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139the call of the pie man at every stop.It appears that Patricia or her children sold their shops to people outside of the family if a series of adverts that ran in the Echo in the 1980s. The ad (right) is clear that the original handmade pies were only available from the Pallion shop..The side ran by Ella remained a family affair for four generations. Her grandchildren David and Paul went on a drive for growth in the early 1990s. In 1993 the company opened a shop in the Bridges (where as an opening promotion it sold pies at the 1927 price of a penny) and a bakery in Hendon. This was followed with an opening in InShops in the Galleries in 1995, and the business had designs of expanding nationwide through a franchise system.In a strange turn of events it was then at the centre of a bizarre scandal when the infamous News of the World newspaper did an expos%u00e9 on the %u2018peeping pie man%u2019 of Maws Pies in Pallion. The paper reported that above the shop, which operated as a photography studio, there was content being produced of an adult nature. While there are questions of morality, there was seemingly nothing illegal about what was going on (and there is a certain irony that the newspaper%u2019s sister title the Sun ran topless images on page 3), making a national newspaper%u2019s scoop on a local pie business all the more surreal. Maws Pies continued to trade after the article, but by 2004 its Pallion shop had closed.There are a number of other pie companies worth mentioning too. One was Cockburns in Silksworth, which regularly had queues out of the door. Both the pies and the dips were a big draw. A second was the Roker Pie Shop, which did a roaring trade on a match day (selling up to 500 pies7) just round the corner to Roker Park. And the third was Gelders, which Alan Gelder (who also owned the Bungalow Caf%u00e9 for a time) started in his father%u2019s butchers and later went into wholesale. It went into administration in 2018.There are still many places you can buy a pie in Sunderland. But there will be a queue of people lining up to tell you they%u2019re not a patch on Maws, Cockburns or Gelders.7 Tributes paid after death of Roker Pie Shop owner - who served up more than a million matchday snacks to hungry Sunderland AFC supporters Sunderland Echo, 22nd March 2018 Credit: Sunderland EchoCredit: Sunderland Echo