From the Tees to disaster on the silvery Tay

Eight men put up the bulk of it. By and large, they are the usual south Durham suspects, but a couple of different names also crop up, including one who is linked to the most dramatic Gothic pile in the district and whose fortune was lost in the worst engineering disaster of all time.

Parliament granted permission for the Weardale Railway on July 31, 1845. It was to run from Wear Valley Junction up the dale to Frosterley. Last weekend, the section between Wolsingham and Stanhope re-opened.

The Act said that £82,000 (roughly £3.5m today) should be raised by a share issue and £27,300 (another £1.2m) could be borrowed.

Top of the list of the eight men who bought most of the shares are the Peases, Joseph and Henry of Darlington, accompanied by their Quaker cousin, Thomas Richardson, and their long-term business partner, Thomas Meynell, the squire of Yarm.

Then come the men of Weardale. Henry Smith Stobart lived in Witton Tower and owned coalmines in Etherley, Cockfield, Bishop Auckland, Chilton and Fishburn.

George Hutton Wilkinson, the first chairman of the Weardale Railway, lived in Harperley Hall and owned Greenhead mine.

Then there was John Dolphin about whom, to our eternal shame, we still have not uncovered anything.

And finally there is John Castell Hopkins, who led the project with Joseph Pease and Meynell.

Born in 1793, Hopkins came from a wealthy Scottish family. He was related to the Duke of Roxburgh; his wife came from one of the oldest Borders families. In 1827 their son, William Randolph Innes Hopkins, was born in Kelso.

The family soon moved to Darlington, and threw their lot, and their money, in with the Peases. Hopkins formed the North Bitchburn Colliery Company (NBCC) which had interests at (believe it or not) North Bitchburn and Hunwick, villages within striking distance of the Weardale Railway.

NBCC also owned Gordon House Colliery, in Cockfield, and Storey Lodge Colliery, Evenwood.

In 1842, he built the Woodside mansion between Coniscliffe Road and Blackwell Lane, in Darlington. He sold it six years later to fellow railway pioneer John Harris, who employed local architects Richardson and Ross to add a huge conservatory, a tower and a new wing. This turned Hopkins' comfortable family villa into a vast and splendid mansion.

(Woodside was pulled down in the 1920s, and Hartford, Ravensdale, Woodvale, Woodcrest, Greenmount and Manor roads are on its site.)

From Woodside, Hopkins moved towards Teesside, first living in Elton and then Redcar. He part-owned a factory in Middlesbrough, producing something called Warlick's patent fuel.

Hopkins' son, William, was also spreading his wings. He started as an apprentice to Darlington architect John Middleton, who designed the stations on the 1845 Weardale Railway. Then he moved to London to work for Sir Digby Wyatt planning the 1851 Great Exhibition.

But architecture was not William's design for life, and in 1850 he returned to Middlesbrough to superintend the fuel factory.

Yet Warlick's turned out to be a load of Horlicks and the factory closed. William instead founded the Teesside Ironworks in 1853, the beginning of the Middlesbrough boom.

In 1865, William amalgamated his company with that belonging to Edgar Gilkes, whom he had met at the fuel factory. At their Tees Engine Works, Hopkins, Gilkes and Company had blast and puddling furnaces and rolling mills employing 1,000 men. They had capital of £675,000 - roughly £30m today.

Such an awe-inspiring industrialist needed an awe-inspiring home. William asked Darlington architect John Ross, who had done so much work on the old family home of Woodside, to create something stupendous.

Grey Towers, in Nunthorpe, took two years to build and is a stupendously frightening Gothic monster, the sort of place where Scooby Doo would wind up in the middle of a thunderstorm.

London interior designer Edward William Goodwin did the inside and a piece of his wallpaper has been rediscovered during Grey Towers' conversion into apartments. The wallpaper is now in the Dorman Museum in Middlesbrough. (In 1895, Sir Arthur Dorman bought Grey Towers, which more recently was Poole Hospital).

Vast business, vast mansion, vast influence: in 1867, William became Mayor of Middlesbrough, a position he was unanimously asked to retain the following year. The corporation was expecting a royal guest to open Albert Park. It turned out to be the Duke of Connaught who opened it in honour of his brother, Prince Albert, Queen Victoria's husband - and William was the only choice to do the glad-handing.

Vast business, vast mansion, vast influence - and vast collapse.

William's father, John Castell Hopkins, died in 1871, aged 78, in Surbiton-on-Thames. The Northern Echo said that "he will be long remembered ... as an earnest, useful, cheerful, Christian gentleman".

William now took full control of the family empire: NBCC, Linthorpe Ironworks, Elswick Steamship Company and, of course, his father's interests in the Weardale Railway.

Almost exactly three months after his father's death, Hopkins, Gilkes and Co, was awarded the contract of a lifetime: to provide the iron for the railway bridge over the River Tay into Dundee.

This contract might also have been a lifeline. Despite William's wealth, his company had difficulties. A steam boiler had just exploded, blasting many workers into the Tees amid a cloud of scalding steam and shrapnel. Sixteen were seriously injured.

But the contract lifted the gloom. The bridge was to be nearly two miles in length - the longest in the world. It was to have 85 spans, be 88ft above the silvery Tay, and follow the designs of Thomas Bouch, who had built the extraordinary line over Stainmore and connected Bishop Auckland with Barnard Castle.

In July 1874, Hopkins, Gilkes and Co took over construction of the bridge. They established a foundry at Wormit beside the Fife foot.

The bridge opened on June 1, 1878. The following summer, Queen Victoria crossed it on her way to Balmoral. So impressed was she that she knighted Bouch, who was then at work on the Forth Bridge.

Yet the Tay Bridge was troubled by creaks and wobbles. A severe iron-cracking winter set in.

On December 28, 1879, a force ten storm blew up with winds gusting at 70mph. It was at its height at 7.14pm, when the evening train - 225ft long, 114 tons in weight, with six carriages and carrying 75 passengers and crew - approached.

The centre of the bridge collapsed, and the train poured off the rails into the icy water. There were no survivors (except the engine, which was pulled from the riverbed, restored, put back into service and nicknamed The Diver).

The disaster shook the British Empire to its core. Until then, the Victorians believed their engineering skills and their industry could tame the entire world.

Sir Thomas' reputation collapsed irrevocably. He was pulled off the Forth Bridge project, was stripped of his knighthood and was dead before the end of 1880.

Hopkins, Gilkes and Co were ruined irretrievably and were bankrupt before 1880 was out.

The company's Wormit foundry was found to be the real villain of the piece. "Had competent persons been appointed to superintend the work ... there can be little doubt that the columns would not have been sent out to the bridge with serious defects," said the official inquiry report.

"The great object seems to have been to get through the work with as little delay as possible without seeing whether it was properly and carefully executed or not."

Bankrupt William tried to auction Grey Towers at the King's Head Hotel, in Darlington. He set a reserve of £30,000 (about £1.35m in today's housing market), but as that was not met, he took it off the market before the sale began.

His second wife's brother-in-law - Thomas Hustler whose family had lived at Acklam Hall for three centuries - took on the mortgage and William had to leave.

He went to live in Norton, near Malton, North Yorkshire - but not in penury. He retained his father's interests, notably the NBCC - the company that had encouraged his father to invest in the Weardale Railway.

In 1893, the NBCC sank a shaft at Evenwood, and named it Randolph, after William's middle name. The Randolph cokeworks started alongside.

In 1900, the Duchess of York stayed with Lord Barnard at Raby Castle and she popped up to Evenwood to visit Randolph, "one of the most important colliers in the district" according to The Northern Echo.

She was led on an exhaustive tour by the managing director, William Randolph Innes Hopkins.

When the First World War broke out, Randolph employed more than 1,000 men, and NBCC had a total of more than 4,000 miners in south Durham.

Randolph Colliery continued until 1962; the cokeworks until 1984.

The name lives on, though. In 1999, £600,000 was spent turning the site into the Randolph Industrial Estate.

William - a keen cricketer and Conservative - died at Leat House, Norton, in 1920, aged 93. His obituaries mention neither the Tay Bridge disaster nor the bankruptcy.

Indeed, the Echo's headline is "G.O.M. of Northern Commerce", and the article says of the grand old man: "By the death, a link with the very early days of the last century is broken in the North of England."

A link that connects Weardale with Teesside via Darlington and disaster at Dundee.

Family home open to public view

TODAY there is a rare chance to see inside Acklam Hall, the family home of the Hustlers.

On July 21, 1865, William Randolph Innes Hopkins married Everald Catherine Elizabeth Hustler at St Mary's Church, Acklam, and a lavish reception was held at the hall owned by the bride's father.

The Hopkins, Gilkes and Co works band played, flags flew from public buildings, and at the ironworks shots were fired from miniature cannons.

After the collapse of the Tay Bridge and Hopkins' fortunes, the Hustlers took over his mansion and asked him to leave.

The hall is open from 10.30am to 3pm as part of the Acklam 2020 local history project. At 11.30am, there is a guided tour of the hall with Sir William Hustler; at 12.30pm there is a tour from the hall to the church, and at 1.30pm there is an archaeological presentation about the area.

* Thanks to Ian Stubbs, of Dorman Museum, Middlesbrough.

Published: ??/??/2004

Echo Memories, The Northern Echo, Priestgate, Darlington DL1 1NF, e-mail chris.lloyd@nne.co.uk or telephone (01325) 505062.