FOLLOWING its exposure in a national television programme, Whorlton Hall, near Barnard Castle, is again in the headlines as nine workers deny mistreating patients with learning disabilities there.
But this is a giant hall with at least two famous sons and one ghost.
Whorlton grew from being just a dot on the map above a blue band of the River Tees in the 1830s when it was connected to North Yorkshire by a suspension bridge. The bridge remains the oldest in Britain to be suspended by its original chains although, sadly and expensively, it is now shut to all users.
An Edwardian postcard of the suspension bridge at Whorlton
READ MORE: THE WONDER OF WHORLTON: THE PIONEERING SUSPENSION BRIDGE
The bridge encouraged the growth of the village, and in 1853, its lowly Norman chapel was replaced by a new church that befitted its up-and-coming nature.
At the same time, next to the church, the vicar of Whorlton built the imposing hall.
He was the Reverend Arthur William Headlam – or “Arturi Gvliemi Headlam” as the brass memorial plaque, written in Latin, to him in the church says. He was the son of the Archdeacon of Richmond and in his own right he also held the posts of vicar of St Oswald’s in Durham, rector of Gainford and honorary canon of Durham Cathedral.
Whorlton Hall, near Barnard Castle, now boarded up. Picture: SARAH CALDECOTT
The 17-bedroom hall was built as his home and also as an “educational coaching establishment” for students who wished to go to university – presumably, he helped prepare them for university entrance examinations.
Two of his sons who were born there became well known for very different reasons.
Arthur Cayley Headlam, who was born on August 2, 1862, became a professor of divinity and Bishop of Gloucester, but was renowned as an anti-socialist, anti-welfare state sort of a chap who regarded himself as “the last of the true Tories”. He was one of the last bishops to wear a top hat, even when he was being driven in his motor car.
Less admirably, he wrote to the Times in 1933 praising the “self-discipline and self-sacrifice” of the Nazis, whom he refused to criticise. The Bishop of Durham, Hensley Henson, labelled him “the pertinacious apologist of the Nazi government”.
He retired back to Whorlton in 1945 to work on his rock garden, and died there in 1947.
A herd of cows mooching through Whorlton in September 1963. The cameraman just about has his back to the church and hall
His younger brother, Sir James Wycliffe Headlam-Morley, was born at Whorlton on December 24, 1863. He went to Germany to study the language and married Else, from Dresden. He became a professor of Greek but as he was an acknowledged expert in German history, he was called into the Foreign Officer to work on propaganda.
He changed his name to inherit an estate in the West Riding, and was part of the British delegation at the 1919 Paris peace conference – it is said to have been his idea to create Danzig, now Gdansk, as a “free city”, controlled neither by Poland nor Germany.
He was knighted for his efforts and became renowned as a First World War historian before his death in 1929. Like his brother, he is buried in the churchyard at Whorlton next to the hall.
Because of its size, the hall has spent much of its life as a school – the Red House School in Norton, Stockton, was evacuated there during the Second World War – and, latterly, as a care home.
Throughout its long history as an institution, there is a persistent spooky story of the “laundry ghost” whose appearance is always accompanied by a clicketty-clacketty noise as she is always doing some knitting.
If you can tell us anymore about her, or any other aspect of the hall, we’d love to hear from you.
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READ MORE: WHEN DARLINGTON WAS ROCKED BY THE GREAT COFFIN LID SCANDAL
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