What drove Spider the horse to drink in Darlington

“WE are glad to see,” said the D&S Times 150 years ago this week, “that the Town Council has so heartily taken up the cause of the visit of the Royal to Darlington that subscriptions to the guarantee fund already amount to above £2,300.”

More than £5,000 – at least £625,000 in today’s values – would be required, said the D&S, and the largest of the early subscribers were Backhouses’ bank and the town’s Licensed Victuallers Association, who had put forward £300 each.

Little can any of the councillors, whose debate on the subject was minutely recorded in the paper, have known it would take so long – 23 years – for Darlington to host the prestigious Royal Agricultural Society Show, and absolutely none of the town’s licensed victuallers can have known that their best customer would be a horse. Called Spider.

The Royal had been the high point of the nation’s agricultural calendar since it was first held in 1839 (it was last held in 2009), but it wasn’t until 1895 that it came to Darlington, to the Hummersknott estate, which was owned by Arthur Pease, who was on the council 150 years ago that first considered bidding to host the show.

More than 100,000 people attended the show, including the Duke and Duchess of York (later George V and Queen Mary), although the really impressive royal guest was Nazrulla Khan, the Shahzada of Afghanistan who was the heir to the Afghani throne and on a tour of Britain on behalf of his father.

The showfield laid out in front of the Hummersknott mansion in 1895

His huge entourage included the Kotwal of Kabul and the Nakim Bashi, and they were met at Bank Top station by a 100-man guard of honour and driven to another of Mr Pease’s properties, Polam Hall, for the night.

Polam was a girls’ boarding school. It was July, so the pupils were on holiday, but still the rooms had to be redecorated and incense burned throughout to remove any "female pollution" before the 20-year-old shahzada could be allowed in the building.

He came with cases of oranges, sacks of rice and live sheep and chickens, which were slaughtered in the grounds and cooked on a specially-constructed stove – it is said that the stove scorched Polam’s wooden floor and, several years ago when Looking Back was chairing an event at the school, the library carpet was rolled back to reveal what appeared to be scorch marks that might have been evidence of the shahzada’s culinary exploits.

Arthur Pease of Hummersknott, was the MP for Whitby from 1880 to 1885 and then for Darlington from 1895 until his death in 1898. The Royal show was held in his grounds in 1895

The meal was served from great brass dishes carried on his servants' heads.

At the showground on the opening day, they strolled around the buttermaking and poultry-dressing displays before returning to Bank Top station.

"Some were wearing turbans and others caps of astrachan," said The Northern Echo. "One had a bright green cloth edged with red lovingly tucked under his arm; another carried a prosaic portmanteau; a third had a mysterious bundle enclosed in a white cloth and a fourth, umbrella in hand, had a few gay blossoms beneath his fingers."

The second day of the show did not pass off so successfully because around lunchtime a terrific thunderstorm broke, causing scores of people to dash for shelter beneath Mr Pease’s trees.

The Hummersknott and Upland mansions were built for Arthur Pease and his sister, Rachel, by their father, Joseph Pease, in the early 1860s. The estate was the setting for the 1895 Royal show

But a bolt of lightning struck one of them, causing it to crash to the ground and crush two spectators to death.

It was terribly shocking, and no creature was more shocked by it than Spider, an eight-year-old black Dales pony who had been sensibly standing in the open with his handler 13-year-old Charles Demer, Their job was to transport passengers, from Bank Top station, or goods, from the specially-constructed platforms beside North Road station, to the showground.

The sight of the carnage not more than 20 yards away left Spider a nervous, quivering wreck, unable to pull his cart from the stations to Hummersknott.

Charles went to his 81-year-old grandfather, a well known greengrocer, and asked for advice on how he could steady Spider’s nerves. The wise old man suggested that Charles should take Spider to the Bull’s Head pub in the Market Place for a pint of ale slops.

Spider lapped it up. He loved it so much that he refused to make a journey from the showground to the stations and back again without calling in at the Bull’s Head.

The sidings between the North Road station on the right and the Hopetown carriageworks - where the Tornado steam engine was built recently by the A1 Trust - in the centre had earth and timber platforms built specially to handle goods coming to the 1895

Spider was making 16 or 17 round trips a day which must mean he was on 34 to 34 pints of slops per day.

It made sound economic sense, as the Bull’s Head charged Spider 6d a pint and the Demers charged each of the five passengers who boarded their tipsy taxi 2s 6d.

The Demer family emigrated to New Zealand before the start of the First World War, but were unable to take the legendary Spider with them. Instead, he was pensioned off to a field near Thirsk where he died at the age of 29.