Descendant of Echo’s founder retraces his footsteps

“It’s been a bit of a pilgrimage,” said Carolynne Frost, from Shepparton in Victoria. “I just feel it is important for my family to understand what he did.”

Carolynne Frost, from Victoria in Australia, visiting the Echo’s former office in Priestgate, Darlington, where her great-great-grandfather started the paper in 1870

Bell’s legacy

John Hyslop Bell, a Scotsman from Dumfries, was invited to Darlington in 1869 by the Pease family, who for several years had endured virulent attacks from the weekly newspaper, the Darlington & Stockton Times, which was owned by their implacable opponent, Henry King Spark.

John Hyslop Bell, the founding proprietor of The Northern Echo

The Peases tasked Mr Bell with setting up a daily regional newspaper that would blow the little local weekly out of the water.

Mr Bell was one of the leading newspapermen in the North East, having worked as a Parliamentary reporter in London in his youth before joining a paper in Sunderland in 1855. It had merged with other Liberal papers to form the South Durham & Cleveland Mercury, based in Hartlepool, which he edited and co-owned.

This experience was vital to the Peases, as was his politics – they wanted their new paper to promote their Liberal views.

The corner of Priestgate and Crown Street in Darlington where Mr Bell set up the Echo in a former boot and shoelace factory

Mr Bell set the paper up in an old boot and shoe lace factory on the corner of Priestgate and Crown Street, publishing its first edition on January 1, 1870.

Stead on board

His biggest move, though, came in April 1871 when he discovered a 22-year-old from Embleton with a moral fire burning in his belly and he appointed him as the paper’s second editor. This was WT Stead, whose frenetic energy made the new paper the voice of the Durham coalfield and gave it an international reputation – the government of Bulgaria passed a vote of thanks to it.

William Thomas Stead.

Stead went on to, in controversial circumstances, play a major role in getting the 1885 Criminal Law (Amendment) Act passed which raised the age of consent for girls from 13 to 16 and is regarded as the world’s first child protection piece of legislation. Stead, of course, was the most famous British person to die when the Titanic went down in 1912 as he was sailing to New York to address a peace conference with the US president.

The former shoelace factory in Priestgate, Darlington, in which the Echo was first published on January 1, 1870

It is through Stead that we learn that Mr Bell was more than just the proprietor of the paper in its early days.

End of an era

Bell remained in charge of the paper until he suddenly quit in 1889, probably because the Peases, like the Liberal Party, were bitterly divided over Irish Home Rule.

He then seems to have fallen on hard times because in 1894 an appeal went out to Liberals to raise £3,000 (worth about £350,000 in today’s values, according to the Bank of England’s Inflation Calculator) for him in recognition of his services to the party.

Many leading Liberals, including the Peases, donated, spurred on by Stead, who wrote a long piece in his magazine, the Review of Reviews, about Mr Bell’s attributes.

Stead said that Mr Bell “never forgot that a newspaper, even though a little one, must be a fighter”.

He said: “Mr Bell has always used his pen and his paper to promote the cause of labour, the cause of peace, and the case of woman.” (This must refer to how, in its earliest editions, the Echo supported women getting the vote in Parliamentary elections.)

And Stead added: “True to his creed, Mr Bell refused to make his newspaper a tout for the tipster and the gambler, and for many years The Northern Echo shared with the Leeds Mercury the distinction of being the only organs which refused to publish the odds on the racecourse.”

John Hyslop Bell, founder and proprietor of The Northern Echo from 1869 to 1889. The maiden name of his mother, Margaret, was Hyslop

Later years

After giving up on newspapers, Mr Bell and his wife, Alice, and their six children, lived in Seaton Carew where he became a Justice of the Peace.

In 1894, he toured India on behalf of the Purity Association advocating against prostitution, and in 1897 he returned and become the coroner for Stockton. This led to him in 1914 conducting the inquests into the 138 people killed when three German warships unexpectedly bombed Hartlepool at the start of the First World War.

Bombardment of Hartlepool – bombed buildings in 1914.

Mr Bell retired in 1919 and died, aged 88, in his home – called St Fillians – in Stockton. He was buried in Darlington’s West Cemetery, and Carolynne, his great-great-grand-daughter, visited his grave.

She also went in search of his son, her great-grandfather, Ernest Hyslop Bell, who is also buried there.

Carolynne Frost, from Victoria in Australia, visiting the Echo’s former office in Priestgate, Darlington, where her great-grea-grandfather started the paper in 1870

Ernest was born in Darlington in 1875. He attended Barnard Castle School (Carolynne went for a look at that) but really rose to prominence in the 1920s due to a legal case that is still discussed today.

Ernest was a senior figure in Barclays Bank which, in 1923, invested in Lever Brothers to help the soap manufacturers start buying palm oil from Nigeria. Ernest left the bank to head up the new operation which quickly diversified into wider trading.

In 1929, Lever Brothers (now called Unilever) merged their African operations and offered Ernest a massive £30,000 “golden parachute” to leave.

However, the company then discovered that Ernest had been privately speculating in a cocoa cartel in Nigeria – a line of trade Levers were also involved in – and so withdrew the parachute.

The case came to court, Ernest arguing that he would never have invested his own money in this way if he knew Levers would object, and Levers counter-arguing that his cartel could have been operating against their interests.

Eventually, in 1931, the House of Lords decided that Ernest was due his money. Today, Bell v Lever Bros is still regarded as an important contract law case that helps define the concept of “common mistake”.

With his settlement, Ernest bought an agricultural estate in Suffolk.

He died in Kirkbymoorside in 1941 and was buried in West Cemetery.

His son, John, served on minesweepers in the Second World War and then, in 1949, emigrated to Australia, taking his nine-year-old son, Antony, with him.

Antony, now 88, is Carolynne’s father, and she will be reporting her findings from Durham back to him.

At least one mystery remains. In Ernest’s later years, after his first wife had died, he remarried Clarissa Hogg, who was much younger than him. They didn’t have any children and, after more than 60 years as a widow, she is believed to have died in Darlington as recently as 2006 – can anyone tell us anything about her?

ANOTHER mystery: where was John Hyslop Bell’s house in Stockton? His obituary says it was called “St Fillians” but, knowing what journalists are like when it comes to accuracy, it could have been “St Fillans”.

Fillan was a 6th Century Irish missionary who travelled to Scotland to convert the heathens to Christianity. He became known as St Fillan the Stammerer and today there is a village called St Fillans on the banks of Loch Earn in Perthshire.

Is this how Mr Bell’s Stockton home got its name?