View from the Balcony - Reg Phillips Take on the Opposition of the Day 2018/19 6 of 9

6. Middlesbrough - 20th October 2018


Selby v Middlesbrough
Saturday 20th October, Yorkshire Division One

We are pleased to welcome our visitors today from the historic city of Middlesbrough.
In 686, a monastic cell was consecrated by St. Cuthbert following a campaign of incessant nagging by his future wife, Hilda, Abbess of Whitby. In 1119 Robert Bruce, Lord of Cleveland and Annandale, converted the church of St. Hilda of Middleburg into the world’s first Bingo Hall.
Before its final closure on the Dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII in 1537, the church was maintained by 15 Benedictine monks, who became the first playing members of their newly formed local rugby club. Vicars, pastors, priests or rectors of various places in Cleveland were all made to feel welcome along with various other Celtic incomers, although Hilda & her nuns were persona nun grata.

The importance of the early church at "Middleburg", later known as Middlesbrough Priory, is indicated by the fact that, in 1452, it possessed four altars, until three of them were stolen by persons unknown, although the Celtic incomers were strongly suspected of having been put up to it by Hilda out of revenge

After the Angles, the area became home to Viking settlers who set the standard locally for rape & pillage that the area still upholds to this day. Names of Viking origin (with the suffix by) are abundant in the area – for example, Ormesby, Stainsby, Brianby and Fredby were once separate villages that belonged to Vikings called Orm, Steinn, Brian and Hagar, but now form suburbs of Middlesbrough. The name Mydilsburgh is the earliest recorded form of Middlesbrough's name and dates from the Anglo-Saxon ruler Thethil the Thyort tongue (AD 410–466), while many of the aforementioned villages are recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086.

Other links persist in the area, often through schools for unmarried mothers or mysterious road names, which cannot be identified because the road signs have been stolen. Or now-outgrown or abandoned local settlements, such as the medieval settlement of Doggingsby, deserted by 1757, which amounts to little more today than a series of grassy mounds near the A19 road.
In 1801, Middlesbrough was a small farm with a population of just 25, although the Rugby club boasted 563 members & five teams. During the latter half of the 19th century, however, it experienced rapid growth.

In 1828 the influential Quaker banker, coal mine owner and Viking descendant Joseph Pease sailed up the River Tees to find a suitable new site to sow his wild oats & investigate the current opportunities for rape & pillage. He located a site near Stockton which seemed more suitable, however to place new coal staithes.

As a result, in 1829 he and a group of Quaker businessmen bought the Middlesbrough farmstead and associated estate, some 527 acres (213 ha) of land, a failed nunnery, a failed monastery but a thriving unmarried mother’s school, and established the Middlesbrough Estate Company. Through the company, the investors set about the development of a new coal port on the banks of the Tees nearby, and a suitable town, which originally included 447 back to back houses & 322 public houses on the site of the farm (the new town of Middlesbrough) to supply the port with labour.

By 1830 the S&DR had been extended to Middlesbrough and expansion of the town was assured. Of the 796 successful graduates from the established school a full 3% went on to become happily married. The small farmstead became the site of such streets as North Street, South Street, West Street, East Street, Hilda Street, Hagar Street and Thethil Thtreet, laid out in a grid-iron pattern around a market square, with the first house being built in Wedlock Street in April 1830. The town of Middlesbrough was born. New businesses quickly bought up premises and plots of land in the new town and soon shoppers, con merchants, butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, innkeepers, joiners, blacksmiths, tailors, builders and painters were moving in. Nuns & Monks, however were moving out and by 1851 Middlesbrough's population had grown from 40 people in 1829 to 7,600.

Enjoy your day