MEMORIES was speaking recently to the Teesdale U3A about Patons & Baldwins, the world’s biggest wool factory that was built after the Second World War at Darlington’s Lingfield Point.
The talk included this picture of six young ladies walking by the fishpond in P&B’s Italianate garden in the mid-1960s and, amazingly, one of them was in the audience: Margaret Brown, third from left, who was beside her sister, Marion Thomas. They were Woodwards back then, and caught the P&B bus in from Butterknowle.
READ MORE: REMEMBERING P&B: THE WORLD'S LARGEST WOOL FACTORY
Now Enid Slater from West Cornforth has been in touch. “The two on the right hand side are twins, Jennifer and Judith Beaty, who lived opposite us at Trimdon village,” she says.
Enid’s sister, Rita Proud, who was 15 years older, worked at P&B.
“We lived in Main Road and the bus stop was at the end of our street, and I remember that in the evening, we would lie in the grass opposite and watch the buses going past,” she says. “There were 20 or 30 of them because nearly everyone in this area worked there.”
Rita met her husband, Alan Cansfield, at P&B. He worked in the dye department. “After they got married, they got a caravan in McMullen Road in Darlington, where there was a little site near the factory,” says Enid. “They lived there for a couple of years in the late 1950s before they got their first house.”
Rita Proud on the left with her team in the P&B factory at Lingfield Point, Darlington
READ MORE: TRIBUTE TO DARLINGTON'S FIRST FEMALE COUNCILLOR AND CAMPAIGNER AGAINST WINDBAGGERY
THE March display in the Centre for Local Studies in Darlington library looks at Polam Hall, from its earliest days as the family home of Jonathan and Hannah Backhouse and its transformation in the 1850s into a Quaker school for girls run by Jane and Elizabeth Procter. Visitors can browse photographs, school magazines and ephemera from years gone by. The display runs until March 27.
This silhouette of Polam Hall was made around the turn of the 20th Century by Darlington's most famous artist, GA Fothergill, and it features in the exhibition.
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