Stormy start for St Mary's

THE clock which stares out from the tower at St Mary’s, Blackhill is keeping good time now. For more than 130 years, it solidly and reliably marked the hours for generation after generation of steelworkers and their families.

Its bells rang every quarter hour to tell blastfurnacemen to get out of bed for the 6 til 2; helped schoolchildren count down to hometime; warned wives their husbands were on their way home from work; set the 2 til 10 men racing to reach the Rose and Crown before the strictly enforced last orders.

WORK OF ART: The stunning interior of St Mary's RC Church

The bells have rung out in advance of countless Sunday Masses, tolled over countless funerals and pealed over countless weddings; they have announced the end of two world wars and more than a hundred new years and Christmas mornings.

The soot-blackened Gothic tower and its impassive gilded faces have looked out over Blackhill, as a steeltown was first forged, then scrapped and eventually reinvented. In recent years, the ageing clockwork failed and the old timepiece faltered, alternately losing and gaining time. But a community which valued its traditions rallied to raise the money and the clock has now been restored, meaning it will keep time steadily for generations to come.

THE story of St Mary’s is inextricably linked with the story of steel. Before the discovery of iron ore, the scattered population of Consett district was around 200, mainly farmers and farm labourers clinging precariously to life on a bleak and windswept moorland hillside.

At the foot of the hill, the ancient village of Shotley Bridge was embarking on a dramatic change. In 1837, Quaker landowner Jonathan Richardson launched an enterprise to develop the old spa, with its distinctive tasting mineral-rich waters, into a health destination to rival Harrogate.

But it was discovered that the water’s distinctive taste derived from its high iron content, and so, the following year, a great enterprise was launched to develop an ironworks at Consett.

The Derwent Iron Company was formed in 1840 and borrowed heavily from the Northumberland and Durham District Bank, also owned by the enterprising Jonathan Richardson, for the finance to open furnaces to smelt the iron and coal mines to fuel the furnaces, but both required thousands of labourers and houses for them. Over the next decade, workers poured into the district from across the country, in particular from Ireland, where the horrors of the Potato Famine were at their height.

The most basic Victorian housing was built at Consett and to the north of The Works on the slopes of Blackhill, although the 1841 census records a number of the population living in tents, and by 1851 there were around 5,000 workmen living in the area, roughly 2,000 of them Irish.

IN 1849, a young priest named Father Francis Kearney arrived at The Brooms church, outside Leadgate, on horseback, his first parish after being ordained at Ushaw College the previous year.

The newly-arrived Fr Kearney was from County Meath, like so many of the newly-arrived ironworkers. Energetic and persuasive, he was, by all accounts, an expert horseman, who would travel the byways of his huge parish to reach his flock on horseback.

Two years after his arrival at The Brooms, he reported that there were 2,000 Catholics living in the district, most of them ironworkers in Blackhill and Consett, while his tiny chapel a good two miles away from the foundries could only accommodate 240 worshippers at a time.

The resourceful priest hit on a very Victorian solution to the problem. He persuaded Mr Foster, the manager of the Derwent Iron Company, to stop the wages of every Catholic in the ironworks for a day to pay for a new church. In July 1854, he paid landowner John Nicholson, of Shotley Bridge, £480 for three roods of land with a cottage on it at Blackhill, near the company houses built for the immigrant workers.

Designed by architects Weightman, Hadfield and Goldie, the foundation stone was laid on August 24, 1854 by William Hogarth, the first Bishop of Hexham who preferred to live in Darlington. That same year, Pope Pius IX enshrined the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary in church law and the new church was officially named Our Lady Immaculate, Shotley Hill, although by all accounts it was universally known as St Mary’s from the start.

THEN, as now, Consett was a windswept place, perched high on the edge of the North Pennines. Late in January 1856, with the new chapel virtually complete, the town was hit by winter rains, which lashed down almost incessantly for a fortnight and, unseen by the builders, seeped into the stonework and weakened the fresh mortar.

On the night of February 7, 1856, the rain gave way to a great storm, which brought down ornate monuments in Glasgow’s Necropolis and sunk ships off Great Yarmouth and Pembrokeshire. The storm also brought the church of Our Lady Immaculate crashing to the ground, with only a fragment of the nave and chancel remaining intact.

The following morning the congregation gathered amid the debris and stoically began the work all over again.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, a new architect was chosen for the rebuilding. Archibald Matthias Dunn, born in Wylam and educated at Ushaw College, was an inexperienced 24-year-old when he was commissioned, but he went on to become one of the North’s greatest architects, his most famous buildings include the Mining Institute in Newcastle’s Westgate Road and the spire of St Mary’s Cathedral, as well as alterations to Pugin’s masterpiece chapel at Ushaw College.

GOTHIC: Gargoyles protrude from the stonework at St Mary's RC Church

But St Mary’s, in Blackhill, was his first commission, heavily influenced by the Gothic revival, with a tower, complete with gargoyles, that dominated the skyline above the squat two-up, two-downs of the infant iron town. Capable of holding 800 parishioners at a time, it was opened in July 1857 with a Pontifical High Mass celebrated by Bishop Hogarth. Mozart’s Mass Number Seven was performed, while an offertory taken by Catholic gentry Henry Silvertop, Matthew Kearney and George Gunn collected 64 shillings.

Fr Kearney briefly remained in charge of the church for two months, before handing over the reins to its first parish priest, Fr Thomas Hanigan. Born in Tipperary, the new priest was 28 when he arrived from his first parish in Berwick.

But the church was an empty shell. There were no pews and members of the congregation brought chairs from their humble homes on Saturday night to be in place for Sunday Mass, while the only light through the dark winter was from candles. Nevertheless, thousands of the faithful came each week, up the steep hill from Shotley Bridge and down from the ironworks at Consett.

But a new storm was brewing...

SINCE the opening of the ironworks, there had been open animosity between the Irish and English workers at Consett with regular violence.

One witness reported: “I have stood in my doorway and counted a dozen fights going on at the same time.” In 1846, a riot lasting several hours left three dead and many wounded, while the following year just under 200 people were arrested and brought before the courts following a full-scale riot in Blackhill.

In November 1857, the over-extended Northumberland and Durham District Bank collapsed, after making a succession of risky loans, chiefly to the Derwent Iron Company. The company was reckoned to owe just under £1m, while the ironworks was valued at little more than a tenth of that figure. It looked like the ironworks, which employed the vast majority of the town’s 10,000 inhabitants, could itself go under.

Workers were laid off, those who kept their jobs faced an uncertain future, feelings were running high. In April 1858, the uncertainty spilled over into confrontation as armed mobs of English and Irish workers faced each other in what became known as The Battle Of The Blue Heaps. Several days of escalating skirmishes ended with a mob of 2,000 Irishmen armed with scythes, bludgeons and handguns facing a similar number of Englishmen on the spoil heaps which lay between Blackhill and Consett.

Fr Kearney and Fr Hanigan went into the crowd attempting to keep the peace and were later praised for keeping the two sides apart before the arrival of 200 soldiers from Newcastle, who dispersed the rival mobs and stayed for several days to ensure there was no repeat.

Throughout those turbulent times, the towering St Mary’s was the most obvious symbol of Catholicism in the divided town.

Left, Father Thomas Alphonsus Smith, who founded two schools and, right, Father Thomas Hanigan, who helped keep warring factions apart during infamous Battle of the Blue Heaps 

IN 1860, after three years tending his belligerent flock, Fr Hanigan left St Mary’s and was replaced by Lancashire-born Fr Thomas Alphonsus Smith.

The 32-year-old travelled by train from Carlisle but, as Consett was yet to get its first passenger rail service, was forced to get off at Riding Mill in Northumberland and walk the final 12 miles.

He found his new church exactly as the builders had left it and set about having it decorated, with oil paintings of The Assumption, The Annunciation, The Visitation and The Sacred Heart, commissioned a copy of Leonardo’s Last Supper and had statues of the saints by Mayer of Munich installed in the nave.

Over the next 12 years, Fr Smith presided over the building of Catholic schools in Blackhill and Consett, a presbytery and convent. He told the Consett Guardian newspaper that “both schools had been built exclusively by the pence of the working men”, while the paper in turn reported: “Fr Smith knew every child by name and by character, he was ever happy in their midst. He took care that the best Catholic education which could be given was given in his schools”.

It was clearly a difficult task. A report from Her Majewsty’s Inspectorate of Schools from 1879 reported: “The schools are principally attended by a poor class of Irish children and even in their ‘best’, as on the day of inspection, a considerable number appear without shoes and stockings.

“Yet in spite of insufficient clothing and, in hard times, of little food, they show plenty of intelligence and savoir faire and are marvellously obedient and well behaved.”

Finally, in January 1884, the clock tower was completed with a spire and belfry with six bells, the largest weighing 22 hundredweight. The bells were blessed by Bishop Bewick and almost tolled for disaster on their first day. The bells were designed to swing in four directions, north, south, east and west, but were initially installed by parishioners who set them to all swing in the same direction, which would have been enough momentum to bring the tower down.