Echo Memories ponders a missing monument to the ingenuity of a Victorian inventor who helped to revolutionise farming by designing an automatic steam plough Look yonder where the engines toil!

Victorious over wave and soil, With these she sails, she weaves, she tills Piercing the everlasting hills.

OH, but look yonder today and all you will see is a square lump of red granite. There is nothing on it to suggest that this once was a monument to the man who made the engines' victory complete, the man who designed the device that tilled the soils automatically, the man who pierced the silence of the everlasting hills with the sound of steam power.

The monument stands, sawnoff, in Darlington's South Park.

But hope is at hand. It is thought that when the nearby lake is drained as part of the £4m refurbishment of the park, the bronze model that once sat on top of the granite plinth will re-emerge from the silt. It is hoped that the 1970s vandals who removed the model merely knocked it off and rolled it down the hill into the water.

The model is of a steam plough. The monument is to John Fowler, the inventor of the steam plough.

Born in Wiltshire, he is linked with Darlington largely by love, but it was the technological advances of this area that drove him to achieve a worldwide reputation before his tragically early death at the age of 38.

Fowler's father, a wealthy merchant, pushed him into the corn trade but when he reached 21, he realised that he really wanted to be an engineer. In 1847, he arrived in the NorthEast to start a job in Middlesbrough with Gilkes, Wilson, Hopkins and Company.

This company specialised in the manufacture of steam locomotives and colliery winding gear. It was a very influential company in the "infant Hercules" that was Middlesbrough in those days - its three founders were among the first 13 mayors of the town - and it was connected very closely with the industrialists ofDarlington. Through the company Fowler, a Quaker, came to meet Joseph Pease, who lived in Southend (now the New Grange Hotel), in Darlington. Joseph, whose statue stands in High Row, was south Durham's first MP and he had a finger in every industrial pie in the district.

He also had 12 children, the ninth being Elizabeth Lucy, to whom Fowler took a shine.

But before marriage, he felt he had to establish himself.

In 1849, his Middlesbrough employers sent him to work in Ireland. It was the time of the great potato famine and he was shocked by the poverty and distress that he encountered.

Driven by his Quaker beliefs, he decided to use his engineering talents and his private money to invent something that would improve the lot of the rural peasant.

He left Gilkes, Wilson, Hopkins, and pondered how industrial technology could be made to work in agriculture.

In 1850, he went into partnership with Albert Fry, who was a Quaker and a member of the famous chocolate family. Together in Bristol, Fowler and Fry invented a horse-drawn drainage plough, which was made by a Quaker firm in Ipswich and which, in 1851, successfully drained a forest in Essex.

The equipment was exhibited at the 1851 Great Exhibition, won national awards and helped the Irish peasants drain their peat bogs. Fowler was on the verge of fame.

In July 1852, he stood for two hours on Brighton beach with one of the Ipswich Quakers and discussed the possibilities of ploughing by steampower.

They concluded it was impossible, but Fowler persevered. He asked Joseph Pease for advice. Pease put him in touch with Robert Stephenson, and at Stephenson's factory on the banks of the Tyne, various ideas were turned into metal objects.

Fowler was chasing the ultimate accolade: the Royal Agricultural Society of England (RASE) was offering a £500 prize (worth about £25,000 today) for the first person to invent a mechanical device that could be mathematically proven to plough a field more efficiently than horsepower.

For millennia, man had trudged up and down the field behind a beast of burden - be it an ox, a yak or a horse - following the plough.

Fowler changed all that. He placed two portable steam engines on either side of a field.

By turning drums and winding cables, these engines pulled a "balance plough" across the field.

When the plough reached the edge of the field, it tipped back on itself and began the journey in the other direction.

In 1856, Fowler announced that his machine could plough an acre an hour, but the RASE mathematicians reckoned his primitive equipment was, on average, 21/2d an acre more expensive than horses.

Still, Fowler felt he had made enough of a mark on the world to return to Darlington and take the hand of Elizabeth Lucy Pease. The marriage was conducted in the Skinnergate meeting rooms on July 30, 1857.

The following year, he tweaked his steam plough ready for another tilt at the RASE title. There was great competition, and a series of showdowns was staged across the country between Fowler and his nearest rivals, the Howard brothers of Bedford.

For Euro 2004 read Plough 1858.

The Newcastle heat attracted farmers from all over Durham and Northumberland. The contest was terrifically exciting: a flywheel flew off one of Fowler's engines but fortunately did not kill anyone.

The Howards' engine became red-hot and people were speculating how close it was to meltdown when the plough struck a rock and knocked the ploughman unconscious.

A contemporary report said:

"The judges had to stop the contest because the huge, excited crowd had invaded the working area and there was grave risk of serious accident." A pitch invasion - just like Euro 2004.

Fowler was crowned the winner and picked up RASE's £500. It "acquired for him a world-wide celebrity", said the Darlington Telegraph.

He set himself up in business in Leeds, building steam ploughs and traction engines.

The company continued until just after the Second World War, and many of the traction engines that you will see at steam festivals this summer will have "Fowler" on the front.

But John Fowler began to suffer from stress. "His brain and nervous system were wrought into a state of undue activity, and his medical team advised much outdoor exercise as the best cure, " said the Darlington Telegraph.

Fowler, his wife and five children moved to Ackworth, about 12 miles to the south of his works in Leeds. He rode energetically into work every day.

But it was not enough. His doctors prescribed even more physical exercise. Take up hunting, they said, and so whenever he was not inventing, Fowler was riding across the fields to hounds.

In November 1864, disaster struck. Out hunting, Fowler fell, fracturing his arm severely.

Tetanus set in and he died on December 3, 1864. He was 38 and, although not quite the Wayne Rooney of his day, he was certainly a well-respected figure across Europe.

He is buried in the Quaker graveyard, behind the Friends Meeting House, in Skinnergate.

At his burial, one of the speakers pointed out that neither genius nor accomplishment could make a man more than mortal.

EVEN when it had the bronze model on its top, the monument to John Fowler was charmingly vague.

Chiselled into one of its huge sides, it simply says: "John Fowler CE 1856".

The CE presumably stands for civil engineer. 1856 is the date when the steam plough first took practical shape and, of course, absolutely everybody knows who John Fowler was.

The beginnings of the monument are also vague. It appears to have been commissioned and paid for by Henry Pease (1807 to 1881), the younger brother of Joseph (1799 to 1872) and the uncle of Elizabeth Lucy, Fowler's bride.

For a decade or so, it stood in the grounds of Henry's sumptuous mansion, Pierremont - "the Buckingham Palace of Darlington". It was moved to its present position in South Park in about 1870.

JOSEPH and Henry Pease's elder brother was John (1797 to 1868). He had two daughters, the eldest of whom was Sophia (1837 to 1892). When she married in 1866, John built Elm Ridge for himself in Coniscliffe Road, and the matching mansion, Woodburn, for Sophia and her new husband (Elm Ridge is now a church; Woodburn is long since demolished).

Sophia's husband was Sir Theodore Fry, the younger brother of Albert Fry, whom the observant will have noticed was John Fowler's business partner in Bristol. Sir Theodore was also involved in this early business, but gave it up for love and moved to Darlington to become south Durham's MP.

THERE is some debate about whether John Fowler was truly the inventor of the steam plough. It is said that Jeremiah Head, who worked for Robert Stephenson, in Newcastle, was the brains behind it.

Another story says that in 1840, a Darlington man called John McDermid sent a drawing of such an invention to Joseph Pease at Southend. Mr McDermid heard nothing more until the 1870s, when he saw a company called Fowler's of Leeds advertising the self-same thing.

The verse at the top of the page comes from William Thackeray, who wrote several odes about the new technology on display at the 1851 exhibition in Crystal Palace.

If you have anything to add to today's column, please write to: Echo Memories, The Northern Echo, Priestgate, Darlington, DL1 1NF, e-mail chris. lloyd@nne. co. uk or telephone (01325) 505062.

Published: 30/06/2004

Echo Memories, The Northern Echo, Priestgate, Darlington DL1 1NF, e-mail chris.lloyd@nne.co.uk or telephone (01325) 505062.