On his 250th birthday, the forgotten Mr Pease of Darlington

This Joseph is rather overshadowed by other members of his family. For example, this Joseph is not the Joseph Pease whose statue stands in High Row. That’s his nephew.

This Joseph was the younger brother of Edward “the father of the railways” Pease.

The Feethams mansion where Joseph Pease lived. Today Darlington Town Hall is on its spot. That's the spire of St Cuthbert's Church in the background

Joseph worked as a buyer for the family woollen mill, which was where Sports Direct is today, and he lived in Feethams, the grandest mansion in town which was where the town hall is today.

A painting of Joseph Pease of Feethams, who died in 1846. Picture: Darlington Centre for Local Studies

Informed by his Quaker faith and by his wife’s family’s friendship with the anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce, Joseph was fired by unfairness. Feethams became a hotbed of quite radical political meetings – his daughter, Elizabeth, even allowed Chartists to meet there – and Darlington became a leading voice against slavery.

In the library’s exhibition is a remarkable anti-slavery poem written in 1824 by John Horner, an employee in Peases Mill. Part of its remarkableness is that, as a literary work, it is not very good, but it shows how so many of the working class in the town were involved in the anti-slavery campaign.

The Peases’ workers joined with those employed by the other great Quaker family, the Backhouses, to raise funds for John Horner’s poem to be printed and distributed “throughout every part of this United Kingdom, for the consideration of abolishing the traffick of slaves”.

The exhibition also looks at the campaigns of Joseph’s daughter, Elizabeth, who moved from the unfairness of slavery onto the unfairness of women not being allowed to vote. She dedicated much of her life to women’s suffrage to such an extent that the city of Edinburgh, where she lived her last decades, has considered erecting a statue in her honour.

READ MORE: THE AMAZING LIFE OF ELIZABETH PEASE NICHOL

The exhibition runs until the end of February in the library which remains open, despite the white hoardings and the scaffolding that is enabling work on the roof to take place.

JOSEPH PEASE of Feethams died in 1846, before the age of photography, but in the exhibition there is a silhouette of him – although he would probably have referred to it as a “shade” or “profile” (above).

A silhouette was made by a skilled artist – in this case, the renowned Augustin Edouart who toured the world and was regarded as the finest silhouette artist of the 19th Century – out of black paper using scissors to create a likeness of their subject.

The silhouette is named after Etienne de Silhouette who was the French finance minister in 1759 who imposed great and unpopular austerity on the French people to pay for the Seven Years War. Anything that was regarded as being penny-pinching and cheap was termed a “silhouette”, and creating a likeness out of paper was certainly much cheaper than paying for a painter to make a portrait.

That’s one theory. Another is that Monsieur de Silhouette was himself a dab hand with the scissors and covered his chateau at Bry-sur-Marne with profiles that he had made. So prolific was he that they became known as “silhouettes”.