VISITORS to Darlington’s library will feel their spirits soar as they see how beautifully it has been restored. No more the forbidding atmosphere of drab wood and the Gothic dread of musty books; now it is light and inviting, with brave colours highlighting the intricate wonders of the Victorian architecture.
But they may also get a sinking feeling because, centre stage, is a giant Lego model of the Titanic.
It commemorates the town’s links to perhaps the most famous – or infamous – ship of all, and also one family’s connection to Darlington and its library.
The model – Lego’s largest – has been made by Titanic enthusiasts Sam and Graham Newton, whose grandfather and father, Bill Newton, was mayor of Darlington.
“It started when I was very little when I was taken by my dad into Darlington library,” says Sam, now 28 and working as an engineer for the BBC in Salford. “I remember collecting my first ever library card at Crown Street and taking out several Titanic books which we would read together and I became fascinated by it – the images, the story.”
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“I remember Sam would draw pictures of the Titanic from the library books,” says Graham, who now lives near Newark. “We shared the fascination and for my 60th birthday last year, Sam took me to the Titanic museum in Belfast and then to the Royal Albert Hall in London to see the film accompanied by a full orchestra.”
“We thought we’d sign off our Titanic year by building the Lego model,” says Sam. “It is the largest they produce, 9,090 pieces, there was a four month waiting list and when it arrived, it took us three days to complete – it is amazingly detailed.”
They have presented the model to the library, as it was the place that launched their voyage of discovery about the Titanic, and as a nod to Cllr Bill Newton, who wore the mayoral chains in 1982-83. He made his living out of crime: he wrote 125 crime thrillers, featuring heroic cops like Joey Binns and Miles Dresser whose names were obviously inspired by Darlington. His books were well read in their day in the library – he was billed as “Darlington’s answer to Raymond Chandler” – and they were translated into 13 languages.
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But some of them were not read at all in the US where magistrates banned his thriller called You’re Dead My Lovely and ordered 1,200 copies of it be pulped because it was too saucy.
As well as commemorating the Newtons’ family connections to the town, the model is a reminder of Darlington’s connections to the Titanic. Immediately outside the library is a memorial to WT Stead (above), the Echo’s pioneering editor in the 1870s who became the most famous British person to drown on the Titanic in 1912 – he’d become a celebrity journalist with a bigger reputation than, say, Piers Morgan has now and was on his way to New York to join the American president on the Carnegie Hall stage in front of 2,000 people at a spiritualist peace conference.
The memorial is a stone cheese press which had been at Stead’s home of Grainey Hill, in the Hummersknott area of town. The villa was demolished after he left in 1880 and in the 1950s the stone was presented to the library.
Beyond Stead, Darlington Forge made the cast steel stern frame, rudder and brackets for the Titanic, which together weighed 280 tons. As the Titanic weighed 52,310 tons, Darlington can claim to have built 0.5 per cent of it – and the Darlington-made stern was the very last section to go under.
The rudder itself was 78ft 8ins high and 15ft 3ins wide and weighed more than 100 tons.
Pages from an early 1930s Darlington Forge catalogue, now in the Darlington Centre for Local Studies in the library, showing its previous products. The Forge is going for an international market as the descriptions are translated into French and Spanish, but nowhere does it mention the Titanic – even though, as the page with the rudder above shows, it is happy to boast that it made parts for the Titanic’s sister ships, the Olympic and the Britannic. Below is the train that took the parts from Albert Hill to Hartlepool where they were taken by steamer to Belfast. The train taking the Titanic’s parts travelled the 25 miles on Sunday, December 12, 1909, at walking pace when the line was closed to other traffic because bits of the supersize cargo were hanging off the bogies. In the picture you can see the men who walked beside the train. Their duty was to cut down any trees or disassemble any obstacles that might snag the train
Darlington Forge was on Albert Hill and its brick offices can still be seen beside the East Coast Main Line.
“The model is our tribute, father and son, to our family’s time in Darlington, to Darlington’s part in the Titanic story, and to the library,” says Graham. “We loved visiting it – it is a remarkable building and has been refurbished so beautifully for the community.”
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