An anonymous reader, who regularly writes with wonderful handwriting, has been following the story of Jonathan Moscrop who emigrated from the Albert Hill area of Darlington in 1879 to find a new life in New Zealand.
She - I'm convinced she's a she, and I reckon she has some connection to Middleton St George - asks: "Are there any books about Albert Hill? There was an Irish settlement there in the 19th Century. Many of their descendants still live in Darlington."
I haven't seen any books about the Hill, although she's right about the Irish. They were attracted over at around the time of the late 1840s potato famine and found work in the ironworks that were springing up on the Hill. Because of the Hill's geographical nature, it became quite an enclave of Irish.
They brought their own local problems with them. A few years ago I wrote about a murder that occured in Parkgate - just about outside the Civic theatre - in 1875. An Irishman was thumped to death by a group of Irishmen: this was sectarian violence. The Fenians had a strong presence in town in those days.
Our anonymous correspondent is right about the Irish descendants in town, too. I have a theory, probably complete tosh, about another of the legacies of the wave of immigrants 150 years ago.
As I understand it, St James the Great church on the Hill has a reputation for being "High Anglican": as much Catholic as it is Protestant in terms of ceremony and incense. Certainly a funeral I attended there some years ago was very different to the low church Anglicanism I was brought up on.
The reason for this, according to my theory, is that the Irish immigrants were obviously Catholic, and so to attract a congregation, St James had to appeal to its market. So it became as Catholic as a Catholic church, and still it is high church 150 years later.
Is this complete nonsense?
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