The life of Relly's railways and paper mills

And now, if you are of a nervous disposition, do not read any further.

Because paper mills were violent places.

Rag and bone men went from door to door collecting rags and bones – the animal bones were ground down to make fertiliser and the linen rags were smashed into pulp to make paper.

Not only were they smashed, but they were torn, pounded and shredded by all manner of rapidly spinning machinery, powered by unforgiving steam engines.

Mixed with water from the river, the pulp was then stretched onto frames and squeezed in a steam-powered press to get the water out. Often it was heated in a furnace, too, and then emerged brown paper.

Great dangers therefore lurked in paper mills.

In 1866, Ellen Dinning, 15, an intelligent girl who lived with her family in Grape Lane in the centre of Durham, started work at Relly Paper Mill – as well as being next to the Browney, the mill was beside the East Coast Mainline and gave its name to the junction where a line looped off to join the Lanchester Valley Railway.

The remains of Relly Paper Mill in 2005

Ellen was employed in the chopping loft of the mill, along with 15 other girls. Their fearsome machinery was driven by a shaft that was spun at 140 revolutions per minute by a steam engine at the bottom of the mill.

One August day after their shift had ended, Ellen volunteered to show a new starter, Bridget Corbett, all the fascinating corners of the mill that was at least a century old.

They went down onto the dusting floor, through which the six inch shaft spun without a cover on it. She opened a trapdoor in the floor to show Bridget the flywheel spinning on the engine beneath.

Then she stepped over the trapdoor.

Ellen was fashionably dressed in a wide skirt. “She seemed to know all about the place,” said Bridget later. “She had a crinoline on, and a knickerbocker winsey frock.”

You’ve probably already guessed what happened.

“The poor girl was drawn in and killed, and her body was carried round at a great speed,” reported the Durham Advertiser, the Echo’s sister paper, on August 24, 1866. “At every revolution of the shaft, the body was jammed in between the shaft and the wall and dashed against the floor.”

It took Bridget two minutes to locate engineman Nesbitt Oswald and for him to cut off the power. The Advertiser’s reporter worked out that in that time, the shaft had spun 280 times.

Other newspapers were far more graphic. The Kendal Mercury reported: “When the machine had been stopped a most sickening spectacle presented itself. The girl’s head and arms were completely severed from the trunk, and she was otherwise so fearfully mangled that the remains could scarcely be recognised as those of a human being.”

The unfortunate Mr Oswald, who had tried unsuccessfully to dissuade the girls from wearing crinolines, had to “cut the clothes off the shaft and carefully collected the mutilated remains of the poor girl”.

The Advertiser said: “After the accident, it was stated in the mill that the deceased had communicated to some of her companions a singular dream she had about a month before her death. She dreamt she saw the engineman standing up to his knees in blood, cutting flesh away from some machinery.”

Mr Oswald told the inquest that he hadn’t had to do the last bit.

The coroner concluded that “the deceased had evidently been the cause of her own death”, but advised that the shaft should in future be covered.

He also said that Ellen’s death was “a favourable opportunity to prohibit the wearing of crinolines”.

MEMORIES 545 was taken into the Relly area by Clive Madgin, who asked about a weathered, carved stone (above) set in the roadside wall on the northern edge of Langley Bridge, which is a mile or so south of the paper mill. Clive’s parents had once told him that the letters on the wall were the initials of a girl who had drowned in the Browney.

As our pictures showed, the letters on the wall read “ELL”.

THE drowning theory about the letters may still hold water. Immediately to the south of Langley Bridge is a row of four houses which is today called Grove Terrace (above, from Google StreetView).

A lozenge on a central house records that they were originally called “Ann’s Terrace 1874”.

Several Memories readers have heard a story that they were built on a spot where a girl called Ann had lost her life in the Browney.

RAILWAYS and rivers were a winning combination for the paper mills. Railways brought wagonloads of rags and rivers provided water and power.

From the north beside the Browney, the paper mills of the Relly area were Aldin Grange, Relly Mill, Stonebridge, and Langley Grove.

In Ellen’s day, several of the mills were run by the Smith family, who lived in nearby Park House, a large riverside estate which included Langley Grove in its grounds.

As coal became more profitable than paper, Park House became the home of Martin Holliday, the agent for Littleburn and Broompark collieries, which were owned by Lord Boyne in Brancepeth Castle. Martin lived there from 1884 until 1923, and after his death, he enabled the Langley Grove area to become a public space – it is now the popular Holliday Park, which is overlooked by Ann’s Terrace.

“I worked for Durham City Parks Department for 34 years and often cut the grass at Holliday Park,” says Billy Mollon, who has helped enormously with this article. “One winter, the Browney had flooded it and had left about 2ft of water in a large lake. I was sent with a van and two small petrol pumps to pump the water back into the Browney as it was a hazard to the public.

“It had frozen over and I could see people had gone through the ice - not much of a problem to an adult but a young child could have drowned.

“There was a filled in shaft in the park which possibly was an air shaft from a colliery.”

IN 1968, Park House became the studios of Radio Durham, which was one of the first nine BBC local radio stations set up by the BBC. A young reporter called Kate Adie made her debut on their airwaves from there.

As BBC Newcastle and BBC Teesside were opened, BBC Durham was squeezed in the middle. It ceased broadcasting from Park House in 1972, and now the county is shared by the two surviving stations.

Since 1988, Park House has been the home of St Cuthbert’s Hospice (above) with Martin Holliday’s villa still at its heart.

NEAR Holliday Park was a Milk Marketing Board depot where, in the 1940s, John Horn worked as a dairy engineer by day.

By night, he played double bass in the Durham dancehalls with the Joe Clarke Band.

John lived up at Stonebridge – a bridge over the Browney, whereas Langley Bridge crosses the Deerness – where his son, Trevor, was born in 1949.

Trevor went to Durham Johnston School, showed such promise on the bass guitar that he stood in for his father when the band played at the Astoria Ballroom.

The Horns left Stonebridge for Leicester when Trevor (above) was in his mid-teens. He, of course, became a legendary music producer responsible for groups like Frankie Goes to Hollywood and the Art of Noise.