IN Memories No 28 (April 14), we told how Katherine Pease fled the rather restrictive Quaker life of Darlington and became the first archaeologist to make a meaningful study of the statues of Easter Island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Katherine’s father, Gurney, died in 1872 when she was eight and the Peases moved her, her siblings and her grieving mother into the Woodside mansion in the West End of Darlington – a mansion that has excited several comments.

It was built on a grassy hillock between Coniscliffe Road and Blackwell Lane in 1842 by John Castell Hopkins, a wealthy Scotsman who had moved into the district to conduct the heavy industry. He had collieries from North Bitchburn down to Cockfield and Evenwood, and the connecting railways, and he became a Teesside ironmaster.

It was his firm, Hopkins, Gilkes and Co, which rolled the iron and built the Tay Bridge – and it was probably his firm’s flaws that caused the famous bridge to collapse in 1878.

In 1848, Hopkins sold Woodside to John Harris, a Quaker railway engineer, who employed local architects Richardson and Ross – the forerunners of Amdega – to add an 80ft conservatory plus a tower and a new wing.

It was into this mansion that Katherine moved in 1872.

While she was away on Easter Island during the First World War, her mother died at Woodside leaving the mansion empty. The Peases put it to a new, rather surprising, use.

“During the war, Woodside was used as a Voluntary Aid Detachment Hospital,” writes Alan Vickers.

The Quakers were profound pacifists and yet they allowed their meeting house on Skinnergate to become a 50-bed hospital for wounded soldiers – and so they aided the war effort.

When the War Office asked for the hospital to be relocated to a more tranquil location, the Peases converted Woodside into a 75-bed hospital with operating theatre.

During the war to which they were opposed, the Quakers helped treat 540 inpatients and a further 2,429 out-patients.

In peacetime, they even received a certificate noting their contribution from the War Office. It was signed on the rear by Winston Churchill.

In peacetime, Woodside could not be economically returned into domestic use and so it was demolished in the 1920s. Hartford, Ravensdale, Woodvale, Woodcrest, Greenmount and Manor roads are on its site. Are there any bits of it remaining in anyone’s back garden?