Christmas Carol makes way for more gutter journalism

1:44pm Wednesday 24th December 2008

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Drains, trains and a champion prizefighter. Echo Memories ties them all together.

IT is Christmas Eve.

You turn to your Echo Memories with a nervous anticipation of some festive fare. But all you get is a trip down memory drain.

In 2008, this column has specialised in gutter journalism.

It started when we developed an unhealthy fascination for scoria bricks – the shiney blue-grey bricks made from blast furnace slag that give the gutters of the Tees Valley their unique character.

Then we sank deeper into the sewer. We discovered that gases emanating from London’s sewers during the Great Stink of 1858 were so foul that even MPs kicked up a, ahem, fuss about them.

This led to sewers being vented by stinkpipes and stenchpoles – wonderful, ornate pieces of cast iron Victoriana.

Although we weren’t able to get a full list of these poles for data protection reasons – even stinkpipes have rights, you know – readers helped us realise that practically every town and village has its own resident stenchpole.

The best of them is in South Bailey, Durham City, where a once proud Webb’s Patent Sewer Gas Destructor now looks down at heel. In its heyday in the late 1890s, this triumph of late- Victorian ingenuity collected the gas released by the bottoms of Durham and burned it to light the streets of Durham with an orangey glow.

If we had that sort of thinking today, we could solve the problem of global warming with the strike of a single match.

Unfortunately, our last report on stinkpipes, one of our earliest specimens – at the entrance to Middlesbrough FC’s training ground in Hurworth – has been cruelly cut down. It was 30ft high and covered in decorative stars, but as rust had gnawed a gaping hole near its top, it is easy to understand why it had to come down.

Many pipes, though, are listed buildings.

Now, after gutters and sewers, we turn our attention to drain covers.

Many are bog standard – made by Needhams of Stockport, for instance – but some have stories attached.

For instance, the main road through Hurworth – beside which the village stinkpipe stood – is lined with drains inscribed with “Durham County Council”, even though the village has been out of Durham since 1997.

One cover stands out – it’s a hulking piece of metal inscribed RDC of Darlington.

This must be a rare memorial to the Darlington Rural District Council which was scrapped in 1974.

Summer wanderings took us up to Reeth where, on the village green, there’s a Mattison & Co drain from Bedale next to a Downing drain from Stockton.

Downing was the doyen of drainmakers, established by Nicholas Downing in 1880 in Railway Street and closed four generations later in the early Eighties. There are Downing drains all over the place.

Michael Race, from South Church, got in touch. He’s interested in J Heslop’s foundry, which used to be where the Riverside housing development is now in his village. He’s spotted J Heslop drain covers in Queen Street, in Shildon, Witton Park, Hunwick and Witton-le- Wear.

Ahh, Witton-le-Wear. It is the drain-spotter’s dream to be holed up in a village like Witton-le-Wear.

“It’s amazing,” says Brian Jones from the village. “I’ve counted grids and covers from 11 local foundries without any effort. Some villagers probably think I’m crazy, but there was so much heavy industry in this area and yet there is relatively little documentation about it.”

As well as a Heslop and a Downing, Witton boasts drain covers made by Turnbull Bros, Crook; R Wilson, Henry Foster, Wilson’s Forge and Lingford, Gardner and Co, all of Bishop Auckland; Newgate Foundry, Barnard Castle; and Dungle and Denham, both of Darlington.

The highlight of the drains of Witton is in Station Road.

It is inscribed “Auckland District Highway Board”.

This takes us back to 2004, when we described the triangular granite stone in the middle of the bridge over the Gaunless at the foot of Durham Chare in Bishop Auckland.

The top of the stone is inscribed “H.&L.A. 1878”, which refers to the Highways and Locomotive (Amendment) Act of 1878.

This Act created boards responsible for the upkeep of local roads. They collected a £10 licence fee from each driver to pay for their work.

The triangular stone marks the boundary between the “Bp.A.L.B.” (Bishop Auckland Local Board) and the “Bp.A.H.B” (Bishop Auckland Highway Board).

The Government quickly realised that this plethora of boards had made the situation too complicated for drivers and so the 1888 County Councils Act invested all road responsibilities in the new councils.

Therefore the “Auckland District Highway Board”

drain in Witton-le-Wear can only have been installed between 1878 and 1888.

What a real piece of history! How wonderful it has escaped the attention of the scrap metal thieves, who would melt it down, for at least 120 years.

So although this trip down memory drain isn’t a Christmas story, while you’re out walking over this Christmas period, keep your eyes in the gutter and your digital camera in your hand, and if you see a drain of some distinction, please send a picture of it in.

BEFORE the year escapes us, we should note that 2008 is the 200th anniversary of the birth of railway engineer Thomas Elliot Harrison. He is overshadowed by his contemporary, Robert Stephenson, but in many corners of the North-East his stations still welcome passengers and his bridges still carry trains.

Born in Sunderland, his first project was engineering the Stanhope and Tyne Railway, a ludicrously ambitious project that took a railway 1,445ft above Weardale. Harrison amazingly completed it in 1834; unsurprisingly, it went bankrupt in 1841.

Aged 30, he was in charge of building the Victoria Bridge over the River Wear, near Penshaw. It opened on the day of Queen Victoria’s coronation, and its 160ft main span means it is still the largest masonry railway bridge in England.

By connecting Darlington to Gateshead in the early 1840s, taking charge of Stephenson’s plans for the High Level Bridge into Newcastle, and then pushing on to Berwick, Harrison is regarded as the founder of the East Coast Main Line.

He built the 11-arch Durham Viaduct, which became part of the main line in 1871, and the towering Newton Cap Viaduct, on the edge of Bishop Auckland. He completed the Whitby, Redcar and Middlesbrough Union Railway along the Yorkshire coast, again with some stunning viaducts, and he threw the 300ft Wear Bridge over the river in the centre of Sunderland. And in 1877, he opened York station, its elegantly curved trainshed being all his own work.

He died 120 years ago, in his 80th year, having designed staiths at Blyth and a new entrance for his Tyne Dock on the day before he was called to take charge of the great trainset in the sky.

A booklet commemorating his anniversary has been written by John Addyman and Bill Fawcett and has been published by the Robert Stephenson Trust in association with the Institution of Civil Engineers (North-East). It costs £4.99, including postage and packaging from the Institution’s regional administrator Irene Hurley, on 0191-261-1850 or irene.hurley@ice.org.uk.

BACK to Thornley, the central Durham mining village created by coal in the 1830s, as we told earlier this month.

With collieries come disasters, and Thornley’s first occured on August 5, 1841, when an explosion in the Harvey seam killed nine workers. Eight of them were boys aged between nine and 17. Two of the boys were brothers. They were Gardners; John, 17, and Robert, nine.

Geoff Gardener from Darlington got in touch. Yes, John and Robert were his great-great-grandfather’s brothers.

“I found out about them in 2006 and I feel as if I should at least try and find the gravestones in Kelloe,” he says.

“It’s nearly 170 years now.

There won’t have been many Gardeners treading the ground there for many of those decades.”

Scattered throughout his family tree are Gardners, Gardiners and Gardeners. In previous generations of nonwriters, it didn’t much matter if you had an i or an e or went without either.

The tree stretches back to the dead boys’ father, Matthew, a coalminer, which makes Geoff a sixth generation miner – he worked at the coalface for eight years until the Lumley 6th Pit, at Fencehouses, closed in 1966. He then moved into farming at Stapleton to the south of Darlington, and is renowned for his prize-winning dahlias.

The tree reveals two other poignant pieces of interest.

Firstly, at the time of the boys’ death, their mother Jane was heavily pregnant with her seventh child.

Secondly, there should have been three deaths in the Gardner household that day.

Nine-year-old Robert had a twin brother, William. He, too, should have been at work as a trapper boy but the previous day he had suffered a slight accident – presumably in the pit – and was too unwell.

“Nearly all the population of Thornley turned out to accompany the funeral procession,” said a contemporary report. “It was a melancholy and heartrending spectacle which it was impossible to behold without the deepest emotions.

“The damage sustained in the workings of the pit were very inconsiderable, there being only a few board-end stoppings knocked down, and some other trifling things, all of which were soon replaced, and the mine again restored to a proper state of ventilation.”

A punchy tale that became a movie

ONE of the partners who sank Thornley pit in 1834 was John Gully.

Early in life, he found himself in a debtors’ prison in London.

He fought himself out by becoming the champion bare-knuckle prizefighter of England.

This took him into bigtime gambling, which provided him with royal connections and led him to becoming a Derby-winning racehorse owner. And, naturally, an MP.

He invested all of his winnings into Thornley and Trimdon collieries, and died in Durham City, aged 80, in 1863. It’s such a good story that, as Martin Birtle in Billingham points out, in 1960 novellist George MacDonald Fraser wrote John Gully into the second of his Flashman series. In 1975, the book Royal Flash was made into a movie starring Malcolm McDowell as Captain Harry Flashman.

Other stars included Alan Bates, Oliver Reed, Britt Ekland, David Jason, Bob Hoskins and Rula Lenska.

And playing the Thornley colliery owner was none other than Henry Cooper, a prize-fighter from another age. What a connection!