Echo Memories wanders around some stately Pease estates, takes a look at Darlington's first mortuary and pays a visit to Fishy Ned and his family before solving the mystery of how Etherley Dene's Wiffing Waffing Wuffing Band got is name.

MORE than 150 years ago, the north part of Darlington's town centre was a tranquil, rural place. Edward "Father of the Railways" Pease (1797 to 1868) lived in his mansion in Northgate, which is now a disgracefully dilapidated collection of takeaway food shops. Pease's gardens were a beautiful display of flowers and fruit. He had vines and fig trees, peach, apricot, nectarine, cherry and plum trees, and a little pagoda to admire them from.

At the bottom of his garden - which is today marked by the industrial decay of Garden Street - was a pretty footbridge over the gently winding Skerne.

The other side of the footbridge marked the start of the property of his eldest son, John Pease (1797 to 1868).

John lived in East Mount, built in 1832, with its attractive verandah looking down over the valley and into his father's beauteous gardens.

Although John was involved in all of the Pease family's businesses - railways, collieries and the creation of Middlesbrough - he was very much a behind-the-scenes man. He took few public offices and made few municipal pronouncements.

But he made plenty of religious pronouncements. John was known as "the silver trumpet of the North" and he visited and preached to Quaker communities across the land.

He spent many months on missionary work in Ireland, and from 1843 to 1845 he toured America, preaching.

He also collected property. His father complained that he was paying far too much for the land stretching from Chesnut Street, in the south, to the railway in High Northgate. In 1866, he had the architect GG Hoskins build Woodburn, a grand Gothic mansion off Coniscliffe Road. This was for his eldest daughter, Sophia, and her new husband Theodore Fry, to live in.

Next door to Woodburn, and matching it, John had Elm Ridge built for himself, his wife (also named Sophia) and his other daughter, Mary Anna.

Woodburn has long since been demolished, but Elm Ridge still stands as a church. On the tower above the main door can be seen John's initials intertwining with those of his wife.

But in 1868, before they could move in to the home, John died - in his third mansion, Cleveland Lodge, in Great Ayton.

Before his death, John Pease had been selling off plots of his estate to builders, as Northgate and Valley Street became needed for housing, and room was required for a gas works.

In 1857, he gave away one of those plots to the Darlington Christian Workmen's Mutual Improvement Society, so that it could build a reading room. The society called its new premises Faith House.

In 1889, as previous Echo Memories have told, the North of England School Furnishing Company had burnt down, killing five on-lookers.

It was on another corner of the East Mount estate and had been started by John Pease as a way of getting religious literature into schools.

One of the positives to come out of the fatal fire was that Darlington required a proper mortuary.The bodies of the fire victims had been stabled in byres behind the Railway Tavern, in Northgate, and when the coroner came to inspect them the pub landlord found he had misplaced the key.

The new mortuary - Darlington's first - was built in the back lane directly behind Faith House, which became the home of the mortuary caretaker.

Faith House still stands, opposite McNay Street, near the North Road railway bridge. It is now the home of AJ Clacher Heating and Plumbing Company.

When Alex Clacher bought Faith House from the gas board in the late 1960s, the mortuary still stood behind it.

"It was a single-storey building, nicely made, a little taller than you might expect and about 25ft long by 15ft wide with a pitched roof," he recalls.

The mortuary passed away in the 1970s when the gas board demolished it.

JOHN Pease's mansion, East Mount, has also disappeared. It was demolished in the late 1940s having become derelict after being used as an ARP centre during the Second World War. There was talk of its landscaped gardens becoming a public park in the 1950s, but this never happened, although the site of the mansion is now a grassed play area.

The gateposts are the only things that remain of the estate, and they can be seen at the end of Lodge Street, which is itself a reminder that it was built on the site of the East Mount gatehouse or lodge.

ONE of those who was a mortuary caretaker living in Faith House was John Charlton Cooke.

Regular readers will immediately realise that he was the same Jack Cooke who starred in the vaunted Aeolian Quartet, which carried off the star prize at the Blackpool Music Festival in 1928 and 1929.

Following the Aeolian articles, Jack's grandson, John Togher, has been in touch.

He has Jack's handwritten memoirs in his possession, which were begun shortly before he died in 1971, aged 75.

Sadly, Jack does not get as far as his time in Faith House or the Aeolian Quartet, but he does record some lovely pre-First World War anecdotes.

The first concerns Jack's beginnings, after he was born in 1896, in Upper John Street (one of the new streets built on the East Mount estate).

"During my first two years, my life was despaired of," he wrote.

"When the family moved to Salisbury Terrace, just before the turn of the century, they conveyed me to the new residence in the bottom drawer of a chest of drawers, not expecting me to be alive when I got there. But I thwarted them. My earliest memory concerns my fourth birthday, when my father made me a wonderful barrow - joiner-made, painted, lined and varnished, a joy to behold.

"The first time I took it out I was a very proud little boy. I pushed it along to a piece of wasteland near my home, actually in Corporation Road (St Luke's Church is now there).

"I had taken a small spade with me, and I commenced digging and filling the barrow and conveying its contents to another hole on the same site.

"I remember carrying on like this for some time until my attention was attracted to a road accident and, being nosey, I crossed over to see it. A horse had collapsed on the roadway. Alas, when I had returned to my job of work my barrow had gone. It was never found. I returned home very sorrowful."

Jack dismisses his schooldays with "no scholarly achievement", but he was in the Corporation Road chapel choir from an early age and started piano lessons when he was 12.

"In the spring of 1913 the manager of the Alhambra offered me a week's engagement to play incidental music on the organ for the picture Dante's Inferno," he wrote.

"I had to play 20 minutes each house, fee 20 shillings. It was reputed that I was the first cinema organist to have appeared in Darlington."

Then Lily Crossling came on the scene, but he remembered that courting wasn't always easy. His father ordered that he had to be home by 9.30pm.

"He would be waiting at the gate, stick in hand shouting 'you still defy me', and my mother would be looking helplessly through the half-open door."

The memoirs end with Jack enlisting in the Northumberland Fusliers, in 1914, fighting on the Somme and marrying Lily in 1918.

One of the wartime stories concerns Jack's leave in June 1915, and his grandfather Edward, known as Fishy Ned because he was a fishmonger.

Jack recalled: "My father met me at Bank Top Station, and when I reached home my grandfather seemed to take exception to my father having taken half a day off to meet me at the station.

"The argument grew and my grandfather, in his temper, raised his heavy stick and sent it cracking on to the piano lid, cracking it severely.

"My father saw red at this and went for his father, parting his long beard and attempting to choke him with it. I was taken quite by surprise - I hadn't even got my equipment or rifle off.

"Something had to be done, so I slipped my rifle off my shoulder and dropped it on to my father's arm and he loosened his grip. This got them parted and they sat down and cooled off.

"My father often related this incident, and thanked me for saving him from the gallows. He said that during his boyhood days he had had a tough time.The horsewhip was frequently in use."

THERE have been so many letters and calls to Echo Memories recently that it will take time to work through them all and move on to fantastic Cockfield Fell.

All snippets, however small, are gratefully received, and many thanks to all who take the trouble to get in touch.

But there is just room to explain one of the mysteries of the universe - possibly.

A fortnight ago, Echo Memories featured a couple of pictures of the extraordinarily-named Etherley Dene Wiffing Waffing Wuffing Band from before the First World War.

Ann Hewitt, of Bishop Auckland, called with an explanation.

"My father, Richard Smirthwaite, spent most of his life in Etherley Dene, and one day when he was telling me about things that had happened in the village he mentioned the band.

"He said that because they played kazoos, mouth organs and paper on combs, it was said that they had to wiff, waff and wuff to get any noise out."

And so the name came about.

Published: 26/06/2002

IF you have any snippets concerning any of the topics in Echo Memories, please write to: Chris Lloyd, The Northern Echo, Priestgate, Darlington DL1 1NF; e-mail chris.lloyd@nne.co.uk; or telephone (01325) 505062