IT is time to say hello to the Hullahs of Darlington.
A war memorial from a Methodist church which closed in 1966 has been rediscovered in Richmond, where it seems to have been taken 60 years ago, and a campaign has been launched to raise £5,500 to bring it back to the town whose fallen sons – and one daughter – it commemorates.
The First World War plaque includes the only female known to be commemorated on a Darlington war memorial – “Miss Ruby Denham” – and nine male soldiers, including “J Hullah”.
Names on the Victoria Road war memorial
Memories 790 told how the plaque had been unveiled in 1921 by Major Sir Henry Havelock Allan, of Blackwell Grange, in the Methodist Church on Victoria Road.
We give little pen portraits of the soldiers, but could not find any information about “J Hullah”. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission website says 13 Hullahs were killed in the war. One was a James and the other a Joseph, both killed in 1917 serving with the Machine Gun Corps near Ypres, but neither had a connection to Darlington.
“Are there any Hullahs in Darlington?” we asked. “Have there ever been?”
Yes, replied Dot Hullah, the chair of South Durham U3A, there are and there have been for seven generations stretching back nearly 200 years. She kindly sent in the family tree that her late husband, David, had compiled, going right back to Thomas Hullah, who was born in the East Riding of Yorkshire in 1771.
There are lots of contradictory theories about where the surname “Hullah” comes from. Some fanciful sources say it comes from an Old French word meaning “to shout or bellow” but more reliable ones suggest that people with that name once lived in Ulley, a village between Rotherham and Sheffield that was mentioned in the Domesday Book.
It is still a predominantly Yorkshire surname, strong around Ripon, Harrogate and Leeds.
It was Thomas’ grandson, John Henry, who moved from Ripon with his wife, Elizabeth, whom he married in 1853, to Darlington. They had nine children, six of whom were boys, and as the eldest of those boys had seven children, there were probably a helluva lot of Hullahs in Darlington by the time of the First World War.
And they spread further afield. There were Hullahs in Bishop Auckland and Barnard Castle.
Some Hullahs could well have attended the Victoria Road church. It was the closest Methodist establishment to Ambrose Hullah, who is pictured in the family archives in military uniform. In the 1911 census, Ambrose was 18 and living in Peel Street at Bank Top.
Ambrose Hullah, of Peel Street, Darlington, in a military uniform around the time of the First World War (Image: Dorothy Hullah)
The same census found his cousin, John, 34, living in Cobden Street.
Cobden Street was the home of the Welburn brothers, George and James, who were both killed in the war and whose names are among the nine on the Victoria Road memorial.
So we’ve come tantalisingly close to finding the “J Hullah” named on the memorial without being able to precisely identify him.
The Victoria Road war memorial has been found in a house in Richmond
NOW the war memorial has been rediscovered in Richmond, the plan is to bring it back to Darlington and mount it in the Memorial Hall at Darlington Memorial Hospital – the hospital, of course, was built as the town’s way of commemorating the 2,000-plus of its local men who had been killed in the First World War.
The plan has the support of the Royal British Legion, the hospital’s NHS Trust and the North East War Memorials Project, and all the necessary paperwork is in place.
All that is needed is £5,500 to make it happen.
The Catherine Cookson Trust, which supports worthy causes in the North East in memory of the novelist, has kindly agreed to donate £1,000, but public donations are also being sought.
They can be placed in the North East War Memorials Project account 60173444 Sort Code 20-27-43 with “Victoria Rd” as the reference. Donations will be refunded if the project doesn’t go ahead.
The New Connexion Methodist Church in Victoria Road, Darlington, shortly after it opened in 1884
GILLIAN HUNT, one of our regular correspondents with an extraordinary eye for research, also helped in the hunting of Mr Hullah, but she too couldn’t pin him down.
“It is possible that J wasn’t his first name,” she counselled. “Sometimes people appear on war memorials under the name they were known by rather than the first name they were registered with.”
Gillian also tried to find out about some of the other nine names on the memorial:
WE knew little about Francis except that he died near Ypres fighting with the Canadian Infantry.
Gillian discovered that he was born in 1880 in Lealholm on the North York Moors, the son of a railway signalman. In about 1885, the family moved into Darlington, and in the 1901 census, they are living in Park Place, near the church. Francis, now 20, is described as a “confectioner/breadmaker/baker”.
In 1907, Francis married Lucy Whitfield, whose father, Joseph, ran a grocery store in Old Model Place, again very near the church.
An 1896 poster given to customers of Joseph Whitfield's grocery shop in Old Model Place, Darlington. His daughter, Lucy, married Pte Francis Elders whose name appears on the Methodist Church memorial (Image: Chris Lloyd)
Then they emigrated to Sturgeon Creek in Winnipeg where they had two children, Dorothy and Raymond, before Francis joined the Manitoba Regiment on August 9, 1915. He was described as a caterer, with auburn hair and blue eyes.
Two years later, on October 30, 1917, he was injured during the Third Battle of Ypres. He was taken back to a dressing station in the grounds of Potijze Chateau, where he died.
His widow Lucy remained in Canada after his death with the children.
We knew little of the drummer boy, except he served with the Border Regiment and died in India.
Gillian discovered he was John Thomas Park, who was born and grew up in Carlisle – his connection with Darlington is unclear.
He was a house plasterer when he joined the Cumberland & Westmorland Battalion of the Border Regiment, and sailed from Avonmouth on March 4, 1915, on ship that collided with a steamer in the Bristol Channel.
He arrived in Bombay on March 31, 1915, and was killed on June 30, 1916, fighting at Peshawar on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border. His name is among the 13,000 on the massive India Gate memorial in Delhi.
Miss Ruby is the great enigma of the war memorial. All we knew is that she was a chemist’s assistant who lived in Hawthorn Street not far from the church and that she died on October 31, 1918, aged 28, of influenza.
Gillian discovered that she was baptised in St Paul’s Church in the north end of Darlington, where the family lived in Japan Street and her father worked as a house painter for the North Eastern Railway.
By the time of the 1911 census, Ruby, 20, was a milliner, and the family home was in Hawthorn Street. Her brother, Herbert, 22, lived with her and was listed on the census as a “professional footballer”.
That census was taken on April 2. Less than three months earlier, on January 14 Darlington Football Club had caused an FA Cup sensation by defeating Sheffield United 1-0 at Bramall Lane – the first time ever a non-league side had knocked out a First Division club.
It is arguably the greatest day in the Quakers’ history, and playing in midfield was Herbert Denham. It must be Ruby’s brother!
Darlington FC of 1910-11, the team which knocked First Division Sheffield United out of the FA Cup. We think Herbert Denham is among the players (Image: Unknown)
Gillian found that he then emigrated to Australia where he served with the Australian Imperial Force and, in 1916, married Lucy Hastie, a nurse. However, in 1922, New South Wales issued an arrest warrant for him for wife desertion.
Of course by then, Ruby was dead. She died 11 days before the end of the war in the second, most deadly wave of Spanish flu.
What had she done to get her name included on a war memorial? Could she have been a selfless nurse in the convalescent hospital, or had she performed a wartime heroic that wasn’t recorded by the newspapers.
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Gillian then pointed out that Japan Street, where Ruby grew up, is no more. The street still stands but since the late 1920s, it has been called “Ruby Street”.
“Why Ruby,” asked Gillian, “when the other terraces in that area are named China, Dublin and Peabody street? Could it possibly have been named for Ruby if she had done something noteworthy in the war?”
A crowd of people waiting outside the Victoria Road Methodist Church in the mid 1960s waiting to see the elephants from Billy Smart's Circus parade through the town centre to South Park, advertising the circus' arrival (Image: Chris Lloyd)
The Victoria Road Methodist Church is now Bathroom World, and no longer has its pointed canopy on top. Picture: Google StreetView
NOW this is terribly sad. After doing her research, Gillian, who had fought cancer twice in recent years, died suddenly. She was a great and diligent correspondent to Echo Memories for a decade: she took us to Tyneham, the deserted Second World War village that is now a tourist attraction in Dorset where she’d found a plaque dedicated to a Gainford woman; she interpreted the shapes embroidered into early 19th Century samplers; she told us some great tales she had discovered connected to Gainford war memorial which she turned into a public talk and, as well as providing so many well researched snippets, it was Gillian who alerted us to the curious County Durham phenomenon of ceramic heart-shaped gravestones.
Her funeral is at 1pm on October 28 at Darlington Crematorium and we know we shall miss her contributions enormously.