Joseph Pease, Darlington’s greatest son, died aged 72 in his opulent mansion, Southend. He was, according to the Newcastle Daily Chronicle, ‘head and shoulders above his fellows, in the mine, the manufactory and the mart … a self made magnate … the embodiment of world prosperity … the first of the new aristocracy of England’. Revd Henry Kendall, of Northgate Congregational church, said he ‘was the greatest of all men in the North-East of England’.
Just a month earlier, King Charles III of Spain had awarded him the Order of the Grand Cross for distributing thousands of copies of a book about morality among the Spanish workers.
Yet for all his renown and £168 million wealth, Joseph – South Durham’s first MP and the founder of Middlesbrough – didn’t have health. In 1859, a German oculist had performed an iridectomy on his eye ‘without chloroform’, or anaesthetic. ‘An iridectomy’, explained The Northern Echo, ‘is the making of an incision in the iris, drawing out a few of the capillary vessels and clipping them off – thus relieving the distension and allowing of the optic nerve resuming its usual shape. He suffered much.’
Widowed in 1861, Joseph was blind for his last seven years. Southend is now Bannatyne’s Hotel, and the south-facing summerhouse, where Joseph in his dotage liked to sit and feel the sun, is where the people of Southend Avenue keep their wheelie bins.
(‘Memories’, The Northern Echo, 2007)