Teesside - Interesting / Fun Facts

GB grew up in Redcar. Family were oligarchs.
She stayed at Red Barn (I think its a pub in Redcar now, but was a family home for the Bell family - one of a few. The Red Barn had its own railway station as Hugh Bell was a director of the LNER. Later the main family home was at Rounton Grange near Northallerton. It was a great Arts and Crafts house and Gertude loved it. It must have been like Downton Abbey in 1913. Hugh Bell her dad spent £900 on a stone fireplace in 1909 made by William Morris & Co. I think the fireplace is in storage at the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow (Rounton Grange was pulled down in the 1950s). My great grandad worked at Cargo Fleet (Hugh Bell's furnaces) at the time, the fireplace was equivalent to around 60 years of his wages, although he only lived till around 47.

G/B helped draw the modern boundaries for the state of Iraq after WW1. The Bell family wealth from the industries of Teesside and NE gave her the freedom to do what she wanted to do in the Middle East. The Bell family owned iron and steel works, railways, ironstone mines, limestone and dolomite quarries. Eventually it was incorporated into Dorman Long in the 1920s.
 
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W.E. Johns, author of Biggles, served in the RAF at Marske. He is nowadays regarded as un-PC by some. Looking at Wiki I note that the first novel to feature Biggles was titled 'The White Fokker'.
 
My family (Norton) can trace its line back to the Grahams of Mentieth and Sir John de Graham who fought alongside William Wallace in the Scottish wars of independence. Hence my middle name being Graham. True Dat!
 
During the war they lit fires in buckets in straight lines on the top of the moors to fool the Germans it was the airport - they dutifully bombed it, the craters are still there. You can google the detail, but if you work for Siemens or Bosch I’d leave this one alone 🤐
Hmmm,

I doubt the decoy was to fool the Luftwaffe that they were bombing the airport. RAF Middleton St George didn't open until 1941, and by then the Air Raid Protection people had worked out that bombing - and especially night bombing - was so inaccurate that you if you lit decoy fires, you were more likely to suffer bombs on the target that you were trying to conceal. The Luftwaffe was a bit more accurate than the RAF, but the RAF bombing accuracy was less than 20% of ordnance fell within 5 miles of the target. Also 7% of the bombs dropped failed to detonate.

The decoy fires were probably to try to divert the Luftwaffe from the steel works on Teesside, and the chemical plants. Bombing airfields was pretty useless anyway because the craters could be filled in pretty quickly.
 
Hmmm,

I doubt the decoy was to fool the Luftwaffe that they were bombing the airport. RAF Middleton St George didn't open until 1941, and by then the Air Raid Protection people had worked out that bombing - and especially night bombing - was so inaccurate that you if you lit decoy fires, you were more likely to suffer bombs on the target that you were trying to conceal. The Luftwaffe was a bit more accurate than the RAF, but the RAF bombing accuracy was less than 20% of ordnance fell within 5 miles of the target. Also 7% of the bombs dropped failed to detonate.

The decoy fires were probably to try to divert the Luftwaffe from the steel works on Teesside, and the chemical plants. Bombing airfields was pretty useless anyway because the craters could be filled in pretty quickly.
You are correct, I did suggest the OP googled it as I’d shot from the hip a bit with my original memory.
 
Christopher Dresser who had dresser potteries on Linthorpe Road was a HUGE influence on the German ‘Bauhaus’ seen as radical and groundbreaking the designs Christopher Dresser produced and aped by Bauhaus were produced near FIFTY YEARS previously!!

Imagine seeing the I phone being released in 1959!! that’s how ahead of his time he was.

View attachment 39526
Dresser designed for Linthorpe Pottery but wasn't from here and probably only visited once. The teapot isn't nothing to do with Teesside, probably for Dixon & Co or one of the other similar firms he designed for.
 
Chris Dresser family was from near Northallerton originally, but he was nationally and internationally famous by 1880. I thought he had quite a strong connection with Linthorpe Pottery for a few years as he introduced new ways of producing pottery, some of which still look modern today even though they were produced in the 1870s and 80s.

Edit - CD was Art Superintendent of the Linthorpe Pottery from 1879 to 1882.
 
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Dresser designed for Linthorpe Pottery but wasn't from here and probably only visited once. The teapot isn't nothing to do with Teesside, probably for Dixon & Co or one of the other similar firms he designed for.

Teapots, designed by Christopher Dresser, 1878-9​


Teapot, Christopher Dresser, made by James Dixon and Sons, 1879. Museum no. M.4-2006
Teapot, Christopher Dresser, made by James Dixon and Sons, 1879. Museum no. M.4-2006
Christopher Dresser (1834-1904) was one of the most talented British designers of the nineteenth century, and these teapots are rare survivals of the radical work he produced at the very peak of his powers.
Dresser was an industrial designer before the profession had been invented, a man who found new ways of designing for production that few of his contemporaries could have imagined. He grasped both the properties of materials and the processes of production and adapted his designs and aesthetics to them brilliantly.
Dresser worked for a large and varied number of manufacturers and created designs for silver plate, cast iron, furniture, ceramics and glass, as well as textiles, carpets and wallpapers.
Teapot, Christopher Dresser, 1878. Museum no. M.5:1-2006
Teapot, Christopher Dresser, 1878. Museum no. M.5:1-2006
The teapots epitomise how innovative he could be and reveal his principles of design extended to their most extreme conclusion. It is to these designs, along with a select group of others developed in 1879, that Dresser owes his posthumous reputation as a major figure in British industrial heritage.
Some now view his metalwork, with its strikingly rigorous and stark forms, as an astonishing prefigurement of the Modernist designs of the Bauhaus, but his style is probably better understood as an extreme version of high Victorian aestheticism.

The design of Christopher Dresser​

Dresser's interest in Japanese design can be seen in the ebonised finish and unusual combination of vertical and diagonal uprights in the back of this chair. It was part of a collection of furniture sold through the Art Furnishers' Alliance, founded in 1880 to promote Dresser's work.
 
Anyone interested go upstairs in the Dorman Museum and see Linthorpe Pottery and information about what made it special for its time.

There was an older pottery in Middlesbrough too set up around 1840. It was near the Transporter Bridge on Commercial Street and one of the first major businesses in the Boro. It was called the Middlesbrough Pottery surprise surprise and benefitted from a new rail connection to Durham coal and been on a major river close to the sea.

I had relatives who moved to Middlesbrough from Birmingham around 1876 to work at the newly established Richard Hill Wire Works where he worked till his death from industrial injury and his son worked there all his working life probably till late 1930s. My great great grandfather was a trained wire drawer, a popular trade in Birmingham in the Victorian period. Any information on Richard Hills would be appreciated.
 
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