While celebrating 150 years of religious tolerance, Memories looks back to when Catholics and Protestants didn’t get on quite so well

NOWADAYS, the churches in Trimdon are very ecumenical. They get on very well with each other. Today, both Protestant and Catholic churches are open to the public to help commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Catholic church that was built on land given by the kindly Protestant landowner.

However, the relationship wasn’t always as easy as this.

In fact, exactly 420 years ago this week, the curate of Trimdon, who had started out as a Protestant, became the last person to be publicly hung, drawn and quartered – and his innards boiled in a cauldron – in Darlington Market Place after he had converted to Catholicism.

He was George Swalwell (or Swallowell) – a long time favourite of Memories. He became a clerk at Trimdon in 1575 and, two years later, when he was ordained in the Church of England, he returned to Trimdon as curate.

The area was recovering from the Rising of the North of 1589, when the earls of Westmorland and Northumberland had re-imposed Catholicism on the North-East and tried to overthrow the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I. Her Majesty sent an army of nearly 20,000 men to restore order and religion, and when the Catholics saw it coming over Croft bridge, they melted away.

Elizabeth exacted bloody revenge.

About 800 Catholic traitors were executed between Wetherby and Newcastle, including 99 in Darlington and 66 in Durham – the Darlington traitors are said to have been left swinging from trees along Coniscliffe Road to act as warning to the townspeople.

Closer to curate Swalwell, five Catholics were executed in Sedgefield, and two were hanged in both Fishburn and Bishop Middleham.

Those Catholics that the Queen thought didn’t deserve hanging were rounded up and imprisoned.

In 1590, George Swalwell’s work caused him to visit a Catholic languishing in Durham jail.

The Northern Echo:
The Beckwith window

But in the cell, George saw the light, and converted to Catholicism.

When he rushed out and started denouncing the Protestant church, he too was thrown into jail, and on Tuesday, July 23, 1594, he was sentenced to death for treason.

Two other accused Catholics, Father John Ingram, of Warwickshire, and Father John Boste, of Penrith, were condemned with him. The unfortunate Mr Boste had already done time in the Tower of London, where he had been stretched on the rack at least four times “in a manner that rendered him a permanent cripple”.

On July 24, Boste was executed at Durham; on July 25, Ingram was executed at Gateshead; on July 26, it was George Swalwell’s turn, in his home town of Darlington.

The gallows were erected on Bakehouse Hill, between the Market Square and Tubwell Row, and as he walked towards them, four priests beseeched him to re-convert. He refused.

“To terrify him the more, they led him by two great fires, the one made for burning his bowels, the other for boiling his quarters,” recorded Richard Challoner, a Catholic bishop, about 150 years later.

George would not be terrified, and so the priests beat him with a rod to make him climb the ladder to his death more quickly.

The rope was put around his neck and “Mr Swalwell desired if there were any Catholics there they would say three paters, three aves and the creed for him, and so making the sign of the cross, he was turned off the ladder”. He was cut down before he lost consciousness “and the hangman, who was but a boy, drew him along by the rope yet alive, and there dismembered and bowelled him, and cast his bowels into the fire”.

Bishop Challoner continues: “At the taking out of his heart, he lifted up his left hand to his head, which the hangman laid down again; and when the heart was cast into the fire, the same hand laid itself over the open body.

“Then the hangman cut off his head and held it up saying: ‘Behold the head of a traitor!’ His quarters, after they were boiled in the cauldron, were buried in the baker’s dunghill.”

The Northern Echo:
Bakehouse Hill in Darlington’s Market Place on this Edwardian postcard. It was outside Bakehouse Hill that George Swalwell was executed on July 26, 1594

FOR all we know, the remains of the curate of Trimdon may lie to this day somewhere beneath Darlington’s Market Place.

Understandably, after the deaths of the “Durham Martyrs”, Catholicism went underground.

But some landowning families refused to relinquish their faith: the Salvins of Croxdale, the Kennets of Coxhoe, the Bradshaughs at Bishop Middleham, the Widdringtons of Fishburn, the Ridsdales of Darlington and the Withams of Cliffe Hall, near Piercebridge, all kept the flame alight with secret priests dashing between them to say prayers.

Over the centuries, attitudes softened, and by the 1840s there were little Catholic chapels at Sedgefield, to the south of Trimdon, and Thornley, to the north.

But it was the opening of the Durham coalfield that really rekindled the faith. Trimdon’s population exploded, from fewer than 400 in 1841 to more than 3,000 in 1861. The immigrants brought their customs and beliefs with them, and usually settled in groups. The 1871 census shows that a pocket of Welsh people made up 13 per cent of the population of Trimdon Grange, while in Trimdon village, 27 per cent of the population was Irish.

The Irish required a Catholic church of their own, which was built on land given by Major-General William Beckwith, the Protestant lord of the manor of Trimdon.

So grateful were the Catholics that when their church opened on January 17, 1864, they dedicated it to St William and they allowed Maj-Gen Beckwith to have a stained glass window in his honour.

However, these were rapidly changing times in the coalfield.

Suddenly, the Ferryhill Ironworks in West Cornforth sprang into life.

By 1875, industrialist James Morrison had ten blast furnaces there, including two of the largest in the world. Immigrants flocked to work, and Mr Morrison gave land for a Catholic chapel, which opened on October 18, 1875. It could seat 1,000, compared to Trimdon’s 250, and had a painting presented by Pope Pius IX. It became the mother church, leaving little Trimdon in the shade.

The Northern Echo:
A cow lying outside St Mary Magdalene Church, Trimdon Village, in June 1974

But bust followed boom. The ironworks’ output peaked in 1877, but it collapsed in 1879. Many of the immigrants left to seek employment elsewhere, and the Catholic population plummeted from about 3,000 to 700.

The church had to change to fit the needs of the population. In 1934, St John the Fisher opened in Sedgefield so that the priest could minister to the growing numbers in Winterton hospital, and in 1966 the huge church in West Cornforth was abandoned so a smaller one could be developed in the emerging village of Coxhoe.

Throughout all of these 20th Century changes, St William’s in Trimdon proved durable. So durable that today it is celebrating its 150th anniversary with a joint open day with the nearby 12th Century Protestant church of St Mary Magdalene.

MAJOR-GENERAL William Beckwith, who gave the land for the Catholic church, died in 1871, aged 75. His short obituary in The Northern Echo said that he had joined the Dragoons in 1813 and had fought against Napoleon in the Peninsular War and at Waterloo.

His finest hour, though, was when he was second-in-command during the Bristol Reform Riots of 1831.

The Dragoons’ commander that day, Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Brereton, refused to fire on the hundreds of rioting Bristolians who were demanding Parliamentary reform.

But Beckwith, according to the obituary, saw his superior’s hesitation and “assumed command, and by his energy ultimately suppressed the riot”.

His energy also killed four rioters and injured a further 86.

By contrast, Brereton was courtmartialled for leniency, but shot himself through the heart before his trial could conclude.

The Northern Echo:
The statue of the Blessed George Swalwell in St Augustine’s Catholic Church in Darlington

Beckwith, who owned Trimdon House, which is now a farm, returned to Durham when his military career was over and unsuccessfully stood as a Liberal candidate for Parliament. He married Priscilla, who was a wealthy heiress from Silksworth in Sunderland. She had converted to Catholicism in her youth, and had paid for a Catholic church to be built in Silksworth.

This would explain why her Protestant husband was so generous towards the Catholics of Trimdon.

THE Beckwiths were originally from Rotherham, but on April 28, 1715, William Beckwith married Elizabeth Woodifield, of Fishburn, the sole heiress to her father’s large estate in east Durham.

And so the Beckwiths became the lord of the manor of Trimdon.

But how did the Woodifields come to be in possession of so much land?

It is a strange story...

A generation earlier, at the end of the 17th Century, Nicholas Woodifield was an ordinary tenant farmer at Mainsforth. One hot summer’s day, he was raking in his dusty, dry harvest, and – understandably – became thirsty. He wandered off to the nearest well, which happened to be on his neighbour’s land.

As Nicholas bent over the well to get a drink, he dropped his rake into the water. It landed with a mysterious metallic clank.

Nicholas sent his servant girl home and took off his brogues – it was obviously considered indecent for the young girl to see her master in his socks.

Nicholas fashioned his shoes into scoops, which he lowered down the well to find the source of the mysterious metallic clank.

The Northern Echo:
From The Northern Echo of February 24, 1871

When he drew his shoe-scoops back to the top of the well, they were full of gold.

In fact, he scooped so many shoefuls of gold out of the well that he was able to buy the manor of Trimdon from the Roper family, and set up his descendants for generations to come.

Or so the strange story goes...