AT dusk on August 3, 1914, having updated the House of Commons on the darkening warclouds in the most famous speech of his career, Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey stood at his window in Whitehall. He watched a lamplighter going about his duties in the streets below, and uttered his most famous sentence: “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”

The words were highly prophetic and, 100 years on, they have inspired many of this week’s First World War commemorations.

Indeed, on Tuesday, they acted as The Northern Echo’s front page headline above an atmospheric picture of the illuminated Tommy statue in Seaham.

Just as the newspaper reached the shops, an email pinged into my inbox. “It says on the internet,” began Kerry Aitken, producer of the BBC Tees radio breakfast show, “that in 1933 Sir Edward was cremated in Darlington. Is it true, and why?”

At the time, I didn’t know.

But, strange to tell, I did know that in the first three decades of the 20th Century, Darlington had the only crematorium between the Tweed and the Humber. Ever since the Darlington Cremation Society had been controversially formed in 1890, the town had been a hotbed of cremation. It blazed a trail on March 20, 1901, when it cremated its first body, that of Daniel Crosthwaite, late brewer of Saltburn.

The concept of cremation was a slow burner – the first Darlingtonian, a railway guard, wasn’t despatched in West Cemetery until July 1, 1904.

Another early customer, I discovered, was Sir Edward’s wife, Dorothy. She died in her early forties when she was thrown from her horsedrawn cart near the Greys’ home of Fallodon, near Embleton in Northumbria.

The small, private service was on February 7, 1906. Newly-appointed Foreign Secretary Sir Edward was there, as was a member of the local Pease family with Dorothy’s friend, Louise Creighton, who wrote: “It had been her own special wish to be cremated, expressed long ago... I had never been at a cremation and felt rather a dread of it, but it was all very nice.”

When Sir Edward died at Fallodon on September 7, 1933, cremation was still unusual – in 1928, there were only 28 cremations in Darlington, despite it serving the region.

So unusual, in fact, that The Northern Echo felt it worthy of a front page headline: “World tributes to Viscount Grey. Crematorium service at Darlington tomorrow.”

And so after his funeral in Embleton’s church, his body was driven 75 miles south by motor hearse, with people lining the roadsides to pay their respects.

“Darlington West Cemetery, with its trees, shrubs and flowers, is among the most peaceful and sylvan of the cemeteries of Northern towns,” said the Echo, as it watched the funeral procession, led by the Bishop of Newcastle.

“In the still air, leaves fell softly from the trees as they carried the body of a great Englishman and statesman into the little chapel. Small birds fluttered among the branches and a pair of robins moved silently among the shrubs.”

And so it could be said that it was in Darlington that the lights went out on the man who saw all the lamps of Europe being extinguished.