KIRSTIE WALLS has sent in pictures of her father, Don Lowes, as a policeman in the late 1960s on point duty at the top of Victoria Road in Darlington outside the original Grange Hotel. The hotel started as a business in 1924, and when this run of 1860s Victorian properties was cleared in 1976 for the inner ring road and Sainsburys supermarket, it transferred to the nearby mansion of Southend where it was known as the New Grange Hotel. Southend was the home of Joseph Pease which in 1904 was converted into the Immaculate Conception Grammar School. The school – and we’d love to hear memories of it – closed in 1975 ready for the building to become a hotel. Today, of course, it is the Bannatyne Hotel Darlington.