The fountain from Darlington town centre to North Lodge Park

The picture from about 1895 found by Peter Giroux of the fountain in Roper's Park with the buildings of Stonebridge behind

And it gives us a rare view of a cherub-topped fountain that appalled and outraged The Northern Echo when it was unveiled in 1895.

“Anything more eminently stiff, disfiguring and unsightly can hardly be imagined,” railed the paper’s editorial.

The photo has been unearthed by Peter Giroux and it takes us back to a distant controversy when a new park was laid out at the bottom of Tubwell Row.

For centuries, the main approach into Darlington town centre was via a wide bridge of many stone arches which crossed the boggy, lazy, meandering Skerne. In Victorian times, the river was “canalised” – dug into a straight channel – so it developed enough oomph to drive the mills and machinery on its banks.

Stonebridge, with the maker's name on and the date: 1895

In 1895, a new bridge was built over the newlook river and even though it is largely made of metal, to this day it is still called Stonebridge.

The roads on either side of the bridge were also reshaped. In Tubwell Row, this meant knocking down Ropery Yard and its rather ropey outbuildings.

An pre-1895 picture of St Cuthbert's Church, Darlington, from Tubwell Row. In the foreground are buildings in Ropery Walk which make up Clapham's ropeworks - Mr Clapham's three storey office on the right remains, but the yard was cleared to make Roper's Park

Two ropemakers and a long yard were needed to make a length of rope. The ropemakers would hold two separate lengths of rolled-up hemp in their hands. One ropemaker would stand still while his colleague walked backwards down the yard twisting the twines together. A paste of soap, oil and gum was then applied to the twisted hemp and the rope came to life.

The last ropemaker here was RH Clapham, and although his outbuildings were demolished, his stylish three storey house and office still stands, having once been converted into Darlington museum.

Roper's Park, or St Cuthbert's Green, in the mid-1960s, with the South African War Memorial on the site of the fountain

The clearance of Ropery Yard allowed the council to lay out a little park, called Roper’s Park, which acted as a green entrance to St Cuthbert’s churchyard. The council spent £20 on shrubs, reused some old iron railings from High Row and spent £50 on a centrepiece fountain from the Coalbrookdale Company, of Ironbridge in Shropshire.

The Coalbrookdale foundry, famous for building the world’s first cast iron bridge in 1781, made many Victorian ornamental fountains – Albert Park in Middlesbrough has a particularly splendid one (above) that was given to it by Darlington’s Joseph Pease in 1869.

But when the Roper’s Park fountain arrived from Coalbrookdale in early autumn 1895 and was placed in the shadow of St Cuthbert’s Church, The Northern Echo was outraged.

In its editorial on September 7, 1895, the Echo attacked the “erection of an incongruous and unnecessary fountain in close proximity of the grand old church”.

READ MORE: CENTURY OF SERVICE - DARLINGTON ROTARY CELEBRATES 100 YEARS

It said that if Darlington had councillors who had enough decency and taste to prevent “anything tawdy, barbaric or meretricious” from being placed in the town centre, “the vulgarism of a gaudily-painted cast iron fountain and basin squatted down in the shadow of the time-greyed walls of a noble piece of architecture would not have been permitted”.

The editorial concluded: “Anything more eminently stiff, disfiguring and unsightly can hardly be imagined.”

Fortunately for the editor’s blood pressure, the fountain lasted less than 10 years as it had gone by 1904 when preparations began to place a memorial to the South African (or Boer) war in the park which by now was known as St Cuthbert’s Green.

The memorial, showing a bayonetting soldier on top of a lump of Peterhead granite, was unveiled by Lord Frederick Roberts, a war hero who was made the first Freeman of Darlington, on August 5, 1905, by which time the abhorrent fountain had been placed in its new home: in North Lodge Park, off Northgate.

This park was based on the large pleasure garden laid out in the 1830s by banker William Backhouse of Elmfield, a mansion that can just about be made out today on Northgate even though its face has been covered by a variety of takeaway shops – in Memories 595 in September, we visited a sweet and cake shop there and found a cast iron range in great condition out the back, dating to the 1890s when Elmfield was still a family mansion.

The boathouse in William Backhouse's Elmfield park which became North Lodge Park. At the back is North Lodge Terrace. The Roper's Park fountain is on the right

William’s gardens included an ornamental landscape immediately outside his mansion and then woodland walks which eventually led to a large manmade lake with an island in the middle and boathouse built to look like a mini-castle.

Darlington council bought the gardens in 1902 and turned them into North Lodge Park. This was to prevent housing being built on them – the Pease family had already encroached on the estate by building the mansion which gives the park its name.

READ MORE: THE FULL HISTORY OF NORTH LODGE PARK

In 1905, after much delay, the council added to the attractions of North Lodge Park by placing the Coalbrookdale fountain from Roper’s Park in the lake, which was kept full even in dry weather as the week’s water from the Gladstone Street swimming baths was pumped into it every Sunday evening.

The boathouse coming down in January 1955, although the bandstand at the back still stands

Sadly, the lake was filled in 1932. The boathouse was left high and dry and we guess the fountain disappeared.

Outrageously, in January 1955, the 1830s boathouse, which had been struck by vandals, was demolished, leaving only a slight depression in the ground at the Gladstone Street end of the park to show where the lake had once been.

We don’t know where the fountain from Roper’s Park ended up – perhaps it was just destroyed.

But there is still a Victorian iron fountain in North Lodge Park. It has a golden band wrapped around its slender central pole so it is very different from the showy cherub-topped fountain that the Echo editor hated.

The slender Victorian fountain in North Lodge Park. Picture by Peter Giroux

No one knows where this slender fountain came from. Our best guess is that it was in the ornamental garden immediately outside Elmfield, quietly going about its business pumping out a pretty trickle of water, but no one paid any attention to it when the vulgar, gaudily-painted fountain with a cherub flouncing over the pinnacle, arrived from Roper’s Park to take centre stage in the park.

READ MORE: THE FIRST LIONESSES PT 1 - NETTIE HONEYBALL AND THE ROSY RAPIDS

READ MORE: THE FIRST LIONESSES PT 2 - THE MUNITIONETTES OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR

READ MORE: THE FIRST LIONESSES PT 3 - THE DARLINGTON QUAKER LADIES