Quaker burial chamber revealed in Darlington cemetery

Before the chamber is re-sealed, the Quakers are inviting the people of Darlington to have a look, on Saturday, December 14, at this very unusual piece of history beneath their feet in the graveyard off Skinnergate.

The headstone beneath which the burial chamber has opened upIt lies just a couple of inches beneath the headstone shared by Jonathan Backhouse and his wife, Hannah. He was the first treasurer of the Stockton & Darlington Railway and she was a renowned preacher who toured the US campaigning against slavery.

It had been presumed that the two, who died in 1842 and 1850 respectively, lay in ordinary coffins a few feet beneath their headstone, but when the ground gave way beneath a cherrypicker operating on a nearby path, their large vault was discovered.

Inside the chamber, showing its coffin shape, its well plastered walls, and an iron bar which had previously been used to shore up the ceiling. The floor is well covered with soil which has not been disturbedIt is about three metres long and a good metre wide, and it is at least two-a-half-metres deep. It appears to be shaped like a supersized coffin as it is a bit wider where the shoulders would be. Its walls are made of brick and have been nicely rendered.

Quakers believe that all people are equal before God and so everyone in the graveyard – even Edward “the Father of the Railways” Pease or his son, Joseph, who is celebrated by a statue in High Row – rests beneath the same sized headstone, unlike in other cemeteries where the wealthy could pay for huge memorials in their honour.

The Quaker graveyard is an oasis of tranquility just off Darlington town centreThe Quaker stones are plain and unadorned – no macabre skulls or maudlin verses carved on them – to represent their humble, inextravagant lives.

And yet Jonathan and Hannah were buried in this large and expensive chamber. Vaults for wealthy families are common in Anglican or Catholic churches and churchyards, but there are only a couple of examples in the country of Quakers going down this path and none of those graves are on this scale.

The heavy stone slabs on the ceiling of the Skinnergate vault have given way at least once in the past, and it has been reinforced with a metal girder. This previous collapse means that a goodly layer of soil covers whatever lies at the bottom of the vault.

And presumably that includes the coffins of Jonathan and Hannah.

Jonathan Backhouse (1779-1842)Jonathan was born in 1779, his family being both textile millowners and bankers. His father, also Jonathan, was a prime mover with the Peases in the creation of the Stockton & Darlington Railway – it was Jonathan Senior who famously “balanced the cash” in his three-wheeled car when the dastardly Lord Darlington was trying to derail the scheme by bankrupting Backhouses’ bank.

Jonathan Junior was also a major player in financing the railway, particularly as in 1811 he married Hannah Chapman Gurney from the Norwich family of Quaker bankers. She was closely related to the great southern Quaker families of Barclay, Fox and Fry which enabled the Darlington railway project to tap into a national fund of Quaker wealth.

Polam Hall was a simple mansion which the Backhouses re-orientated so that it no longer looked on to Grange Road but instead faced down to the River SkerneJonathan and Hannah lived in Polam Hall, enlarging the property and transforming its gardens which ran down to the Skerne – Hannah had a suite of rooms with the best views.

She spoke at the Friends Meeting House for the first time in 1820, and in 1826 travelled to preach in Manchester, Lancaster and Leeds. In 1827, she and Jonathan went to Devon, Cornwall and the Scilly Isles to preach, and then in 1829 to Ireland.

Hannah Chapman Backhouse (1787-1850)In 1830, they left their children – Jane, 16, Anne, 15, and Edmund, six – in Polam Hall and sailed for America where, for 18 months, they were Quaker missionaries, travelling on horseback through Philadelphia, Boston and Cincinnati, before taking a boat to Indiana.

Hannah stayed on in the US when, in January 1832, Jonathan returned to tie up his interests in Darlington. As a businessman, he had consolidated the family bank as the largest and most dependable in the North East, and he had shifted away from the old textile concerns and invested in the new coal industry, starting with the Black Boy Colliery near Shildon.

In December 1832, he retired as treasurer to the S&DR and returned to the US, surviving a terrible storm – a “raging of the mighty deep” – on his crossing, and he rejoined Hannah. For the next two years, they toured Ohio and Indiana, crossing the River Ohio by stepping from ice floe to ice floe, and pushing deep into the slave-owning states of Tennessee and Kentucky.

Hannah drove her own carriage, crossed a river in a hollowed out canoe and slept on straw on the floor of a railroad coach – things a woman just didn’t do in those days.

Her principle concerns were the education of the people she came into contact with, and her opposition to slavery.

In October 1834, she wrote from North Carolina: “We have now been travelling some hundreds of miles through slave States. The distress of seeing these poor creatures on the road, just bought up by the slave-dealers, separated from the nearest relations of life, never more, in all probability, to be heard of again by them, is unspeakably great.

“Could you see what I see, and hear what I hear, you would not wonder that we are called to suffer as we do. No one who has not seen it can tell me what slavery is.”

In March 1835, Jonathan was called back to Darlington on bank business, and Hannah stayed out until October, travelling with an American female Quaker, Eliza Kirkbride.

Just a few months after Hannah got back to Polam Hall, Jonathan had a stroke. He never recovered full use of his limbs and died on October 7, 1842, aged 64.

Hannah's obituary in the Darlington & Stockton Times in 1850Hannah continued her ministering around the UK for a couple of years until her health began to deteriorate, and she died on May 6, 1850, aged 63.

Her husband had died before Darlington had a local newspaper and so he doesn’t have an obituary, but the Darlington & Stockton Times, founded in 1847, hailed Hannah as “one of the most distinguished ladies of our vicinity”.

It said: “She was one of the most pleasing and interesting of women; her very countenance was the embodiment of benignity and a richly stored mind. Warm in her attachments, a good mistress and kind to all, few have lived so far removed from envy, enmity and strife, and few leave so large a circle of attached and sorrowing friends.”

Her funeral was held, unusually, on Sunday, to allow friends from all over the country to reach Darlington.

The D&S Times says the ceremony was “devoid of exterior pomp and circumstance”. It tells how large crowds lined the route of the procession from Polam Hall into Skinnergate, and how Hannah’s American friend, Eliza, who had by now had married one of her Gurney cousins, gave a “beautiful address”.

The Friends Meeting House, SkinnergateIt doesn’t mention that she was buried in a vault, but that is what now seems to have opened up beneath her headstone in Skinnergate.

The Quakers are inviting people to come down for a respectful look on Saturday, December 10, at either 10am, 10.30am or 11am. Meet in the meeting house car park just off Skinnergate.

The hole that has opened up beneath the headstoneWE can only guess at the motivations of Hannah and Jonathan, who were one of the wealthiest couples in Darlington, for having a vault – perhaps they were saving space for their children to be buried with them.

But it is very unusual.

In the 18th Century, Quakers considered even headstones too showy and discriminatory and so they were buried in unmarked graves. By the early 19th Century, grave markers were allowed, but they only had the name, date and age of the person beneath them – and usually the months are referred to as “first month”, rather than the name “January” which comes from another religion.

The only other known Quaker vaults are in Staines, Middlesex, where the cemetery was redeveloped in 1973, and 31 brick-lined graves for up to four burials were discovered, and in Bathford, near Bath, where 12 walled graves containing up to three coffins were revealed by road-building in the early 1990s.

The most elaborate known grave is that of John Walker in North Shields. He was from a Quaker family of wealthy shipowners – a boy called James Cook became an apprentice in 1746 on one of their ships in Whitby – and when he died in 1822, he was buried in a timber sleeve in a lead coffin in a wooden outer-coffin which was placed in a tight, brick-lined vault.

Mr Walker was from a Quaker family but had left the faith by the time of his death, which may explain why his burial was so different.

Chris Lloyd investigates the hole