Park to keep the working man quiet or healthy?

SO here it is. At last, the Echo Memories history sign has been installed in Darlington’s South Park.

In 2005, to coincide with the local council spending nearly £4m of Lottery money on restoring the park, this column ran a series of articles on the “Bellasses Park” or “People’s Park”, as it was originally known.

Those articles became the basis of a book, A Walk in the Park, and 50p from the sale of each copy has financed the sign.

Many thanks to all who bought a copy. And those who are about to (it has been reprinted and costs £6.50 from all good bookshops).

The park opened in the very early 1850s without any real ceremony or fanfare – a ploy we have copied with our sign to give it that air of real historical authenticity.

It was the first municipal park in the North-East – Sunderland (1857), Gateshead (1861), Middlesbrough (1865), Newcastle (1873) and Stockton (1893) all lagged behind.

Indeed, there were only two other municipal parks in the entire north of England: Sheffield (1841) and Liverpool (1842).

When Echo Memories gives its talks, those still awake at the end of the evening often ask if the Pease family, which created so much of the industrial Tees Valley and south Durham, were on the side of the good guys or the bad guys. The motivation for the creation of South Park is a good example of the dilemma.

Undoubtedly, the Peases and their associates were very generous in creating the park for the working man – their working man – to wander in. Joseph Pease, the founder of Middlesbrough, whose statue stands on Darlington’s High Row, personally donated 100 tons of slag from the bottom of one of his blast furnaces to build the park’s first paths.

Yet it is no coincidence that those paths were laid for the ordinary people just as the Peases were being criticised for building tall walls that prevented the ordinary person from peering in – or even getting in – to the luxurious parks and gardens sprouting on the sides of the grand mansions.

It is also no coincidence that the park was laid out just as pressure from the town’s dissatisfied ratepayers had forced the unelected Board of Commissioners, which ran the town until 1850, to be replaced with an elected Board of Health. The Peases dominated both bodies, but to stem the ratepayers’ dissatisfaction, they had to show that the new, democratic Board of Health was capable of doing something.

So the town made history by getting the region’s first municipal park – but was the motivation a desire to improve the lot of the working man, or a desire to keep him quiet?

ON a similar theme, we remember that there was talk of historic interpretation being placed alongside the new Eastern Transport Corridor in Darlington which follows the trackbed of the Peases’ Stockton and Darlington Railway.

During the construction, rare stone sleepers from 1825 – the first day of the line when Locomotion No 1 steamed along this very stretch and changed the history of the North-East, if not the world, for ever – were uncovered. They were to be used in the interpretation.

The new road came in over budget.

Sadly – as when the High Row pedestrianisation came in over budget – the first thing to be cut was the historic interpretation.

Even Stockton has the decency to call the road it has just built along the trackbed of the S&DR “1825 Way”.

If Darlington, “the birthplace of the railways”, isn’t proud of its own past, who else will be? No one else will promote Darlington’s heritage if it doesn’t care about it.

ANYWAY, back to our architect friend William Peachey, who was helping the Peases to build the railways while helping himself to a few backhanders.

Among the stations that Mr Peachey built was the one in the Gaunless Valley village of Evenwood (well, actually in Ramshaw, but called Evenwood), on the Bishop Auckland to Barnard Castle line. It was an economy design which he completed in early 1876.

Unfortunately, the Board of Trade inspected and refused to allow the station to open because of the severe gradient of the railway line leading up to it.

The North-Eastern Railway refused to accept that there was anything wrong with the line.

Stalemate ensued with station standing unopened for eight years.

Finally, in March 1884, the North-Eastern Railway backed down, altered the line and Peachey’s station received its first train on June 6 – by which time the architect, who designed Middlesbrough’s grand station and the superb Zetland Hotel, in Saltburn, east Cleveland, had been forced to resign in disgrace.

Evenwood station closed on October 14, 1957, and through services between Barnard Castle and Bishop were withdrawn on June 18, 1962.

Why the Dickens did he pick on Bowes?

BACK at Bowes, the debate continues about whether William Shaw, the real headmaster of Dotheboys Hall, was as horrible as Wackford Squeers, the fictional headmaster that Charles Dickens turned him into in Nicholas Nickleby.

Michael Rudd, the author of the lovely book, The Discovery of Teesdale, writes to point out that in the preface to the 1838 novel, Dickens states: “Mr Squeers is the representative of a class, and not of an individual.”

Boy-farming, where unwanted boys were dumped in large stone-built houses in distant dales, was very lucrative in Teesdale until Dickens exposed the cruelty of the trade.

While researching his book, Michael also discovered this line in The Darlington Half Holiday Guide of 1899: “The school at Dotheboys Hall was rather a superior one of its class, and nothing like so bad as Dickens painted it. Indeed it has been said – and with some degree of truth – that the school Dickens intended to caricature was Bowes Hall, at the foot of the village.”

Bowes Hall was run by George Clarkson. His wife died at the foot of the stairs in 1820 after a drunken riot involving pupils and teachers.

In a letter, Dickens wrote that Shaw was a “scoundrel” who “opened up a cancer in the head of a miserable child with an inky penknife and so caused his death”.

Dickens was so taken with this tale that he has Mrs Squeers perform the operation on a boy in his book.

However, it was Clarkson who had taken a dirty penknife to a pimple on a boy’s nose – and the boy survived so successfully that he was able to tell Dickens the horrific story during the novelist’s two-day stay in the district in February 1838.

So, Dickens was a little harsh on Mr Shaw. In fact, Dickens was a little harsh on Bowes. It had several “boyfarms”, as did other Teesdale villages such as Cotherstone, Startforth and Romaldkirk. Why the Dickens didn’t he pick on them instead?

Bowes’ bleak aspect, surrounded by moors and with the chillest of winds blowing a snowstorm off Stainmore on the day Dickens visited, must have appealed to the writer.

Val Fryer, who 20 years ago wrote a pageant to celebrate the village’s connection with Dickens, has another theory.

“Dickens’ brother, Alfred, gave him a childhood nickname of ‘Moses’, but as Alfred had trouble with his adenoids, he pronounced it ‘Bos-es’,” she says.

“This was then shortened to ‘Boz’ – with a long o, so it would have been pronounced ‘bowes’. Dickens would have been unable to resist such a coincidence.”

■ Following last week’s article, the owner of Bowes Hall has been in touch.

While the windowpanes on which the pupils scratched their messages have indeed gone, the names carved in 1821 on the wooden window shutters still remain.

Taking a trip down memory drain

IN the recent past, this column has been filled with items about sewer pipes and stench poles and attractive pieces of slag that are to be found lining our gutters.

Now we’re going down the drain. Dick Graham sends this picture, right, of a cast iron drain cover he discovered in Castleside, on the road to Waskerley, in County Durham.

It says: “ZENITH PAT 236361. SINGLE SEAL GULLY. PEASE AND PARTNERS MAKERS, MIDDLESBROUGH.

REINFORCED GRATE.”

This patent was granted in 1924.

Writing in the new edition of The Bonny Moor Hen, the magazine of the Weardale Field Study Society, Dick says that in Weardale alone you can still find grates made by the Newgate and Bowes foundries of Barnard Castle, Lingford and Gardiner, of Bishop Auckland, Auxwells, of Durham, N Downing, of Stockton and Jennings Foundry, of Sunderland.

“The list is by no means exhaustive, but the names are disappearing fast as the roads are upgraded and the old covers scrapped,” he said.

How can we resist? If you’ve got an interesting drain cover in your street, please, please let us know.

Time for inspiration

WHILE staying at the King’s Head, in Barnard Castle, on his 1838 factfinding tour, Dickens gained further inspiration.

He spotted Thomas Humphrey’s clock shop at Amen Corner, beneath St Mary’s Church.

In the doorway, Thomas displayed a clock made by his son, William – it was, therefore, Master Humphrey’s clock.

On April 4, 1840, Dickens published the first edition of his weekly story paper called Master Humphrey’s Clock. In the following 88 editions of the magazine, Dickens serialised his famous novels, The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge.

Dickens felt that Master Humphrey’s clock was a magic clock. The stories were so absorbing that they would make time fly for the reader.

And what did Dickens say was the name of the maker of Master Humphrey’s clock?

Of course, none other than "Boz" himself.