A view of Norton High Street, showing the Unicorn Inn on the right. 
Picture Stockton Archive
A Pictorial History of Stockton-on-Tees
A view of Norton High Street, showing the Unicorn Inn on the right.
My Uncle Dick Barker from Crooks Barn Farm, after a hard days work, would get on his bicycle and go for his usual pint most nights at ‘The Top House’ – what memories!
Margaret Hazell (nee Lindsell)
Margaret I’m almost sure that we used to go potato picking on your uncles farm and often helped out with cleaning the cow sheds etc.Did he many years later move to a place which I think was a farm next to the Alms houses in the village? I had a job at Wades garage on Billingham bank where he also came in for petrol several years later.
It was Les Barker who lived in the farm next to the Alms Houses it had been Lamberts, I went to school with the lads. Crooksbarn Farm was where Les moved from as it was bought up for housing. I discovered last year that Les died young often wondering what happened to him having been away myself and not keeping track. We played together as lads and he was always the life and soul of any group.
You could have picked potato’s on any of the many local farms and small holdings that turned over to growing them in war time but then carried on growing them in the Austerity years that followed. People do not know that things got worse after the war with some foods on ration that had not been during the war.
Norton was still a village surrounded by market gardens small holdings and farms, there was always plenty of work for the locals during harvest hay making and potato picking. The potato pickers worked entirely hands on as the only machine was the horse drawn scrabble that went up the rows turning most of the potato’s to the top to be picked.
Dad and I would pay the farmer and re-pick the fields after the pickers left getting bags of potato’s to store and feed the pigs all winter, what we did not need we sold on, though Dad would not eat them he grew Arran’s or King Edward.
My job was lighting the boiler next to the stables and cooking enough potato’s for four or five days which mixed with waste cake and bread from Sparks Bakery and waste Lemon Curd or Jam from Pumphrey’s which Dad collected with his truck.
They had been well scrubbed by me in an old tin bath with a yard broom so once they were tender a couple taken from the boiler and mashed with home made butter helped satisfy a growing lads appetite, I was not fussy what type they were and cooked in the skin lovely I still do cook them in the skins a lot of the time.
Dad was famous for his bacon as he would not use the fish meal or the compound waste produced by the corporation from waste collect by them, only the best for those pigs and the taste of the bacon proved him right.
The long brick wall on the left of the picture was a back way in to Dr Willan”s house. He used to park his Sunbeam Talbot outside there in the 1940-50″s
During restoration work on The Unicorn in 1990″s, lath and plaster work was found dating the building to at least the late 1500″s. For over 100 years there were 3 pubs on The Green, each with their own “clique”. The Fox and Hound” West-Row, now private housing – farmers seed-merchants and travellers, as the inn had both carriage and stabling to the rear. The Hambeltonian, now paper-shop in centre of Green- both indoor and outdoor male servant”s of the 8 “big houses” around the Green. The Unicorn, serving the Village for well over 300 years. An early centre for farm-laboures (unions) and village soceties (medical and welfare) and cricket club. Contact point for Vicars and Doctor/Midwife Clerk Note the mandatory lime-ash, denoting a pub or Inn to travellers before street lighting. The pub is fondly also known as “Nelly”s after long time landlady.
This pub was one of three in Norton. It has become locally known to this day as “The Top House” due to its former patrons, the “top end ” villagers