Great pagentry: 125 years of the Durham Mothers' Union

Then, at Brancepeth Castle, 1,000 Mothers’ Union performers, added by trumpeters from the Durham Light Infantry, put on a show that was watched by an audience of 2,000 women – and all of them were sodden by the incessant rain.

Five hundred performers were dressed in the national clothes of the 23 countries in which the MU then had branches, and, said the Echo, “they carried on with enthusiasm in spite of wet clothing”.

The real high point of the evening for the paper’s reporter, though, was the “lusty singing” of the bedraggled audience.

The Brancepeth open-air pageant with its cast of hundreds was enacted for three nights, and so it must surely have been the inspiration for today’s proposed Auckland Castle nightshow extravaganza. The pagent told the history of the MU, which was then 62 years old.

This week, an exhibition opened in Darlington’s St Cuthbert’s Church which also tells how the MU was founded in 1876 by Mary Sumner in Winchester. Mary had just become a grandmother, and, remembering how frightening she found being a new mother, she formed the union to provide her daughter – and all mothers, regardless of social class – with Christian support.

The idea gained impetus in 1885 when the Bishop of Newcastle, Ernest Wilberforce, realised he had nothing of relevance to say to the women he was about to address at the Portsmouth Church Congress. He’d heard of Mary’s union and so he invited her to take his place on the podium. It was either an inspired idea or a masterful piece of laziness because, reluctantly, Mary agreed and the audience members took the MU to their hearts.

In June 1890 – 125 years ago – the ladies of Durham decided their diocese needed a branch of the MU. The prime mover seems to have been a Mrs Lake, the President of the Durham Association for the Care of Friendless Girls, who pulled together an inaugural meeting on June 20 in Bishop Cosin’s Library on Palace Green in Durham City. It chose its first president, Sarah Westcott, the wife of the bishop.

Quite quickly, local parishes formed their own branches – in 1892 in Durham, there were 1,460 MU members in 31 branches.

There are glimpses of the history of those early days to be found in the tightly-printed columns of newspapers like The Northern Echo. For instance, we know that there must have been a branch at Whitworth in Spennymoor in 1895 because on, April 20, it was reported that when the daughter of the Whitworth vicar married the agent of the Shafto estate, she was presented with “a gold thimble from members of Whitworth sewing club and Mothers’ Union”.

And we know that the inaugural meeting of the Staindrop MU was held on January 17, 1899, with Lady Barnard from Raby Castle in chair. It was reported that, addressing 40 local mothers, “she spoke very feelingly of her deep interest and their welfare...and her ladyship earnestly hoped that the tone of the village might be raised by (the MU’s) influence”.

“Tea and cake was handed round by the workers at the close of the meeting.”

Later that year, over at Wynyard Hall, Lady Londonderry and her Germanic friend, Fraulein Sturmfells, entertained 150 members of the Wynyard Park and Seaham Harbour MU to tea. “It was served in the covered-in coach yard, on tables beautifully florally decorated,” said the Echo.

In Darlington, the first of the town’s branches, St Hilda’s, was formed in 1895, although in 1907, 18 of the town’s members were asked to leave “for persistent disregard of the rules”. How we would love to know how naughty these mothers were.

The First World War proved to be tough for the MU, and not just because they found it difficult to hire halls for meetings as most venues had been requisitioned by the army. The Durham branches noted a rise in juvenile delinquency and an increase in drinking among women. They adopted a new slogan to reflect the times and their changed mission: “Rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation, continuing constant prayer.”

Post-war, some of the women found themselves with the vote, which the MU encouraged them to use, and they campaigned against a Parliamentary Bill which would have made divorce easier.

The 1920s plunged Durham into the Great Depression, and in 1925, 10,000 women trekked from all corners of the county to the MU festival services in the cathedral. Just as their mining men marched to their gala behind lodge banners, so the MU members marched to their festival behind branch banners – many of these were at Monday’s service and there are plenty of old Darlington banners in the church exhibition, which runs until the end of this month.

The darkest day in the MU’s history was June 28, 1928. Eighteen members of the Hetton-le-Hole branch were returning from an outing to the seaside at Scarborough when their 45mph express engine ploughed into a goods train, which had come to rest straddling the mainline at Darlington’s Bank Top station ..

The second coach, in which the Hetton women were sitting, telescoped into the third, and only three of them survived – including Dorothea Smith, the wife of the Hetton vicar. Dorothea remained in Darlington’s Greenbank Hospital receiving 175 stitches that weekend while her husband conducted the funerals of her 15 MU colleagues.

It was a great tragedy but, of course, the MU pushed on. In fact, its membership peaked in the 1930s – in 1938, the year of the great Brancepeth pageant, there were a staggering 22,422 members in Durham.

Of course, times have changed. In 1969, the Durham MU had 13,782 members in 254 branches and today it has 1,800 members in 80 branches.

Durham diocesan president Jean Carleton says: “In 1910, one of the members lived in a big house in Dipton, near Stanley, and she let people come for a holiday for 2s 6d a week – or, if you couldn’t afford that, it was 1s 6d for a couple of days. We now run a scheme called Away From It All where we give £400 to poor families and help them book a little break, so even today, in our own way, we are continuing what was started in 1910.”

So although times have changed enormously over the past 125 years, the Mothers’ Union’s Christian mission of quietly providing help, support and physical assistance to families remains unchanged.

The exhibition celebrating 125 years of the Mothers’ Union in Durham, and specifically its four branches in Darlington, runs until the end of the month in St Cuthbert’s Church. It is open for viewing from 11am to 1pm each day.

ANOTHER women’s organisation is celebrating a major landmark: the Women’s Institute is 100 this year, and this week several local members have been at a Garden Party in Buckingham Palace celebrating the centenary. The WI started in Canada in 1897 to teach women home economics, childcare and farming. It spread to this country during the First World War to promote food production. The first branches – in north Wales and Sussex – opened in September 1915. Perhaps later in the year, Memories should look at the WI.