By the time it reaches Stockton Bridge the Tees has been transformed from one of the most wild and lovely to one of the most tame and repellent of existing rivers. Its soiled waters henceforth flow between banks of blast-furnace slag; unpleasant odours float about its shores; it is ploughed by great steamships; all around there is the smoke of furnaces, the noise of hammers, the ugliness of trade. Stockton is a town of ancient foundation, which, after sleeping beside the Tees for ages, suddenly woke up to find itself in the nineteenth century, and, full of the nineteenth century desire to “get on,” shook off its old apathy, measured itself against the age, deepened its river, built ships, smelted ironstone, cast and forged and manufactured, until it found itself accepted as one of the most spirited and enterprising of English towns. In the process of growth everything that may have been beautiful in its surroundings has been destroyed, and now, glorying in its ugliness, it flaunts its frightful aspect as one of its claims to consideration.
HIGH STREET, STOCKTON.
Stockton Manor was granted to the see of Durham after the Conquest. A fortress was built, as was so necessary in those days, and the place was visited in 1214 by King John. In the sixteenth century Stockton was a town to which a Bishop of Durham might retreat from the Plague. The castle was taken by the Parliamentarians in 1644, and destroyed, the only stone houses in Stockton a few years ago being such as were built from the castle walls. There is one fine street and a Borough Hall, but every other part of Stockton bears witness to the fact that a town which is engaged in growing and prospering has neither time nor inclination to attend to its looks. As to the growth of the last half century, there is only one town—the neighbouring Middlesbrough—by which it has been excelled.
At the beginning of the century Stockton had already a shipping trade, but one that could seem important only in the eyes of its 11,000 inhabitants. At that time the river kept a tortuous, shallow course until it arrived at the wide, sandy flats which stretched far eastward to the sea. The first improvement was a straightening of its course, which dates back to the year 1810. The effect was a heightening of the tide from eight to ten feet at Stockton Quay, and little short of a doubling of the shipping trade. The construction of the first public railway came just in time to encourage the town in its efforts at development. A Tees Conservancy was formed, with the consequence that the river was so dredged, banked up, and reformed generally, that Stockton is now not only a considerable port and an important manufacturing town, but a centre of shipbuilding, the vessels built here being as large as many of those which are constructed on the Tyne. Wealth and population have increased enormously, and there seems no necessary limit to further industrial development.
Any accurate description of Stockton is in many respects applicable to Middlesbrough, a still more wonderful town, which has, within living memory, sprung up close to the estuary of the Tees. Fifty years ago there was only a single farmstead where the great town of Middlesbrough now stands. The United States have few examples of such marvellous growth. At the census of 1831 there were 154 persons in Middlesbrough, and at the census of 1881 the population was 55,281. It was in 1830 that the present town was founded, on 500 acres of marshy land. It has been assisted both by enterprise and good fortune. Originally it was intended as a port for the shipping of coals; but iron was discovered in the Cleveland hills, and blast furnaces were built where it was supposed that only coal-staithes would be seen. The first ton of Cleveland ironstone was mined in 1850, and in sixteen years the output was no less than two and three quarter millions of tons. When the iron trade was declining, a decade since, Middlesbrough men set themselves to devise new methods of manufacturing steel, with the result that Middlesbrough steel is now in demand all over the world. Talent, enterprise, the bounty of Nature, have all combined to make of Middlesbrough one of our large centres of population and industry, and to bring about a growth so rapid as has not previously been witnessed in the history of our country.
The brief voyage down the Tees from Stockton to below Middlesbrough should be made in the night time, when clouds of smoke are shot through by columns of flame; when the furnace fires are blazing out into the darkness; when seething bars of iron, crushing and straining through the rolling-mills, make the forges look like some huge Vulcan’s smithy; when the steel converters are sending out a fiery rain; and when the Tees is reflecting all manner of strange lights and weird coruscations—an appalling sight to one not accustomed to such spectacles, but grand and deeply impressive and wonderfully characteristic of the age in which we live.
Middlesbrough has its fine docks, crowded with shipping. Where, a few years ago, the Tees spread itself over a broad estuary, the channel of the river has been divided from the wide stretch of mud and sand and creeping waves by a curving groin of slag; lines of light stretch downward as far as the eye can follow, guiding ships to the desired haven. Henceforth the Tees—
“Not hurled precipitous from steep to steep;
Lingering no more ’mid flower-enamelled lands