“THE quarry manager, Mr Thomas P Gowland, was stepping across the shafting in Blake’s crusher house when he missed his footing,” reported The Northern Echo on November 23, 1883.

As you may guess, the next sentences make painful reading.

“He was caught by the revolving driving wheels and drawn between the pinions. He was carried two or three times round before the heavy machinery could be stopped and his left leg below the knee was completely severed in two.”

Mr Gowland, 47, was carried to his home in Wesley Terrace, Middleton-in-Teesdale where, surrounded by his wife and children, he died.

There used to be several road stone quarries, like the one the unfortunate Mr Gowland was working in, on the south side of the River Tees at Middleton. They were blasting into the Great Whin Sill, a horizontal band of dark rock formed about 300m years ago when the Earth’s tectonic plates shifted and allowed hot magma to explode to the surface. The “igneous intrusion” baked the surrounding rocks, and as the magma cooled, it crystallised and solidified to create rock that was so hard that it formed some of the north’s most dramatic landscapes: High Force, Hadrian’s Wall, Bamburgh Castle and Holy Island Castle are all shaped by it.

And the whinstone was also good for road-building.

In 1868, Henry Pease of Darlington drove the Tees Valley Railway up the dale from Barnard Castle and terminated it on the south side of the river at Middleton-in-Teesdale. A couple of decades later, a little mineral snaked its way from the terminus towards the hamlet of Holwick, and encouraged the opening of the quarries by the Darlington firm of Ord & Maddison.

By the 1920s, a couple of hundred quarrymen were employed in the Middleton, Park End and Crossthwaite collieries.

It was dangerous work, as the fate of Mr Gowland shows. On June 13, 1901, 19-year-old James Hebdon died when his head was crushed between a railway wagon and a post, and six months later assistant blaster James Allinson, 61, died when his gelignite exploded prematurely. He had prepared a fuse that should have taken 11 minutes to ignite the explosive but, for some unknown reason, it went up immediately, bringing 300 tons of whinstone down on the blaster.

Middleton Quarry closed in the 1930s, but the other two outlasted the railway, which closed in 1964.

“I worked at Park End, where I think your picture of the face dressers would have been taken, from 1964 to 1969,” writes Colin Bennett. “I enjoyed it – they were a grand set of blokes to work with.

“I enclose some photos that I took in about 1966 – they were taken using a Box Brownie camera that my mother obtained through The Northern Echo pre-war.”

The Box Brownie giveaway was one of the Echo’s great gimmicks of the 1930s, and gave many readers their first taste of photography – and the pictures, as Colin’s efforts show, weren’t too bad.

LAST week, we asked why the west end of Middleton-in-Teesdale is known as “Hude”. Bill Payne, who has written a booklet on the area, says: “Hude towers above Middleton, protecting it from the prevailing winds that frequently storm in from the west. The meaning of “Hude” is not absolutely clear, but a favoured theory is that it has its origin in the dialect use of the word “hood”.”

The height of Hude means it acts as a protective hood to the rest of the village. In Teesdale talk, double o vowels sound like “eu” – a book is a “beuk”, and so a hood is pronounced “heud” which is written as “Hude”.

“To complicate matters further, older residents use a form of double dialect and used to refer to it as the “yud”,” says Bill.

“FIRSTLY, just to say how much my husband and I enjoy reading Memories,” emails Cynthia Latcham, building us up for a fall. “Secondly, I doubt that last week’s photo showing the Teesdale Workmen's store in Middleton-in-Teesdale was taken in March 1963 – we've never found the trees so fully in leaf as in the picture at that time of year in Middleton. Perhaps it was May 1963.”

A good point well made.

MANY thanks to everyone who gets in touch with Memories: more of your feedback in the future. Next week there’ll be a slimmed down version of Memories and we hope to return in full glory in a fortnight.