A three-day Northern Ireland peace conference began at the newly opened Europa Lodge Hotel (now Blackwell Grange).
Northern Ireland Secretary William Whitelaw led the talks between a dozen moderate Ulster politicians – the Nationalists and Revd Ian Paisley boycotted the event. Whitelaw was assisted by a large secretariat and 150 police officers, and scrutinised by 200 journalists.
Although it wasn’t regarded as significant at the time, the Darlington conference agreed that while Northern Ireland should remain part of the UK for as long as the people wanted it to, a way forward would be to give ‘minority interests a share in the exercise of executive power’ – the start of ‘power-sharing’. ‘There was only one snag,’ Whitelaw said later in his memoirs. ‘The hotel was surrounded by a golf course which would have to be closed for the conference.’
This disappointed Whitelaw, a keen golfer, as the only ‘golfers’ on the course were undercover security men taking part in the biggest such operation ever undertaken in Britain – 1972 was one of the deadliest years of the Troubles, with more than 450 people killed.
However, ‘the Blackwell Grange Golf Club … was generous enough to make me an honorary member’, and Whitelaw returned for a round when he was guest at the local Conservative Association ball in September 1974.
(‘Memories’, The Northern Echo, 1999)