This photograph shows the Garrick Hotel in mid facelift.
Lemon Top anyone? The photograph also shows Pacitto’s, at its old site on Yarm Lane in Stockton.
Date unknown.
Picture Stockton Archive
A Pictorial History of Stockton-on-Tees
This photograph shows the Garrick Hotel in mid facelift.
Lemon Top anyone? The photograph also shows Pacitto’s, at its old site on Yarm Lane in Stockton.
Date unknown.
In the mid-fifties the Corporation Hall was a popular venue for regular, extremely well attended Barn/Folk Dances. Wilf Ashman was the caller/MC and the team of musicians included a member of Grangefield Grammar School staff, Ken Whitfield. The dancers were aged from about 14 upwards to many adults. Part of Wilf Ashman’s task was to teach the various dances to newcomers who were given plenty of support & encouragement by the regulars. Amongst the dancers were members of the local Morris and Sword dance teams. Somewhere in this archive is a photo from a special rally/display/dance at the Maison.
I also went to the Barn dances in Corporation Hall, and remember the people you talk about very well. The boy I used to go with to these dances was Harry Langton, we would both walk along Dovecot Street with our “sandshoes” tucked under our arms and enjoyed great times there.
My mother was the cleaning lady at the Garrick pub for a while, sometime in the late fifties.
I remember it where it is in the photograph. My dad took me in there for an ice cream soda before we went to see Cinderella at the Odeon. It was my 7th birthday. Yum!
Spot on Ken, my future wife also went to Richard Hind although the said brick wall meant I never knew it until I came back from abroad and met her for the first time.
Max I think you mean the Corporation Hall which also had big boys and girls dancing, it had many uses after the war and my late wife danced there with a keep fit club at one time.
I think one of the Pacitto girls married one of Marshalls biscuit stall boys who was also a Richard Hind lad. “Oh what intermingled lives we led”.
I enjoyed Pacitto’s on the south side of Yarm Lane too. I presume Frank Mee means the brick wall seperating Richard Hind Boys’ and Girls’ Schools.
Thats how I remember it in the early 50’s, on the opposite side, used to call in with my Mam and Dad for a Sunday treat having walked along the river to Preston Park via the old bus sheds.
The original Pacitto’s building had very high ceilings as I remember and the colours where a pale blue to white. Uptons was not far from them on the same side.
The photo shows I think the entrance to West Row where there used to be a dance club for youngsters, the ‘Coronation’? … prior to you being of an age for the ‘Maison’ or ‘Jubilee’ for starters.
Max.
Now we know John how your dad Walter Laing always looked young and fit, he was a top turner at Head Wrightson’s light machine shop and he taught a lot of good tradesmen. The dance hall in West Row was the Corporation Hall.
Max-Speed, the dance hall was called Butlins Dance Hall.
Depends on how old you are whether you consider this the old site. Pacitto’s was on the opposite side of the road from well before the war and a meeting place for young teens on a Saturday afternoon. When I first met my late wife we would go and sit in the back room among the crowd drinking ice cream Soda’s or eating Knickerbocker Glories, it was the thing to do. It was always a popular shop and the Pacitto girls lovely, I went to school at the same time as one of them but that big brick wall down the playground meant we only met in the shop. I still go into Dovecot Street shop for warm apple pie and ice cream now and then a continuous warm memory.
I also remember the old shop on the other side of the road to this. The smell of the place is still in my memory, I loved it. Knickerbocker Glories were a real treat back then in the 1940s and 1950s. I have never found that taste of Pacitto’s raspberry ice’s (which I experienced in my childhood) since.