Being interested in local aviation history I’d heard on the grapevine that some of the original wartime buildings were to be demolished at Teesside Airport so I went along to take some photographs but was too late as I was met by several piles of rubble!
However as every cloud has a silver lining on closer inspection I found that some of the bricks had a name stamped on them and I was very 
pleased to see that it was ‘Crossley Coatham Stob’. The building in question was built in 1942 and the brick had been made, quite literally within a stones throw of the airfield!
Photographs courtesy of David Thompson
Hi. Does any of your readers have or know where I can acquire magazines of the Crossleys Brickbats magazine?
Track down STUART GORDON he has lots of them. Lives around the Whitehouse Farm area
My brother worked in the Traffic Office about that time. I was only about twelve years old and he used to get me days out with the drivers. I remember one called Jack Plews, he took me to an airfield near York and I did help offload but maybe I was more of a hindrance than a help. Good old days.
Hi this is Jacks son Clive can you remember if it was Bowesfield Brick Works or Coatham Stobb? If you’d like to get in touch directly, Picture Stockton will give you my email address
I probably helped deliver some of those bricks, dad being a haulage contractor and delivering bricks and road making materials all over the area at that time. The bricks would be hand balled onto the truck a couple of men at the stack of bricks throwing three at a time up to dad on the truck and neatly stacked, there was a knack in throwing and catching and I did learn how to do it though never getting the rhythm dad and the loaders had I probably got in the way, the procedure was reversed at the other end once delivered.
Dad had bought a German Opel from a Japanese garage owner in Middlesbrough called Sano, he was not the only one in the area as the truck held an extra cubic yard (one ton) was well built had a heater in the cab and was reliable and comfortable, it ran for years.
The Aerodromes we delivered to were under tight security with sandbagged guard positions and barbed wire so imagine the fun the Guards had when a German truck came into sight. Call out the guard man the guns, they would stop the truck dad would give a sigh “here we go again just go with it”, yells of Hande Hock out of the truck in very bad imagined German and we would be searched plus the truck, I am sure those guards were disappointed at not being able to shoot us. The day they did not pull us up we had been stopped up the road by some army men attacking the Aerodrome they let us drive through with half a dozen armed soldiers hidden on the back and all hell broke loose.
Coatham Stob was in use for many years after the war I was always wandering around the clay pits and the brick kilns, learning about the industrial revolution at school it probably made a picture of the dark satanic mills I was reading about.
Dad continued to use the pits dumping tons of ICI waste in them over the years a lot of things went into those dumps although the urban myth of Spitfire engines going into them was exactly that a myth.