Staiths were a hive of activity

LET’S flip the medal over. On the obverse is the world’s first railway suspension bridge – the bridge we’ve been hanging around for a while now.

You remember: the medal was struck to commemorate the opening of the £2,300 bridge on December 27, 1830, built by Sir Samuel Brown to carry the Stockton and Darlington Railway (S&DR) over the River Tees.

You must remember: it was, as bridges go, rubbish.

When the first train went over, its deck rose up alarmingly in the middle and the Yorkshire pier cracked, sending masonry crashing onto the track.

The only way they could get trains across it was by chaining batches of four wagons 27ft apart so the load was evenly distributed over the bridge’s entire 281ft length.

After 14 years, the railway proprietors gave up on the world’s first railway suspension bridge, and Robert Stephenson built them a more conventional – and stable – bridge alongside.

Nevertheless, these “large and handsome medals” were “plentifully distributed” on that auspicious first day, “and were generally worn, suspended round the neck by a blue riband” by all in attendance. It became common for medals to be struck to commemorate railway openings, but this medal is only the second of its kind. The first such medal had been struck threeand- a-half months earlier for the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway on September 15, 1830.

Anyway, let’s flip the medal over.

There on the reverse is a stunning view of the coal staiths at Port Darlington.

You will also remember from the recent story of the Teesside iron industry that in 1829 Middlesbrough’s population was only 40 – agricultural workers plus the odd pilgrim who tarried overnight at the middle point between the two religious centres of Whitby and Durham.

Then came Port Darlington to send County Durham coal on its way to the London market.

The staiths were the most important part of the port.

They had to deliver the coal from the railway on the land into the ship moored in the deep water, and they had to do it quickly, without spillage and without smashing the black gold into useless dust.

In 1800, William Chapman of Newcastle patented a wonderful contraption that did all of this, and in 1829, the S&DR’s locomotive engineer, Timothy Hackworth, was instructed to build six Chapman staiths at the new port.

When the coal successfully made it over the dodgy suspension bridge and into the port, a steam engine hoisted it 15ft or so up to a wooden gantry. There a horse was coupled to it and pulled it along an enclosed, gas-lit corridor – rather like an aircraft boarding tunnel – to the head of the staith where the wagon, containing nearly three tons of coal, was locked into a cradle to which a man also clung. An engine lifted man and cradle 19ft 6ins into the air and swung them out over the water and down to the ship’s deck.

A Victorian historian with an intimate knowledge of Roman mythology said of the man: “What a picturesque appearance his descent has … like Curtius leaping with his horse into the gulf.”

Hovering above the deck, the man removed a bolt from a trapdoor in the bottom of the wagon and the coal dropped into the hold.

The man was known as the coal teemer, presumably because his action sent the coal teeming into the boat.

The loss of weight caused a counterbalance to swing coal teemer and empty wagon back up to the staith’s head from where the wagon rolled down the wooden corridor to re-join its train and ultimately return to the south Durham coalfield for re-filling.

On the waterside of the staiths, there were up to 100 sailing ships waiting on a tide to take on a cargo.

The captains would let a boy ashore at Redcar or Saltburn and he would walk up to the Turn Office at Port Darlington and fill in the Turn Book so that his vessel was now officially waiting its turn in the queue.

When that turn came, the coal trimmers – “the aristocrats of the coal staiths” –ushered the boat to the vacant staith, prepared the paperwork and ordered the coal teemer to teem.

Hackworth’s steampowered staiths were judged a great success – unlike, of course, the world’s first railway suspension bridge.

Yet the faulty bridge remained in use until 1844; the superb staiths were derelict by 1842.

Port Darlington’s position on the bank of the Tees made it vulnerable to tides, storms and the shifting sands of the riverbed. The depth of water at the staithes varied between 6ft and 16ft, meaning the poor coal teemer could find himself flying way over the mast or snarled up in the rigging.

Port Darlington was also vulnerable to competition.

Its rivals Seaham Harbour (opened 1831), Port Clarence (1834) and Hartlepool (1835) soon offered sheltered berths and faster loading to bigger ships.

So the same motives that had driven the S&DR away from its first port at Stockton drove it away from Port Darlington.

On May 12, 1842, the brand new Middlesbrough Dock received its first ship, and Port Darlington was rendered redundant – its staiths put up for auction in August 1842.

“The Spur Gearing, Fly Wheels, Shafting Sheaves and Chains, Gearing for working Force Pumps of the Fire-Extinguishing Apparatus, and all the Sheaves, Shafting, Brake Wheels, Suspending Frames, and the much-admired Machinery for lowering the Empty Waggons, are in good working order and could be readily removed to any part of the United Kingdom by water or railway conveyance,” said the advertisement in the Durham Chronicle.

Time and tide wait for no piece of machinery, even if it is commemorated on the reverse of a medal.

REPUTEDLY, if you go “over the border” in Middlesbrough you will stumble across exotic entertainment after dark, yet over the border is where the historic heart of the town lies.

The border is formed by the 1861 railway to Redcar and Saltburn, which cut off the old town by the riverbank, and today there is little to see of what once was.

Port Darlington has disappeared beneath light industrial units, and only three buildings remain of the community that grew up beside it.

The oldest is the Ship Inn (now the Middlehaven) in Stockton Street which was built in 1833 at the entrance to Port Darlington. Its first drinkers must have been the coal teemers who worked up a thirst as they swung out on the staiths.

Around the corner is the Customs House, designed in the mid-1830s by George Burlison in the Greek Revival style.

Here, on October 19, 1838, a banquet was held in honour of Prince Augustus Frederick, the Duke of Sussex and King George III’s sixth son who was Middlesbrough’s first royal visitor.

Still looking grand despite the boards bolted to its windows, the Customs House was in charge of the comings and goings on the nearby wharves and jetties.

Houses for dockworkers were laid out in a grid and the first was built in March 1830 in West Street by George Chapman. Although all the terraces were cleared in the Sixties, you can still make out their streetlines in the vacant grassland.

The streets converged on a market square at the centre of the grid. It was the highest point on the floodplain.

In the centre of the square was the Town Hall, built in 1846 by Scottish architect William Lambie Moffatt, another Greek Revivialist, who created countless hospitals, poorhouses and churches across Yorkshire and south Scotland, including Northallerton workhouse (1858) and Newcastle Asylum (1868).

His Middlesbrough Town Hall was dismissed in its day as “a very unpretentious pile . . . designed evidently with an eye to utility rather than to ornament”.

Yet with its soaring clocktower, it was a centrepiece that marked Middlesbrough as a booming new town, with ships pressing to its riverbanks and tradesmen setting up business on its shores.

A writer in 1846 declared: “To the stranger visiting his home after an absence of 15 years, this proud array of ships, docks, warehouses, churches, foundries and wharfs would seem like some enchanted spectacle, some Arabian Night’s vision.”

It was in the Town Hall in October 1862 that Chancellor of the Exchequer WE Gladstone delivered one of the most famous soundbites in North-East history.

With all the ironmasters, who were transforming Middlesbrough from a docktown into a prosperous ironopolis, gathered around him, he said: “This remarkable place, the youngest child of England’s enterprise, is an infant, gentlemen, but it is an infant Hercules.”

Today, the clock beneath which Gladstone uttered his remarks still tells the time, but the ground floor where he stood is vandalised, derelict and decaying.