At one time, local historians were as ‘rare as happy farmers’ – but now there are lots of them and they're all publishing books in time for Christmas.
Local history books are pouring onto the shelves in time for Christmas. Chris Lloyd pores over a few...
Wynyard Hall: The History of a Great House, by Norma and Haydn Neal, Barbara Leo and foreword by Sir John Hall (£15 softback, £25 hardback)
AT 11pm on February 19, 1841, the watchman and underkeeper of Wynyard Hall saw smoke rising from their master’s sumptuous £100,000 mansion.
As they dashed across the parkland, they saw flames darting out of a window near his fabulous chapel.
Their master, Charles William Vane-Tempest- Stewart, the third Marquess of Londonderry, had spent the past decade-and-a-half creating what a local newspaper report called “an edifice fit for a monarch”. In fact, Wynyard is widely regarded as the finest 19th Century mansion in County Durham.
Yet barely was it complete than it was on fire.
And that February night was so cold that the pipes on the mansion’s small fire-extinguishing engine were frozen.
The servants formed a human chain, dredging water from the fish pond into buckets to douse the flames, while Lord Londonderry’s horseman galloped off to summon the fire engines of Stockton five miles away.
It took him an hour to reach Stockton. It took a further hour for the horsedrawn engines to reach Wynyard, by which time the hall was engulfed in flames and the parkland was engulfed in a huge crowd of onlookers.
“The magnificent drawing rooms, dining rooms, picture gallery, library, grand staircases and more than 30 bedrooms were reduced to rubble and smouldering ash,” says a splendid new book on Wynyard’s history.
All the Marquess’ valuables were hurriedly rescued from the flames and placed on his large lawns.
“Rural place kept the crowds back,” say the authors, “and only one woman was charged with stealing from the wreckage.”
Wynyard rose from the ashes. Its restoration cost a further £40,000 and another five years.
Yet in 1847, Benjamin Disraeli, a frequent visitor, wrote to his hosts: “I admire your noble courage more even than you splendid taste.” He was, he said, impressed “by the unparalleled and, to me, startling resurrection of Wynyard”.
His host, the Marquess, is one of the most controversial figures in North-East history – he is “t’man on t’hoss”, or the equine statue, in Durham City’s Market Place.
The money he lavished on the hall was earned by his exploitation of his Durham coal mines and his reaction to the plague has long been debated – should he have closed his industries to stop the spread or would that have caused more harm because it would have dried up his source of income and stopped his povertystricken workers from earning their crust?
This magnificent book – well-researched, beautifully laid out and richly illustrated – shows another side to the Stewart story. In 1856, his widow, Frances Anne, held a feast for 4,000 workers in Chilton Moor, near Fencehouses.
“On the centre table stood a huge baron of beef,” says the book. “Other provisions included eight fat bullocks, 15 sheep, 40 bushels of potatoes, a ton-and-a-half of bread, a ton of plum pudding, and 50 barrels of strong beer.
“Frances Anne invited everyone in her employ – pitmen, harbourmen, quarrymen and railwaymen. Thanking them for their hard work, she particularly praised the pitmen for working on when other collieries were on strike.”
The book has been written by three members of Sedgefield Local History Society and has a foreword by the hall’s current owner, Sir John Hall. It is available from the reception desk at Wynyard Hall Hotel or posted out (£6 p&p). Call 01740-644811 for further details.
The Industrial Heart of Old Middlesbrough by JK Harrison (Cleveland Industrial Archaeology Society, £10).
THIS is a fascinating study of how Middlesbrough began on the south bank of the Tees beside Joseph Pease’s Port Darlington railway staithes in the early 1840s.
After a shipyard, the second industry, surprisingly, to establish itself was a pottery, which by 1851 employed 160 people – a large concern.
The third industry was Henry Bolckow and John Vaughan’s ironworks, which opened six years after the pottery.
Very soon it was killing its employees.
On October 8, 1842, “two men were killed by the bursting of a boiler at the works of Messrs Bolckow and Vaughan and about 30 men and boys injured, two of whom afterwards died”, recounts a Victorian historian.
The author of the new book, JK Harrison, adds: “Not emphasised was that casualties in this one accident amounted to over half of the men employed in the engineering workshop.”
A year later, a John Hall (unlikely to be a relation to the Sir John Hall mentioned previously) was killed in another boiler explosion, and in October 1856, four boilersmiths were killed when a steam locomotive they were testing “suddenly burst with great violence”.
It seems the men were literally testing the engine they had built to the point of destruction.
Well illustrated with maps and sketches, the book also features the stories of the ironworks which built bridges like the fantastic Belah Viaduct over Stainmore, the romantic Halfpenny Bridge at Saltburn and the ill-fated Tay Bridge at Dundee.
It is available from the Guisborough Bookshop and by post for £12 from the society at Grindstone Garth, Dalton, Richmond DL11 7HX.
No Five o’Clock on Our Calendars: A history of hay time in the North Pennines (North Pennines AONB Partnership, £6.99).
THIS book is the result of the Teesdale Haytime Project, led by Neil Diment, which has been recording farming memories from the upland meadows.
At the top of the dale, the needs of man and nature coincided, creating haymeadows with up to 120 different species of rare plants flowering in them: wood crane’s-bill, melancholy thistle and globeflower, for example.
Cutting the hay was an important and anxious time of year. It required four consecutive sunny days – one to mow the grass, one to turn and strew it, one to row it up and one to lead it into the barn – which, at the top of Teesdale, were as rare as a happy farmer.
This is a lovely compilation of rural pictures and memories is available in bookshops and the AONB offices in Stanhope.
Coxhoe and Kelloe Revisited 2, by Bernard Mc- Cormick (Bermac Publishing, £9).
ONLY three weeks after former Bowburn miner Bernard McCormick released his second volume about his home area of Coxhoe and Kelloe, local people had been in touch to lend him enough pictures and memories to create a third volume.
Here it is, self-published, and chocker with faces from the past and their stories.
Bernard has also had access to the archives of the TMS bus company – Trimdon Motor Services – which served south-west Durham and was formed after the First World War by Joe Grundy.
His first vehicle was a Ford Model T which was both a lorry and a bus: on Tuesday, Thursdays and Fridays he used it to deliver groceries; on Saturdays, he refitted the seats to ferry football teams about and then, on Sundays, there were church outings before it reverted to being a grocery delivery lorry.
Available from Lings, Coxhoe; Locomotion museum, Shildon; Poplars Garden Centre, Shincliffe Village, or by calling 01325-318441. For more details of Bernard’s other local history publications, visit bermac.co.uk
Letters to Ilio from the Cafe de Luxe, by Barbara Laurie (£12.50).
THIS is subtitled A Selkirk Story, so perhaps it shouldn’t be included here, but it is compiled by Bishop Auckland historian Barbara Laurie from her late mother-in-law’s love letters.
And it is an extraordinary wartime tale. Ilio was an Italian called up by Mussolini, taken prisoner-of-war by the British in 1943 and held in a camp in the Borders town of Selkirk, where he met Gloria, the teenage daughter of the local cafe owners.
Early in 1946, Gloria discovered that she was pregnant and was afraid to tell her parents.
A fortnight or so later, Ilio was “forcibly, tearfully repatriated” to Italy.
These heart-breaking letters across the separation are available from Bishop Auckland Town Hall, Etherington’s newsagents, Chribec Newsagents, the Teesdale Mercury, Waterstone’s, Darlington, and Barbara’s website, bishopaucklandhistory.co.uk
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