A home from home

Others would say that the mistake was huge – we were, it transpired, half a world away from where we should have been.

Dorothy Turner in Great Ayton was one of several to correctly identify the building. “I’ve seen this cottage in Melbourne, Australia, and it is very similar to mine – the same railings, the same sandstone base, the small narrow bricks, the Yorkshire sash windows,” she said.

And that’s because, as Dorothy pointed out, the cottage started life in Great Ayton in the middle of the 18th Century when it was built by James Cook Senior, but in the 1930s it was taken down brick-by-brick and rebuilt in Melbourne, where it acts as a museum dedicated to James Cook Junior.

The great captain was born in Marton in 1728. When he was about eight his father, a farm labourer, came to work at Airyholme Farm, a couple of miles outside Ayton. The family lived in a farm cottage, and the farm owner, Thomas Skottowe, the lord of the manor, paid for young James to go to the village school.

The site where he was educated is now a schoolroom museum.

In 1744, Cook’s father, wanting him to do more than farm labouring, persuaded him to become an apprentice shopkeeper at Staithes, and so the 17-year-old left Ayton. He found shopkeeping not to his taste, became an apprentice mariner in Whitby, and the world was his oyster…

Back in Ayton, Cook’s father retired from farmwork and built a family home in the centre of the village. On the lintel over the door he had carved: “CJG 1755” – which stood for “Cook James Grace”, Grace being the explorer’s mother.

Given the date over the door, it is impossible the Capt Cook ever lived in the cottage, but he certainly visited – perhaps after Grace had died in 1765.

Harry Mead, who lives down the road in Great Broughton, said: “There can be little doubt he would call on his father in the cottage during an eight-day visit he made to Great Ayton over Christmas and New Year 1771-72, staying at Ayton Hall, home of a friend, Commodore William Wilson. Cook had obtained leave from the Admiralty to travel north, because, as he explained in a letter, he had "business to transact in Yorkshire, as well as to see an aged father”.

“It is believed he wished to persuade his father, then a 77-year-old widower, to move to Marske-by-the-Sea, to live with a married daughter, which Cook Senior did the following year.”

Harry, our venerable columnist, can practically prove that Capt Cook stepped foot under the lintel.

“His "business" was at Hull, where he was to meet a Capt Hammond, it is thought to arrange modifications to vessels being prepared for his second voyage of discovery. But Cook cancelled the visit, giving as his reason "Mrs Cook (who had accompanied him north) being but a bad traveller”.

“The letter to Capt Hammond cancelling the visit is dated "Ayton 3rd, Jan 1772", so it virtually confirms that Cook would have visited what is usually, but wrongly, called "Capt Cook's Cottage.”

So James Jnr visited the cottage and when James Snr went to live elsewhere, it was bought by the Dixon family.

At the start of the 20th Century, a large chunk of the cottage was demolished to widen Bridge Street, and then in 1933, the last of the Dixons put it up for sale. Initially her instructions were that it had to stay in England, but she was persuaded to change that to “Empire”, and Sir Russell Grimwade stepped in. He was an Australian chemist and philanthropist who offered £800 for the property – the highest local bid was £300.

Every brick was numbered as it was dismantled, and then they were loaded into 253 packing cases and 40 barrels. Even part of the ivy which covered the cottage was taken.

The house-sized consignment was placed on a train at Great Ayton station, driven to Hull from where it sailed on the liner Port Dunedin to Melbourne. Down under, it was painstakingly reconstructed in Fitzroy Gardens, with even the ivy taking root.

But that was not the end of the story. The packing cases were then filled with granite hewn from Point Hicks at Cape Everard – the first piece of Australia sighted from Capt Cook’s Endeavour on April 20, 1770 – and sent back to Great Ayton so that an obelisk could be erected on the site of the cottage.

The obelisk, unveiled on October 15, 1934, is said to be identical to the one at Cape Everard.

Capt Cook’s parents’ house is believed to be the only 18th Century building in all of Australia.

“IT is not Great Burdon blacksmiths,” said Rob Jones of Darlington, ringing in after Memories 279, “because I remember it from when I was a boy, as I used to ride Clydesdale horses from Newstead Farm in Black Banks Lane to it for shoeing, and I think you’ve got the wrong one.”

Great Burdon smithy should not be easily mistaken – when it closed in 1982, it was described as the last working smithy in Darlington.

“My father, John Gill, was the blacksmith at Great Burdon from 1951 until he retired in 1982,” writes Pam Marrs. “He started at Deaf Hill Colliery when he was 14, working alongside his father. He was an apprentice farrier, working underground shoeing pit ponies.

“When he took over the blacksmiths in Great Burdon he travelled each day from Trimdon, on his bike or using the bus, until in 1953 we moved to Sadberge, making a much easier commute. My brother, Robert, served his apprenticeship with Dad, who had a wide variety of skills, shoeing horses, mending farm implements and of course doing wrought iron work. He made lots of decorative railings and gates for private residences as well as ornate floor-standing candle holders and stands for flower displays in churches...jobs too numerous to mention.”

After Mr Gill’s retirement, the Dean and Chapter of Durham, which had owned the village since 1541, wanted to demolish the smithy and build something big and expensive on the site.

However, Darlington council slapped a protection notice on it, and the Department of the Environment gave it Grade II listed protection, noting that parts of the blacksmith’s cottage dated back to the early 18th Century. Other sources put another 200 years on top of that.

In 1990, permission was granted to convert it into a two-bedroomed cottage, preserving many of the original features, including, we believe, the forge.

In 2014, it was on the market for £235,000.

THE man who set us off on this wild goose chase was Douglas Jefferson, who was the Echo’s first chief photographer. He worked between the world wars, and left a dusty suitcase of fascinating, but poorly captioned, prints in the Echo archive.

One of them was a selfie – Douglas, debonairly dressed, posing against the front wheel of an early delivery van, cigarette in hand. But he didn’t write down which hostelry he had been visiting – although the name over the door can be read: “Philip Gill”.

The photo’s appearance in Memories 279 to look up Philip Gill in the 1911 census, and there he is, a 45-year-old farmer and innkeeper living with his wife, Margaret, and there five daughters at Broom Dykes, Heighington.

Broom Dykes is actually just outside Heighington on the A68 – people who regularly travel the important road to Weardale and Consett will know the Dog Inn on the Broom Dykes crossroads.

The Ordnance Survey map marks Broom Dykes North as being a couple of hundred yards further up the bank from the Dog, and opposite it as a building set back from the road that the map calls Cock Inn Farm.

The windows on Douglas’ selfie tally exactly with those in the farmhouse, so we reckon that he’d called at the Cock on the A68 for a quick beer after a hard day’s photography.

MANY thanks, as always, to every one who gets in touch. Each snippet of information is extremely welcome, and who knows what unusual avenue it will take us down – who thought we’d get to Australia from Great Burdon. Thank-you.