Thanks to Colin Sarin we now have a firm location for the premises of Wilkinson’s following the 1941 bombing.
It would appear that the firm simply moved across the road to the top end of King Street, just up from where King Street social club is today.
Colin remembers driving in to a courtyard where his van would turn and back up to a 2 story building where the bottles would be washed and refilled by the 3 women working there.
Clearly a small scale affair at this time and one of a business in terminal decline.
Alan Bainbridge posted the following to our Facebook page:
After the factory closed (not sure what year) it stood empty and some parts, mainly out buildings, stables etc were becoming derelict. E C Leighton (Builders) owner Mr Everitt Leighton, had a builders yard in George Street which was under a compulsory purchase order. He bought the empty factory probably late 1960’s and the firm, F W Johnson’s, I served my apprenticeship with, were given the contract to re-wire the whole building, this was carried out by the late Mattie Ross and Fred Dickinson and myself as an apprentice. Entrance to the office upstairs was by a door at the end of King Street nearest Tynemouth Road, the entrance to the factory was via a door in the yard at the right hand side of the building.As far as I can remember there were 4 or 6 stables at the back of the yard, a large wooden ramp led to the upstairs ones, these were converted to storage rooms and there were several other smaller storage huts in the yard probably used to store the hay and food for the horses. The upstairs ‘office’ was kindly loaned by Mr Leighton to the RSPCA and Mrs May Bulman ran it with volunteers on a Friday night to help ‘poor’ people have their animals attended by a vet (Miss Pinkney & Mrs Smart) (now Ayres Vets.) There was a voucher system and the people paid back the money at so much a week.
My friend, Mabel Moffitt’s grandfather was the owner of the factory and she tells stories going with her dad as a young girl to feed the horses at the week end, her Dad drove one of the horse & carts delivering the mineral water round the area.
