Memories and pictures of Dressers of Darlington keep rolling in

Here we feature just a few stories – no doubt there are plenty more to come.

To share your pictures, email jo.kelly@newsquest.co.uk

Margaret Ellerton also got in touch. She was employed by Dressers twice and in the staff picture below left, Mrs Ellerton is in the front row, last in the row.

She told us: “I joined Dressers for the first time in about 1962 in the store on High Row where Santander now is, and I was employed to help set up and work in the new toy department upstairs. I stayed with Dressers for about three years and then left to take up an apprentiship in hairdressing."

Margaret continued:“In the early 1980s I was once again employed by Dressers and I worked in the book department under the care of Freda Lofthouse, a wonderful woman whose knowledge and love of books was insprirational.

"Dressers was an extremely traditional business with old fashioned values. For instance we were not allowed to use first names on the shop floor, it was always Mr, Mrs or Miss, and it was frowned upon for a Dressers girl to sit on a bench outside of the store eating lunch

 “Dressers was a beautiful store that sold fine china, superb leather goods, quality pens and stationary, toys and of course the best book department in the area, and I was proud to be part of the business.

“I progressed from the book department into the office and after almost 13 years left to continue my career with a new and up and coming company in Darlington called Hutchinson Telecom, soon to become Orange.”

We featured this photo recently of Dressers staff in October 1961. Doug Kent recognised his sister, Pheobe Kent, who is on the second row at far left above the man

Jennifer Raine, nee Ingram, got in touch too. Mrs Raine worked at Dressers for a number of years in their first shop before they moved to the more central High Row location, where Lucks used to be

When we searched in the Dressers archive we found this picture of The Goodies – Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie – which looks like a book signing at Dressers. Can anyone shed any more light on it?

Don Eccles contacted us after he spotted a photo of the retirement of his dad, Eddie Eccles, as manager at Dressers. Don remembers going with his dad to the Skerne Printing Works, at the bottom of Garden Street, as a nine-year-old boy.

He said: “I think it was possibly a Sunday morning because I don’t remember any other staff were present. It was in 1945 and there was a printing press working, printing posters for the Labour Party. The printing machine had an arm which picked up each sheet and placed each copy on a pile. The same pictures were displayed on many billboards all over town.

“I remember going into the printing works in Priestgate in my early teens with my dad when he worked for The Northern Despatch. I went with him as he ‘clocked in’ and remember the overhead drive and the belt-driven printing presses.

“My father was a compositor, lineotype and stereotype operator, the father of the chapel, ie. union rep and retired in1968, I have his watch that he was presented with ‘by the directors of the North of England Newspaper Co Ltd on the completion of 45 years of service April 1968’. I wear his watch on special occasions.”

Eddie Eccles died in 1996 aged 89.

This was taken shortly before the store closed. It reopened a few years later as Waterstones and is now Poundland

Great photograph of Dressers of High Row, Darlington, ready for the Christmas season

After we received such a good response to our stories about Dressers of Darlington we had a look in our own archive and found this picture. It's such a great scene shot from the day and what fashionable coats