News Beat
The bridge that collapsed and the Sunderland end named Hendon
IN October 1856, joined Ralph Harrison predicted that the bridge over the Tees he was helping to construct at Dinsdale would fall down. He was sacked for bad-mouthing the project.
Two weeks later, on November 4, the bridge fell down, catapulting five workmen off their scaffolding and into the river below. John Goldsborough and John Woods, both from Hurworth, were killed.
Crowds came from miles around to view the scene of the disaster.
The architect, John Howison, who had twice survived charges of negligence over bridge-building in the previous six years, was exonerated, but Christopher Turnbull, inspector of works, was charged with manslaughter and gross neglect. However, he was cleared by Durham Assizes.
An iron deck was then laid across the river to create the idyllic crossing that we see today.
THE death of US President Jimmy Carter at the age of 100 caused us to reminisce about May 6, 1977, when he came on a four hour visit to Tyneside and Wearside. As he was driven from the airport, he asked Ernie Armstrong, the Durham North-West MP, what the placards saying “Ha’way Jimmy” meant. He then began his speech to 20,000 Geordies outside the civic centre with the words: “Ha’way the lads!” and won them over.
IN the 1935 New Year’s Honours, Lt-Col Thomas Gibson Poole, of Middlesbrough, received a knighthood for service to Teesside, as he had donated his mansion in Nunthorpe to the town for use as a sanatorium. He was given the gong even though in 1910 the Football Association had found him guilty of trying to throw a football match to further his own political goals.
He was chairman of Middlesbrough FC and felt that if the Boro won the derby against Sunderland just two days before the general election it would help his chances of being elected as a Conservative MP. He persuaded the Middlesbrough manager, Andy Walker, to offer the Sunderland captain Charlie Thomson £10, with £2 for each conspiring team-mate, to lose the game.
Thomson refused, reported the attempted bribe – and then Sunderland lost 1-0. Gibson Poole lost the election, and was banned from football for life.
TOM DOBBIN, born in Tursdale who became the North East had of communications for the National Coal Board, told how he had helped set up a Candid Camera stunt outside Ashington pit in the late 1960s. An innocent-looking furniture van laden with free beer was placed outside the pit gates so that the pitmen’s reaction could be filmed. Unfortunately, the pitmen drank the whole contents of the van within minutes before the cameras had started rolling, so the film crew had to buy another van-load of beer to give away.
IN 1932, John Healey of Bishop Auckland fancied a little excitement before he went down a mine so applied to the University of Chicago for a job as a mechanic. The university sent him to look after machines that its archaeologists were using as they excavated the pyramids of Egypt. He became friendly with chief explorer Howard Carter, who had discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb, and Carter gave Healey his suitcase, with his initials HC on.
Healey retired back to Bishop in 1970 with the battered suitcase, which may even have carried the treasures that Carter was found to have spirited away from Tutankhamun’s tomb.
In February, his son, Derek, showed it to antiques dealer David Harper who arranged for it to go for auction with an estimate of £1,000 to £2,000. It sold for £12,000.
A DAFFODIL named after a Stockton woman who married into Darlington’s Backhouse banking family was named by the Royal Horticultural Society as one of the most wanted daffodils in the country.
The Mrs RO Backhouse daffodil caused a sensation when it was introduced in 1923 as it was the first daff ever to have a pink trumpet, but since then it had been overtaken by other daffodil novelties and disappeared.
The Backhouses bred many new types of daffodil on their remote Weardale estates, and Robert Ormston Backhouse named one after his wife, Sarah Elizabeth Dodgson, from Stockton.
AT 8am on Saturday, October 1, 1910, 18-year-old Florrie Trusler dived into the Kendrew Street swimming pool in Darlington and swam 12 miles 46¾ yards without stopping in nine hours and 20 minutes, and so became Darlington’s first known world record holder.
Florrie died in Reeth in 1984, aged 92.
THE revelation that 800 Iron Age objects had been found in a field near Scotch Corner captivated the nation. It appears as if the items, which belonged to wealthy people, had been put beyond use by the owners by being placed on a fire, probably as part of the funeral of a 1st Century ruler.
The discovery, near Melsonby, will rewrite history. It proves that in the north there was great wealth, skill, craftsmanship and taste in the darkest of ages, and the area’s rulers were connected and trading with people across Europe.
A 100-year-old wooden nameboard from a railway signalbox that once stood at Fighting Cocks, Middleton St George, fetched a world record £5,200 at auction. The “Fighting Cocks” board dated from before 1923. Other signalbox nameboards in the same GW Railwayana auction included Hunwick (£750), Croft (£500) and Welbury (£480).
BEHIND the Gothic façade of an empty Victorian bank in Barnard Castle was discovered the remains of what had once been the biggest and best house in the town. It had been built by wealthy tanner Ambrose Edwards in the Market Place in the late 1720s. The building is due to be converted into a new tourist entrance into the castle, which is otherwise rather hidden from the main street.
ST ANDREW’S CHURCH in Haughton celebrated its 900th anniversary in 2025 – it is Darlington’s oldest building, and its rector used to earn the most in south Durham. In 1861, the Bishop of Durham appointed the 28-year-old Reverend Edward Cheese to this lucrative post, sparking a national scandal because the young cleric was the bishop’s son-in-law. It became known as “the Cheese Affair” and it was said to stink as badly as over-ripe Stilton. Punch magazine punned: “Our Bishop’s really anxious to please, When we ask him for bread, he gives us cheese.” The pressure of the scandal drove the bishop, the Rt Rev Henry Montagu Villiers, to an early grave, aged 48, but Mr Cheese rode the storm out and matured into a respected local figure until his death in 1886.
WHEN Mary Lyons scored for England against Scotland at St James’s Park in Newcastle, she was just 15 years and 291 days old – she remains England’s youngest ever football goalscorer. She worked in a Tyneside munitions factory during the First World War. After the war, women’s football was effectively banned, and her claim to fame was forgotten. She died in a Jarrow carehome in 1979 and was buried in an unmarked grave – but this year a new headstone has been erected proclaiming her role as a pioneer of the Lionesses.
Seldom Seen
Never Seen
Todhills Bank
And Byers Green
THIS rhyming ditty was popular among south Durham schoolchildren 80 or more years ago, referring to a railway line that ran near Todhills and Byers Green which went between farms called Seldom Seen and Never Seen. We tried to get to the bottom of it, and concluded that because the places were beside the River Wear, they were so often covered by mist that there were Seldom Seen or Never Seen.
AFTER decades in a packing case, a lifesize statue of Prudentia was erected in the grounds of the Hopetown visitor attraction in Darlington. Prudentia had been sculpted in 1911 to go over the door of the Prudential Insurance Company’s new office in Northgate. However, in 1969, as the inner ring road swept through, the office was demolished and Prudentia consigned to a packing case. After a Memories campaign in 1999, she was briefly put on display beneath the escalators in the Cornmill Centre, but now at last she seems to have found a permanent home.
WILLIAM SOUTHERNE was born in Ketton, to the north of Darlington, in 1569, but on April 30, 1618, he was stripped, hanged, drawn and quartered at Newcastle. He was one of 158 priests who had trained at the Roman Catholic college in Douai in France to be put to death for his faith. He is now on his way to becoming a saint, having been beatified – the third of four steps to sainthood – in 1987 by Pope John Paul II.
SUNDERLAND FC played their first competitive home match on November 13, 1880, and lost 1-0 to Ferryhill. They played on the Blue House Field at Hendon and so they wore blue shirts. Sunderland only switched to red and white in 1884.
IN 1823, Margaret Newby, 46, the wife of the Witton-le-Wear curate, found a lump in her breast – back then, a death sentence. However, she travelled to a quack doctor near Rochdale who claimed to cure cancer, and stayed for months in a pub beside his practice, painfully keeping a poultice made of mustard on her chest, burning her skin. By the summer of 1824, she was clear and returned home, living 21 years until she was 78.
THE south-facing sundials which grace the villages of Hurworth and Neasham were installed by famed mathematician William Emerson, and his helper John Hunter, as practice pieces before he published his book the Art of Drawing Dials in 1770. The book was a guide to building your own sundial, telling what angle to put the gnomon to the sun to make sure it kept the right time.
