Why they went through hell for leather in Durham

The process of preserving an animal skin through tannins involved pits full of stale urine and the use of animal faeces while the very nature of the business meant there was often decaying flesh on the site. It stank.

Perhaps this contributed to the gradual degeneration of the Milburngate area. When John Blagdon founded the business around 1834, Milburngate was a respectable middle class area, but by the 1930s, it contained slums that were considered the worst in England. Their clearance in the 1950s and 1960s allowed the Milburngate Bridge to be driven across the Wear, ready for opening in 1967, when Blagdon’s shut.

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The Blagdons themselves usually lived away from the site – founder John, for instance, built Red Hills Villa (below) near where the miners’ parliament would later be built.

Another generation of Blagdons lived in Shincliffe, where Florence Blagdon was twice president of the village Women’s Institute, in 1926 and 1930.

She came from Oswestry in Shropshire where her father, Richard Mason, was a brass and ironfounder and, in 1900 when Florence was 18, mayor.

And in that year her mother, Agnes, requested a separation order from Richard on the grounds of his violent abuse under the 1895 Married Women’s Act – a landmark piece of legislation which enabled women for the first time to legally break from their abusive husbands.

The deputy mayor of Oswestry heard the case in which Agnes alleged “persistent cruelty” against Richard. They’d been married 20 years and had had 10 children, but in recent times she alleged that the mayor had beaten her with a birch rod about the head, kicked her out of bed, attempted to smother her and inflicted a black eye upon her.

However, in the witness box, Richard alleged that Agnes had undergone a behavioural transformation when her mother had died suddenly five years earlier. She had made life “hell on earth” for their children and the only time he had been violent towards her was when he intervened to stop her “half killing” them.

He said that she had moved to Rhyl to run a lodging house and was viewing his term as mayor as a “golden opportunity” to wring extra money out of him.

Having aired their dirty laundry in public – “A Shropshire mayor and his wife – a painful story of domestic life” was the headline in the Ludlow Observer – the unhappy couple came to an out-of-court settlement.

Perhaps it was because of the fall-out from the case – Oswestry, which today has a population of 17,000, must have been alive with gossip about the mayor’s family life – that in the 1901 census, Florence was recorded as living in Jarrow and working as a nurse.

Garry Stout, of Shincliffe History Society, who is researching all the village WI presidents, then found her in 1911 living in a lodging house in Old Elvet before, in 1913, she married George Blagdon, probably the third generation of Blagdons to run the leatherworks.

Durham, like most places, had had several unpleasant leatherworks but at the outbreak of the First World War, Blagdon’s was the only one still operating.

Blagdon’s leatherworks at the centre of this 1960 picture. On the left on the riverside is Lambton Walk

And it fell to Florence’s son, George, born in 1915, to close the works in 1967, allowing them to be demolished and replaced by the shopping centre, which has itself recently been demolished.

By then, Florence, who had been a widow since her husband died in 1944, was living in Seahouses where she died in 1968.

A painting by Clive Madgin of Lambton Walk on Milburngate riverside. “Lambton Walk came to be very run down, virtually derelict,” says Clive. “I did this painting shortly before it was demolished. It caught my eye because I liked to paint tumbledown and derelict sites”

The Five Ways Inn in the 1960s. Its address was at No 130, Framwellgate and it can be seen in the background of Clive Madgin’s picture of Lambton Walk on the riverside. Picture courtesy of the Gilesgate Archive

The Milburngate bridge shortly before its opening in 1967

• With many thanks to Garry Stout for his research, Clive Madgin for his artworks, and Michael Richardson, of the Gilesgate Archive, for his picture