READ FIRST: OUR 35 AMAZING, HISTORICAL FACTS FROM THE FIRST PART OF 2024 May Hill Close House, Darlington Darlington’s oldest secular house, Hill Close House, was on the market for £650,000. Buried deep in the West End, parts of it are probably 500 years old. Jane Laninga wondered why one of her family photos, taken in South Shields in 1904, showed four-year-old Jennie Jackson wearing a black-out eye-mask (above) .
Readers were convinced that this was part of her treatment for measles – one of its symptoms is greater sensitivity to light which can develop into a squint. On the opening day of the Stanhope & Tyne Railway in 1834, a rope snapped sending a train careering down the line up which hundreds of spectators were walking. Rather than wipe them all out, a quick-thinking pointsman at Crawley threw his switch so the train went into a siding where two men were killed.
The pointsman was hailed a hero, but his name was never recorded. The pub on the corner of Darlington’s Blackwellgate got its umpteenth renaming as the Hummingbird, but in its original incarnation as the Black Bull, it was the inspiration for a hotel in Sir Walter Scott’s novel Rob Roy published in 1818. The Hole in the Wall in Barnard Castle is now flats run by the Endeavour housing association, but its first floor had once been a Methodist meeting room holding 150 people, although one day around 1750 when William Darney was preaching, the floor gave way and some of the congregation fell into the apar.
