ON the credit side, Eliza Barclay came from Darlington’s biggest banking Family and she married, as her surname suggests, into one of the country’s leading financial families, but, sadly, she lived a life touched by profound grief.
Her mother died giving birth to her and her husband died a few months after marrying her.
When her brother followed his wife to an early grave, she devoted herself to bringing up their orphaned child – only for him to die at the age of 24 after she’d nursed him through university.
However, in her home town Eliza left a legacy of kindness and of botany – and tomorrow (Sunday, July 31, 2022) is your last chance to have a nosey at parts of her botany which include the tallest tree in Darlington.
It is believed to be the tallest tree in Darlington. All pictures by Sarah Caldecott
The gardens of Nos 45 and 46 Blackwell are open to the public between 1pm and 4pm on Sunday to raise money for charities.
No 45 is the carriagehouse and stables for Eliza’s lost mansion of Blackwell Hill. The garden behind it, now lovingly and organically tended by Cath Proud, features a fabulous bird’s eye view of the Tees, the remains of a croquet lawn and a tennis court, a 300-year-old beech tree and a sky-high Sequoiadendron giganteum – a type of giant redwood which Darlington’s Quakers loved to plant in their parklands.
This one is 80ft, perhaps 100ft, high. It is clearly visible from the A66(M) approach road, standing above all the other trees that screen Blackwell, beckoning the visitor in.
But tomorrow is the last chance to visit.
Pete and Cath Proud in their garden which is open to the public on Sunday, July 31
“We first opened the garden in 2010, but the weather this year has been horrendous – cold and windy to start with, then boiling hot and now we don’t even know whether it’s going to be dry on the day itself,” said Cath this week. “It means the garden is now becoming too much work to keep it up to the high standard required, so this will be our last National Garden Scheme opening.
“I set out to raise £10,000 for charities, and I hope that this year we will get there.”
It’d be a great way to bow out, and one that does justice to the spirit of Eliza, who was born a Backhouse in Beechwood – the mansion beneath Sainsbury’s in Victoria Road – on September 2, 1812. That was the day her mother died.
On September 9, 1841, Eliza married Robert Barclay, of the London banking family, only for him to die on May 4, 1842 after only eight months of marriage.
When in 1847 her sister-in-law died, Eliza moved into the Blackwell home of her brother, John Church Backhouse, to look after his three-year-old son, John Henry. But then in 1858 her brother died, so Eliza took full charge of the 14-year-old orphan. When he got a place at London University (Oxford and Cambridge universities were closed to Quakers), she moved to the capital to look after him because he had a sickly constitution, but as soon as he graduated in 1869, he caught typhus and died.
Eliza moved back to Blackwell, practically alone but with the fortunes of the Backhouse and Barclay family behind her.
Around 1850 in Blackwell, an ancient but derelict manor house had tumbled down. It was on a fabulous site high above the Tees, and all that remains of it to this day is a curious castellated wall, apparently made out of beach stones, with the date “1847” on it.
Blackwell Hill, Eliza's 1873, in the centre of this aerial view of Blackwell, looking north, taken in 1949
Inside this wall, in 1873, Eliza built a Gothic mansion with seven bedrooms, six dressing rooms and splendid views over the river.
A photograph of Blackwell Hill. Eliza Barclay's school for servants, shortly before it was sold to developers in 1972, for £140,000, and subsequently demolished
But she did not build it for herself. It was a boarding school, or possibly an orphanage, where working-class children could learn to be servants – in Victorian times, this trade offered children a future out of poverty. The 1881 census found five boarders, from as far away as London, living at Blackwell Hill, attended by a schoolmistress and a school matron.
For herself, Eliza built what today is called the "Dower House" in the mansion’s clifftop grounds. It is smaller in scale than the mansion, but still rather grand, with an orangery and a carriage bridge over a deep gorge.
The Dower House, where Eliza lived
Somewhere on the estate there were two ice-houses built into the cliff so that in winter ice could be shovelled off the river and stored for use in the heat of the summer. Sadly all trace of them has gone.
Next to the Dower House is No 45, which started life as a carriage house, stables and home for estate workmen, like the groom.
How No 45 is believed to have looked when it was the carriage house to Blackwell Hill. The carriages were kept in the block on the left, next to the stables, and the main body of the house - occupied by someone like the groom - was only single storey. Below: As it is today
Eliza died in the Dower House on March 5, 1884, aged 71. Among her bequests was £1,000 to "Blackwell Home and School", which was presumably the establishment she had founded.
In her obituary, The Northern Echo noted how "the great grief of her early life had a sequel of almost equal trial" with the death of her adopted son, John Henry Backhouse. His premature death affected her deeply, said the paper.
But it said: "The pensive melancholy of these events cast no gloom over her character. To the last she had lived a life of quiet and unostentatious charity."
Her school continued for a few years after Eliza's death, and her Dower House became its laundry. A bell, which still remains, was added to the house and was apparently rung whenever a batch of clean linen needed collecting.
The giant sequoia in the gardens of No 45, Blackwell
By the end of the 19th Century, Blackwell Hill had become a private home occupied by Edward Backhouse Mounsey.
In 1927, it was sold to GM Harroway, managing director of Middlesbrough ship builder Sir Raylton Dixon and Company.
In 1944, motor dealer and Darlington Football Club director John Neasham bought it and in 1972, after his death, it was sold for £140,000 to developers who knocked it down and built the exclusive houses of Farrholme on the site.
All that remains of Blackwell Hill are is its gateposts, which today lead into an electricity sub-station, its two lodge houses plus the Dower House and the carriagehouse, which is now Cath and Pete Proud’s home at No 45.
And in the garden – which Cath keeps beautifully for bees, bats and badgers as well as for humans to admire – is the sequoia which is said to be the tallest tree in town.
The view of the Tees from the gardens in Blackwell
The Backhouse family, of which Eliza was a member, were mad keen on these trees, which are among the largest living organisms on the planet. The first samples were brought back to England from California in 1852 and were named “wellingtonia” after the Duke of Wellington who had recently died. American botanists were outraged by this example of cultural imperialism, as were the French who had suffered at Wellington’s hands, so perhaps it is safest just to call them sequoias or giant redwoods.
Eliza’s cousin, Alfred Backhouse, planted specimen sequoias at his homes of Rockliffe Hall in Hurworth and Dryderdale, near Hamsterley, in the mid-1860s. Alfred also gave two sequoias to South Park in 1863, and as they share the same genetic defect as the very first ones that came over in 1852, the British Tree Council has placed them in the top ten most important trees in the country.
An Edwardian postcard of South Park showing the two sequoias on the right hand side, reflected in the River Skerne. They are among the ten most important trees in the country, according to one survey
Eliza must have continued the family fascination with these monsters, because there are several in the grounds of Blackwell Hill, but the one in the grounds of No 45 is the tallest – it is head and shoulders, and bark and branches, above all the rest.
- Nos 45 and 46 Blackwell are open tomorrow from 1pm to 5pm. Whereas No 45 is a naturalistic garden, No 46 is kept by Chris and Yvonne Auton who are described as “plantoholics”. Admission to both is £5 for adults, and there will be plenty of homemade cakes, scones, preserves and homegrown plants for sale
READ MORE: BITE-SIZED BLACKWELL: ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE VILLAGE
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