While the hand of a giant dominates an eccentric exhibition in Darlington, Chris Lloyd discovers a much sweeter-smelling side to a former tannery and raises the alarm over missing stinkpipes.

WHEN he was spotted, Patrick Cotter was working as a bricklayer in the small Medieval town of Kinsale on the west Cork coast of Ireland.

He was 18 years old and ideally equipped for bricklaying: he was up to 8ft 8in tall and could reach a cottage roof without a ladder, and he had hands so large that they rendered a hod obsolete.

You can see how large they were because one of his super-size gloves is at the centre of an eccentric exhibition this summer at the Head of Steam museum in Darlington.

The Northern Echo: Patrick Cotter O’Brien's glove on display at the Head of Steam museum in Darlington

Patrick was spotted, in 1778, by a travelling showman who realised he could make far more money in a freak show than he could as a brickie.

Patrick came to England and adopted the stagename of Patrick Cotter O’Brien – his new surname allowed him to claim kinship with a legendary family of towering Irish kings.

Then he toured the country, making his fortune just by being extremely lanky.

He had the bottom of his stagecoach lowered to provide more legroom. Once, a highwayman got the shock of his life when he stopped a vehicle with normal-looking occupants, only for a giant to uncoil itself from out of the floor.

The highwayman fled emptyhanded.

A poster in the North Road railway museum advertises Patrick’s appearance in Bristol – where he was especially big – in July 1783. It finishes with the line: “Four inches taller than the noted Burn.”

This refers to Charles Byrne, a rival Irish giant who had come to London in 1782 for a battle of the big men.

The fame, and wealth, quickly went to Byrne’s head and he turned to drink.

One day in June 1783 while drunk, a pickpocket relieved him of £700. To console himself, he drank himself to death in his Charing Cross rooms. He was only 22.

He asked to be buried at sea because so many medical men wanted his skeleton. It ended up in the possession of the Royal College of Surgeons which has worked out that Byrne was 7ft 7in tall.

Patrick O’Brien died on September 18, 1806, aged 46. His remains were exhumed in 1972 and surgeons worked out that he would have been 8ft 1in tall – one of only 12 men in medical history to be verified as over 8ft, according to Wikipedia.

How his gigantic glove came to be in Darlington, no one knows.

Perhaps he dropped it on a visit. It certainly makes a curious centrepiece to the museum’s current exhibition, Everything But The Bear, which showcases Darlington’s forgotten treasures.

■ Ukrainian Leonid Staduyk, 39, is currently the world’s tallest man at 8ft 5in. He weighs 32 stones and has 17in-long feet.

LET’S return to the tannery in the centre of Darlington, and the louvre-roofed building that has been exposed by the recent demolition of Skippers’ garage. No one has yet disabused us of the notion that this curious building was once used in a smelly part of the tanning process.

It is in Clayton’s Yard – a yard which was named after Clayton’s bakery of Parkgate.

The bakery was founded on the Hippodrome side of the road by Joshua Bradley Clayton, who hailed from Lancashire, in 1876. As the tannery faded into history, he turned its buildings into stables for his delivery horses and carts.

As horses faded into history, the buildings became motor orientated.

Joshua’s great-grandson, Brett Clayton, says: “I remember visiting the building as it was where our vehicles were serviced by Ronnie Tugby, who ran his father’s agricultural and motor engineering business until into the Seventies.

The building was then used by Dockray and Wealands, body repairers.”

One of Joshua’s four sons was also named Joshua and he became “one of Darlington’s best-known architects”.

Joshua, who lived in Highfield, Barnard Castle, joined Darlington council in 1931 and turned down the mayoralty in 1945 “for military reasons” before his death in 1948.

He had at least two architectural triumphs. During the Twenties, he designed the ED Walker homes in Coniscliffe Road – 36 homes for elderly people, surrounding a green and with “an airy, lightsome and healthful atmosphere”.

His second triumph was the Majestic cinema in Bondgate, which opened on Boxing Day, 1932.

At a cost of £30,000, it was the biggest and best of Darlington’s many cinemas.

It is now a snooker club, and wouldn’t it be a joy if the horrible cladding (which has shrubs growing through it) that besmirches Joshua’s attractive Art Deco frontage were to be removed?

He had other successes, too, such as the Ritz Cinema which opened on December 21, 1940, in Catterick.

“Yorkshire’s largest luxury cinema” said the front page of the Darlington & Stockton Times, which also advertised that it was putting on a continuous performance (even on Christmas Day) of Douglas Fairbanks Jnr in Green Hell.

And then there was a new bakery for his family. It was on the opposite side of Parkgate, and opened in the late Twenties, with the family living above the shop.

So Brett got to grow up in his great-uncle’s distinctive work with his bedroom in one of the attractive portholes in the roof.

“The view from that window was of the fire engines turning out from the Borough Road station,” he says.

“I remember one day coming home from school around 1966-7 and watching the appliances turn out because a tower crane being used in the construction of John Neasham’s garage had slipped off its short length of railway track and was resting against the building that has just been demolished.

“The driver must have been in the cab and there was a rescue to get him out.

“Those memories never left me and I successfully fulfilled my ambition to join the Fire Service in 1980.” He is now in charge of planning at Bishop Auckland.

In total, four generations of Claytons worked in the bakery until it closed in the Nineties.

PIERREMONT, in Darlington, continues to fascinate. The fantastic Echo Memories blog has been rumour-mongering about a tunnel which some say ran to the town centre, and others say ran northwards under the Cocker Beck to the Brinkburn mansion.

Apparently, multi-millionaire Henry Pease was deeply worried about his safety and so built a subterranean bolthole to his son’s mansion at Brinkburn.

We’ve even heard someone claims to have seen inside the tunnel, saying it was very low.

But Tony Cooper, of builders Bussey and Armstrong, whose head office is in the former Brinkburn stables block, says: “Very interesting – but news to me!

“We have never found any evidence of a tunnel at Brinkburn even when demolishing and redeveloping the remains of the house.”

Sadly, this low tunnel sounds like a drain.

Doreen Chapman takes us back to the mansion. “In the early Fifties, when I was at Reid Street school, we had two rooms in the mansion,” she says. “I think they were near the clocktower.”

The clocktower was built in 1873-74 and changed the orientation of Pierremont approach.

The original entrance was off Woodland Road and up what is now Tower Road – a lodge house, dated 1854, still stands on the corner, as the picture kindly lent by Percy Airey shows.

After the clocktower was built, carriages swept up what is now Hollyhurst Road, came thundering down Bloomfield Street – the oldest house in the street appears to be a lodge house from this era – and entered the mansion through the dramatic arch under the clocktower.

Indeed, these visitors would have seen the northern-looking face of the clock, which is made of inlaid marble and is shinier and more expensive than the more subdued south face, which was intended for private time-telling.

TERRIBLE news from Durham City.

Stinkpipes are disappearing.

One of this column’s strange obsessions is the cast iron stench poles that vented Victorian sewers.

A few months back, Bryan Chambers wrote from Durham to tell of the specimens in Carrville.

Last week, he noticed that one at the west end of the High Street was still present and correct – its maker’s name, George Hauxwell, clearly visible.

“But I regret that since I last wrote, its neighbour only about 100 yards away has been lost to a housing development,” he says, sorrowfully, “and the small one on the Lanchester road about 400 yards west of the new Sniperley park and ride has also disappeared.”

Has Durham no soul? Does it not treasure its stinkpipes?

Stinkpipe maker Hauxwell was a Durham JP and alderman. He was born in Great Ayton in 1826 and arrived in the city in about 1860 to establish his foundry in Atherton Street.

The foundry buildings were demolished in about 1970, but Mr Hauxwell’s name is all over the city’s manhole covers and running down the side of its stench poles.

Mr Chambers finishes his letter: “Remain vigilant!”

Save our pipes and our past! Up the poles!