the talking doll for which they’d clubbed together. For Eileen Bennett, Christmas had come early.

The story made the Northern Despatch on December 27 – “a splendid example of true British Christmas generosity,” said the report, and a splendid antidote for a Boxing Day hangover, too.

Most may quickly have forgotten it; Eileen never did.

“I still remember getting that doll, probably the first thing I ever do remember.

My mother said I called it my trip bus, except that I couldn’t say ‘trip’ and called it my twip bus.

“I think I must have thought that it was mine, and that it would take me away somewhere nice. I must have been an early rider; I’d been standing there since March.”

The story has resurfaced, and the little girl been tracked down, ahead of a reunion for workers from the former Marshall Richards factory in Crook.

Beneath the headline “The little girl who waved”, the Despatch report had been reproduced in the group magazine. Eileen, now Eileen Hutchinson but still in Crook, was found by Crook Local History Society Muriel Marr, now inevitably known to fellow historians as Miss Marr-ple.

The company made machinery for the wire and copper tubing industry, chiefly for export. At its peak it employed around 400 men, those 60 bussed in every day from Tyneside.

Eileen then lived with her parents on High Job’s Hill, her travelling fan club so bowled over by her winsome wave that they wrote a Christmas poem, too:

To the little girl so very sweet
We present this doll so prim and neat.
Hours of joy, and gladness, too,
We hope this toy may bring to you.
Your catching smile, your tiny waves,
Capture the heart of willing slaves;
From travellers who have children, too,
May fate be kind to such as you.
So Eileen, dear, please make no fuss,
Accept this gift from all of us.
In giving you this we’re thrilled to bits,
Snug in your pram we hope it fits.

Though the Despatch carefully noted that it was “only one of many lovely presents the child got at Christmas”, Eileen became particularly fond of her bus trip dolly.

When she was five or six, however, she dropped it – “there was no carpet on the stairs, it bounced all the way down” – and the doll forever lost its voice. Eileen forgets what happened after that. “I just know that I was very upset and I think I got wrong, too. They tried to glue it but it had broken its neck and it was never the same.”

In the intervening 63 years she has never again had her name in the paper. “Who’d have thought,” says Eileen, “that that little doll could do it all over again?”

MARSHALL Richards came to Crook, in south-west Durham, in 1946, bringing just six men from company headquarters in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire.

“In Lincolnshire they’re farmers, but we know that in the North-East they have engineering in the blood,”

said a company spokesman at the time.

Within a year they’d recruited 63 workers locally. By 1968, Marshall Richards had won the Queen’s Award for Industry and founding director Sam Richards – a teacher’s son who’d started work on 3/6d a week as a shipyard apprentice in Barrow – had been made OBE for services to export.

“If you don’t keep a sharp look-out, you could drive right past the Marshall Richards factory at Crook without ever noticing it was there,” wrote the Echo’s industrial editor in 1963.

Richards worked every day until he was 74, developed machines that could make wire five times thinner than a human hair, mischievously threatened to go into politics when finally he retired, but was seriously injured in a car crash that killed his wife.

Particularly he was proud of the company’s efforts in reducing unemployment as the pits closed all around. “We can’t do much for the fathers,”

Richards said, “but we can try to help the sons.”

The firm was severely hit by the 1970s recession, the workforce dropping to around 40 before a move to nearby Fir Tree in 1984.

The idea of a small reunion came after the Local History Society began researching the company for an information panel. Those invited include 90-year-old Jack Harbron and Hilda Cushion, the first female crane driver, who’s 87.

“We really should celebrate the fact that a small town like Crook was home to such a pioneering company,”

says Society chair Brenda Smith. “Everyone’s really enthusiastic about the get-together and been brought up to date on the firm’s progress.

“It’s indicative of the pride and affection which they had, and still have, in Marshall Richards. We hope to produce a public information board to mark the company’s stature and importance.”

After several acquisitions and name changes, the company is now part of the multi-national SMS Group, based in Germany, but employs 23 people in South Church, near Bishop Auckland – manufacturing is outsourced elsewhere.

It’s at South Church that the reunion will be held, the company still world leaders. “I think that the former workforce is going to see some significant changes,” says Ian Mason of SMS, “but it’ll be lovely to have them, nonetheless.”