Setting sail with a Pease at the Elm

WE all know that beautiful cathedral on the banks of the Wear, and today we boast of our own cathedral on the banks of the Tees,” said George Harroway at the opening ceremony. “We have just as beautiful a view from Elm Ridge across the Pennines as the one across the Wear.”

And then, because Mr Harroway had been the managing director of Middlesbrough’s largest shipyard, they almost literally launched Darlington’s new church.

More than 1,000 people gathered beside the old butler’s lodge in Carmel Road that day in June 1932 to witness Miss Mary Hodgkin formally name the church.

She seems not to have smashed a bottle of champagne against its side as if it were a ship at the top of the slipway, but as soon as Miss Hodgkin – from the family that had once called the mansion home – had finished her little ceremony, “the White Ensign was then broken at the head of the mast on the tower amid great cheers”.

Next Saturday, as Elm Ridge nears the end of its 80th year of worship and is still in shipshape condition, the Methodists are holding a day of commemorative activities, looking back over the mansion’s 146-year history and culminating in a grand choral concert.

THE story of Elm Ridge begins with a little sadness.

It was one of a pair of mansions commissioned by John Pease, the eldest son of Edward “Father of the Railways” Pease.

John got a young architect, GG Hoskins, to build a pair of houses on the farmland at Salutation Corner, which was then the western edge of Darlington.

The first house, Woodburn, was his wedding present to his eldest daughter, Sophia, and her husband, Sir Theodore Fry. It was complete in 1866.

The second house, Elm Ridge, was to be for John and his wife Sophia. Indeed, twined in the stonework above the front door are their initials – JSP – and the date, 1867.

But Elm Ridge was not ready for occupation when John died on July 29, 1868, at Cleveland Lodge in Great Ayton. He was 71.

“A modest and unobtrusive life has passed into the quiet and unpretentious shadow of death,” said his obituary in the Darlington and Stockton Times. “Modesty is, oftener than not, the veil of merit.”

John was the most devout of Quakers. He was known as “the silver trumpet of the North”, as he toured the country, preaching. He spent months in Ireland, France and Germany, and two years touring North America, spreading the word.

He didn’t bother much with the family businesses, but still left an estate valued at £180,000 (more than £17m today, according to the Bank of England’s Inflation Calculator).

His widow and his other daughter, Mary Anna, moved into Elm Ridge when it was complete, although Sophia cannot have lived long beneath her initials as she followed her husband to the grave in 1870.

Mary Anna inherited. She had probably just met the man she would marry: Jonathan Backhouse Hodgkin. Although he was born in Tottenham, his middle name gives him away: he was the grandson of the great Darlington banker who had bankrolled the Peases’ Stockton and Darlington Railway.

He arrived in Darlington to work in the family bank on High Row in 1870. He met the wealthy heiress Mary Anna, married her in 1873, and, aged 30, “retired” from banking to devote himself to philanthropic work.

Theirs was a deeply religious household. Jonathan, whose spell as mayor of coincided with the opening of the library, was “a zealous Friend”. Preachers and missionaries were regular guests at Elm Ridge and the whole family was called to daily prayers by a bell.

In 1901, Jonathan and Mary Anna went on missionary work to Syria, and two of their four sons became missionaries – Henry in China and Olaf in Madagascar.

(However, they didn’t put all their trust in God. A foldaway bed was built in the woodwork of the Elm Ridge butler’s pantry to pull down across the entrance to the bulging silver store so that the night-duty servant would always be protecting the valuables.) They spent their Golden Wedding at Elm Ridge in 1923 happily reminiscing how, 50 years earlier, their bridesmaids’ outfits – “the beautiful and brilliant dresses of the Quakeresses” – had shocked their elders’ view of Quaker simplicity.

Jonathan died in 1926; Mary Anna in 1928.

And it seemed likely that Elm Ridge would die, too.

Many Victorian multi-millionaires’ mansions were too expensive to keep during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Indeed, Woodburn, the sister mansion, had diced with death in 1913 when Lady Sophia and Sir Theodore Fry had passed away. Neither had really recovered from a holiday accident in Italy in 1895.

While driving around Lake Maggiore, their horse had shied violently, tipping over the carriage and crushing Sir Theodore.

Sophia was so badly shocked she died less than two years later while seeking a warmer climate for the sake of her health in Biarritz. Sir Theodore, Darlington’s MP for 15 years, lasted until 1912, and he too died while seeking relief from the after-effects of the accident: he was sailing to gentler climes in South America.

At auction, most of the Woodburn estate was bought by solicitor Thomas Clayhills Henderson. In 1935, after his death, Woodburn was demolished and about 20 substantial properties – mostly semidetached – were built among its well-treed grounds in Woodburn Drive and Coniscliffe Road.

WHEN empty, Elm Ridge was put up for sale in 1929, it was lucky to catch the eye of GM Harroway, the former managing director of Sir Raylton Dixon and Company, owner of the Cleveland Dockyard, the largest shipbuilder on the Tees. It closed in 1923, having built more than 600 cargo ships, and launching Mr Harroway into retirement.

In 1927, he moved to Blackwell Hill – a grand house in its own right, now demolished, on the same escarpment as Elm Ridge, overlooking the Tees.

He was a devout Methodist, and offered an interest-free loan to the church to purchase Elm Ridge. It feels as if there were some reluctance among the brethren of the mother church in Bondgate to take on such a large ongoing expense, but Mr Harroway had grand plans, personally supervising the removal of Elm Ridge’s main staircase and much of the upper floor to create a place of worship to seat 250.

It was opened – that should read launched – on June 8, 1932, when Mr Harroway made quite a splash when he announced: “To help to bear the financial strain, my wife and I ask you to accept as a gift Elm Ridge, with its gardens and grounds.”

No wonder the 1,000 guests cheered when the White Ensign was broken on the mast on Elm Ridge’s tower.

“I hope it will become a great centre of quiet worship and meditation,” said Mr Garroway.

So it has been these past 80 years.

And as well as a great centre of worship, once the secondhand YMCA timber hut was replaced by the hall in 1991, it has also been a great centre for the wider community in the West End of Darlington.

Perhaps it was meant to be.

When a small boy, Mary Anna and Jonathan Backhouse Hodgkin’s eldest son – another Jonathan – looked up at the large south-facing window, above which his grandparents’ initials were entwined in stone, and said: “It’s big enough to be a church.”

• With thanks to Hilda Rishworth