Spurred on by a galloping horse, Chris Lloyd traces the route of the region's steam roller empire through a brickworks to a school playground - and nearly picks up a speeding ticket.

INFORMATION about the rampant brass horse has come charging in during the past couple of weeks. The animal was once a common sight steaming along on the front of road rollers.

Our quest began when Chris Mills, of Butterknowle, bought the equine badge at auction in Darlington. The horse is over the word Invicta, and a sticker on it says that it came from “Eddison’s Whessoe Rd roller”.

But that was all we knew… THE badge comes from an Aveling and Porter road roller. Farmer Thomas Aveling set up a workshop in Rochester, in Kent, in 1850 to repair agricultural machinery. In those days, the engines were stationary and had to be hauled from field to field by teams of horses.

Aveling set out to make them move and he became “the Father of the Traction Engine”.

Richard Porter was Aveling’s business partner, providing him with the capital to expand his Invicta Works. In 1867, the first steam roller rolled off A&P’s production line and, within two years, they were shipping them to France, India and the US.

By 1872, A&P employed 400 men; by 1895 they had nearly 1,000 men in their employment, and they built more rollers than any other manufacturer in the world.

They chose Kent’s county emblem of a horse rampant over the word Invicta as the distinctive mark to go on the front of their engines.

“It is said that Thomas Aveling chose the rampant horse because there were complaints that his steam engines would scare horses,”

says Graham Redfearn, in Bishop Auckland.

The brass emblem became very collectable – generations of acquisitive men have had a go at easing the horse from the front of an engine.

“All you needed was a sharp shovel and they came off easily,”

remembers Thompson “Tommy”

Dodds, of Middridge. This was regarded as a workman’s right if the engine was going to scrap.

“I have an Invicta badge from the front of an Aveling-Barford GN diesel-driven road roller,” says Dave Jenkins. In 1933, A&P merged with engine builders Barford and Perkins, of Peterborough, to create Aveling-Barford. “These rollers were the direct descendants of the old steam rollers and were quite a common sight in the Seventies and Eighties. They weighed between eight and 13 tons, depending on the model, and had a Ford diesel engine.”

Aveling-Barford went into decline in the Sixties and Seventies, and is now part of the Wordsworth Holdings group of engineering companies, based in Grantham.

The name Aveling appears to have disappeared, and Barford on its own specialises in dumper trucks.

THE EDDISON Steam Rolling Company started in Dorchester in late Victorian times and spread all over the country. It was an early plant hire company, which specialised in hiring out A&P rollers.

“Eddison’s Darlington depot opened in 1935 at the bottom of Chesnut Street – the car park in that area has been built on what was known as Eddison Yard,” says JW I’Anson, suggesting that it was on or near the Pease mansion of East Mount.

In 1949, Eddison’s was bought by the British Electric Traction Company, a huge conglomerate that ran buses, had TV stations and newspapers, and owned Rediffusion TV rental, as well as plant hire, laundry and waste management companies.

In 1953, Eddison’s moved to a former brickyard at Burtree Lane, in the Whessoe parish.

“It was getting near the end of the steam era when I worked for them in the early Sixties,” says Edward Payne, from Middleton-in- Teesdale. “They still hired some rollers, with living vans – a wooden construction on a four iron-wheeled trailer, no more than 12ft by 6ft, and the driver would hitch it to the roller and go off up the Dales and the Pennines. Often his wife would go, too, for the summer.”

Tommy Dodds, in Middridge, joined at about the same time. He remembers that, as the rollers reached the end of their working lives, rather than be scrapped, they were sent to schools to act as climbing frames.

“An old steamer went to a school at Brotton, near Whitby,” he says.

“And then, in the Seventies, they sent a DX diesel roller to Middleton St George school and another to a Darlington school. We took them down, welded them up and disconnected anything that would catch on the children, so they could use them as a plaything.”

Wow! Does anyone remember having a real road roller in their playground?

From information received, it appears that Eddison’s moved to Faverdale in the late Seventies and then disappeared, as the British Electric Traction conglomerate was broken up in the Eighties.

BUT there’s more. Charles McNab, in Hurworth, is writing a book about Darlington brickworks. He says the Whessoe Lane site which became Eddison’s was operated by James Dunwell, of Leeds. He bought it in 1893 when the previous brickmaker went bankrupt and, followed by his sons, ran it along with another brickworks in Salters Lane, Harrowgate Hill. Both works shut during the First World War.

They scooped large quantities of clay out of the ground to make their bricks.

Malcolm Middleton, a Rise Carr lad, remembers: “In the Forties and Fifties, we boys loved to go swimming in the water-filled old workings. The water was as clear as gin, I recall.”

In these mollycoddled days, we do not advise you do this at home.

FINALLY, Thompson Dodds, 82, gives his place of birth as Eden Pit, a collection of 36 houses which were three-quarters of a mile south of Middridge, a village between Shildon and Newton Aycliffe.

The Eden Pit was beside the original Stockton and Darlington Railway. It was sunk in 1872 and abandoned by 1894, although its houses weren’t cleared for many decades. Does anyone have any memories of this lost colliery community?