Eliza's life dogged by grief and loss

THIS is the story of a woman of immense family wealth but great personal sadness. Her name was Eliza. She was born into Darlington's great Backhouse banking family and married into the world renowned Barclay banking family.

But despite the privileges of Eliza's world, her mother died giving birth to her, her husband died a few months after marrying her, her brother died an untimely death and the young nephew she devoted her life to died on the cusp of greatness.

Poor Eliza was born on September 2, 1812, in Beechwood, a mansion that is now beneath the Safeway car park in Grange Road.

Her father was John Backhouse; her mother was Eliza (ne Church, a military family from Cork, in Ireland) who died on September 2, 1812.

Eliza grew up under the watchful eye of her stepmother, Katherine, with her sister Ann, who died in 1829, aged 19, and her brother, John Church Backhouse.

On September 9, 1841, 29-year-old Eliza married Robert Barclay, of the London banking family. He died on May 4, 1842 - only eight months after the marriage.

The following year, John Church Backhouse married Anna Gurney, from a Norfolk family of bankers.

In 1844, Anna gave birth to a son, named John Henry Backhouse, and happiness reigned.

All was rosy for three blissful years, topped on March 23, 1847, when Anna gave birth to another child, this time a daughter called Eliza Jane. But five months later, another run of tragedies began.

On August 17, 1847, at the family's country retreat of Shull, near Hamsterley, Eliza's father, John, died. He was 63.

On November 26, in Pisa, Italy, baby Eliza Jane died. She was eight months old.

Then, on January 17 the following year, in Palermo, Italy, Anna died (John Church Backhouse and Anna had presumably gone to the continent to improve Anna's health).

Eliza moved into the Blackwell home of her brother, John Church Backhouse, to help him over his bereavement and to look after his three-year-old son, John Henry Backhouse.

This arrangement became even more necessary in 1858, when John Church Backhouse died, leaving John Henry Backhouse a 14-year-old orphan.

With Eliza as his sole guardian, John Henry Backhouse prospered under his private tutor and gained a place at London University (Cambridge and Oxford universities were closed to Quakers).

We believe Eliza moved down to London with him, as he had never been to school, never been away from home and had a sickly constitution.

There he thrived, studying archaeology, history and philology ("the scientific analysis of literary and historical texts", according to the dictionary).

When John Henry Backhouse graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree, he and Eliza returned to Blackwell and he took his first tentative steps into public life, being elected a Guardian of the Poor.

But, in July 1869, he caught typhoid fever and died of congested lungs.

"It was indeed an interesting future that lay like a bright dawn before the son of John Church Backhouse," wailed the Darlington Telegraph.

"Talents beyond the level of ordinary cleverness, and amiability and geniality in their most graceful form, were his.

"Literary tastes - and alas! delicacy of constitution - he derived from his parents, and he found a congenial field in the study of archaeology."

Poor Eliza. Parents dead; husband dead; siblings dead; her adopted son dead. What would she do? The one thing Eliza did not lack was money. She had the fortunes of three banking families - the Backhouses, the Barclays and the Gurneys - behind her. She also had a real interest in helping poor young children to receive education.

So, on the Backhouses' Blackwell estate she built Blackwell Hill (a picture of which featured in Echo Memories a fortnight ago).

Designed either by GG Hoskins or John Ross, it was a Gothic mansion on the site of the ancient Blackwell Manor.

It was a fabulous site, high above the Tees, with rolling countryside as far as the eye could see.

But Eliza did not build it for herself. We believe she built it as a boarding school, or possibly an orphanage, where working-class children could learn to be servants (this was a different age and such a trade did offer children a way out of poverty).

Bird's eye view: Jimmy Blumer's 1968 aerial photograph of Blackwell Hill. At the bottom of the picture is the curious castellated wall which still stands. Immediately to the north of the hall is the Dower House which Eliza built to live in In the 1881 census there are five boarders, from as far away as London, recorded as living at Blackwell Hill.

They were being looked after by a schoolmistress and a school matron - a level of supervision which suggests day children also attended.

For herself, Eliza built what today is called the "Dower House", which was next door to the school.

It is smaller in scale, but rather grand, with its own stables, which is now a separate home, and a huge orangery on the east side, the wall of which is a foot-thick heat sink.

In the garden is a carriage bridge over a deep, wide gorge, which suggests Eliza enjoyed rides along the river's cliffs.

There also appear to be two ice-houses into which ice off the river would have been shovelled for use in the heat of the summer.

Eliza died in the Dower House on March 5, 1884, aged 71. Among her bequests was £1,000 to "Blackwell Home and School" - presumably the establishment she founded.

In her obituary, The Northern Echo noted how "the great grief of her early life had a sequel of almost equal trial" with the death of her adopted son, John Henry Backhouse. His premature death affected her deeply, said the paper.

"The pensive melancholy of these events cast no gloom over her character. To the last she had lived a life of quiet and unostentatious charity."

BLACKWELL Hill was built on the site of the ancient Blackwell Manor, which fell down about 1850.

A curious castellated wall, which appears to made out of beach stones, can still be seen in Blackwell.

It once enclosed Blackwell Hill's garden, and has "1847" written upon it. It may be that this wall once guarded the privacy of the lost Blackwell Manor as well.

THE school continued for some years after Eliza's death. Her Dower House became its laundry.

A bell, which still remains, was added to the house and was apparently rung whenever a batch of clean linen needed collecting.

By the end of the 19th Century, Blackwell Hill had become a private home occupied by Edward Backhouse Mounsey.

In 1927, it was sold to GM Harroway, managing director of Middlesbrough ship builder Sir Raylton Dixon and Company.

In 1944, motor dealer and Darlington Football Club director John Neasham bought the mansion.

In 1972, after his death, it was sold for £140,000 to developers, who knocked it down and built the exclusive houses of Farrholme on the site. All that remains of Blackwell Hill is its gateposts, which lead into an electricity sub-station.

Echo Memories is hugely indebted to Louis Watson for his help with this article, and to Geoff Duncan. Pictures are courtesy of Darlington Centre for Local Studies.

If you have any memories or information about Blackwell Hill or the castellated wall, write to Echo Memories, The Northern Echo, Priestgate, Darlington DL1 1NF, e-mail chris.lloyd@nne.co.uk, or telephone (01325) 505062.

Published: 23/07/2003

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