Rise and fall of Lingford, Gardiner and Company - a once famous engineering works

The book is about Lingford, Gardiner and Company which provided engineering services for the mines and railways of south Durham; the quirk is the Rational Umpire, the name of the bicycle the company produced during the boneshaking bike-building bonanza of the late 19th Century.

Captivated by its horse-drinking trough at Escomb, its drain covers all over the place and its strangely-named bike, Memories spent much of the spring looking at Lingford, Gardiner, and this morning from 10am to 1pm, the Bishop Auckland Station History Group is launching its book on the company in the Four Clocks centre.

“In the 1890s, LG were one of the two major engineering employers in the town outside the railways, with a workforce of 40 to 50 men, and their services to the local coal industry were significant,” says co-author Gerald Slack. “Within five miles of Bishop Auckland just before the First World War, 17,000 men were employed in the coal industry, and LG were major players in that.

“History, though, seems to have forgotten them. They weren’t very good at keeping records, and what records they did keep have ended up in Devon.”

By consulting the Devon archive, Gerald and his co-researcher Michael O’Neill have discovered that the driving force behind the business was Samuel Sutton Lingford, from a Nottingham family of entrepreneurial Quakers. Samuel’s elder brother, Joseph, moved to Bishop to set up the famous baking powder firm, Lingford’s, and Samuel followed suit to set up a high class grocery store in Newgate Street. By the 1850s, he had branches in Tow Law, Coxhoe and Langley Moor.

Samuel saw collieries blooming across south Durham like flowers in the dessert, sprinkled with life-giving water by the new railways.

He decided to move into colliery engineering. In 1856, he took a 99-year lease on a piece of church land in undeveloped South Road on which to build a workshop. On one side of the workshop was Railway Street – because he was into repairing railways – and on the other side was Chester Street, because the churchman who had signed the lease was the Reverend Matthew Chester of St Helens Auckland.

Both streets still stand.

It was Samuel’s business brain that drove the venture, but he relied on the engineering skills of John Gardiner of New Shildon, who seems to have learned his skills from Timothy Hackworth in the Soho Works in Shildon.

By the end of the century, LG had expanded to fill four acres near where the Asda supermarket is today. They turned their hands at anything, from rebuilding colliery locomotives to repairing roller flour mills.

But after the First World War, the south Durham coalfield went into rapid decline, and on May 12, 1931, the company, which was still in the hands of Lingfords and Gardiners, went into voluntary liquidation.

This gave the researchers one of their few definite insights into the company because the liquidators recorded how they sold the only locomotive known to have been built from scratch by LG in 1932. It went for £1,100 and worked for Kettering Furnaces in Northamptonshire until 1962 – it must, therefore, have been a pretty decent piece of engineering.

After the liquidation, the Lingfords and the Gardiners disappeared from Bishop. The Lingford descendants went to Australia and Michael O’Neill has traced Samuel’s great-grandson to Lincolnshire.

“As for the Gardiners, they seem as if they don’t want to be found,” says Michael. “I know they lived in Albert Hill in Bishop up until 1928, and then they vanish.”

If you can shed any light on either family, email Memories or go along to the launch today and have a look at the history group’s railway exhibition of banners, football excursions and even a 1919 poster from the nearby Hippodrome.

The book itself costs £5. Further details from geraldslack@live.co.uk

AND so to the quirk: the Rational Umpire, “a safety bicycle” built in Railway Street from 1894. How did it get its name?

In the course of their research, Gerald and Michael came across 16-year-old Tessie Reynolds who set a famous record by cycling 120 miles on a men’s bike from London to Brighton and back in eight hours and 30 minutes.

Cycling had become massively popular among men in the early 1880s, but, inspired by Tessie, women started getting on their bikes in the mid-1890s, just as LG were going into manufacture.

Tessie was particularly controversial because she cycled wearing “rational” clothing: clothing that was fit for purpose. In this case, Tessie ditched the Victorian skirts and bustles, and pedalled off in pantaloons and a shirt – suspiciously male looking attire.

Critics thought it an outrage against femininity and decency; the suffragettes held Tessie and the rational clothing movement up us ground-breaking feminists.

Tessie’s father was a bike seller who doubled as a timekeeper and umpire in Brighton cycle races.

Could this be how LG, keen to sell their bicycle to the burgeoning female market, came up with the quirky name for their product?