Charity's garden event revives memories of a family whose business enterprise and generosity helped shape a town

LADY STARMER died more than 35 years ago, but she is still fondly remembered in Darlington for her generous garden parties and for her idiosyncratic driving.

The recent death of Jungle has caused the retelling of how she once accidentally knocked him off his Kawasaki, so starting an enduring friendship between her ladyship and the Hell's Angel.

Next Saturday, a garden party will be held in the grounds of her West End mansion, reviving memories of the days when every summer Saturday she threw open her doors to raise money for local good causes.

Her home was Danby Lodge, an Edwardian brick villa set in an ocean of lawn which, hidden behind tall walls off Coniscliffe Road, is now an oasis of peace. Today it is an Abbeyfield home, which provides independent living for elderly people.

It was built between 1902 and 1904 by Sir John Scott, a civil engineer. His father was Sir Walter, who started out as a Cumberland wrestler and stonemason but who ended up as the 1st Baronet of Beauclerc, Riding Mill. Sir Walter was a publisher and a contractor – his most famous constructions include the portico on Newcastle station (1863) and the Tyne Theatre in Newcastle (1867).

His eldest son John, who became the 2nd baronet, specialised in watery constructions. According to his obituary in The Northern Echo in 1922, Sir John "carried out great water storage and filtering works for the Tees Valley Water Board at Hury, Grassholme and Lartington, from which nearly the whole of the drinking water for the towns in the lower reaches of the Tees area is supplied".

Not all of his projects were so successful. In 1909, after four years of work, his £206,0000 Birkenhead dock was just days from completion when, during a snowstorm, a temporary dam gave way, and 14 of his workers were swept to their deaths. The coroner concluded that it was an accident and no one was to blame, but the Government refused to hold a public inquiry and Merseyside is still not happy with the unexplained nature of the tragedy.

Sir John's wife was Elizabeth, who came from Saltburn, which may explain the name of their mansion, Danby being on the North York Moors above the seaside resort.

There's another line in Sir John's obituary which may explain another mystery in the mansion: the panelling in the library is designed to around a painting of a white horse with its tail clipped.

"In his later years, Sir John took a keen interested in the breeding of racehorses and his horses won several races," said the obituary.

Perhaps the white horse was one of his favourites.

The painting is signed by James Clark, whom we believe to be the West Hartlepool artist whose famous depiction of the 1914 bombardment of Hartlepool lighthouse featured in Memories last year. At Christmas 1914, Clark's work entitled The Great Sacrifice, which showed Christ appearing to a wounded soldier, was published by The Graphic newspaper as a souvenir print. It became one of the most popular images of the war.

Sir John died at Danby Lodge in 1922. His estate was worth £582,165 (nearly £30m in today's values, according to the Bank of England Inflation Calculator).

The new owner of the mansion was Sir Charles Starmer, the saviour of The Northern Echo. He'd grown up in Loftus, on the east Cleveland coast where one of his childhood friends had been John Fenwick Latimer. Latimer also moved to Darlington to establish a prosperous career, and his name still lives on his solicitor's practice in Priestgate.

Starmer started with the Echo as an advertising salesman, but when the paper was on the brink of collapse in 1903, he persuaded the Rowntree family of York to take it over so it could continue to promote Liberalism. He became its managing director and, with rare business brilliance, built a nationwide group of local newspapers around it. He offered readers free gifts, like Box Brownie cameras and life insurance, and he introduced the Nig Nog Club – for all it sounds politically incorrect today, Nig Nogs were children, and more than 50,000 of them joined up in the club's first ten weeks in 1930.

Starmer and his cronies ruled Darlington. In 1903, he was elected as a Liberal councillor. In 1907, he became mayor. In 1915, he became an alderman. In 1917, he was knighted for his public services. In 1918, he stood unsuccessfully for Parliament in Sedgefield. In 1923, he was elected MP for Cleveland, but, in 1924, he lost the seat.

But there was probably more power than in either the council chamber or the Commons found in Fox's cafe in Bondgate. There, daily, Starmer met his friends – including Latimer – to plot the running of the town. It was they who pioneered a Liberal experiment of using public money during a recession to put unemployed men to work building useful infrastructure – they dug a boating lake in South Park, they extended the library, they extended the Echo's offices.

And when there was no public money available, Starmer and his clique raised it themselves: in 1933, he presided over the royal opening of Darlington Memorial Hospital, which had been built by charitable donation.

Six weeks later, midway through his second term as mayor, Sir Charles, 63, died suddenly at his Westminster residence.

This made a widow of his second wife, Mary Cecilia Wakefield Willink, the daughter of the Dean of Norwich, whom all Darlington knew as “Lady Starmer”. They’d only been married four years, and she was only about 38 years old – Lady Starmer’s precise age was a subject never discussed in public.

Widowed so young, Lady Starmer immersed herself in good works. When she died in 1979 – she was somewhere in her eighties – she had been president of 38 local organisations and vice-president of another 37. Many, if not all, of them had been allowed to use her lovely lawns for fund-raising garden parties, and inside the house was a room full of lockers which were allocated to local scouts and brownies whom she encouraged to use her grass for meetings.

She also indulged herself in questionable driving. She had driven a First World War ambulance in France and, it is fair to say, that the streets of Darlington often looked like a battlefield after she had driven by. She liked to regally wave at all the people she knew, so her eyes were rarely on the road, and she would often stop abruptly to hail them from the window. She knocked the unfortunate “Mr Jungle” off his motorbike in her Vanden Plas; once, when she couldn’t park her Austin Princess in Skinnergate, she left it, engine running, in the middle of the road and gave the keys to a passing policeman, saying: “You look after the car, my man.”

Before she died, she agreed to leave Danby Lodge to the Abbeyfield Society, a charity which provides family-style living for elderly people who no longer wish to live alone but want to retain their independence. The mansion was converted into nine apartments, and a couple of years later a generous bequest from the Latimer family enabled a new wing to be built in the grounds – JF Latimer House.

Today, 25 elderly people call Danby Lodge their home, and next Saturday’s garden party on Lady Starmer’s lawns will raise money for the Abbeyfield Society. All are welcome.

GARDEN PARTY

Saturday, July 11, 2pm-4pm
Danby Lodge (Ashcroft Road off Coniscliffe Road, Darlington)
Raffle, cake stall, tombola, refreshments, music from the Dalesiders
Free admission, proceeds to the Abbeyfield Society