Quaker College

The Society of Friends grew out of the English Civil War of the mid 17th Century. Its founder, George Fox, toured the country expounding his views on a simple, direct relationship with Jesus Christ without ceremony and clergy getting in the way. Quaker services were usually a period of quiet reflection or study until one of their number felt moved to speak – they were said to “to tremble in the way of the Lord”, and so they were nicknamed “Quakers”. As are today’s football team!

The North-East was fertile territory for Fox. Before his death in 1691, he preached in villages around Darlington – Heighington, Raby and Headlam. In 1678, the Quakers had bought a couple of cottages, with a paddock behind, on Skinnergate for £35. Over the decades, they turned these cottages into meeting houses – one for men, one for women – and enlarged the ground so it was big enough to take burials (about 1,000 bodies are believed to still lie below the soil).

The two main Darlington families involved in building the factories needed and getting the money required to pay for the Stockton & Darlington Railway in 1825 were quakers – the Pease Family (factories) and Backhouse Family (bankers). By then, the Quakers had established a permanent headquarters in Darlington. These two families owned large houses called villas in Darlington and Joseph Pease’s statue in on High Row.