Edward Pease's fifth son, Henry Pease a Quaker railway company promoter, was born at Darlington on 4 May 1807. He also entered with enthusiasm into the railway projects of his father. His principal achievement was the opening in 1861 of the line across Stainmoor, called ‘the backbone of England’, the summit of which was 1374 feet above sea level. It joined at Tebay the London and North Western Railway (LNWR), and was soon extended at its eastern limit to Saltburn-on-Sea.
Henry Pease was a director of the Stockton and Darlington Railway and was responsible for the foundation of the seaside resort of Saltburn-by-the-Sea. He purchased the Pierremont house in Darlington in 1845, moving in 1846. The Pease family also rented the Stanhope Castle, Durham. Henry Pease was elected in 1857 as MP for South Durham and held the seat until 1865.
In January 1854 Pease was deputed by the meeting for sufferings, held on the 17th of that month, to accompany Joseph Sturge and Robert Charleton as a deputation from the Society of Friends to Russia. On 10 February they were received by the emperor Nicholas, and presented him with a powerful address, urging him to abstain from the then imminent Crimean War. He received them politely, but their efforts were unavailing, and Alexander William Kinglake ridiculed their action in his history of the campaign, Invasion of the Crimea (1863). Pease was MP for South Durham from 1857 to 1865. In 1867 he visited Napoleon III with a deputation from the Peace Society, but their request for permission to hold a peace congress during the Universal Exhibition in Paris was rejected.
Henry Pease married, on 25 February 1835, Anna, only daughter of Richard Fell of Uxbridge, who died on 27 October 1839, leaving a son, Henry Fell Pease, MP from 1885 for the Cleveland division of Yorkshire; second, on 19 January 1859, he married Mary, daughter of Samuel Lloyd of Wednesbury, with whom he had three sons and two daughters.
Henry Pease was chairman of the first Darlington school board in 1871, in 1867 the first mayor of the town, and president of the Peace Society from 1872. In the early 1860s, when negotiations were in hand for a takeover of the Stockton and Darlington Railway by the North Eastern Railway Company (NER), Pease declared his opposition to the merger, in spite of the generous terms on offer to his family as leading shareholders in the Stockton and Darlington Railway. Following the takeover, however, Pease's sensibilities were overcome by his appointment as vice-chairman of the NER board. It was in that capacity that he presided over the railway jubilee held at Darlington on 27 September 1875, at which eighty British and thirty foreign railways were represented. He was always a prominent member of the Religious Society of Friends. He died at 23 Finsbury Square, London, while attending the yearly meeting, on 30 May 1881, and was buried in the Quaker burial-ground at Darlington on 2 June.
Date
27 June 1837- 29 July 1876
Scope and ContentMainly letters to Henry Pease of the Stockton & Darlington Railway (S&DR) and later. Letters concern the 1875 Jubilee celebrations, land for the S&DR expansion to Saltburn, North Eastern Railway (NER) affairs, Pease's private business etc. Correspondents include Thomas MacNay of the S&DR, and Henry Newton and Thomas Sopwith with memoirs of early railways.
Extent37 items
Physical descriptionGood condition
LanguageEnglish
Archival historyThe material originally formed part of a large Pease family collection. This collection was sold by Tennants Auctioneers in 2008 and the collection was split into various lots, splitting the railway papers from the family material. The buyer of the material then further split up the auctioneer’s lot and some of this material was transferred to the NRM in 2010.
The Stockton & Darlington Railway (S&DR) was the first steam operated public railway in the world when it opened in 27 September 1825. The object of the railway was to reduce the cost of carriage of coal sent from the small coal mine in the Shildon area to Darlington & Stockton and at first it was not thought that there would be any need to provide facilities for passengers. For the first eight years the few passengers were carried in horse-drawn coaches operated by the contractors, it was not until 1833 that the company started to operate passenger trains hauled by locomotives.
Synonymous with the S&DR are the names Pease and Stephenson. The Pease family, led by Edward Pease strongly supported the railway and Edward's son, Joseph, prepared the original prospectus and became the company's first treasurer. George Stephenson was appointed engineer in January 1822 to see to the survey and the building of the line, he also supplied the first locomotives which were built be his son, Robert Stephenson.
In May 1825 Timothy Hackworth was appointed locomotive foreman and worked with the company for eight years and designed a type of locomotive more suitable for coal traffic, with six-coupled wheels.
Most of the branches and extensions to the Stockton and Darlington Railway were built by separate companies, although worked by the S&DR, however most of these companies were taken over by S&DR in 1858.
In 1863 the Stockton & Darlington Railway ceased to exist as a separate concern, but until 1876 it was run as the Darlington section of the North Eastern Railway.
The North Eastern Railway Company was formed in 1854 when the York, Newcastle and Berwick, York and North Midland, Leeds Northern, and Malton and Driffield Railways amalgamated. It acquired the West Hartlepool Railway in 1864, the Stockton and Darlington in 1865 and the Blyth and Tyne in 1874. As a result it almost had a monopoly in its area. Its area of operation covered the north east and north Yorkshire, and stretched from Berwick-on-Tweed south to Doncaster, with extensions into Westmorland and Cumberland and into Scotland. It exercised running powers over the North British line from Berwick to Edinburgh and a joint owner of the Forth Bridge. It was also a joint owner of the East Coast Joint Stock with the Great Northern and North British Railways.
Its main goods traffic was coal from the Northumberland and Durham coalfields. It was an early investor in electrification, initially to deal with a difficult approach to the docks but later extended to the Newcastle-upon-Tyne suburban area. It also electrified goods workings between Shildon and Middlesbrough and planned to electrify the York to Newcastle route (even building a prototype locomotive) but the first world war intervened and the work was not carried out.
The headquarters of the NER were in York where it also had its carriage works. The main works were at Shildon. Among its Chief Mechanical Engineers were Wilson Worsdell, Thomas Worsdell and Vincent Raven.
The NER became part of the London and North Eastern Railway under Grouping in 1923.
The London & North Western Railway Co (LNWR) was established in 1846 following the amalgamation of the London & Birmingham, Manchester & Birmingham and Grand Junction Railways. The new company was the largest joint stock company in Britain, and initially had a network of approximately 350 miles (560 km) connecting London with Birmingham, Crewe, Chester, Liverpool and Manchester.
The LNWR continued to expand and by 1868 the company had added links to Oxford, Cambridge, Leeds, Swansea and Cardiff. However, attempts to amalgamate with Midland Railway ended in failure. By 1871 the London & North Western Railway employed 15,000 people. As part of the 1923 Grouping the LNWR became a constituent of the London, Midland and Scottish (LMS) Railway.
The Somerset and Dorset Railway was originally founded from an amalgamation of the interests of the Somerset Railway (commenced 1854) with the Dorset Railway (commenced 1860) from 1862. In 1875, following financial problems, the lines were leased jointly to the Midland Railway and the London & South Western Railway, to become the Somerset & Dorset Joint Railway Company. The company remained a separate, jointly managed enterprise following the major amalgamations in 1923 (between the London Midland and Scottish Railway and the Southern Railway) and nationalisation in 1948 (between the London Midland Region and the Southern Region). The company was finally closed by British Railways in 1966.
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