I'LL give him "tired and emotional". George Brown, that is, the flamboyant deputy leader of the Labour Party in the 60s. For, a few months after his embarrassing performance on television on the night of President Kennedy's assasination gave the language a new euphemism, he was also tired and emotional with me.

It was in the new main hall of Darlington college of technology during the 1964 election campaign. The future foreign secretary, God help us, and eventual Lord George-Brown, patted this 28-year-old reporter on the head, called me "Sonny" and proceeded to give an incoherent answer to my question.

You know how the right, deflating response to these situations always comes to you minutes too late? Well this time the process took about a quarter of a century. The moment Norman Fowler coined his own memorable euphemism on the occasion of his resignation, it clicked.

"George, you bibulous Cockney," I should have said, "it's time you spent more time with your family."

Now why should all that come back to me on opening a centenary history of the college that has just been published? Perhaps because, of the dozens of times I've been in the hall since reporting on its opening in December 1963 by the Tory education secretary, Sir Edward Boyle, that brush with the cross so bravely borne by Harold Wilson has been my only uncomfortable moment there.

Or it may have been this: in 1890, takings fell at pubs all over the country when the more ambitious of their customers deserted to attend newly-opened technical colleges - so the government voted so-called "whisky money" with which local authorities could compensate landlords.

Nearly 40 years later, when George Brown left his school near London Bridge at 15, evening classes of the sort offered by these colleges were firmly established and were the making of him and many another bright working-class lad. But one suspects that George somehow ordered his studies in a manner which did not leave publicans out of pocket.

THE booklet, A Century of Achievement, explains that an 1889 Act of Parliament which allowed local authorities to spend a penny rate on technical or manual instruction encouraged Darlington to build the college's first home, the wonderfully ornate former technical college that still stands in Northgate.

Not that much encouragement was needed. The town, with a population of 37,000 that had increased eight-fold since 1800, twice the national average, had an enviable industrial base which needed a skilled and technically educated workforce. This was at a time when, nationally, only 9pc of 14-year-olds were at school full-time.

Darlington was, is, an education-minded town. The new free boys' grammar school had opened in Vane Terrace in 1878 and the girls' high school in 1885 in nearby Trinity Road. The British and Foreign Schools Society, which had been training young women teachers in the town since 1872, moved four years later into its fine new building - now the town's arts centre - in Vane Terrace and there had been a school of art since 1857; and some of the elementary schools held evening classes for working people.

But the emphasis was on the academic and not the practical, with not even the Mechanics' Institute or the Railway Institute quite fitting the bill.

The first Darlington fruit of the 1889 Act was a crop of technical classes, including some for women in cooking and laundry, held in schools, the Mechanics' Institute and the Chamber of Agriculture. Then the decision was taken to build a college in Northgate, on land acquired from Peases who had been prominent on the organising committee, which would incorporate the school of art and the other, scattered, classes.

"White elephant!" cried the town's reactionaries, who must have been delighted when, despite the best plans laid by noted distinguished local architect G C Hoskins, designer of the grammar school, the new college was built a mere 37ins from the Great North Road instead of the intended 8ft 9ins.

But the doom-sayers were confounded almost from the day in October 1897 when it was opened by the Duke of Devonshire, the education minister, who said technical education was "essential to the continual efficiency of our manufacturing and commercial industries, without the prosperity of which, people could neither continue to prosper nor even to exist".

Enrolment was eagerly taken up, mainly by young men. The 1898-99 session saw 702 on the books, by 1902 the figure was 1,082, including 388 girls and women. The college had begun its climb to today's total of over 17,000 students, 1,700 of them full-time.

The 1897 mayor of the town told a newspaper that the college's "areas of usefulness may be almost indefinitely extended ... not Darlington alone, but Teesside, not Teesside alone but South Durham and North Yorkshire".

His confidence was not misplaced. Students today come from all those surrounding areas, especially North Yorkshire, and overseas. There is a partnership with Teesside university as well as a high-tech new branch of the college at Catterick Garrison.

Most classes were in the evening, some to 10pm. The 1898 offerings included courses for engineering and building apprentices and classes in botany, French, German, Latin, wood carving, cookery, drawing and painting, some for pupil teachers. Daytime classes included elementary science, art, needlework and "high-class" cookery. Saturday saw teaching of science, chemistry, woodwork, mechanical drawing and art.

And there was also something that even the apparently all-embracing 2000-01 prospectus, with subjects ranging from the internet to hairdressing and beauty and from business studies to catering and nursing, cannot match: here, a century ago, you could take the first steps towards becoming a dentist.

Extensions were soon needed. Money from Durham County Council, the North Eastern Railway and individuals including Arthur Pease enabled a 1904 start on a lecture hall, engineering laboratories and workshops. Six years later another laboratory was opened by Sir Charles Parsons, inventor of the steam turbine.

At first, all classes were in the students' time and at their own expense. In 1907, however, after pressure from the borough council, the North Road railway workshops and other local railway employers became more enlightened. They paid for their best apprentices to attend the college full-time for five months a year.

It has not been all sweetness and light, of course. There was soon tension between the borough and county councils about who should pay for what. In 1911 there was a tussle over the purchase of an experimental steam engine to keep the college abreast of the North Eastern Railway's latest technology.

Much nearer our own time, there have been failed efforts to merge the college with the sixth-form college (the former grammar school a few hundred yards away) which has been a rival for the enrolment of A-level students; Queen Elizabeth parents and grammar school old boys headed the resistance to the latest proposals and an earlier locally-agreed attempt was vetoed by the then education secretary, Margaret Thatcher.

Indeed, even before the technical college opened there was bitterness about the choice of its first principal. Favouritism was alleged when one of those prominent among the venture's instigators and fundraisers was chosen ahead of 133 other applicants, many of them graduates. He was James I'Anson, a Quaker scientist and chemist, who was managing partner of the Whessoe foundry.

But his integrity, industrial experience and enthusiasm did not serve the college for long; overwork killed him only months later.

His was one of just two full-time posts: E F Elton, former head of the school of art, and A B Dresser, an art teacher at the BFSS training college, shared the other salary (for art master). Seven part-timers, who took the evening science classes, completed the staff.

The centenary history, commissioned by Mr Peter Shuker, since 1987 the college's tenth principal, is also the story of Darlington. George Stephenson is there; in 1948 it was proposed to give his name to the college, which instead changed from "technical" to "technology" in 1964.

So too is Henry Havelock, hero of Lucknow, because his family's former home at Blackwell Grange was host to secretarial classes during rapid post-war expansion that forced the use of odd corners all over town.

Closure of the North Road workshops in the 60s and arrival of the Chrysler- Cummins engine plant saw engineering teaching change from steam to diesel, just as the building of the world's largest worsted spinning mill in east Darlington by Patons and Baldwins in 1949 brought classes in textile technology.

The site of a home for unmarried mothers and their babies was once subsumed in the main Cleveland Avenue campus which still includes a nucleus of buildings vacated by the girls' high school when it moved to Hummersknott in 1955.

As they also say, all the news that's fit to print is in the booklet. But also a piece that's unfit ... on grounds of accuracy. Harold Evans, who in his Darlington days encouraged the setting up of the college's successful journalism courses, has not yet become editor of the New York Times.

l A Century of Achievement was largely researched by John Davies and edited by Ernie Haidon. It costs £5, including p&p, from the college.