Echo Memories delves into the political turmoil of the late 1860s and manoeuvreings to break the stranglehold on Darlington held by the Pease and Backhouse families

THE late 1860s made up the most torrid period in Darlington's political history. After the advent of the railways in the 1820s, the town had been in the pocket of two ruling families: the Peases and the Backhouses.

Gradually, resentment grew as to how those Quakers governed - and handed out lucrative municipal contracts. By the beginning of the 1860s, the local opposition demanded, to the disgust of Joseph Pease, that Darlington should have its own democratic council and its own MP.

A Parliamentary Commissioner came to Darlington to investigate and Joseph was so annoyed that, in September 1866, he resigned as chairman of the local board of health which ran the town.

The commissioner decided that Darlington deserved a proper council and the first election was held in December 1867.

"Feelings ran very high, there being two opposing parties, one mainly composed of members of the ten existing local board of health who strongly opposed any change in the administrative status of the borough," wrote a historian in 1916.

"The other party was a section of the community calling themselves the Corporationist Party, who contended that the new form of local government should be given a fair trial and that its friends were more likely to promote its efficiency than its opponents."

The maverick leader of the Corporationists was Henry King Spark, this column's old friend. He lost this bitter election to the Peases, just as he lost the 1869 Parliamentary election to the Peases when he stood to become Darlington's first MP (the 1869 election was so humiliatingly close for the Peases that they immediately set up The Northern Echo as their mouthpiece to drown out their political opponents).

In the middle of all this rancour was Hugh Dunn, Darlington's first town clerk, who lived in the wonderfully porched house called Glassensikes, in Grange Road.

Hugh was born in 1818, but lost his parents early in life and grew up with his aunt at White House Farm, in Yarm Road.

He seems not to have had much education, for in 1839 he entered the employ of solicitors Mewburn and Hutchinson as a clerk.

Francis Mewburn is renowned as the great railway solicitor who fought in Parliament against the Duke of Cleveland to get the Stockton and Darlington Railway started.

Henry Hutchinson, his partner, cropped up for the first time last week, because he lived in the biggest house in Harewood Hill and may even have owned the land on which Harewood Grove was built in about 1835.

The boy Hugh did well in the offices of Mewburn and Hutchinson, working his way up and being entrusted with many pieces of railway legalese.

In 1852, he left to join another Darlington practice, headed by John Shields Peacock, who was clerk to the local board of health. Under his tutelage, Hugh became a fully-qualified solicitor.

Hugh had other interests as well. He was editor of the Darlington and Stockton Times, The Northern Echo's weekly sister paper, for a couple of years, and he was chairman of the Mechanics Institute when it moved from its tenement beneath Central Hall to its splendid new home in Skinnergate in 1853.

In the same year, Mr Peacock spread his wings. Middlesbrough was rapidly growing and when it was incorporated as a borough it required a full-time solicitor (or town clerk). Peacock took the job, which left a vacancy in Darlington. Hugh Dunn filled it.

He was clerk to the board of health as the controversy around it grew, and after the bitter elections of 1867 - which, incidentally, the Peases' Party won - he was unanimously elected as the first town clerk. Even the Peases' opponents regarded him as impartial, wise and learnd.

In those days, Parliament was minded to give more and more power to local government, and so Hugh found himself dealing with increasingly important matters.

Gas, water and sewerage were all under his control, and he was widely praised for his calmness during "the great fight" in which the corporations of Darlington, Stockton and Middlesbrough squabbled about how much clean water each could pump from the River Tees to quench the thirsts of their growing industrial populations.

"His sympathies, though, were not cribb'd, cabin'd and confin'd to musty tomes and parchment rolls," said the D&S Times in one of its less understandable phrases.

"He had a heart brimful of tenderness, possessed cultured literary tastes and had a happy vein of humour."

During 1886, Hugh became increasingly poorly. He spent the early part of the summer at Saltburn, then moved to "the pleasant western watering place" of Morecambe Bay. He came back to Glassensikes for a couple of days before booking himself in to the Queen Hotel, in Harrogate, to take the waters.

It was the first time he had been back to Harrogate since his wife, Dorothy, had died there two years earlier while taking the waters. Hugh, too, died there within days of his arrival. He was 68.

His body was returned to Glassensikes, and he was buried in his family's vault in West Cemetery