“’Tis frightful to see how fast the graves do grow up in the new cemetery,” said one of the women, whose glad surprise at the contrast between her home and her holiday could hardly express itself in words. “It can’t be a healthy place to bring up a family in. That’s where we live, is it—down there, under all that smoke? Ah! if we could only come up here every day!”
Middlesborough, as we can see from far off, is now a large town, numbering nearly 8000 inhabitants in 1851, and owes its sudden growth to coal and iron. There the smelting furnaces, roaring night and day, convert hundreds of tons of the Cleveland hills every week into tons of marketable iron. The quantity produced in 1856 in the Cleveland district was 180,000 tons. And there is the terminus of the “Quakers’ Railway;” a dock, of nine acres, where vessels can load at all times of the tide; an ingenious system of drops for the coal; branch railways running in all directions; and a great level of fifteen acres, on which three thousand wagons can stand at once.
I stayed two hours on the hill-top, then taking a direct line down the steepest side, now sliding, now rolling, very few minutes brought me to the village of Newton at the foot. With so sudden a change, the heat below seemed at first overpowering. In the public-house, which scrupled not to open its door to a traveller, I found half a dozen miners, who had walked over from a neighbouring village to drink their pint without molestation. Each recommended a different route whereby the ten miles to Stockton might be shortened. One insisted on a cut across the fields to Nuntharp.
My ear caught at the sharp twang of the ar—a Yorkshire man would have said Nunthurp—and turning to the speaker I said, “Surely that’s Berkshire?”
“Ees, ’tis. I comes not fur from Read’n’.”
True enough. Tempted by high wages in the north, he had wandered from the neighbourhood of Our Village up to the iron-diggings of Cleveland. I took it for granted that, as he earned more than twice as much as he did at home, he saved in proportion. But no; he didn’t know how ’twas; the money went somehow. Any way he didn’t save a fardin’ more than he did in Berkshire. I ventured to reply that there was little good in earning more if one did not save more, when a tall brawny fellow broke in with, “Look here, lad. I’d ruther ’arn fifty shillin’s a week and fling ’em right off into that pond there, than ’arn fifteen to keep.”
Just the retort that was to be expected under the circumstances. It embodies a touch of proud sentiment in which we can all participate.
I found the short cut to Nunthorp, struck there the high road, and came in another hour to Marton—the birthplace of Cook. It is a small village with a modernised church, and a few noble limes overshadowing the graves. The house where the circumnavigator was born was little better than a clay hovel of two rooms. It has long since disappeared; but the field on which it stood is still called “Cook’s Garth.” The parish register contains an entry under the date November 3rd, 1728: “James, ye son of James Cook, day-labourer, baptized.” The name of Mary Walker, aged 89, appears on one of the stones in the churchyard; she it was who taught the day-labourer’s son to read while he was in her service, and who has been mistakenly described as Dame Walker the schoolmistress.
I caught the evening train at Stockton, which travelling up the Durham side of the Tees—past Yarm, where Havelock’s mother was born—past the “hell kettles” and Dinsdale Spa, where drinking the water turns all the silver yellow in your pockets—and so to Darlington, where I stayed for the night.