DARLINGTON Book Fair is held next Saturday in the Queen Elizabeth Sixth Form College. There will be scores of sellers from across the country offering antiquarian and secondhand books, and there will be lots of other printed material for sale.

For example, there is a folder of late 19th Century documents relating to the iron and steel industry in the Tees Valley. It contains plenty of signatures of members of Darlington’s Pease family on old deeds, plus a couple of letters which shed light on the downfall of the Skerne Ironworks.

These ironworks were founded with Pease money in 1864 on virgin land on Albert Hill in Darlington – on one side was the River Skerne, on the other was the east coast mainline.

Very quickly, the Skerne had 40 puddling and heating furnaces. It had three railway lines bringing in coal and taking away iron and steel, and it employed 1,000 men and boys.

The Skerne developed a reputation for building bridges. Locally, it built the Thorngate footbridge in Barnard Castle and the Pilmore carriagebridge on the Rockliffe estate at Hurworth (both bridges spanned the Tees). In the early 1870s, it built all the viaducts on the Whitby-Redcar-Middlesbrough railway line – including the dramatic 790ft-long Staithes viaduct and the picturesque 268fl-long Sandsend viaduct.

This reputation extended internationally: it built 20 bridges in Sweden, 40 in Denmark and more than 50 in India. These included the 3,852ft-long Kistna viaduct. The Skerne Ironworks knocked out three 107ft spans a month for three years before all 2,500 tons were shipped from Middlesbrough to Madras.

In 1872, the Skerne took over the Britannia Works in Middlesbrough which had 120 furnaces and its own wharf on the Tees – it was a huge concern which saddled the Skerne with large debts.

But the late 1870s was a time of severe economic downturn – also in the folder are documents from the same period showing that Mr Waterhouse was acting with another famous accountant, William Peat, to liquidate the Darlington Iron Company, which was also on Albert Hill.

Because of the depression, the Skerne closed the Britannia Works in 1875, and Albert Hill struggled on, shedding staff and temporarily shutting gates, until 1883 when it gave up the fight. Liquidator Edwin Waterhouse was called in – his firm is now the globally famous accountants PriceWaterhouseCooper and his brother was the architect who designed Darlington’s town clock.

Mr Waterhouse’s letters show he tried to keep the ironworks open, producing “puddled bars”, but as the price continued to fall, he laid the remaining workers off. He said that he couldn’t sell either the site or the equipment on it, and he was reduced to going through the slagheaps in search of anything saleable.

“Finding that the forge cinder thrown aside as refuse in the past commanded a certain value, the slagheaps have been sifted to extract the cindier, and sales amounting to £1,937 12s 10d have taken place,” he wrote.

Even with this credit, the Skerne’s overdraft at the bank was still £4,444 – and rising, as the National Provincial Bank charged interest. In fact, another of Mr Waterhouse’s letters says that in 1885, the bank took legal action against the Skerne to get its money back, although he managed to reach an agreement with it.

It wasn’t until 1889 that Mr Waterhouse managed to wind the Skerne up.

However, the spirit of the Skerne lives on. In 1877, when its gates were temporarily shut, 11 of its ironworkers bought Polam Hall’s strawberry patch, off Neasham Road, and set themselves up as bridge-builders. They named their company Cleveland Bridge – which, of course, is still going strong.