ON Saturday, the Bishop Auckland Heritage Festival takes place with displays, talks, tours and activities throughout the day with the revived flower and produce festival at its heart.
In late Victorian times, the flower festival held in Auckland Park was one of the biggest outdoor horticultural events in the country, attracting crowds of 30,000.
For example, 150 years ago, The Northern Echo described it as “the great floral fete of the north”. Its reporter had words every bit as colourful as the blooms as he saw thousands upon thousands of rail passengers arrive from every corner of the North East, and “crush” their way into the crowded Market Place before entering “the bosky retreats of Auckland Park”.
READ MORE: WHEN BISHOP AUCKLAND WAS ABLAZE WITH A LUSCIOUS PROFUSION OF FLOWERS
“Gay dresses, bright colours, laughing faces. But that alone would not make a fair. Look at the stalls, look at the shows! Here are vendors of walking sticks. There vendors of ice creams...stalls devoted to the display of cakes and nuts; stalls on which only iced creams at a fabulously low price are offered for sale; stalls on which fruit only is shown; stalls on which shellfish, ready cooked, stand ready for eating; stalls laden with trinkets and gee-gaws, round which rustics gather and admire as if the jewels of Golconda were exposed to view; and a vast expanse of standage devoted solely to cocoa-nuts fresh from West India, over which two stalwart purveyors are flourishing their knives and hatchets to shell out the crumpy sweet kernels.”
“Bosky” is a real word, first used by Shakespeare in the Tempest to mean tree-lined, and Golconda was a fort in India where diamonds like the Koh-i-Noor were kept.
Then the reporter turned his attention to the shows, which included Mander’s menagerie – one of he most famous touring menageries of the day – which featured a lion which the previous year at Bolton, had killed its one-armed handler, Thomas McCarthy. This “all alive ferocious bruit” would have been a huge draw.
Alongside the menagerie was “the great fat lady…as wide as a house end”.
“Peep shows are numerous; stereoscopic panoramas prevalent; models of churches and cathedrals in cork in quantity; shooting salons and photographic galleries galore; flying boats and merry-go-rounds in constant motion...
The reporter went past the boxing salons and the monster horse from Newcastle which stood 21 hands high and into the bosky park, where the best band in the country – the Royal Grenadier Guards – was playing, and the tents were full of the finest produce.
As this was the age of pteridomania, a craze for collecting ferns, the reporter noted the rare specimens on display from the ferneries of Raby Castle and Brinkburn, in Darlington.
“The African marigolds are remarkably attractive and there’s a long array of globes, almost faultless in form, of various shades from orange to yellow in colour and measuring an average of 3½ inches in diameter,” said the reporter.
READ MORE: BREAKING INTO THE BISHOP AUCKLAND ICEHOUSE
“The fruit tent, which we enter last, is so crowded with lingering, admiring spectators that it is difficult to examine its miracles of culture and sweetness. Some Black Tartars and Biggareau (both cherries) and Washington plums, the black grapes from Raby, the Ravensworth peaches, the marvellous bunch of Buckland Sweetwaters (grapes) shewn by the Marquess of Londonderry, and the melons and nectarines generally make the teeth water and raise whispered discussions among the cognoscenti…”
The 1873 fair was the 21st, as the first was held in 1852 at the instigation of Bishop Edward Maltby who had been impressed by the produce he had seen in the mining villages. However, in the 1880s, the fair was hit by a run of bad weather and so made a loss, and it seems to have petered out in 1887.
It was revived 10 years ago, but funding has always been an issue. Last year’s was cancelled, and this year’s is the first arranged by the Bishop Auckland and Darlington chrysanthemum and dahlia societies, supported by The Auckland Project, with Liz Drake as show secretary. She has been assisted by Hathaway Roofing, and the festival will be staffed by volunteers from the Pollards allotments.
It is held on the Auckland Castle lawns, and will be open to the public from noon to 4pm, with the entries being auctioned for charity at 3.30pm.
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