Whiff of history

DOWN Gasworks Bank, beside the Swale, coal was burned, tar was syphoned off, ammonia was cleaned out, sulphur was let off and gas was produced. Smoke, steam, stink.

Although the gasworks stopped producing in the mid-1950s, you can still see its derelict industrial frontages facing the river.

And in the gasworks manager’s house – halfway up Gasworks Bank, with the most stunning views over the Swale – still lives the last gasworks manager’s son.

He’s rightly proud of what went on here as Richmond saw the light early: it was one of the first provincial towns in Europe to be lit by gas.

Christine and David Morton outside Gasworks House, Richmond

The history books all say that William Murdock, a Scotsman living in Cornwall, was the first person to experiment with making gas from coal in 1792. They say that the first building in the world to be lit by coal gas was Boulton and Watt’s factory, in Birmingham, in 1804.

But here in the North- East, we know that the honours all belong to George Dixon, of Cockfield – well, they would have done, if he hadn’t had an explosive accident.

George dug coal on Cockfield Fell. He was incredibly resourceful, mixing coal with water to create tar, which he sold to the Sunderland shipbuilders to make their boats watertight.

Then, in about 1760, he noticed that when he boiled coal in a kettle of water, it gave off gas.

So, in the cellar of Garden House, in Cockfield, he connected the hollow stalks of a giant hemlock plant to the top of his kettle and soon he had gas running in “pipes” around his house. He made pinpricks in the “pipes” and as the gas escaped, he lit it with a candle – a good 30 years before Murdock made his mark on history.

George dreamed of lighting his dark coalpits with gas. Out on the fell, he built a huge metal kettle in which to boil the coal. It had a large pipe running off it with an enormous collieryilluminating flare at its end.

Success.

“To extinguish this,” wrote his nephew and witness John Bailey, in 1810. “He struck at it with his hat. The flame was driven inwards, the gas in the inside of the apparatus took fire as quickly as gunpowder and exploded with a report like a cannon, driving a wooden plug to a great distance and exhibiting a cylindrical body of fire several yards in length.”

The loud report echoed across the fell, and George was struck by the frighteningly explosive nature of this stuff he was creating.

George Dixon’s house in Cockfield, which he first lit using coal gas in the 1750s still stands – and still bears his name

“From this time he considered his project of lighting collieries and rooms with gaslights as very dangerous,” said John Bailey.

Too dangerous to proceed with, and so George gave up, and instead concentrated on working out whether he could dig a canal from Cockfield to Stockton, so he could sell his coal to merchants to sail to London.

AND so, in the history of gas, it is Murdock’s name that is up in lights, and George Dixon’s is relegated to the backburner.

In 1812, the first gas company – Frederick Winsor’s Gas Light and Coke Company – was set up to provide a supply for London.

This aerial photograph of Richmond was taken in the mid-1960s. At the top is the castle and at the bottom is the gasworks. The gasworks frontages can still be seen today

Only nine years later, five entrepreneurs in Richmond, North Yorkshire, raised £2,050 to build a gasworks and to lay pipes to light the streetlights.

This was very far-sighted, particularly because it wasn’t until 1825 that the Stockton and Darlington Railway began moving coal across County Durham, it wasn’t until 1829 that a branchline carried that coal to Hurworth Place – about ten miles from Richmond – and it wasn’t until 1845 that Richmond itself was connected to the rail network.

That meant coal could be delivered to Richmond station, carted over Mercury bridge and sold in the market place – the lower half of the cobbles was known as Coal Hill. From there it was taken halfway down Gasworks Bank and, from just beneath Castle Walk, it was tipped into the gasworks.

“I can just remember being in my pram and seeing five ton of coal dropped 40ft,” says David Morton. “It makes some dust.”

One of Richmond’s two gasholders, pictured in 1973. It is a now a children’s play area

David comes from a family of gasmen. His grandfather was awarded an OBE for services to the gas industry after starting as a fitter and rising to become the government’s Northern inspector of gasworks.

David’s father, William, started in Darlington’s gasworks in John Street on £350pa in 1946 and came to manage Richmond in 1948.

With the job came Gasworks House – where David still lives with his wife, Christine.

It is an old property, possibly even pre-dating the gas industry as it is said that the 18th Century manager of a riverside paper mill once lived there.

Producing gas around the clock was a dirty, labourintensive job.

The coal was baked inside large retorts for ten hours at 1,350 degrees, so that it gradually gave off its impure gas. The gas was then bubbled through water to remove tar, pumped through washers and scrubbers to remove ammonia, into oil to remove naphthalene, and finally passed through purifier boxes to remove hydrogen sulphide.

Then it was ready for use, and stored in the riverside gasholders.

The boiler house for the old gasworks

THE by-products were collected because they had countless uses, although it was a messy business, with tubes syphoning off sticky tar.

One day the tar tube became gunked up so a Richmond fitter went down to the roadside end to degunk it, leaving an apprentice called Cecil in charge of the top end.

When the fitter had got the tar moving again, he triumphantly shouted up to his mate: “Success.”

So Ces the apprentice picked up his end of the tube and sucked.

Quite what Ces’ innards were like after receiving a mouthful of oily tar is anyone’s guess, because tar was used to surface roads and creosote fenceposts. It also turned up in mothballs, carbolic acid and oil of wintergreen as well as in flavourings such as vanilla, thyme, violet, almond and cinnamon.

Naptha made paint and resins. Ammonia was turned into fertiliser, baking powder, smelling salts, artificial silk. Even the carbon which collected on the inside of the ovens was scraped off and sold as lead for pencils or oil for paint.

Plus the coal, having been baked for ten hours, was dragged out of the oven by a stoker and, red hot, quenched with water from the Swale. Amid a huge hiss of steam, it became coke and was then burned to heat up the next delivery of coal.

You can still see the gaslights around the obelisk in Richmond Market Place in this 1964 photo, although it was taken to illustrate a story about complaints concerning the new traffic layout

Because of the large quantities of water required, gasworks were nearly always built beside a river: Barnard Castle’s and Gainford’s were beside the Tees, Bishop Auckland’s was on the Gaunless and Darlington’s was beside the Skerne.

It was, though, hard manual labour. When William Morton arrived as Richmond manager in 1948, there appears to have been trouble among the stokers – some were claiming for firings that never happened; others were fighting.

Stokers Morris, Ellis, Stone-Barrett, Dawson, Chapman and Hobson were all reprimanded and given a stern warning: “The council has had enough of this trouble and bickering and quarrelling at the Works, and the Manager is being empowered to dismiss immediately any stoker who misbehaves.”

The stokers, though, were not implicated in the fire at the gasworks in 1955, which took the roof off the retort house and ended Richmond’s 134-year history of producing its own gas. From then on, gas was piped down from Darlington, and William Morton was transferred to the John Street works, where he designed the “four lift”

gasholder, which dominated the town’s skyline for many years.

AND so now down Gasworks Bank, all is quiet. A children’s play area has replaced one gasholder; the other’s site has been landscaped into the tourists’ riverside walk.

The gasworks’ frontages remain, but there is planning permission for houses to be built on top of them. Clearance of the site appears to have begun.

It has been so long now since gas was produced down Gasworks Bank that people are forgetting its nickname, and it is reverting back to its proper name, Millgate.

But Christine and David Morton still live in Gasworks House, with its stunning views over the Swale – a picture of tranquility where once there was industry.