150 years since the death of Darlington's Joseph Pease

He is probably Darlington’s greatest son. Here are some pieces of Pease…

Joseph Pease in 1832, shortly after the founding of Middlesbrouugh

He was born on June 22, 1799, in Houndgate. He was the second son of Edward “the father of the railways” Pease.

After attending Quaker schools in Leeds and London, he took an apprenticeship in his father’s woollen business – Peases Mill was where the Sports Direct multi-storey car park is today.

In his youth, he climbed up a tree onto the roof of his father’s house in Northgate (now Domino’s pizza parlour) and ran across the rooftops to the old Post Office (which, according to The Northern Echo this week, is about to reopen as a Milletts shop) – in Joseph’s day, there was no ring-road or Crown Street, just a continuous line of houses.

Aged 19, he drew up the prospectus for the Stockton & Darlington Railway, his father’s pet project. This document persuaded careful Quakers to invest in the railway. Joseph was also involved in negotiations with landowners over whose land the railway ran.

Joseph's statue in High Row

In 1826, the year after the railway opened, he married Emma Gurney from the East Anglian Quaker banking family. They moved into Southend – now Duncan Bannatyne’s New Grange Hotel – and had 12 children.

On August 8, 1828, he sailed down the Tees, surveying its desolate saltplains, but wrote in his diary: "Imagination here had ample scope in fancying a coming day when the bare fields will be covered with a busy multitude and numerous vessels crowding to their banks denote the busy seaport." He felt Stockton was badly placed for the dock at the end of the railway, and wanted one closer to the sea. He called it Port Darlington, and it became Middlesbrough.

There was great opposition to his plans in Yarm and Stockton, but Joseph said: "Yarm was, Stockton is, Middlesbrough will be." Erimus, Latin for "we will be", is still Middlesbrough's motto.

In 1829, he was the lead partner in the Middlesbrough Estate, buying 500 acres of bleak, empty land, which he developed into the new town. In 1840, he enticed John Vaughan and Henry Bolckow to come from Tyneside to set up their foundry in Middlesbrough on "a dreary waste of mud on which sailors had discharged their ballast". Joseph ran railways out to Guisborough to exploit the ironstone in his mines in the Cleveland Hills; he opened an early blast furnace in 1853 at South Bank – he created the industry on which Middlesbrough was based, and in 1856, he owned 800 houses in the town.

In 1829, at the other end of the line, Joseph bought his first colliery – Old Shildon – and grew into the biggest coalowner in south Durham. By 1870, he was exporting 1m tons of coke from his mines.

In each of the new industrial communities he created, he built a school, preferably south-facing. When he died, he was personally paying the wages of 29 teachers, seven sewing mistresses and 60 pupil teachers who worked in his schools.

In 1833, Joseph topped the poll to become the first MP for South Durham. He was the first Quaker MP, and his plain Quaker dress and mode of speech – he refused to use the words “honourable member” – made him a celebrity. He passionately spoke against slavery and the death penalty. He introduced the 1835 Cruelty to Animals Bill which outlawed bear and bull baiting and cockfighting.

He was challenged to a duel by Irish nationalist MP Andrew O’Dwyer, but as he was a pacifist, he refused.

He took down truckles of Cotherstone cheese to Parliament to give as gifts to his fellow MPs.

At the 1851 Great Exhibition, the flags on the roof of the Crystal Palace were made at Peases’ mill in Darlington, and the iron which held up the structure was smelted by Peases’ coke. Peases’ firebricks and Peases’ Coburg – a type of material – won awards as Joseph was proved to be one of the country’s leading industrialists.

After leaving Parliament in 1841, Joseph developed Southend into Darlington’s leading mansion (above). As well as extending the house, he created gardens with a large fishpond (now beneath Green Park) surrounded by paths lined with purple and white fluorspar from his mines of Weardale so that they sparkled like amethyst in the sun. In his hothouses grew pineapples, nectarines, peaches, grapes, figs and melons. In his conservatory, he kept a cage with 40 canaries in it.

The fountain from his garden (below) has lost its top tiers of cherubs but now stands in Houndgate opposite the Saltfish restaurant.

In Southend, they had breakfast at 8.30am, dinner at 1.30pm, afternoon tea at 4.30pm, meat tea at 6.30pm and supper at 8.30pm. Sunday lunch was a roast for all the family, finished with Cotherstone cheese.

In his prime of life, Joseph could speak with anyone “from peer to peasant”. He was a great orator, he had a huge fund of anecdotes, a brilliant memory and he was able to mimic perfectly any accent.

In 1859 in Berlin, he was diagnosed with glaucoma, and a Dr Critchett in London performed an iridectomy – cutting the iris, pulling out the capillaries and cutting them to change the shape of the eyeball. Joseph refused chloroform or any other anaesthetic. “He suffered much,” said The Northern Echo. The operation worked in that his sight improved, but he never really recovered from the shock.

In 1860, his wife Emma died, and Joseph withdrew from his business empire, which stretched from upper Weardale to the coast. His son, Sir Joseph Whitwell Pease, assumed control.

Inside Joseph's Southend

In Darlington in the 1860s, Joseph paid £1,200 for the construction of the town clock – he was probably inspired by seeing a clock on a visit to a French chateau. He paid for eight mural fountains to be installed to provide water for travellers, both human and animal. He paid £600 for Darlington’s first fire engine.

Joseph had a seat on Darlington’s first council in 1850, and in 1867, was elected as Darlington’s first mayor. He turned the post down due to ill health.

From 1865, he was practically blind. He liked to walk to his south-facing summerhouse, just beneath the Southend terrace, and sit and feel the sun on his face. The flats in Southend Avenue now keep their bins in his summerhouse.

On January 2, 1872, Joseph was given the Order of the Grand Cross of Charles III by the king of Spain – one of Spain’s highest honours. Joseph had paid for a translator to work for 12 months on producing a Spanish version of Jonathan Dymond’s Principles of Morality. He then had 1,000 bound volumes circulated in Spain. One volume reached the king who was so grateful, he bestowed the honour on Joseph.

He died at 8am on February 8, 1872, in Southend with his family at his bedside. He was 72.

He left a fortune of £320,000 – worth at least £41m today.

The Northern Echo said: “We speak of him as a man of the locality, as one of the central figures of south Durham, as one of the most honoured and respected of the men who have made the district what it is… his enterprise and energy have literally been the seeds from which villages and towns have arisen… To thousands upon thousands, the announcement of his death will seem like the removal of a timeworn landmark, like the fall of some stately oak that long had been a prominent feature of the landscape.”

The Newcastle Daily Chronicle said he was "head and shoulders above his fellows, in the mine, the manufactory and the mart”. He was “the embodiment of world prosperity…the first of the new aristocracy of England".

The 10,000 men employed by him at his death donated £3,500 to create a monument to his memory. The statue, by Scottish sculptor George Anderson Lawson, was unveiled on September 25, 1875, and shows him in a characteristic pose. Around its base are four friezes that sum up his life: his election, his industry, his interest in education and his opposition to slavery.