How bowling began in park with big bang

Yet in Darlington's South Park the gentle game had an explosive start.

Bowls is as old as the hills - the ancient Egyptians played it 7,000 years ago - and in Darlington it was probably played for several centuries on a green in Post House Wynd. The green was probably in the back yard of a pub, either the Talbot Inn or the Black Swan.

As the 19th Century grew old, South Park became the base of many sports. It had a gymnasium and tennis courts. There was boating on the River Skerne and swimming, too.

Then, probably in 1895, JF Smythe presented the park with a set of woods.

Mr Smythe was probably a very altruistic fellow who wanted to encourage bowls. That his gift might have promoted his sports shop, in Horsemarket, was just a happy coincidence. And, of course, his kind donation was in no way linked to the fact that a year or so earlier he had accidentally devastated the town centre.

Joseph Forestall Smythe was born in Dublin in 1845, his ancestors a couple of generations earlier having owned Esh Hall, in County Durham.

He became an apprentice gunmaker when he was 15, first in Dublin and then in Edinburgh. He befriended another apprentice, Francis Brebner, who, in 1867, moved south to set up on his own in Darlington.

Joseph worked with him for a while, before moving to Birmingham to further his knowledge.

The Brebners were a tragic family. Francis died of tuberculosis in 1875, aged 35. Brother David took over the business, but was drowned fording the River Tees at Neasham on January 22, 1884. He was 37.

(David's son was RG Brebner, Darlington FC's goalkeeper who represented England in the 1912 Olympic Games. He died of injuries sustained in a match in 1914, playing for Leicester.)

Joseph, now back in Dublin with his wife and three children, bought the Brebners' old business and moved his family lock, stock and barrel to Darlington.

His shop was No 13, Blackwellgate - roughly where Binns starts today, opposite the Royal Bank of Scotland - and business boomed. By 1886 he had three departments: guns, rifles, pistols; fishing tackle; and lawn tennis, croquet and bowls.

His reputation burgeoned. He was the only gunmaker between Newcastle and York, and he made first class weapons for nobility, even royalty, at home and abroad. For those guns, he made cartridges with brand names such as The Champion, The Field and The Durham Ranger.

The shooting estates of Wynyard Park, Windlestone, Raby Castle, Brancepeth Castle and Lambton Castle were among his customers - Wynyard ordering 30,000 cartridges a year.

In an August 1893 advertisement in the North Star newspaper, he boasted: "Three million loaded cartridges and two hundred guns made... No burst barrels or broken actions. JF Smythe claims these facts alone guarantee the quality of his work."

In the workshop at the back of Blackwellgate, his staff filled 7,200 cartridges a week, 370,000 a year.

But on Tuesday, October 9, 1894, it all went tragically wrong. Joseph left at 11.15am to catch the 11.25am train to Stockton to visit his other shop. At 11.40am, his cartridge loading room exploded.

It was so big a blast that The Northern Echo printed a special afternoon edition to explain to readers why it felt as if an earthquake had shaken Darlington.

"Houses in Skinnergate, High Row and Blackwellgate rocked as if about to fall, while glass clattered and burst from almost every window," reported the Darlington and Stockton Times (D&ST).

"Immediately the air was filled with a cloud of smoke, from which descended a veritable hail of mortar, glass, wood, iron and pulverised brickwork. All around in the streets and lanes this fell, injuring some people and frightening many more. Horses bolted, and men and women ran terrified into shelter."

Although Smythe's Blackwellgate frontage remained standing, nearly all the properties behind it as far as Mechanics Yard were reduced to matchsticks.

Grocer WJ Reed, on the High Row side, had his rear warehouse completely destroyed, trapping his two men, Hornby and Ramsdale.

On the Skinnergate side, Nicholson's chemist's shop was severely damaged and, behind it, plumber Emmerson Smith's office was destroyed.

"Prone on the floor lay Mr GG Hoskins JP with blood oozing from his head," reported the D&ST. "By him was Mr Emmerson Smith with his face dreadfully disfigured; while down the remains of the shattered door blood trickled and dropped."

Mr Hoskins was Darlington's pre-eminent architect of the day but, bandaged up, was allowed on his way. Mr Smith, whom he was visiting, was not so fortunate.

He was "struck in the left eye by a flying piece of glass which had penetrated far into the head," said the D&ST. Surgeons had to "abstract the eye and probe some three inches into the tissue behind for splinters of glass".

Smythe's staff, though, bore the brunt of the blast.

His children, Francis and Catherine, were running the shop in his absence. They were dug out of the debris, bloodied and bruised, but thankfully alive.

His two apprentices, Thomas Hine and Thomas Howe, were out the back near the cartridge loading room.

Hine was extricated with surprising ease. Howe could be heard moaning piteously in the rubble.

"The poor youth was discovered lying with a heavy bench vice jammed hard against his disfigured face and with his arms crushed under him," reported the D&ST.

Sparing few graphic details, the paper said "his mangled form" was stretchered out and carried through the streets to Russell Street Hospital.

"A glimpse of his face caused more than one woman to faint." Almost immediately, he was chloroformed and his left arm amputated by Dr Eastwood.

Police cordoned off the blast zone, but at 2.30pm Frank Cooper managed to sneak through. He was a photographer from Ivy House, Bondgate, and he took some pictures which he exhibited in his shop window to great excitement at 7.30pm.

"In the foreground are seen the iron girders, rafters and other debris heaped together in picturesque confusion," reported the Echo.

"The background is formed by the ruined office with its skeleton rafters and tottering timbers."

Even today Mr Cooper's pictures make fascinating viewing.

In the evening, the directors of the Mutual Plate Glass Insurance Company Limited met. The company was based in Darlington and it promised to repair all windows - at a cost of £250 (about £15,000 today). The damage to property was said to run into thousands.

The following morning, Captain JH Thompson, the Government Inspector of Explosives, arrived from London and strode through the ruins. He learned how safety conscious Mr Smythe had been, the loading room surrounded by glass walls, the gunpowder stored in a wall safe with an automatically closing door, and everywhere rigorously swept clean.

Suspicion centred on the two apprentices, but at 4.45am on the Saturday morning, poor Thomas Howe, 14, of Grass Street, died without regaining consciousness.

His inquest was held a couple of days later in Chesnut Street police station. Our old friend John Wharton, the man who donated the eagle and lion statues to South Park, chaired the jury.

Thomas Hind told how Howe had gone into the loading room and cried out "Oh Tom! Oh Tom!" immediately before the blast.

JT Proud, the coroner, said: "The cry of distress was that Howe had done something and realised what was about to happen".

Mystery deepened when PC Thompson reported that in Howe's pockets he had found "a portion of a toy pistol, an empty cigarette case and an obsolete military nipple key".

Then the Government inspector said he believed the explosion was caused either by "some boyish experiment" or by Howe's hobnail boots sparking against a nail protruding from the wooden floorboards. In all, he said, 65lbs of powder had gone up.

Mr Wharton's jury could not ascribe a cause to the explosion, but research by firearms historian Gordon French, of Toronto, Bishop Auckland, has led him to a conclusion.

"Vast amounts of cartridges were loaded over the years, and the lack of proper ventilation would have caused a build-up of powder dust which would have penetrated the timber of the building," he says.

"When it reached a certain density it would have easily ignited from static electricity and then would have ignited the rest of the powder."

The traders of Blackwellgate no longer welcomed Mr Smythe's combustible companionship, and so he rebuilt his business in Horsemarket. Shooting and fishing continued to be his main lines, but golf and football were added to his ball games.

He died on Christmas Eve 1930, aged 85, having been knocked down by a bus ten weeks earlier on the way home from his shop. He is buried in West Cemetery.

SOUTH Park's bowlers may have had Mr Smythe's generously donated woods, but for the first year they had to bowl them on an uneven patch of "ridge and furrow" grass.

In 1896, J Deas persuaded the council to spend £80 laying a proper green on the site of the old lawn tennis court - roughly where the greens are today.

James Morrison, the park superintendent, was also a keen bowler and soon South Park was recognised as the North of England's best green.

The popularity of the sport grew. The Darlington Bowling League started in 1903, only to be renamed in 1906 the Darlington and District Bowling League, when Barnard Castle entered.

Further council greens were laid in North Park (1903), North Lodge Park (1906), East Park (1908) and at Hundens and Brinkburn Dene (1920s). The Darlington Railway Athletic Bowls Club opened in 1913.

Of course, even without Mr Smythe's assistance, bowls would have become established in Darlington - but he certainly helped it begin with a bang.

* With many thanks to Gordon French and Malcolm Middleton for their help with this article. Pictures courtesy of Darlington Centre for Local Studies, Crown Street.

Published: ??/??/2004

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