AMID the upturned tables and the boxes covered in bird poo, surrounded by scorched mattresses, burned tyres, blackened pews and melted children’s plastic toys, there is a font.
A font given to St Peter’s Church by pupils of Bishop Auckland Grammar School 151 years ago when the church opened and hopes were as high as heaven.
St Peter's font lies amid the debris inside the church. Picture: SARAH CALDECOTT (Image: Sarah Caldecott)
A font in which one of the world’s most famous comedians was baptised not once – but twice.
St Peter's Church , where Stan Laurel was baptised a second and third time (Image: Unknown)
St Peter’s Church closed in 2013 and, with no obvious future, has fallen derelict. A fire on September 13, which could have been much worse, prompted the MP, Sam Rushworth, to organise a “multi-agency walkaround” to see if anything can be done. The church was once the fulcrum of the terraced streets around it; now it represents a major fire hazard to them.
Multi-agency walkabout around Bishop Auckland pictured at St Peter's Church Picture: SARAH CALDECOTT (Image: Sarah Caldecott)
Contrast that to April 20, 1875, when St Peter’s was consecrated and Bishop was booming. The streets on the eastern side of town were sprawling out with homes for miners, railwaymen and co-op workers, and the landmark church, with its green copper roof, was the centrepiece of the new community in Princes Street.
An Edwardian postcard of St Peter’s Church, Bishop Auckland, where Arthur Stanley Jefferson was twice “received into the church” (Image: Unknown)
“One of the largest and most fashionable congregations ever brought together in the town” attended the opening ceremony, said The Northern Echo, with “nearly 1,000 persons computed to be present”.
The day was declared a holiday. Shops shut. Flags flew.
So many people had helped kit out the church: Mrs Spencer of Whitworth Hall had personally richly embroidered the pulpit pendant; Mr and Mrs Limoelan had provided the Communion tablecloth and faldstool; the grammar school pupils had donated the font; Mr Sibbald had given shrubs for the outside, and, said the Echo, “the seats are covered with crimson rugs given by Mrs Holland's sewing class”.
If they could see it now…
Multi-agency walkabout around Bishop Auckland pictured at St Peter's Church Picture: SARAH CALDECOTT (Image: Sarah Caldecott)
After the service, which was led by Charles Baring, the Bishop of Durham, 200 leading citizens were treated to a “luncheon of a recherche character” in the Town Hall, which had been “beautifully decorated” with mottoes and designs on the walls.
In the evening, 1,000 townspeople enjoyed a public tea in the hall.
The church, designed by Robert James Johnson, a Stokesley-born architect who served his time in Darlington and set up his own practice in Newcastle, had cost £7,000 to build (more than £725,000 in today’s values) and was not complete. The spire had not risen above the eaves of the nave and, said the Echo, was temporarily covered up “until funds are forthcoming to finish it”.
But they persevered and topped it off in copper. And they added stained glass windows in memories of men killed in the war. They donated an altar table, lectern and chairs in memory of parishioners.
Multi-agency walkabout around Bishop Auckland pictured at St Peter's Church Picture: SARAH CALDECOTT (Image: Sarah Caldecott)
In 1902, they erected a brass plaque to Private James Armstrong, 31, of the Durham Light Infantry, who had been killed in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, on December 6, 1900. Like many Durham men, he had volunteered to fight in the Boer War but had been run over by a steam engine when he was crossing a railway line.
The engine dragged him 40 yards down the track before it stopped, by which time he was quite dead.
He was buried that same afternoon in a military ceremony at Van Reenen cemetery. The firing party was made up of 12 men from Bishop Auckland and the chief mourner was his brother, Pte Jack Armstrong.
A young Stan Laurel (Image: Unknown)
Another plaque in St Peter’s Church noted that in the font that the grammar school pupils had donated, a young lad called Arthur Stanley Jefferson was baptised twice.
His father, Arthur, known as “AJ”, moved to Bishop from Ulverston in Cumbria to become the manager of the struggling Theatre Royal in Princes Street in 1889. The following year his new wife, actress Madge, by now heavily pregnant, moved back to her parents in Ulverston to give birth.
The baby, Arthur Stanley, was so poorly he was immediately baptised.
Madge and AJ returned to Bishop while the baby, known as Stanley to avoid confusion with his father, remained in Ulverston.
Number 66 Princes Street, the Jefferson family 's first home in Bishop Auckland, which was practically opposite St Peter's Church (Image: Chris Lloyd)
On October 21, 1891, 14-month-old Stan was visiting his parents in 66 Princes Street and they took him over the road to St Peter’s to be “received into the church” – a second baptism. He was, though, largely brought up by his grandparents in Cumbria.
As AJ turned the fortunes of the theatre around, renaming it the Eden Theatre after Sir William Eden, of Windlestone Hall, who patronised it, so he and Madge moved to a larger, double fronted house in Waldron Street – still in the terraces of St Peter’s but definitely a step up.
South View, Waldron Street, the Jeffersons more substantial home until 1896 (Image: Chris Lloyd)
In the house on December 16, 1894, Madge gave birth to their fifth child, a daughter, Olga, who was baptised on January 3, 1895, in St Peter’s.
Stan, by now four-and-a-half, was visiting for the holidays and so at the same ceremony, he too was “received into the church” – effectively a third baptism.
In 1896, the family moved to run a new theatre in North Shields, but in 1902, Stan, 11, became a boarder for 18 months at King James I Grammar School – the same school whose pupils had paid for the font in which he had been twice baptised.
Stan’s noted tomfoolery probably brought his scholarly career in Bishop Auckland to an end. He was moved to Gainford Academy for three months, but brighter lights than south Durham’s were beckoning.
Stan Laurel (Image: Unknown)
In 1917, he was part of Fred Karno’s slapstick troupe of comedians in the United States, acting as an understudy to Charlie Chaplin and, before making his first film, Nuts in May, changing his name to Stan Laurel – he thought the name he had acquired at St Peter’s, “Stan Jefferson” was unlucky because it contained 13 characters.
Oliver Hardy and Stan Laurel (Image: Unknown)
And in 1926, he really did strike lucky. With Oliver Hardy, he formed what is still regarded as the world’s greatest comedy double act, Laurel & Hardy, making 107 films over 20 years which are still watched – and laughed at – today.
Sadly, the church where he was twice baptised is now in a very fine mess indeed.
Clairmont on a 1907 postcard when it was still being used as a school. Picture: Tom Hutchinson (Image: Tom Hutchinson)
IF the Eden Theatre is at the bottom of Princes Street, St Peter’s Church is about a third of the way up and Clairmont is at the top.
It featured in last week’s supersize Memories and is in a condition of dereliction that almost matches St Peter’s.
It was built perhaps a year or two after St Peter’s as a boarding school where in 1886, 16-year-old Ethel May Snowball came “second in all England” in her Cambridge Examinations – a remarkable performance.
In 1888, Ethel returned to teach at Clairmont under her old headteacher, Janet Orr. The school closed a year or so later, and several readers have kindly undertaken genealogical research to see what became of Ethel.
Tom Hutchinson found that in the 1891 census, she had returned to live with her father, William, who ran Snowball’s, a large drapery store – known as “the Harrods of the North” – in Gateshead.
In the 1901 census, Ethel, now 30, was found visiting her old headteacher, Miss Orr, 52, who was living comfortably in Kincardine in Fife.
And in the 1911 census, Tom found Ethel, now 40, listed as visiting Thomas Reah, 59, and his wife, Alice, and 21-year-old daughter Doris in Gosforth. Ethel’s occupation is given as a “lecturer in voice production”.
After that, she disappears without trace – unless you know more about her.
The 1943 quotation for giving birth at Clairmont received by Peter Thompson's mother (Image: Peter Thompson)
“I SUPPOSE it could be because I'm in my nineties but you keep dragging me back into my history,” says David Armstrong. “I was born in Clairmont nursing home on September 11, 1935, and then baptised in St Peter's Church on September 26, 1935 –some years after Stan Laurel!”
But perhaps in the same font.
For much of the 20th Century until 1982, Clairmont was a maternity unit.
Until the National Health Service started in 1948, the Clairmont County Maternity Hospital was paid for by a mixture of county council subsidy, the National Health Insurance maternity benefit pay-out plus patients’ contributions.
Peter Thompson has sent in a letter showing the charges his mother was quoted in 1943 four months before he was born.
She was expected to pay “1½ Maternity Benefits plus 13 shillings a week”.
The “maternity benefit” was the sum the private insurance would pay – but it was 50 per cent below the actual cost of the birth. Then a 13s-a-week board and lodging fee was added, and as the average confinement in those days was 10 to 14 days, giving birth could be an expensive business.
- If you can tell us any more about St Peter's or Clairmont, please email chris.lloyd@nne.co.uk