ONE of the burning issues of just over 100 years ago in the North-East concerned the disposal of dead human bodies.

The Victorians were suspicious of cemeteries - they believed the decomposing bodies buried there gave off noxious fumes, so nearly all municipal cemeteries are on the outskirts of towns.

However, they were even more suspicious of the concept of cremation.

"It is neither reasonable, decent nor reverent and we do not want such a pagan practice in our midst," a meeting of anti-cremationists was told in Northgate, Darlington, in 1892.

Although the burning of dead bodies was commonplace a thousand or so years ago, when Dr Price of South Wales had cremated his son on a cask of blazing paraffin oil in January 1884 he was attacked by an angry crowd. He was ordered to stand trial, but was acquitted of an offence by a judge who said: "Cremation is not an illegal act providing no nuisance is caused to others."

This gave pro-cremationists heart and in March 1890 Darlington Cremation Society was formed. One of its leaders, Dr Richard Taylor Manson of Stanhope Road, said he had been present at the exhumation of the notorious West Auckland mass-poisoner, Mary Ann Cotton, and seen an "unspeakable horror" which had proved to him that cremation was the only way of disposing of bodies.

Two years later, the society became only the third in the country to buy a plot of land. It started selling shares so that it could build a crematorium near West Cemetery - but this meant that bodies would have to pass over council-owned ground to reach it.

The council agreed that the society should pay five shillings for each body that passed through the cemetery. But the anti-cremationists were outraged. Led by ED Walker - the newsagent and owner of The Northern Echo after whom the ED Walker Homes in Darlington are named - they collected 4,100 names demanding that the council had nothing to do with this pagan practice.

The protests slowed up the cremationists, but one look at the names supporting the project - Pease, Backhouse, Fry, Hodgson, Wooler, Fothergill - shows the power of its momentum.

And so, eventually, in West Cemetery a small £1,000 chapel and coke-fired incinerating chamber was built. On March 19, 1901, the directors gathered for a test run.

"It was intended to get the dead body of a sheep but this couldn't be arranged so portions of a horse were placed in the coffin which, by the way, was more massive than usual, and the whole put through the process," reported the Darlington and Stockton Times which, like The Northern Echo, had been banned from attending.

"The chamber was heated to 1,800 Fahrenheit degrees and the reduction of the coffin and its contents was carried out with the reasonable expedition anticipated."

All that was required now was the first human.

Step forward Daniel Crosthwaite, a brewer of Saltburn. His views on cremation were well known and so after his funeral on April 13, his body was loaded on to the 2.20pm train which arrived at Darlington Bank Top at 3.30pm.

He was then loaded on to a brewer's dray and processed to West Cemetery where quite a crowd had gathered to witness the historic occasion.

The brass handles were removed from his coffin, the doors around the chamber were locked, the coke was ignited. "In some hour and 40 minutes, whitened ashes of the human remains were removed from the tray into which they had fallen and were transferred by the undertaker to a neatly-moulded urn," said the D&ST.

A great success. But it was not until July 1, 1904, that the first Darlingtonian, Mr W Banks, a railway guard, was cremated. It was not until 1930 that the number of cremations carried out in a year reached 53 and the Darlington Cremation Society made £129. It was in this year that Newcastle, who had had representatives at the initial cremation in 1901, opened its own crematorium and broke Darlington's monopoly between the Tweed and Humber.

The next big moment in Darlington's history came in November 1957 when the crematorium burnt down. As a new £36,000 construction rose from the ashes, it was decided that Darlington council should take over this service and the Darlington Cremation Society be wound up.

The new crem was "plain, simple and sincere" when it opened in 1961, and on National Heritage Day, September 9, you have the chance to look round this highly unusual piece of North-East history.

It is proving popular, but if you call (01325) 388666, there're are still a few places left for a trip of a lifetime.