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A PLAQUE has been placed on the terraced house which was once the home of the dance teacher who, more than 100 years ago, led the campaign for women to get the vote. The plaque is dedicated to Maria Swanson, who is one of the great unknowns of the local suffrage movement. Maria Swanson, Darlington suffragist. Picture courtesy of the Darlington Centre for Local Studies For a provincial town, Darlington played a surprisingly lively role over many decades in the campaign, and Miss Swanson was one of the most prominent local leaders. However, perhaps because these campaigners were ordinary working class women, their activities are not recorded, and once the vote was won in 1918, they stepped back into the daily business of running their households. ....
ONE hundred years ago this week, Darlington was given one of the most remarkable gifts in its history: a big game collection, the finest in the north of England, including 182 heads of exotic animals and an enormous stuffed creature that was to become a feature of many Darlingtonians’ childhoods. The Northern Echo in 1921 said the collection comprised “a magnificent Polar bear, the head and hide of a royal black-maned lion, the head and skull of a huge white rhinoceros, and a gigantic buffalo – second largest of its kind in the country – topi, tiang, oryx-bisa, gerenuk, giant and lesser elands, antelopes, hogs, gazelles, hippopotami, dinka, kondoo, cheeta, and a giraffe”. ....
BOWLS looks such a genteel game but in Darlington it had an explosive start. Part of the town centre blew up, killing a lad and reducing a yard to rubble and dust, but out of those ashes, exactly 125 years ago this week, the first bowls club was formed. And today that club is exploding again, only this time in a pleasant way with scores of new members raring for a roll up when the green reopens next month. The South Park Bowling Club was formed on March 11, 1896, at a meeting in the Mechanics Institute which may still have been surrounded by the rubble caused by the explosion on October 9, 1894, in the yard behind it. ....