IN late June 1878, stonemason Robert Borrowdale returned to the scene of one of his earliest triumphs to erect a typically Borrowdalian monument to his wife, Martha Ann, who had died, probably in childbirth, at the age of 40.
Most people who lie in Startforth churchyard, on the outskirts of Barnard Castle, have a waist-high headstone in their memory with their name inscribed on it.
Not Martha Ann. Her memorial towers over all the others. It is 12ft high, carved by her husband, and features a lifesize female figure whose eyes look skyward towards the top of the church spire while she’s weighed down by the anchor in her right hand.
In the folds of the figure’s flowing gown, Robert – one of the finest masons in south Durham and certainly the most eccentric – had carved: “Sleep on now and take your rest. Behold the hour is at hand.”
On the stone tablet beneath the figure, he carved the name of his “dearly beloved wife”, and of the five young children that they had lost in the preceding 13 years: Martha Jane, aged two; Elizabeth, aged three; Robert, aged two; Emily, aged nine months, and Clara, aged five months.
Then, 10 months later, he returned once more to carve the name of his son, Joseph, who had died aged just 10 months – it seems it was Joseph that Martha Ann had died giving birth to.
So much grief seems to have affected Robert profoundly because, having built some of Darlington’s most curious Victorian buildings over the course of 20 years, he disappeared almost without trace from south Durham.
It is appropriate that the female figure on the memorial should be looking towards Startforth Church because it was there, a year or so after Robert had married Martha Ann, that he began his remarkable career.
He was born in Barnard Castle in 1833 where his father, William, was a stonemason and monumental sculptor, probably in Briggate.
Startforth Church
In the early 1860s, the father and son won a major contract to rebuild Startforth church. There had been a church on this plateau above the River Tees since Norman times but it was, according to the Teesdale Mercury, in “too dilapidated and perishable condition to repair”.
In 1861, a contract was awarded to Liverpool architects J, WH & JM Hay, to pull it down and build a new “one of much architectural beauty” in its place.
Eight years earlier, the Hays had performed an identical operation a few miles upstream at Whorlton, where they had completed the new church with a “spirelet”.
The Borrowdales were awarded the contract to build the new £1,700 Startforth church around the ancient vault of the Feilding family of Startforth Hall. The Feildings’ monuments also survived the rebuild, the oldest commemorating William who died in 1539. The family gave £360, the largest single donation, towards the cost of the project.
Construction work got under way in the early summer of 1863, and it is rumoured that the Borrowdales were under extreme time pressure to complete the new church because descendants of the Feildings were planning a big mid-summer wedding.
The Hays’ original drawings do not feature a spire on top of the church tower but another rumour says that the Borrowdales cracked on so well that they had time enough to plonk on a 90ft spire. This may be why the unexpectedly weighed down tower looks reluctant to remain attached to the rest of the building.
The consecration on July 8, 1863, was reported on by many newspapers across the north, including the Leeds Intelligencer, which called it “one of the most beautiful smaller churches of the diocese, and worthy to become a model church”.
The star feature was, of course, the eye-catching, sky-scraping spire.
“The spire springs from the tower in a peculiar and very effective manner, and is enriched with lucern and triangular lights on the alternate sides, separated by moulded bands, and the apex finished with a finely proportioned and gilded metal cross,” said the Intelligencer. “At the four angles of the tower from which the spire rises, the emblems of the four evangelists are most beautifully carved.
“The architects, to whom very great praise is due, are Messrs Hay, of Liverpool. The contractors were Messrs Borrowdale, of Barnard Castle, who have executed their work in a first rate manner.”
Newspapers also give credence to the second rumour because a week after the consecration, the Richmond & Ripon Chronicle – now amalgamated with the Darlington & Stockton Times – reported that Margaret, the elder daughter of Charles Milner of Startforth Hall and a direct descendant of the Feildings, had married the Reverend Boulby Haslewood, of Oswaldtwistle in Lancashire at the new church.
Despite the rave reviews in the newspapers, not everyone was complimentary about the church. One ecclesiastical magazine called it “a rogue architect’s architecture” while, after a visit in 1906, the Archaeological and Architectural Society of Durham and Northumberland wrote in its Transactions that the old church had “been wantonly pulled down and replaced by a most offensively pretentious mock-Gothic structure”.
But to the Borrowdales, it must have been a triumph. Not only had they completed it in time for the wedding but they had found a few seconds to add a splendid spire.
And they had peopled the nave with carved faces that were to become Robert Borrowdale’s trademark. Supporting the arch were heads of Queen Victoria on one side and the Bishop of Ripon, who consecrated the church, on the other.
Elsewhere, there are saints – the male heads have bizarre beards and funny facial hair, while the few females look slightly startled.
Rise Carr Hotel
AFTER such a local success, Robert Borrowdale wanted the big time – he wanted to fill the whole world with his carved heads.
He sold up in Barney, including disposing of two tall statues to Lartington Hall which were used to adorn the main gateposts. At least one, depicting the Muse of Literature, is believed to survive in the hall’s grounds.
And he moved to the metropolis that was Darlington which, in the 1860s, was a true northern powerhouse where the Quaker industrialists were investing in grandiose town centre buildings. When he arrived, the complex featuring the covered market, the iconic clocktower and the old town hall was newly completed as was, opposite it, the dominant headquarters of Backhouses’ bank. These were statements in stone, about the unbreakable wealth of the bank and the arrival of Darlington as a municipality of note.
As a stonemason of note, Robert must have thought that this was a town in which he could fit.
His first move was to build himself a home, which doubled as a source of income and a billboard on which to advertise his unique talents.
In 1867, he built himself the Rise Carr Hotel, in Whessoe Road. Opposite the blisteringly hot rolling mills, the pub was guaranteed to provide him with an income when the thirsty ironworkers popped out on their “spell” while he sought specialist work as a stonemason.
To advertise his skills, he covered the outside of the hotel with carved heads: men with bizarre beards, and in one case a kiss-me-quick hat, and women looking startled.
Chesnut Street Police Station
IF that was his plan, it worked. On December 4, 1867, Robert advertised that he was looking for six people to become stonemasonry apprentices, presumably to help him because he had won the contract to build a new police station in Northgate.
Darlington’s first police station was in Grange Road, south of the town centre, but, with the town’s working class housing expanding up North Road, it was becoming inconvenient – police had to march troublemakers through the town centre to reach the Grange Road cells.
So in 1865, a £550 plot of land on the corner of Chesnut Street and North Road was bought containing a thicket of magnificent conker trees. The trees were cut down and Robert built the new station in 1868 to the designs of County Durham architect William Crozier.
There were no heads for Robert to carve, but he would have felt at home working on the austere Gothic frontage, with its churchy features, and its seven steps leading to the front door that local criminals came to dread as they were forced up them into the cells.
Leadenhall Street
ROBERT was now a very busy man, building houses in Chesnut Street, Whessoe Road, North Road and, his piece de resistance, Leadenhall Street next to the Railway Tavern.
Today, only No 1 Leadenhall Street survives, occupied by a Kurdish kebab takeaway, but once there was a terrace of eight or nine houses running down to the River Skerne.
Here Robert let his imagination run wild, embellishing each door and window frame with a carved male head with a bizarre beard. He completed the gable end of No 1, which looks onto High Northgate, with a head with fine chin foliage (not unlike Robert’s own beard) and above that, where most builders would have had a chimney, Robert placed a magnificent stone lion.
And it wasn’t just the outsides of these properties that Robert adorned. Inside were finely patterned ceilings and walls which featured carved men with elaborate facial hair.
In the 1960s, an elderly spinster, Audrey Proud, whose family ran an electrical shop from No 1, applied for permission from Darlington council to remove two male heads from the room she was now using as a bathroom.
She told the council committee: “I don’t dare having a bath with them looking down on me.”
Perhaps exhausted by this artistic success, or, more likely, his business arrangements were falling through, Robert jacked it in. A poster in Darlington library advertises a sale on November 5, 1869, in Bridge Close, Northgate, of the contents of his stonemason’s yard “in consequence of the owner having entered into other business arrangements and the termination of the tenancy of the sculpture and stone yard premises”.
Rather grandly, the poster says the sale will take place in Robert’s “sculpture arena”, and as well as about 30 unfinished headstones, it featured “a pair of chastely and elaborately sculptured allegorical figures”, one depicting Literature and the other Fine Arts.
After the sale, Robert went back to the bar, announcing in adverts over the summer of 1870 in The Northern Echo that, formerly of the Rise Carr Hotel, he was now the landlord of the Waterloo Hotel in the Market Place, which is now beneath the Dolphin Centre.
(Interestingly, that same summer, his brother, Thomas, advertises in the Echo that he is in business as a stonemason and monumental sculptor in Barnard Castle.)
St Mary Magdalene Church, Trimdon
ROBERT didn’t last long behind the bar. The call of his chisels was too much, and it looks like John Hay of Liverpool, one of the architects a decade earlier of Startforth church where Robert had started his career, had lured him back to work by 1873.
Hay had a £700 project to add a north aisle to the famous Norman church at Trimdon – it was from outside the church that Prime Minister Tony Blair addressed the nation in the immediate aftermath of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the “people’s princess”, as he referred to her.
The new aisle was connected to the nave by three Gothic arches, the stock-in-trade of the Gothic stonemason.
Westbrook Buildings
IT looks like St Mary Magdalene inspired Robert to return to building full time, and to complete his masterpiece: Westbrook Buildings.
This was opposite Leadenhall Street on High Northgate, on a triangular piece of land beside the Cocker Beck at the entrance to Westbrook Villas.
It was designed by William Hodgson, the architect responsible for the first Theatre Royal on Northgate and for the octagonal chimney that was attached to Peases Mill in Priestgate, but only Robert Borrowdale could have turned it into such a grotesque, gargoyled Gothic extravaganza.
It made full use of its odd-shaped, beckside site, and Robert covered it with 25 carved figures: male faces with bizarre beards and female faces looking startled, but there were also animals and even eagles.
The crowning glory was a statue of the Angel of the Nativity who stood 50ft above Northgate, the folds of her drapes tumbling from her body. She stood on a rounded tower and on the cupola beneath her feet was a legend readable from the street below: “Glory to God in the Highest. Good will to all men.”
With the Leadenhall lion roaring on the gable end on the east side and the angel in all her finery on the west, this must have made a very eccentric gateway on what was then the Great North Road – no traveller would forget Darlington in a hurry having seen these two carved creations.
But what was Westbrook Buildings?
Some people felt he had built it as a home for Martha Ann and their 14 children. They never moved in, although they did live in Westbrook Villas behind.
In 1962, the Echo’s evening sister paper, the Northern Despatch, described it as “an oddity of uncertain purpose”, which was just about right. On its first floor, it had a large assembly room that was used by the Westbrook Christian Lay Church, an earnest temperance movement, and then, in 1902, the Independent Labour Party – the forerunner of the Labour Party – converted it into a 400-seater club which was opened on October 11 by party leader, Keir Hardie.
In 1915, Westbrook Buildings became a social club for the wives of soldiers and sailors who were away fighting the First World War. Then the North East Harriers, a cycling club, took over before the National Spiritualist Church moved in.
In 1937, it was bought by Darlington Corporation and during the Second World War it was used as sleeping quarters for the National Fire Service.
In 1951, it was earmarked for demolition so that the Great North Road could flow more easily, which saddened the borough architect who called it “the most bizarre building in the town”.
This prompted speculation about why exactly it had been built, with people concluding that it was the work of a member of “some unknown religious sect”. This caused Robert’s son, John, to step forward and remind Darlington of his father’s eccentric works. John said: “My father was not a very religious man but he was a first class builder.”
North Cemetery
JUST how much of a first class builder is illustrated by his next project, which is probably his largest and most enduring.
On February 8, 1872, Joseph Pease died. He was the first Quaker ever to be elected to the House of Commons as South Durham’s first MP; he was the first Pease to own a coalmine; he lived in Darlington’s most opulent mansion called Southend (now Bannatyne’s hotel); he single-handed founded Middlesbrough and then he owned the first blast furnace as the iron industry made it one of the great industrial towns of the 19th Century.
A statue – Darlington’s only statue – was erected of him on High Row in 1875.
But on November 7, 1872, Joseph’s eldest son, Sir Joseph Whitwell Pease, offered 14 acres of land to Darlington town council to build a new cemetery in memory of his father. He said Joseph had often spoken of the “expensive and painful journey” of the railway communities in the north of the town who had to travel across town to lay their loved ones to rest in West Cemetery.
Darlington’s greatest architect, GG Hoskins – responsible for everything from the library to the technical college, the sixth form college plus the bank in Bishop Auckland which is now the Spanish Gallery and the gargantuan Middlesbrough Town Hall – was to design the gates, gatehouse and the chapel, topped with a 100ft spire, as a memorial to Darlington’s greatest son.
And Darlington’s greatest stonemason was to build it – Robert Borrowdale was appointed the sole contractor having tendered £4,375.
On April 8, 1874, mayor Arthur Pease laid the foundation stone for the cemetery. Within the stone were placed photographs of Joseph Pease and his five sons, copies of The Northern Echo and the Darlington & Stockton Times, an explanatory document signed by Arthur Pease, Edward Kipling, the chair of the Parks & Cemeteries Committee, architect Hoskins and, of course, contractor Borrowdale.
However, when the cemetery was consecrated on November 2, 1874, by the Bishop of Bradford – the Bishop of Durham was unwell – Robert had barely started work. The land needed a lot of drainage work first, although interments had already commenced with bodies “buried” in temporary iron buildings.
Over the next couple of years, Robert built the gates, the gatehouse, the lodge and the centrepiece chapel. It is as restful and peaceful as a lump of Gothic architecture ever could be, and Robert was so restrained there are no bizarre beards or startled females.
However, much of his carvings today looks very delicate and, spinning in the stonework, he placed a couple of serpents who are still chasing their tails quite dynamically.
Robert’s final task was to build the memorial monument in 1877 in the centre of the cemetery. It, of course, commemorates Joseph Pease and all his wondrous works, and all the wondrous people involved in the project, and so inscribed on one of the panels of Sicilian marble is the name of Robert Borrowdale.
Melville House
FATE was to allow Robert Borrowdale one last major project in Darlington. It was Melville House, which has the date 1876 on its stone. He constructed it on a curious triangular site where Melville Street and Station Road meet North Road, next to what is now a petrol filling station.
There are no gargoyles amid its rough hewn stone, but still it has an air of curiosity about it, from its grand datestone to its rounded frontage with panoramic windows on its first floor – this should be a coastguard’s look-out station rather than an end-of-street oddment on the edge of Darlington’s railway quarter.
It looks like Robert had acquired an awkward piece of land that no one else really wanted and was determined to turn it into a characterful landmark.
It works superbly. It is completely out of place.
And it was, like so many of his buildings, an oddity of uncertain purpose.
It was not until February 22, 1879, that it got a full time occupant when the firm Lockhart’s opened a cocoa room in it to refresh the working man with drinking chocolate and to tempt him away from the pub. This was Darlington’s first cocoa room, just four years after Robert Lockhart had opened his first cocoa room in Liverpool and only two years after he had started up in Sunderland and Newcastle – cocoa rooms were the great craze of the late 1870s.
READ MORE: THE OPENING OF THE COCOA PALACE IN MELVILLE HOUSE
Tragedy strikes
AFTER the triumph of Melville House of 1876, things began to unravel for Robert.
On June 15, 1878, under the headline “disputed accounts”, the Darlington & Richmond Herald reported how Thomas Borrowdale, monumental sculptor of Galgate, Barnard Castle, had sued Robert Borrowdale, contractor, of Startforth.
The short report said: “The parties are brothers, and the debt represented money lent, money paid, and goods supplied. The disputed sums were gone through seriatim (Latin for consecutively) by His Honour, who ultimately gave a verdict for £27 11s 3d with immediate payment.”
A week later, Robert was engulfed by an even greater tragedy: Martha Ann died on June 21. He returned to Startforth church, where his career had begun just 15 years earlier, and created the marvellous Borrowdalian monument in her memory, an angel 12ft high with the flowing folds of her long dress bearing the message: “Sleep on now and take your rest. Behold the hour is at hand.”
And then, ten months later, on April 14, 1879, he had to return to the monument to carve the name of Joseph Borrowdale, aged ten months – the baby Martha Ann had died giving birth to also seems to have died.
Such tragedy affected Robert profoundly. He had spent all 46 years of his life in the Barnard Castle and Darlington area, but now he jacked it all in. He packed it all in and went to London.
It is said that he went to work decorating the Royal Albert Hall, and then moved to Enfield “where he became clerk of works on several important contracts”.
But the only facts are that he died on March 19, 1908, aged 75, at Bush Hill Park, Enfield, and he is buried in Lavender Hill Cemetery there. It appears to be a straightforward, late Victorian, leafy middle class surburb, without much need for high flying stone angels and with no call for grotesques and gargoyles however much facial hair they might have.
Let’s hope the north Londoners appreciated this Teesdale man’s unique talents, because Darlington has not.
Leadenhall Street is now down to just one house, although 20 years ago, it was renovated with deep piles sunk into the silty ground beneath it to stabilise it. In the course of the work, Robert’s fierce lion, a real king of the jungle, on the gable end was replaced by a rather soggy moggy which is unable to roar down at the passers-by.
Melville House, once the fashionable cocoa palace with temperate drinkers standing sipping the latest tastes while down on the road traffic from the remarkable summer windows, is again shuttered up and without an obvious use.
The chapel at North Cemetery is boarded up, while the slates skitter-scatter down the broken roof of the cemetery-keeper’s house, which was recently up for sale.
There was a bit of a battle to save the hotel at Rise Carr, its front populated with Robert’s heads, once it closed in 2003 following the death of a man in a bar room disturbance.
English Heritage was called in to see if it should receive statutory protection. Its report said: "The heads are well carved and painted. They seem to represent specific people but they have not been identified. They look more reminiscent of ship's figureheads than anything else. Unfortunately the architectural quality of the exterior of this pub does not match the high quality of these carvings."
It concluded: "In all, though this building does have these interesting carved heads, which are undeniably of real local historical interest, the remainder of the structure is not of high enough quality to warrant its listing."
It was demolished, heads and all, in 2005.
Unsurprising, as a previous generation had allowed Robert’s quirky masterpiece, Westbrook Buildings, to be demolished.
Robert Scarr, the great Darlington historian, wrote in 1952: “Westbrook Hall was regarded as a masterpiece of architecture by the railway workers of those days as they gazed in admiration at its carved string course and its series of quaint gargoyles.”
But it jutted out into Northgate – then the Great North Road – and was obstructing the traffic flow.
“Above it, still as firm as when put there in 1873, is a slender female figure, its delicately detailed carving almost unblemished by nature’s powerful buffetings,” said the Northern Despatch in October 1962, shortly before demolition begun.
They didn’t just bring the whole edifice crashing down. They did try to save the Angel of the Nativity – either to go in Darlington museum or a clergyman’s garden. They detached her from her cupola, put a rope around her neck and slowly lowered her towards the ground.
Sadly, a couple of feet above the pavement, the rope slipped, the angel fell and her head snapped off.
That was that.
How much more characterful Darlington would be if it still had buildings peopled with male heads with bizarre beards and funny facial hair, staring female faces who look slightly startled, and a landmark angel from the 19th Century looking down on the hustle and bustle of the 21st.
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