The Felix, with a crew of nineteen, set sail from Stranraer to discover the fate of explorer Sir John Franklin. He had been gone for five years on an Arctic mission to find the Northwest Passage, a putative short cut that joins the Atlantic with the Pacific.
The Felix was captained by veteran explorer John Ross, 73, many of whose expeditions had been sponsored by the gin distiller Sir Felix Booth, after whom he had named large parts of the Arctic. Indeed, Sir Felix had chipped in another £1,000 for the rescue mission.
Although Ross, often fortified with his sponsor’s product to keep out the cold, was not successful, he returned with the news that three skeletons belonging to Sir John’s men had been discovered to the north of Boothia, hinting at terrible calamity.
The crew of the Felix then broke up. The ship’s doctor, David Porteous, landed a job in the new village of Middleton St George that was growing beside an ironworks to the east of Darlington. Ironworking being dangerous, the doctor prospered, and in 1876 built himself a sturdy villa-cum-surgery, with two iron balconies and a pair of conservatories. He named it after the small ship on which he had sailed to the Arctic, and so today the people of Middleton St George are treated in Felix House.
(‘Memories’, The Northern Echo, 2003)