From Toffee to Ghost Stories: Marie Lowden, the Toffee Crackle Lady of Staithes

For generations of people in Staithes, Marie Lowden was simply “the Toffee Lady”: the woman on the High Street who made and sold her own crackly toffee. But behind that familiar village memory was a woman who had already lived several lives before she began selling sweets — and who, in later life, became a remarkably prolific published writer.

There are some people who become part of a place so completely that their names almost become attached to the landscape.

In Staithes, Marie Lowden is one of them.

Even today, the name Toffee Crackle House will be familiar to many people, and the story behind it is wonderfully simple. The house was once home to Marie Lowden, who made and sold homemade toffee and toffee apples to people passing along the High Street. The museum's photo archive shows a sign in her window advertising “Lovely Crackly Home-Made Toffee, 5p per bag”, and records that she sold her toffee from the house for around fifty years.

A local photograph preserved online by the East Cleveland Image Archive adds another little piece to the picture. Local resident Jackie Roe-Lawton remembered Mrs Lowden selling toffee from her house steps, wearing a white bonnet; other contributors remembered her as a member of their own family and recalled the importance of the toffee business after the death of her husband. One of Marie's granddaughters, Felicia Walker, described her grandmother as an inspiration without whose kindness and intervention she “would not be the person I am today.”

The present-day property is still called Toffee Crackle House, and the story of the name remains part of its identity. 

So it is easy to imagine Marie as a sort of permanent feature of the Staithes High Street: the deaf and partially sighted woman in her bonnet, standing at her doorway with bags of homemade sweets, known to visitors who came back year after year.

But there is much more to her story. Because Marie Lowden was not simply a woman who made toffee.

She was a journalist, a freelance writer, a collector of stories, a lover of old buildings and local traditions, an enthusiastic believer in the power of libraries, a compiler of spiritual writing and, eventually, an author of books about Yorkshire, personal memory and ghost stories.

Thanks to a research request last week, I finally took the opportunity to read her books which are held in the museum’s collection, and when they are read as a group, something rather remarkable emerges. The “Toffee Lady” was also an archivist of sorts — not an archivist in the modern professional sense, but someone who was constantly collecting memories, anecdotes, moral observations, local traditions and stories before they disappeared.

Her four books take us a long way beyond the bag of toffee on the doorstep.

Who was the Toffee Crackle Lady?

The best place to start is with Marie herself.

One of the most fascinating things about the first book is that Marie was clearly aware that people had created their own idea of who she was.

She begins by explaining that photographs of her had appeared in This England magazine and in the book Yorkshire Pride. She had even discovered that a photograph of her former home, St Martin's Lodge in Staithes, had appeared in one of James Herriot's All Creatures Great and Small books.

You might expect someone in that position to be delighted.

Marie, however, says she felt “a bit of a fraud”.

The reason was that she wasn't Yorkshire-born at all. She was a Geordie from Tyneside.

Marie explains that when she was sixteen her parents moved from Tyneside to Middlesbrough. Her father, a skilled engineer, had worked at Vickers Armstrong in Newcastle and had been promised work with Dorman Long on Teesside. Marie came to regard herself very strongly as a Yorkshirewoman, but she never forgot her Tyneside origins.

Her childhood had also left her with significant disabilities. In her own account, a severe bout of measles when she was four eventually resulted in serious problems with her sight and hearing, becoming apparent when she was a teenager and eventually leaving her completely deaf. She had been developing as a pianist and loved classical music, making the loss particularly painful.

Yet writing became an unexpected way forward.

She found work at the old Middlesbrough Gazette office and began contributing to its magazine. Her writing was regularly published and paid for, and when she was nineteen she entered a literary competition and won first prize from hundreds of entries. By the time she married at thirty-one, she says, she was an established freelance writer.

This is a particularly important part of the story, because it means that the Toffee Lady was a writer before she was the Toffee Lady. Writing was not something she suddenly discovered when she was eighty-five. It was something she had been doing for decades.

Then came Staithes.

Marie and her husband had visited the village on day trips and rented cottages there during their children's holidays. Eventually they decided to move from Middlesbrough to Staithes because her husband's health was deteriorating after many years of industrial work. They bought an old house with the intention of modernising it and running it as a guest house. Her husband, however, was diagnosed with leukaemia and died only four years after their move. Marie was left widowed with a mortgage and renovation bills to pay.

And this is where the story of the toffee begins.

Her youngest daughter suggested making and selling toffee apples to the crowds of summer visitors. The apples were bought cheaply from a local orchard. Then visitors began asking for the toffee that had dripped off the apples.

So Marie and her family started selling the toffee itself.

The little sideline became a livelihood. Within nine years of her husband's death, Marie says, the house and all the bills had been paid.

That is a wonderful detail, because it changes the way we might think about the familiar image of the woman selling sweets in the High Street.

It wasn't simply a quaint little village enterprise for tourists.

The toffee paid the bills.

It was a practical answer to widowhood, disability and financial necessity — and Marie was remarkably successful at it.

Eventually, however, age and her deteriorating sight made Staithes too difficult to negotiate. The steep banks and steps of the old village became dangerous, and she moved to another village about a mile away. There, in retirement, she returned to writing.

It is an unexpectedly circular story. She came to Staithes with a husband and plans for a guest house. She became a widow. She became the woman famous for making toffee. And then, when the toffee business had finally become too difficult, she returned to the thing she had been doing as a young woman: writing.

Book One: Behind the Scenes in Yorkshire

The first of Marie's books is the one that gives us the clearest glimpse of the woman behind the village legend.

The book is tltled “BEHIND THE SCENES IN NORTH YORKSHIRE – Marie M. Lowden – the Toffee Lady of Staithes”.

It would be tempting to call it an autobiography.

It isn't quite.

Instead, it is a wonderfully mixed-up collection of memoir, travel writing, local history, folklore, moral observation and personal reminiscence. Marie begins with her own life, then gradually opens the door onto the wider Yorkshire world as she sees it.

And that structure tells us something important about her.

For Marie, her own story is inseparable from the stories of the places and people around her.

The Toffee Lady herself

The opening chapter is the obvious place to begin.

Marie explains her background, her move from Tyneside to Teesside, the loss of her hearing, her early writing career, her marriage and finally her life in Staithes.

Most importantly, she tells us exactly how the toffee business began.

It is a lovely example of the way a small commercial activity can become a local landmark. There is no business plan, no grand entrepreneurial scheme and no suggestion that anyone set out to create a “Staithes attraction”.

There were visitors.

There were apples.

There was toffee.

And there were people who said, in effect, forget the apple — can I just buy the stuff that drips off it?

In the book, Marie then tells the reader that old neighbours still reported visitors knocking on doors looking for her after she had moved away.

Her final reaction is wonderfully understated:

“Nice to know.”

It is probably the perfect ending to the chapter.

She doesn't claim the fame that belongs to her and her toffee. She is simply pleased that people remembered her.

The unsung heroes of the Dales

The second chapter moves away from Marie entirely.

Its subject is the people who kept villages going: postmen and women, milkmen, coalmen, paperboys and other workers who had to navigate the hills, steps, alleys and narrow passages of rural and coastal settlements in all weathers.

This chapter gives us a useful clue about Marie's way of looking at the world.

She notices work.

She notices the people whose work is easy to overlook.

And she is especially interested in the physical effort involved in living somewhere like Staithes or the Dales.

The postman doesn't merely “deliver the post”. In Marie's imagination he has to climb Boulby Bank, negotiate Barrass Steps, squeeze through narrow alleys and somehow continue doing the job when the wind is howling and the steps are covered in ice.

The coalman has to carry heavy sacks into awkward coal holes.

The milkman still arrives, rain or shine.

And therefore, Marie argues, they deserve recognition.

There is even a comic image of coal sacks so cold that they apparently refuse to lie down and instead stand upright.

It is easy to imagine Marie standing in the High Street observing this sort of thing first-hand.

In that sense, the chapter isn't really about famous Yorkshire history at all.

It is about the infrastructure of everyday life.

Yorkshire bridges — and the stories attached to them

The third chapter is called “Some Tell-tale Yorkshire Bridges”, and the emphasis is very much on “tell-tale”.

Marie is interested in bridges not just as pieces of engineering, but as objects with stories attached to them.

She begins with Beggars' Bridge at Glaisdale, whose name, she points out, has nothing to do with crowds of beggars. Instead, she tells the story of Thomas Ferris, who supposedly courted Alice Richardson when the river separated them. Alice's father refused to allow the marriage because he considered Thomas too poor — little better than a beggar.

Thomas left to make his fortune, became a successful sailor, returned with enough money to win over Alice's father, and eventually built the bridge so that future lovers could cross the river without getting wet.

It is exactly the sort of story Marie likes: architecture transformed into a monument to human relationships.

Then there is the tale of Redmayne Bridge at Linton-in-Craven, in which a woman outwits neighbouring farmers who refuse to contribute towards a new bridge. She builds it anyway — but in such a way that their cart gets stuck when they attempt to cross.

Marie clearly enjoys this one.

It is infrastructure as revenge.

She then moves to God's Bridge, packhorse bridges, bridges associated with writers and old customs such as making religious marks on bridges to protect travellers.

Today, Beggars' Bridge itself is listed by Historic England as a Grade II structure, dated 1619 and associated with Thomas Ferris. So this is a good example of the sort of material where Marie's storytelling sits alongside a substantial built-heritage record. 

The interesting thing is that Marie isn't writing an engineering history.

She's asking a different question:

What stories have accumulated around this stone?

Emily Brontë, Margaret Clitherow and the ghosts of York

After the bridge chapter, Behind the Scenes in Yorkshire becomes even more of a Yorkshire miscellany.

There is a long piece on Emily Brontë, inspired by Marie's visit to Haworth.

She is particularly interested in Emily's mystical side, quoting extensively from Wuthering Heights and Emily's poetry. For Marie, the moorland landscape and the spiritual intensity of Emily's writing belong together.

Marie then turns to another Yorkshire woman whose story she finds compelling: Margaret Clitherow, the “Lass of York”.

She describes Clitherow's home in the Shambles and retells her persecution as a Catholic recusant during Elizabeth I's reign. Modern heritage records confirm that 10 and 11 Shambles were her home and that she was executed in 1586 and canonised in 1970.

Marie is particularly interested in the moral questions surrounding Clitherow's story: conscience, religious persecution, hospitality and tolerance.

And then she changes mood completely.

She goes looking for ghosts.

The Ghosts of York

Marie begins her ghost chapter by observing that old places are almost always alleged to be haunted.

She is not entirely dismissive of the idea.

Indeed, one of the things that makes the chapter entertaining is her mixture of curiosity and uncertainty.

She tells the story of the supposed ghost of Cardinal Wolsey at York Minster, but also records that when she went to the Minster to ask the guides about it, they were astonished and told her Wolsey had never had anything to do with the Minster.

So even within the story itself, Marie is a journalist. She is comparing the story she has heard with what the people at the historical site say.

Her ghosts include Wolsey, a priest at St William's College, “Sarkless Kitty” of Farndale and a rather marvellous tale about a farmer trying to escape a troublesome supernatural visitor.

The farmer loads up his possessions and sets off for a new home. He pauses to speak to a friend, who asks:

“Is thoo a-flitting?”

From inside the churn comes the reply:

“Ay, lad, ’tis a-flitting!”

So the farmer goes home again.

The ghost, apparently, has come along for the move.

It is one of the funniest stories in the whole collection — and it gives us a clue to why Marie later devoted an entire book to ghost stories.

For her, ghosts aren't necessarily frightening.

They are stories people tell.

And that distinction becomes enormously important in her fourth book.

A Glimmer of Northern Lights: Marie's Staithes

The final part of Behind the Scenes in Yorkshire brings us home.

“A Glimmer of Northern Lights” is probably the section that will be of greatest interest to anyone researching Staithes today.

Marie describes the old village at the foot of the steep bank, the narrow cobbled streets, the sea, the fishermen and the houses tucked beneath the cliffs.

She writes about Staithes as she knew it rather than as a distant historical curiosity.

She talks about fishermen, changing employment, the old houses, visitors, artists, the Staithes bonnet, local surnames and the changing relationship between the old village and modern life. She remembers Laura Knight's studio and mentions Tea and Kippers, as it appeared in Knight's autobiography.

And then she becomes nostalgic.

Technology is changing the village.

Traditional clothing is disappearing.

Young people have to seek employment elsewhere.

Old customs are fading.

This leads into “Some Dying Yorkshire Customs”, another fascinating section in which Marie records things she thinks are disappearing.

One of the customs she remembers from Staithes is particularly striking: on Sunday mornings, churchgoers would gather on the Staith, walk through the High Street singing hymns, and enter their respective churches as they passed them.

She also records weather lore, including the traditional idea of recognising “Noah's Ark” in the sky, old communal mowing customs and children's games played against the stone walls of cottages.

This is where the book starts to look very much like an archive.

Marie is writing down things that she believes people will otherwise forget.

Book Two: Thames, Tyne and Tees Roundabout

Marie had not finished.

Her next book takes a much larger geographical sweep.

Thames, Tyne and Tees Roundabout was published by White Rose in Hinderwell in 1989, and the British National Bibliography records it as a 51-page book concerned with English social life and customs in the twentieth century. 

The title tells us what Marie is doing.

Three rivers.

Three parts of her life.

Three places which, in very different ways, made her the woman she became.

The Thames represents London.

The Tyne represents her childhood and her Geordie origins.

The Tees represents Middlesbrough, marriage, family and the industrial world in which she spent much of her adult life.

The book therefore works almost like a geographical autobiography.

The Thames

The first chapter begins with London's significance as the capital, but it quickly becomes clear that Marie isn't interested in writing an ordinary tourist guide.

She remembers first visiting London at about twenty-five. She wandered around on foot. She remembers the streets as safer and cleaner, recalls being able to explore without a guide and takes great pleasure in places such as Westminster Abbey, the Tower, the museums, the parks and the river.

But this is a book written in later life, so nostalgia is always accompanied by criticism.

Marie looks at modern London and sees things she believes have been lost: architectural character, older businesses, familiar streets and what she sees as a more manageable scale of life.

She is particularly interested in the river and its bridges.

There is a wonderful sense throughout the chapter that she is not really looking at London as a tourist. She is looking at it critically - as someone comparing the city she sees with the city she remembers.

That becomes the pattern for the whole book.

The Tyne: discovering Newcastle

The second section is much more personal.

Marie remembers growing up on Tyneside, exploring Newcastle from Gateshead and developing her lifelong fascination with old buildings.

One of the things she remembered most strongly was the High Level Bridge.

Her own childhood memory is of crossing it to explore Newcastle. Historic England confirms just how remarkable this bridge is: it opened in 1849, was designed by Robert Stephenson, carries road and railway traffic on two levels and remains in use. It is listed at Grade I. 

That makes Marie's nostalgia especially interesting.

For her, the bridge wasn't an engineering monument.

It was the thing she walked across as an adventurous girl.

She also describes exploring Newcastle Castle and having experiences which she interprets as ghostly: a sudden blast of cold air and the apparent sight of a woman in old-fashioned dress.

These stories connect Thames, Tyne and Tees Roundabout directly with the later Dead Men Tell Tales.

Marie cannot visit an old building without wondering about the people who once inhabited it.

The Tees: Middlesbrough and the road to Staithes

The third major section is even more autobiographical.

Marie describes the family's move from Tyneside to Middlesbrough when she was sixteen. Her father had lost his job at Vickers Armstrong and was promised work with Dorman Long, which explains why the family came south. She remembers the first impression of Middlesbrough as gloomy and industrial, but gradually built a family life there.

She remembers cinemas, shops, Albert Park, the Dorman Museum, Middlesbrough Town Hall and — perhaps most importantly — the Carnegie Library.

The library was her “university”.

Because she was deaf, she had not followed the conventional educational route she might otherwise have taken. Instead, she taught herself through books.

She would leave her husband looking after the children and spend evenings at the library studying.

The head librarian noticed how often she came and how seriously she worked. Marie remembers him telling her that, had she not been deaf, he would have employed her as an assistant.

That is one of the most revealing passages in all four books.

For Marie, the library is an institution of opportunity.

It is where she educated herself.

It is where she became a writer.

And it becomes part of the route from Tyneside to Teesside to Staithes.

The Transporter Bridge

Marie also devotes considerable attention to Middlesbrough's Transporter Bridge.

She remembers it as one of the most impressive things about an otherwise heavily industrial town and takes pride in the engineering involved.

Her description is personal rather than technical, but the bridge is indeed an extraordinary surviving piece of engineering. Historic England dates it to 1911 and lists it at Grade II*. It was designed by G.C. Imbault and constructed by Sir William Arrol and Company, with a 174-metre span across the Tees. 

Again, there is the same pattern: Marie sees history through things she experienced first-hand. She doesn't separate “industrial history” from “family history”. The bridge is simply part of what Middlesbrough looked and felt like.

York, Knaresborough and looking back

The book eventually moves towards York and other Yorkshire places before ending with “Looking Back on the 3 T's”.

By this stage, the three rivers have become something more than geography.

They are Marie's own biography:

Thames — the wider world she visited.

Tyne — where she came from.

Tees — where she became a wife, mother and writer before eventually becoming the Toffee Lady of Staithes.

And that makes Thames, Tyne and Tees Roundabout rather different from Behind the Scenes in Yorkshire.

The first book asks: Who is this woman everyone thinks they know?

The second asks: How did she become her?

Book Three: The Knock

Then Marie does something unexpected.

She stops writing primarily about Yorkshire.

Instead, she produces a book of spiritual reflections.

The Knock was published in 1988 by White Rose Productions. Its full subtitle is “A Book of Witness to World Wide Spiritual Unity”, and Marie is credited not as the sole author but as compiler.

This is important.

The Knock is not a conventional book with a continuous narrative.

It is more like a spiritual scrapbook.

Marie gathers Bible passages, poems, prayers, anecdotes, observations and short pieces from a remarkably wide range of sources and brings them together around themes of belief, compassion, responsibility and human behaviour.

The book's acknowledgements alone tell us something about the breadth of the material she was reading: she refers to the King James Bible, Billy Graham, John Wesley, William Booth and the Salvation Army, The Christian Herald, The Times Literary Supplement, Spurgeon's College and many others.

What does The Knock actually say?

Its first major theme is spiritual unity.

Marie is interested in the idea that people may approach God through different traditions but nevertheless share fundamental concerns.

The book includes Christian material alongside pieces attributed to Gandhi, an “Indian Prayer”, a Sioux prayer and other expressions of spiritual wisdom.

It is not a systematic work of theology.

It is much more personal than that.

Marie is collecting the things she thinks are worth remembering.

The importance of everyday behaviour

One of the strongest themes in the book is the idea that belief is demonstrated through behaviour.

There are sections on:

• giving

• the Ten Commandments

• faith

• loving difficult people

• forgiveness

• friendship

• judging others

• humility

• peace

• aging

• mortality

• doing good in ordinary daily life.

There is also a particularly revealing piece called “The Great Design”, which argues that people do not have to be powerful or important in order to have meaningful work to do.

That idea fits Marie remarkably well. Here was a woman who had not become famous because she was a politician, aristocrat, academic or celebrity. She had made a living making toffee. She had educated herself through a public library. She had written articles. She had brought up a family. And she had continued working despite major disabilities. The philosophy of The Knock is therefore rather close to the life described in her other books.

The aged woman looking back

Some of the most moving material in The Knock concerns old age.

There is a piece called “Beatitudes for Friends of the Aged”, which asks readers to be patient with faltering steps, failing eyesight and hearing, repeated stories and the need for companionship.

Placed in the context of Marie's life, this takes on a particular poignancy.

She knew what it was like to lose hearing.

She knew what it was like to lose sight.

And she wrote this book in her eighties.

This is not an abstract concern.

It is something she had lived.

Similarly, her own short piece on peace ends with the simple idea that people can sometimes achieve peace by accepting that they disagree.

That is very characteristic of The Knock.

It isn't intellectually complicated.

It is practical.

Be kinder. Forgive people. Don't judge too quickly. Take responsibility for what you do. Live peacefully.

“Praying Hands If Only”

One of the little stories in the book concerns the famous image of Praying Hands, attributed in Marie's account to Albrecht Dürer.

She retells the story of two poor friends who want to become artists but cannot afford art school. They agree that one will work to support the other and then they will reverse the arrangement.

The first succeeds.

But when the time comes for the second man to study, years of hard labour have left his hands crippled with arthritis, and he can no longer paint.

The story becomes, for Marie, a meditation on sacrifice, friendship and the things we cannot undo.

That title — “If Only” — is revealing.

So much of Marie's later writing is concerned with looking back.

What did we lose?

What could we have done differently?

What survives?

What can still be put right?

Those are questions that appear again and again in her books.

Book Four: Dead Men Tell Tales

And finally we arrive at perhaps the most surprising book of all.

Dead Men Tell Tales  was published by White Rose Productions in 1989 and describes itself as stories “retold by Marie Lowden”. The contents include a mixture of remembered stories, stories whose original authors were unknown, and stories which Marie had traced back to particular writers.

At first glance this might look like a fairly ordinary collection of ghost stories.

It isn't.

The really interesting thing is where the stories came from.

Marie the young journalist meets the storytellers

The book's preface explains that when Marie was a young freelance journalist she had investigated a group of older people who were telling each other their favourite ghost stories.

She called the stories “Remembered Ghosts”.

Decades later, she decided to return to the material and collect it in book form.

And this is where the book becomes fascinating from a museum and archive perspective.

The people who had told her the stories originally were recalling them from memory.

Some could not remember the authors.

Some could not remember the titles.

Marie and her researchers tried to identify the original sources, with varying degrees of success.

She explicitly says that where she was uncertain, she indicated that uncertainty, and that in some cases she supplied titles herself.

That means Dead Men Tell Tales is not simply a collection of “authentic old ghost stories”.

It is a record of stories being remembered.

And that is much more interesting.

A book about memory as much as ghosts

The title Dead Men Tell Tales becomes increasingly appropriate the more closely you look at it.

The stories are supposedly about the dead returning to disturb the living.

But the book itself is also about dead people continuing to speak through the stories that remain after them.

An old person remembers a story.

Another old person remembers part of it.

Marie remembers what they told her.

Her researchers look for an author.

The original text may or may not be found.

And eventually Marie writes it down again.

Every stage is a form of memory.

This is very close to the way oral history works.

A story is not necessarily unchanged simply because it is old.

It survives because somebody remembers it.

And every person who remembers it potentially changes it.

That is exactly what Marie is documenting.

What is actually in the book?

The collection begins with “Uneasy Lies the Head”, remembered from a story by Mary Coleridge.

It is about a king who apparently dies and is then given a strange opportunity to return to life if he can find three people who genuinely want him to live.

What follows is a surprisingly moral story.

The king assumes thousands of people must love him because he is a good ruler. But once he returns anonymously to the world, he discovers that the reality is much more complicated. He encounters a child who wants him alive, a man who had reason to respect him, and the people closest to him whose affection turns out to be less certain than he imagined.

Like much of Marie's writing, it turns out not really to be about the supernatural.

It is about how people behave when they think nobody is watching.

The collection then moves through stories with titles including “The Alibi”, “Dear Enemies”, “Interval”, “Discipline”, “Coroner's Inquest”, “Shade of Peterbee”, “Tomorrow Never Comes”, “City of Ghosts”, “Voice in the Night” and “A Faraway Melody”.

Several are explicitly labelled as remembered from writers such as Vincent O'Sullivan, Michael Kent, Arthur Machen, D.S. Shorter and Mary Wilkins Freeman, while others have no known original author.

One of the stories, “The Bowmen”, is identified as being “after Arthur Machen”. It deals with supernatural intervention during wartime and is very much in the tradition of the First World War ghost story.

Elsewhere, the stories move from haunted houses and mysterious voices to apparitions, unexplained events, strange coincidences and stories whose endings provide a moral twist rather than a blood-curdling shock.

And Marie herself makes an important point in her preface.

She isn't trying to produce horror.

She says the stories can be read by young and old without the nightmare-inducing terror that had become fashionable in ghost stories. Instead, she says, they might grip the reader, make them smile and teach them something about people and places around the world.

That is a very revealing description.

For Marie, the point of a ghost story is not simply to frighten you.

A story should teach you something.

The ghost stories bring us back to Staithes

And suddenly Dead Men Tell Tales doesn't seem so far removed from Behind the Scenes in Yorkshire after all.

Remember the strange woman Marie sees at Newcastle Castle.

Remember the ghosts of York.

Remember “Sarkless Kitty”.

Remember the story of the farmer whose ghostly visitor follows him when he moves house.

These are all part of the same fascination.

Marie is interested in what old places do to the imagination.

A castle has ghosts.

A bridge has a love story.

A cottage has a custom.

A village has a weather sign.

A street has a martyr.

A bonnet has a history.

A library can become a university.

And a woman selling sweets from a doorway can become a legendary character remembered by an entire village.

Four books, but really one enormous subject

Read together, Marie Lowden's books begin to look less like four unrelated publications and more like four different ways of approaching the same subject.

That subject is memory.

In Behind the Scenes in Yorkshire, Marie remembers her own life and the Yorkshire people and traditions around her.

In Thames, Tyne and Tees Roundabout, she maps her memories onto the geography of the three rivers that shaped her life.

In The Knock, she collects spiritual and moral writing that she thinks deserves to survive.

And in Dead Men Tell Tales, she rescues stories from older people's memories before they disappear.

The subjects change.

The method doesn't.

Notice something. Remember it. Write it down. Pass it on. Notice how it changes.

And that brings us back to the toffee

Perhaps this is why I think Marie Lowden is such a fascinating person to find in the museum archives.

The story most people know is a very small one. A woman made toffee. She sold it from her house. Visitors bought it. Her house became known as Toffee Crackle House.

But look more closely and the story expands.

The woman making that toffee was a trained writer who had been publishing journalism since she was nineteen. The widow standing at the door selling sweets had educated herself in the Carnegie Library. The woman remembered in Staithes for her homemade sweets had written about Emily Brontë, Margaret Clitherow, Cardinal Wolsey, Yorkshire bridges, local customs, the Tyne, the Thames, Middlesbrough and the ghosts of Newcastle and York.

She had made a spiritual anthology about unity and compassion. She had collected ghost stories from elderly storytellers and spent years tracing their origins. And when she was in her eighties, she was still writing.

The toffee was not a curious little footnote to her life. It was one of the ways she survived. It was the thing that made her famous locally. It gave the house its name. And it gave generations of visitors a reason to remember her.

But the books show us that Marie Lowden was always collecting stories.

Sometimes the stories were about herself. Sometimes they were about fishermen, postmen and coalmen. Sometimes they were about bridges. Sometimes they were about saints, writers and ghosts. Sometimes they were about God. And sometimes they were about a strange thing somebody once saw in an old castle.

Her life therefore gives us a rather lovely reminder of something that matters to museums and archives everywhere: local history does not always arrive in a box labelled “Local History”.

Sometimes it looks like a recipe. Sometimes it is a bag of sweets. Sometimes it is a half-remembered ghost story told by an old person. Sometimes it is a handwritten book. And sometimes it is a woman standing in a doorway on the High Street, selling toffee to the holidaymakers while, somewhere in the background, an author is taking notes.