There are tales to be told at Darlington's newest bar, Dr Inks

There may even be a “wind up keeper” on the range which also displays its maker’s name: Lear & Sons, Darlington.

Cellars are usually lowly, private affairs, where the below-stairs maids used the range to prepare meals for the family who lived in the three substantial storeys above ground, but as of Thursday night, it became the central talking point of Darlington’s newest bar.

Dr Inks has opened in No 1 Paradise Terrace, which is a townhouse dating from the 1830s in what we today know as Coniscliffe Road. A couple of centuries ago, though, this was a track leading to a large country house called Paradise, where the St Augustine’s parish centre is today.

The range in No 1 leads us back further, to 1760 when John Lear opened an ironmongery in Horsemarket beside Chancery Lane – Pizza Hut now occupies its spot.

Mr Lear, who came from Brixton in Devon but married a lass from Bishopton, was the first of five generations of Lears to deal in iron goods from Horsemarket.

The Lears catalogue from 1832 survives, and it shows you could buy anything iron-related that your heart could possibly desire: tinned skillets, manger ovens, sough grates, grog pots, maslin kettles, iron tinned porringers and saucepans with bright handles, for instance.

They had four different designs of spittoons, available in three sizes depending, we presume, in the volume of phlegm your customers was likely to cough up. Size zero, the smallest, was nine shillings for a dozen, but if you wanted the ultimate large luxury spittoon, which had a hinged cover, you’d be paying one shilling and eight pennies for one.

You could get a mole trap, a fox trap, a wolf trap, a deer trap or a humane man trap (humane because it just had iron bars which cleanly snapped a poacher’s leg unlike the inhumane trap which had iron teeth on it which ripped into the poacher’s flesh, as well).

Sheep bells started at a shilling each; cow bells were 1s 3d rising to 2s 3d.

And what an array of “best cast nails” Lear offered. There were lath nails, wall nails, flat point lath nails, hob lath nails, flooring brads, headed bills, plain bills, headed sprigs, hob bills, plain sprigs, shoe tubs, prison door nails, slate pegs, coffin nails, bullen nails, tinned trunk bullen nails, coffin pins, tinned Flemish tacks, tinned round head tacks, tinned rose head tacks, black tacks and japanned tacks, all available in a variety of sizes and often colours.

Coffin nails, for instance, were very short and were used for nailing the material to the inside of the coffin. They came in nine sizes and three finishes – white, lacquered and black. Coffin pins were longer and were used, we guess, for nailing the lid down. You could get them in white, lacquered, black, gilt and brass finishes depending upon the dead person’s wishes.

Plus, of course, Lears did a range of ranges, with or without backs and boilers, and if they had “wind up keepers” attached, they’d cost a bit more (other than shouting abuse at Joe Hart, we have no idea what a “wind up keeper” is).

Little wonder that Lears prospered, and their business expanded until they occupied all the higgledy-piggledy outhouses back to Houndgate, including taking over a Chancery Lane brushmaker’s business which had started in 1706. Brushmaking was big business: in 1851, the brushmaker employed four men and one apprentice whereas the ironmonger only employed three men and an apprentice.

Then, in 1853, a man in a hurry burst into the Horsemarket shop and ordered some gunshot, powder and gun caps. He tendered a large note, which the second Mr Lear was unable to change, so the customer took his order and promised to return for his change.

The Crimean War then broke out and the customer never returned, but for decades his change remained in an envelope beside Lears’ till just in case he came back from the battlefield.

But, of course, times change, sweeping aside the past. For example, the brushmaker – a man named Palphramand – worked in his garret until 1956, drilling holes in the brush-head, pouring in hot tar and then inserting boars’ hair specially imported from Russia.

For the business as a whole, the end came in 1965, when the fifth Mr Lear – John Aubrey – called it a day and retired. After 205 years of ironmongery, Lear & Sons – a true Darlington institution – was no more, although the name lives on a range which is itself enjoying a new lease of life in Dr Inks in Paradise Terrace.

MR PALPHRAMAND was the brush-maker at Lears for 50 years until he retired in 1956. It seems likely that he was related to people with the surname Palfreyman. A palfrey was a small horse, a runabout as opposed to a giant cart horse or war horse, and a palfreyman was in charge of it.

WE reckon Paradise Terrace, of three townhouses, was built in the 1830s because in 1840, Paradise Methodist Chapel was built next to it on a field owned by the Duke of Northumberland. The chapel was vast, capable of holding 800 worshippers at a single service, and yet in 1890 it was extended out the back so it had a hall and a school.

It proved too big for 20th Century needs. By the 1960s, its congregation had dwindled to 80, and the fabric of the building was in need of substantial repair. It closed in 1971, the congregation amalgamating with Bondgate, and it was demolished in 1973. The Coniscliffe House office block is now on its site.

THE townhouses of Paradise Terrace would have started as residential properties but due to their proximity to the town centre, they were taken over as offices. For example, 100 years ago, No 1 was occupied by Thomas Clayhills, solicitor (telephone Darlington 468), and the Haughton Road Brewery Company; No 2 was the home of the Inland Revenue, and No 3 was the offices of R Bowes, solicitor, and TC Wise, land agent.

Our man in No 1 is the most interesting. His full name appears to have been Thomas Clayhills-Henderson, and he came from a well-to-do Scottish military family. He was born in 1836 in Mainz in Germany and didn’t arrive in England, from Finland, until he was ten when he was classed as an “alien”. He pitched up in Darlington when he was a newly qualified solicitor and, married to a Thirsk woman, he progressed nicely.

No 1 was his office for many years, from which he ran a business empire. As well as his legal work and his sharedealing, he was big in beer, owning a brewery and the Dun Cow pub in Gainford. He co-owned a large part of Dundee with the Countess of Buckinghamshire and Lt-Col Henry Scrymgeour Wedderburn, which are names to conjure with, and he dabbled in real estate in Darlington: at one time or another, he had interests in the East Mount estate in Haughton Road, the Southend mansion which is now Bannatyne’s hotel, and the Woodburn estate next to Elm Ridge.

Somewhere along the way, he dropped the second barrel of his surname.

He and Elizabeth had nine children, including Captain George Clayhills, who was twice mentioned in despatches fighting in the Boer War, and was killed at the first battle of Ypres on November 2, 1914.

If we’ve got the right man, solicitor Thomas Clayhills died in 1933, when he was 98, and left an estate valued at £141,089 – that’s £9.6m in today’s values, according to the Bank of England’s Inflation Calculator.

All controlled from his office in No 1, Paradise Terrace. He may even have found time to break from his money-making to have a quick brew on the range in the cellar and make the connection with “Lear & Sons, Darlington” who in his day were trading just a couple of hundred yards away.

DO you have any items which you can trace back to J Lear & Sons? Do you have a range with an interesting name on it? Can you tell us what a “wind up keeper” is? Can you tell us any more about Thomas Clayhills? Please email chris.lloyd@nne.co.uk