Gin with lots of ice on an Arctic voyage

The surgery is called Felix House. In the Arctic, if you are very, very adventurous, you will find shelter in Felix Harbour, on the tip of Boothia Peninsula.

You may also find warmth, when you are frozen in the pack ice for months on end, in a bottle of gin made by the company owned by Sir Felix Booth.

All are related, although the herd of pedigree goats that used to be found among the Alpine chalets of Felix House will have to wait for another week.

The story of who put the Felix into Middleton St George begins in 1497, when Venetian navigator John Cabot accidentally landed in Nova Scotia, off the east coast of Canada. Somehow he believed he had skirted around the top of the Americas, passed through a north-west passage, to reach the Pacific Ocean.

It was the year that Vasco da Gama had amazed the world by sailing around the Cape of Good Hope, at the lower tip of Africa, and bumped into India. If da Gama could find such a southerly passage to bypass a continent, then surely there must be a north-west passage to bypass America to reach the spice islands of the Pacific?

So man began his search to see if Cabot had found the way.

The search started to intensify in 1744, when the British Parliament offered a £20,000 reward to the first person to prove the North-West Passage. The passion rose even higher when Britain won the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. She now ruled the waves, and to exploit her naval dominance her finest explorers were dispatched to the Arctic to find a short-cut to the Pacific.

One of the first off the mark was John Ross (1777 to 1856), an irascible Scot who sailed in 1818 into Lancaster Sound and saw a range of mountains, which he called the Croker Mountains, blocking his way.

He returned home saying that because of these mountains the North-West Passage was impossible. But the following year, his great rival, William Edward Parry, sailed back to Britain and reported that Lancaster Sound was passable.

It turned out that Ross had, in fact, mistaken a large plume of clouds for a huge range of hills.

He protested: "I distinctly saw the land, round the bottom of the bay, forming a connected chain of mountains with those which extended along the north and south sides."

But his reputation was in tatters. No longer would the British Admiralty finance with taxpayers' money his expeditions. So Ross had to watch with growing frustration during the 1820s as Parry conducted more unsuccessful state-sponsored expeditions.

In 1829, Ross managed to persuade his gin-making friend Felix Booth to stump up £17,000 to finance an Arctic adventure. It was about £700,000 by today's standards, but if Ross had been successful he would have been as big as an England World Cup-winning rugby team and the name of Booth's Gin would have been plastered all over the place.

Sadly, Ross was not too successful. He spent four winters bobbing about in the Arctic Circle in his ship, called Victory, without finding very much at all in the way of passages. What he did find was an uninhabitable land mass that he generously named Boothia Peninsula. It was in the Gulf of Boothia, and the inlet in which he had been frozen for two winters he named Felix Harbour. To reach it, he had sailed around a bump on King William Island that he called Cape Felix.

The expedition was an extraordinary feat of endurance and exploration. Ross' young cousin, James Clark Ross, had pinpointed for the first time the North Magnetic Pole. They then had to abandon the damaged Victory and walk miles across the frozen wastes of Boothia to reach the wreck of another explorer's boat, in Lancaster Sound. They took the row-boats from that wreck and heaved their way towards the Atlantic Ocean, chasing every sail on the horizon in the hope of being rescued.

After a couple of months at sea they flagged down a passing whaleboat. At first the crew refused to believe their story.

"Captain Ross has been dead these two years," the whaler's captain told Capt Ross.

Although they had not found the North-West Passage, they returned home heroes. Ross was knighted in 1834; Booth collected the same honour in 1835.

The two men rested on their laurels and watched when, in 1845, the Admiralty dispatched Ross' old explorer friend, Sir John Franklin, to the Arctic to seek out the passage. With him went two steamers, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, and "the flower of the British Navy".

All disappeared without trace. The Admiralty refused to send a rescue mission so, in 1849, Ross decided to set out on his own to find his old friend. He received a grant from the Hudson Bay Company, raised money through public subscription and stung Sir Felix for another £1,000.

Sir Felix died suddenly before Ross could leave, and so when Ross set sail from Stranraer, on May 23, 1850, he called his small ship The Felix in his benefactor's honour. There were 19 crew on The Felix, including the ship's doctor, David Porteous.

The Felix's expedition was ultimately unsuccessful, but Ross and his men were present in 1851 when the first three skeletons from Franklin's doomed crew were discovered on Beechey Island, to the north of Boothia, in the Lancaster Sound. Ross returned home, but was still desperate to discover the fate of Franklin. The Admiralty, though, was reluctant to send to the Arctic a man of 75 - probably a gin-soaked man to boot, because Ross reputedly enjoyed his sponsor's product while frozen in.

In revenge, Ross wrote a vituperative pamphlet called: "Rear Admiral Sir John Franklin: a Narrative of the Circumstances and Causes which led to the Failure of the Searching Expeditions sent by Government and others for the Rescue."

It poured scorn on the Admiralty's efforts and showed how, even to the last, Ross' irritable nature could get under the skin of officialdom.

Sir John Ross, one of Britain's most extraordinary explorers, died the following year, and it was not until three years after his death that the remains of the rest of Franklin's crew were discovered near Cape Felix, on King William Island. They had died from lead poisoning from the solder on their food cans, and from scurvy. Some skeletons showed signs of cannabalism.

Ironically, they had perished in the very seas that Ross had survived in for four years from 1829 to 1833. Ross, though, had followed the eskimos' diet of plenty of fresh fish and game, which had kept the scurvy at bay. Franklin, in 1855, had looked down on such native stupidity.

After the death of Ross, the crew of the Felix drifted apart. The ship's doctor, David Porteous, landed in the new village of Middleton St George, which was springing up beside the ironworks that had been established in 1864.

In about 1876, Dr Porteous decided to build himself a surgery and house. He appears to have asked Axel Hugo von Bergen to design it.

Mr von Bergen was a Swede, from Gothenberg. His trade with some Middlesbrough ironmasters, Messrs Cochrane and Co, had drawn him to the North-East, and then, after 1868, he was appointed manager of the Middleton Ironworks, in Middleton St George.

It was a time of great expansion for the ironworks. In 1870 it doubled its blast furnaces to four and the workforce increased to 300.

Why Dr Porteous chose Mr von Bergen as his architect is a mystery. But we can surmise. He would have known Mr von Bergen well - partly because the ironworks were very dangerous. Workers were regularly injured and would have to have been treated by Dr Porteous.

But also because in 1873, Mr von Bergen had married Ana Maria, the eldest daughter of Dr Stephen Piper, Darlington's first Med ical Officer.

Dr Piper had made enormous strides in cleaning up Darlington and would have been the obvious person for Dr Porteous to turn to for advice - especially as his daughter lived in the same village.

So it was Mr von Bergen who designed the doctor's house, a splendidly sturdy Victorian villa with two distinctive iron balconies and a couple of comfortable conservatories.

But it was down to Dr Porteous, a bachelor, to give it a name. He decided to call it after the small ship on which he had sailed to the Arctic in 1850 with Sir John Ross, a ship that had been named after Sir John's sponsor, the gin-maker Sir Felix Booth.

So, in Middleton St George, via the North-West Passage, there is Felix House.

To this day, it is still a doctor's surgery. The senior practitioner is Dr Adrian Marshall, who has kindly lent some of the pictures on this page.

The naming of Felix House is not the only extraordinary story to be attached to the surgery.

There is also the tale of the herd of pedigree goats that used to wander around the Alpine chalets which were later erected in its grounds. But that, as I said earlier, must wait until the week after Christmas.

Published: 17/12/2003

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