This watercolour depicting a late-night scene in Stockton High Street was painted by Elsie Cannon in 1951, in Impressionist style. The vibrancy of the colours captures the lively, if somewhat chaotic end, to some weekend big night out with lots of different stories and emotions going on, all picked out by the bright, neon sign advertising the Blue Posts Hotel, just off stage. Whilst a small crowd jostles to get on board the last bus (the number 3, I recall, plied between Hartburn and Roseworth), other night owls are still partying and one or two characters are clearly the worse for drink! Meanwhile the young couple in the central foreground are too much in love to notice all these shenanigans and are dreamily wending their own way.

Elsie Cannon grew up in Stockton and studied at West Hartlepool College of Art where she met and befriended my mother’s sister, my Auntie Win. She became a close friend of the family and was known to us as ‘Auntie Elsie’. She lived with her parents in Linden Avenue, near Ropner Park and taught art at Richard Hind school. As well as local scenes, Elsie liked to paint landscapes, particularly of the Lake District and the Isle of  Arran where she would spend her holidays, sometimes touring by bicycle. Later, she took up photography and deployed the same artistic talent in capturing scenes, characters and landscapes as expressed in her paintings.

I remember Elsie as a demure lady, in fact the archetypal ‘prim aunt’, and I cannot imagine that she could have sat with paintbrushes and easel in the middle of Stockton High Street, late at night to capture this surreal scene. But whatever her method, she certainly caught and ably recorded in this painting, something of the times.

Photograph and details courtesy of Robert Still.