These photos show the celebrations for the Darlington to Stockton Railway Centenary in 1925.
Picture Stockton Archive
A Pictorial History of Stockton-on-Tees
These photos show the celebrations for the Darlington to Stockton Railway Centenary in 1925.
The 1927 total eclipse of the sun – not strictly relevant to this photo but another crowd puller from the same era. My father recalled seeing the total eclipse of the sun whilst on holiday in Marske, and he reported, ‘shortly after six o’clock in the morning of 29th June 1927, we stood on the sandhills outside the village and watched the shadow of the eclipse sweep down the hillside from Upleatham and heard all the birds go silent as the darkness fell’. Stockton was in a narrow line of total darkness that stretched from Hartlepool in the north to near Saltburn in the south. Bearing in mind that it lasted less than a minute and was at 6am on a cloudy morning, there are probably few recollections (and even fewer pictures) of the event (unlike the 1999 eclipse in Cornwall), but I would be interested in hearing any recollections of the event. Not sure when Stockton will experience another total eclipse but it will definitely not be before 2100!
The event took place in September 1925, and my father attended the event as an 8 year old with the rest of his family. They apparently walked from their home in Raby Road to Hartburn village, and then over the Potato Hall fields to the railway line from Darlington to Stockton and Thornaby where the procession took place headed by Locomotion No 1.
What a change to see some of the spectators at that event, rather than the railway locomotives and trains. There seems to be a small group of schoolchildren there and the adults” fashions are interesting in the range of styles. I wonder if they were local people or if they had travelled from other places to be there?