Edward Pease, ‘the father of the railways’, died aged 90 in his home in Northgate, which is now a pizza parlour and a kebab takeaway.
Edward was born in Bull Wynd. He began his career in textiles, riding hundreds of miles to buy fleeces for his Priestgate mills and, ironically for a pacifist Quaker, he made his fortune during the Napoleonic Wars, as his mills were busy for fifteen years providing yarn for uniforms.
A fire at his mill in 1817 threw his 600 employees – nearly 10 per cent of town’s population – out of work, and encouraged him to diversify. He took an interest in plans to connect the south Durham coalfield with the sea, and began investing in 1818. To protect his investment, he took control, and risks – he decided it was to be a steam-powered, locomotive-driven railway, while others were still imagining it being horse-drawn.
The Northern Echo wrote in 1875: ‘He was supreme; what he could not do by influence he effected by sheer weight of votes; and hence for many a long year he was regarded as the King of the Railway, whose sovereignty extended over every department.’
A strict Quaker, he grappled uneasily with the luxurious lifestyles that his offspring enjoyed due to the immense wealth brought to them by the railways which, when he died, girdled the globe.
(‘Memories’, The Northern Echo, 2010)