IT is ironic that Darlington council no longer feels that the ratepayers of the town can support a fully functioning library because back in the early days of libraries, the ratepayers of the town refused to allow their pennies to be spent on a public library.

The 1850 Public Libraries Act gave local councils the power to set-up a library funded by a farthing on the rates – but only if two-thirds of a town’s ratepayers agreed in a referendum. Public libraries were very controversial – they would drive private libraries out of business, they would become centres of social agitation, they would be expensive.

When one was proposed for Darlington in the last 1860s, there was a campaign against it. "The Free Library contest in Darlington waxes hotter and more bitter,” said the Darlington & Stockton Times. “The promoters seem determined to thrust their schemes down the popular throat, and the popular throat seems as determined to reject them."

To counteract the campaign, in the very first edition of The Northern Echo on January 1, 1870, the principle promoter, Edward Pease, paid for an open letter to be published, urging people to vote yes in the forthcoming library referendum.

But, the D&S Times was right. The popular throat rejected the library, by 1,240 votes to 932, with 814 neutral, and the plan was shelved.

Mr Pease kept on agitating. There are so many Peases from the same pod that they are confusing. This Edward Pease is not the Edward Pease who famously, with George Stephenson, created the Darlington and Stockton Railway in 1825. This Edward Pease is his grandson, and this Edward Pease was so fabulously wealthy that he barely did a day’s work. Instead, in delicate health, he split his time between his three mansions: Greencroft in Darlington, his self-built Scottish retreat of Kindrochet Lodge in Perthshire, where he went walking and fishing, and his estate in Bewdley, Worcestershire, where he specialised in forestry, fruit farming and mule breeding – he imported the best donkey sires from France and Spain to improve his asses.

Three mansions wasn’t enough, because Edward spent the “trying seasons” somewhere warm on the Continent, and it was in the five-star Hotel Schwitzerhof, on Lake Lucerne in Switzerland, that he died in 1880, having been taken unwell when travelling through the Gotthard Pass. He was only 46, and left his 14-year-old daughter, Beatrice, an orphan.

I am always in two minds about this mule-breeding Edward: it is difficult to reconcile his wealthily indolent lifestyle with his generous nature. His sudden death exposed that he was quietly paying for a missionary to go from door-to-door in Ireland handing out his money to the poor, and in Darlington, he genuinely and passionately believed that self-education through reading was the best way for the lower classes to improve themselves.

And so in his will he left £10,000 – just over £1m in today’s values – to fund a free library.

The ratepayers of the town had to be consulted, but now they knew the burden of the books would fall on the Peases rather than themselves, the result in 1883 was a walkover: 3,420 yes votes to 599 nos with 1,725 neutral.

Even before the result was in, an architect had been instructed, and the Edward Pease Free Library was opened on October 23, 1885, by Beatrice.

If a referendum were to be held today, would council taxpayers vote for libraries to be funded by the rates?