ONE of Darlington’s great unsung heroines takes centre stage in an exhibition which opens on Monday in the town’s library.
From Massachusetts to Edinburgh, the name of Elizabeth Pease Nichol is revered, but in her hometown she is rather overlooked.
Perhaps this is not surprising as just days after commemorating her greatest contribution to Darlington life – founding the Mechanics Institute – she was “disowned” by the town for “marrying out” and she spent the rest of her life in Scotland.
Now Stockton artist Phil Gatenby is bringing her home, and, using works by 12 other artists, placing her among other brave and campaigning women through time who also don’t get the credit they deserve.
His exhibition is a sister to his one that ran in Durham last summer called “Indelicate, Ungenteel, Vulgar & Outrageous Women” which put Josephine Butler centre stage. Josephine, from Northumberland, was campaigned on women’s issues in Victorian England and even helped The Northern Echo’s former editor WT Stead procure a 13-year-old girl to work in a London brothel to further their crusade against child prostitution.
Josephine has a Durham college named after her, but Elizabeth hasn’t gained that sort of recognition.
“Her achievements are substantial and transformational in the way we live our lives today more than we know,” said Phil, who lectured at the Cleveland College of Art for 38 yerars, standing beneath a silhouette of Elizabeth that he discovered in a collection in Massachusetts. “What I’ve got to like about her is that while all her brothers and uncles were working terribly hard at the forefront of industry, she had that Quaker value of it not being about her – it is about how you assist the burden on others.
“She had the ability and the connections to make a difference to the burden on others.”
Elizabeth was born in 1807 in Feethams, the grandest mansion in Darlington which stood where the Town Hall is today. She was a cousin of the railway Peases, and she was fired by unfairness. She believed that all people were equal, irrespective of the colour of their skin or their gender, and, in 1836 formed the Darlington Ladies Anti Slavery Society – it was one of the first political organisations for women and it campaigned vigorously against slavery.
She went to America to see the horrors of slavery herself, and in 1838 wrote a pamphlet entitled Address to the Women of Great Britain, urging all women to speak up against slavery.
In June 1840, she attended the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London and was horrified to discover that because she was a woman she was not only forbidden from speaking but also had to be fenced off behind a bar and curtains.
This unfairness fired her further, and she returned to Darlington determined to make life fairer for women. She invited the Chartists, radical political reformers who also wanted equality for women, to Feethams and distributed their literature even though many of her class regarded them as dangerous revolutionaries.
She supported workers striking in the factories of Yorkshire and Lancashire – even though her family owned the biggest factories in Durham. She didn’t, though, support the use of physical force in the battle for equality.
In 1853, she gave the largest donation – £400 (about £50,000 in today’s values) – for the building of the £2,300 Mechanics’ Institute in Skinnergate. She saw wealthy families, like her own, send their children for expensive education which the working classes could not afford – so the institute was her way of providing equal educational opportunities for all.
On May 12, 1853, she laid the foundation stone for the institute using a “silver trowel which was judiciously contrived to serve as a fish slice and was presented to the lady”.
Three weeks later, Elizabeth, 46, married Dr John Pringle Nichol in an independent chapel off Northgate. Dr Nichol was the professor of astronomy at Glasgow University and was considered to be the greatest astronomer of his day with an ability to fire the interest of the ordinary person in the heavens – he was the Brian Cox of his day.
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But he was a Presbyterian, and it was forbidden for a Quaker to marry outside her faith. Edward “Father of the Railways” Pease wrote that this was “a union very much advised against and disapproved by all her friends”.
And so because of love, Elizabeth was “disowned” by the Darlington Quakers and lived out the rest of her days in Scotland.
In fact, her last visit to her hometown seems to have been on September 1, 1854, when she returned with Dr Nichol to perform the official opening of the Mechanics Institute. Her cousin, Henry Pease, chaired an elaborate tea for 500 people and her husband gave the well received inaugural lecture, entitled The Immensity and Endurance of Creation.
Elizabeth, as a woman, was not invited to speak, although she may have got the consolation of usefully wielding her fish slice.
Her husband lived just five years after their marriage – “Alas! Alas! Widow and desolate,” she wrote in her diary – and in widowhood she threw herself into numerous causes in her adopted city of Edinburgh: peace, temperance, education, anti-racism, anti-vivisection and women’s suffrage.
She was a founder of the Edinburgh Women’s Suffrage Society in 1867 and dedicated her last decades to getting women the vote and also to ending cruelty against animals. In 2013, historians in Edinburgh labelled her one of the city’s four forgotten female heroines and called for a statue in her honour.
Now at least in her hometown, she is centre stage in an exhibition.
- Place, People & Living Memory, curated by Phil Gatenby, is in the Art Gallery at Darlington library until March 25. The official opening is on Thursday, February 8, at 6pm when Chris Lloyd, who compiles Memories, will talk briefly about Elizabeth. All are welcome.
- Phil Gatenby will give talks about the story behind the show on February 5, 15 and March 25.
- The artists in the exhibition will be giving talks about their contributions: Ikuko Tsuchiya on February 20, talking about her photography within the NHS; Karen Melvin, a fine art photographer, on February 27; Phil Gatenby will talk about photographer Jo Spence on March 5; Mima curator Claire Pounder will ask who is Elizabeth Pease on March 12; and Nicky Peacock will talk about her art on March 19.
- All of these talks are free and start at 2pm and everyone is welcome. Either turn up for the start or book in advance at www2.darlington.gov.uk/living-memory
READ MORE: A TREASURY OF TREES AT DARLINGTON'S BLACKWELL GRANGE
“I WORKED at Doggarts in Darlington from the age of 16 until l was 20 when I left to have my son,” says Caroline McLean (née Douthwaite) in response to our stories about the department store that was known as “the Harrods of south Durham”. It had many of the old fashioned attributes of the Grace brothers store in TV’s Are You Being Served?
READ FIRST: THE STORY OF DOGGARTS, THE HARRODS OF SOUTH DURHAM
The Darlington store was on Northgate – you can still see it next to the Queens Arcade although it closed on Christmas Eve 1980.
“I worked in the curtain department with John Rhymer (first sales), Dot Darnell (second sales) and Ann Tweedy,” says Caroline.
“There was Mrs Bainbridge in the ladies department who many a customer said she looked like Mrs Slocombe, and there was Mr Richardson, manager, who looked like Captain Peacock from Are You Being Served?
“There was Yvonne Miller in the office, Sue Pratt and Judith worked in the boutique, and Sue Calvert and Sue Brown who worked on other departments.
“Doreen Lockhart, Barbara Bibby, Sheila Sturgeon and Ann Robinson worked in the shoe department. Jim and Fred were the delivery drivers, and Kath Newcombe was the Doggarts club lady.”
Then she comes to the bit that everyone remembers: the pneumatic system which sucked pods full of money from the front counter to the accounts department at the back where the change was worked out so the pod could be returned to the customer with a few pennies in it.
“People were fascinated by the capsules in which we put money and invoices and then put it in the chute,” she says. “Off it went to the office and then it was sent back down with the change and receipt. If they took too long, we would rap on the chute to let them know.”
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