A man of considerable wealth, expensive tastes and great generosity

He kept a gig - a light twowheeled runabout - and a fourwheeled Phaeton carriage, a Rolls- Royce of its day. In 1840, he spent £50, equal to £5,000 today, to redecorate a bedroom. The work required 140yds of damask and 114yds of the finest French lace.

Flounders' home was the first house on the Yorkshire bank of the Tees over the county bridge at Yarm. A model of Georgian restraint, well-proportioned and with three elegant bow windows, it was built for Flounders in the mid-1820s and handsomely survives.

It had its own coach house (naturally), laundry (less common) and brewery (rare).

Flounders' taste for beer perhaps rivalled his liking for spirits as household accounts, still preserved, show considerable purchases of ale - 300 gallons in one five-month period.

This supplement to the home brew might have been shared with staff, since beer was an everyday drink in that era of unsafe water.

But Flounders himself also enjoyed tea and coffee, then still luxuries.

He ordered consignments from London, which were shipped, together with chocolates, to Stockton.

Accompanying each was a letter signed by Mr R Twining, head of the eponymous tea empire.

Among men of substance, Flounders was just about as substantial as any. His family had prospered through the manufacture and sale of linen, especially by his father, John, who operated mills rented from Lord Crathorne.

Selling the linen through his own shops, in Darlington, Stockton, Yarm and Stokesley, and via agencies in other towns between York and Newcastle, he once gave evidence to a Parliamentary committee on behalf of the North Riding linen industry.

Born at Crathorne in 1768, Flounders didn't follow in his father's footsteps.

While other family members ran the linen mills, he launched a successful timber importing business at Yarm.

In 1810, through his mother's brother, he inherited a 4,000-acre estate in Shropshire, which raised him to the ranks of the mega rich.

He could afford to build a folly tower commanding a view of his property. A well-known landmark on Wenlock Edge, it was recently restored, and reopened by the Princess Royal.

Flounders' hefty spending on port and sherry probably amounted to little more than petty cash. But he has claims to attention other than those of an archetypal provincial businessman.

He was a leading pioneer of the Stockton and Darlington Railway.

Posthumously, he was the virtual founder of Barnard Castle School and the present Yarm Grammar School. His money also established a teacher-training college and supported numerous socalled National Schools, the putative state primaries.

And now this notable North-East figure has his first biography, entitled How Durst He Do That? The Life of Benjamin Flounders Esquire by Jim Fox.

Mr Fox, a health and safety consultant, came across Flounders while researching his family history, including the pedigree of his wife, nee Flounders. An extensive archive of papers left by Flounders, held in the North Yorkshire County Record Office, has enabled him to bring his subject impressively out of history's shadows.

First recorded at Ingleby Greenhow in 1550, the name Flounders could be a corruption of Flanders - identifying an immigrant from that region.

Benjamin was educated at Ackworth School, Leeds, where a fellow pupil was Joseph Pease, destined to become the first Quaker MP. Mr Fox notes that Pease's Quaker beliefs led him to refuse to take the Commons' oath of allegiance, remove his hat even for the Speaker, or address fellow MPs as "honourable."

Flounders' link with Pease perhaps played a part in his backing of the Stockton and Darlington Railway, in which Pease was also prominent. At the opening of the first Tees cut in 1810, Flounders seconded a proposal to investigate building a canal or railway between Winston, near Barnard Castle, and Stockton, via Darlington.

When the railway was well-established, Francis Mewburn, its first solicitor, recalled that the proposed line had been opposed by "all the landed gentry in the county with the exception of two, Mr Thomas Meynell and Mr Benjamin Flounders."

The world-changing triumph of the railway contrasted with personal tragedies suffered by Flounders.

By 1814 he had lost two wives and his only son through illness.

His Quaker principles wavered and, while not neglecting his business interests, he lived indulgently - hence the port and sherry - and took up country sports, particularly pheasant shooting on his Shropshire estate.

Even so, in the harsh winter of 1816-17 he provided soup for Yarm's poor. He had already endowed the town's new National School with £1,000, which provided free education for 50 pupils, about a third of the total.

Flounders had a gift for marrying self-interest with a genuine concern for the community. When poaching seriously threatened to ruin his pheasant shoot, he sent a £5 note to the wife of each tenant farmer.

Suggesting the money be spent on the children, he also invited them to report any knowledge of poaching.

His agent reported back: "You stand high with the wives; they sound your praise from one corner of the county to the other."

The poaching ultimately climaxed in a dramatic pitched battle, vividly described by Mr Fox.

Flounders was also a fastidious man. Besides the household accounts, he kept every received letter and made copies of many of his own. He once rented a house in Shropshire for three months.

The owner said that, on his return, it was as though he had "gone to bed there the night before and the servants had put everything in order to a greater extent than usual."

Remaining a widower, Flounders lost his only surviving child, a married daughter, before his own death, aged 77, in 1846.

In today's values, his wealth was about £8m.

He bequeathed his housekeeper, Mary McClough, £250 a year plus his annual income from the Yarm- Thirsk turnpike, today's A19, another project he had supported, a house in Jesmond and, a truly golden prize, his Yarm residence and most of its contents.

It's a wonder Yarm tongues aren't still wagging.

But generosity to his housekeeper wasn't an exception. Flounders' butler received two-and-a-half years' wages, and a housemaid five times her annual pay of £10.

Some £40,000 had already been invested to found a Quaker teaching institute at Ackworth, and the will also provided for smaller sums to be paid to about 30 local schools, including Sedgefield, Long Newton, Thornaby and Normanby.

Flounders' had also stipulated that, after the deaths of all his personal beneficiaries, any money left in the fund set aside to pay them should be used for educational purposes.

In 1884, his trustees allocated £30,000 towards the founding of Barnard Castle School, which cost precisely that sum to build. A further £20,000, raised by subscription, was invested for running costs.

Meanwhile, a sum of £2,500 from Flounders' estate enabled Yarm Grammar School to relocate from cramped premises in the churchyard to its present site in Spital Road.

Mr Fox concludes his biography with the thought: "These schools provide a fitting memorial to the life of this remarkable man."

● How Durst He Do That? The Life of Benjamin Flounders Esquire by Jim Fox is available from the publishers, The History of Education Project, Miners' Hall, Red Hill, Durham DH1 4BB, for £12 plus £1.50 p&p.

How a daughter's illness heralded family conflict

AN unseemly episode in Benjamin Flounders' generally exemplary life occurred when the relationship between him and his son-in-law, a Maj Arthur Lowe, turned sour.

The pair got on well initially, with Lowe taking a helpful interest in the Shropshire estate. But he detected a change when his wife, Mary, Flounders' only surviving child, fell terminally ill three years into the so-far childless marriage, in 1844.

During Mary's final months, the couple lived with Flounders.

Lowe later told him: "When I became your guest to attend my poor wife through her last illness I soon found out I was no longer welcome."

Jim Fox remarks: "Benjamin had dismissed Maj Lowe now he could no longer serve his purpose of providing an heir."

Lowe didn't help repair the breach by having his wife buried close to the wall of Yarm churchyard, thus denying her father his desired place next to her on his own death. Flounders surmounted this hurdle by the (for him) simple expedient of buying the adjoining land and gifting it to the church for an extension to the graveyard. He reserved the first plot next to his daughter, just outside the former south wall, where he was buried in October 1846.

Lowe later adopted his mother's maiden name, "probably to inherit property from his mother's side of the family," suggests Fox.

As ever, money had a corrosive influence.