Alfred’s healthy legacy

Echo Memories book, The Road to Rockliffe, was launched on Saturday amid mulled wine and festive nibbles at Rockliffe Hall in Hurworth. Written by Chris Lloyd, it tells the story of the hall from Roman times, looking at its owners, its parkland and its connection to the railway. The book also travels along the road to Rockliffe, telling the stories of Croft, Hurworth, Neasham and Sockburn, from spas, plague pits and mad mathematicians to highwaymen and fire-breathing dragons. It costs £12.50 softback or £25 hardback.

ROCKLIFFE Hall, set in an enchanting loop of the Tees, was built by banker Alfred Backhouse with extravagant elegance at the forefront of his mind.

Now his hall, near Darlington, is a sumptuous hotel, so we can still marvel at his eye for detail, we can stroll among his “woodland beauties” and we can sink deep into his opulence.

But I’ve spent the past three years trying to get closer to him.

It has been difficult. The few photographs show him stern and unsmiling, balding and bearded, serious and uncompromising, but they give very little away.

He was born in 1822 in Sunderland, where his father had made a fortune by being the only banker in town. Alfred grew up in Ashburne, an imposing residence which is now part of the university and its gardens, including the Valley of Love, are a public park: Backhouse’s Park.

Alfred went from school Alfred’s healthy legacy Alfred Backhouse spent thousands of pounds creating Rockliffe Hall, but IN ASSOCIATION WITH into the bank, and he ran the head office for about 30 years from its headquarters, which still dominate Darlington’s High Row – built, like Rockliffe, by Alfred Waterhouse, the greatest architect of his generation.

But there’s little more to say here, as Alfred was a model banker: unspectacularly solid.

Only a little more is revealed in his family life. He met his wife, Rachel Barclay, at a Quaker wedding in 1848, but they didn’t have any children.

When Alfred’s elder brother died, leaving three orphans, they took on the 12-year-old middle son, James Edward.

He lived with them at Rockliffe and when he married in 1873, Alfred gave him a wedding present only he could have devised: Hurworth Grange, a £15,000 country house (about £1.3m today) designed by Waterhouse, just over the road from Rockliffe.

Alfred’s public life gives us another glimpse, as he sat on Darlington’s first real council – the Board of Health – for 18 years after it was formed in September 1850. He hardly ever spoke, and voted loyally with the Peases in their paternalistic attempts to improve the town.

Board members stood for reelection every four years, and in 1864, Alfred topped the poll with 1,186 votes. But one of his defeated opponents, Barnard Castle carpetweaver turned Chartist troublemaker Nicholas Bragg, spotted an electoral anomaly.

By law, board chairman Joseph Pease should have overseen the whole election process personally. But halfway through, he had suffered a deterioration in the debilitating eye condition which dogged, and darkened, the last decade of his life, and so had gone to Ireland to consult a specialist, leaving town clerk Hugh Dunn to count and validate the votes.

This was unlawful. Mr Bragg labelled Alfred “the illegal member”. The courts agreed, but every time his election was declared invalid, Alfred appealed. For more than two years, Regina versus Backhouse rumbled through the highest courts in the land like a Dickens sub-plot.

His lawyers argued that Joseph’s absence was only a minor technical irregularity that had no bearing on the result.

Mr Bragg’s lawyers argued that it was a point of principle: the high and mighty Peases should not be allowed to ride roughshod over a law which had been framed to protect the delicate workings of democracy.

The case appears never to have reached a conclusion because it ran out of relevance when the Board of Health was replaced in 1868 by a municipal council, and Alfred retired from public life. I think he was quietly pleased. He seems not to have enjoyed the public arena, and now he was able to devote himself quietly with great generosity to the causes close to his heart.

His prime interest was health. He was involved from the beginning in Darlington’s first hospital, which opened in Russell Street in 1865, sitting on its management committee and donating annually, and substantially, to its funds.

With Rachel, he watched it outgrow its original building and move to Greenbank, which remained Darlington’s maternity hospital until 1989.

He was equally committed to the North of England College for Training Mistresses for Elementary Schools in its £17,000 purpose-built home in Vane Terrace (now Darlington Arts Centre).

It was unusual for its day as it trained young women to have a career, and was again funded wholly by charitable contributions, most of them, like Alfred’s, of Quaker origin.

Alfred’s other great interest was his estates. He began buying land in the Rockliffe loop of the Tees in the late 1850s, and he completed his jigsaw in 1881. He demolished the old farmhouse, which had been lived in by war heroes and minor aristocrats, and set Waterhouse to work creating a symphony of chimneys, a drama of rooflines, a bounty of bays, a collage of windows, a brilliance of balustrades, and a cunning contrast of stone and brick.

These were topped off by a wealth of detail, a multitude of pinnacles, finials, weathervanes and even a minaret – ideas that had been stolen from financial institutions, appropriated from cathedrals and nicked from chateaux across Europe and throughout time.

It took two phases, two decades and £30,000.

The mansion was set at the centre of an ornate pleasureground, designed to have vistas east to the Cleveland Hills and west to the Pennines, all topped of by the drama of the four arches of the Tees Viaduct which was one of the most remarkable railway bridges of its day.

There was a lake and a boathouses, a private carriage bridge over the Tees, a grotto, a summerhouse, and the newest exotic trees from all over the planet.

“Mr Backhouse was an ardent horticulturist and an enthusiastic admirer of Nature,”

said his obituary in the Darlington and Stockton Times of September 8, 1888. “His residence is famous for its woodland beauties, and the cunning of its arrangement. The deceased gentleman was never so happy as when he was roaming about his grounds, noting their yearly growth and planning improvement for the future.”

But Rockliffe had a terrible twin: Dryderdale, above Wolsingham.

Enveloped in trees on the edge of never-ending moorland, Alfred had Waterhouse build a Scottish baronial six-bedroomed mini mansion in grey stone with a steep slate roof and dramatic views down the dale. Weardale was wild and wooly; Rockliffe was immaculate and opulent.

In August 1887, The Northern Echo reported that Alfred and Rachel were “sojourning at their beautifully wooded estate of Dryderdale”, and it was at Dryderdale that Alfred died the following autumn of a heart attack, aged 66.

In death, we learn more about Alfred. For instance, I had assumed that Joseph Pease – Darlington’s greatest son, whose statue stands in High Row – would have been the wealthiest man of his era.

He died in 1872, leaving £320,000 (£27m now). Sixteen years later, Alfred left a personal fortune of £369,911 1s 1d – roughly £36m now. By some distance, he had outstripped the greatest of the Peases.

After Rachel’s death in 1898, poor Alfred was laid bare: all of his possessions were spread out across Rockliffe’s lawns for a five-day sale, a lifetime of wealthy accumulation broken up into a million little lots and nebbed over by thousands of inquisitive eyes.

Once the vultures had picked the bones of the Backhouses’ lives bare, only one item remained. The finest of the collection. The sort of piece that would grace the entrance to a grand hotel like Rockliffe Hall. It was a lifesize revolving statue, in white marble, showing a sensuous young lady cradling a newborn infant.

It was carved by Giovanni Battista Lombardi (1822-80) in Rome, whose works now sell in the world’s leading auction houses for £100,000 or more.

He specialised in large figures of religious young women in tender poses with flowing gowns rippling around their shapely contours.

This statue shows the Pharoah’s daughter finding Moses in the bulrushes, and in March 1899 it was presented to Darlington Hospital in memory of Alfred and Rachel Backhouse, who had donated so much time and money.

Since 1989, the Pharaoh’s Daughter has stood at the entrance to the children’s department at Darlington Memorial Hospital.

There are many versions of the Moses’ story, but perhaps the most poignant says that as the Pharoah’s Daughter had no children, she adopted the foundling as her own.

Alfred and Rachel had no children of their own, but the hospital was their baby and Rockliffe, in all its extravagant glory, is their legacy.