From the Darlington & Stockton Times of June 24, 1871

THE paper of 150 years ago is full of terrible accidents, usually involving runaway horses and carriages, or peculiar industrial practices: lead ore smelter John Sunter was severely burned at Reeth’s Old Gang Mines when “he slipped into a pot containing the molten liquid”.

But none of the accidents was more tragic than that which cost the life of Robert Stephenson’s one-year-old son in the Goliath’s Head Inn in Barnard Castle’s Horsemarket. His mother had put the infant down for his afternoon nap and then, sometime later, had forgotten he was in bed and had folded the bed away.

“Sometime elapsed before the child was thought of, and when the bed was let down, the child was found dead, by suffocation, to the great grief of its parents,” said the D&S.

The paper also reported that a violent thunderstorm had struck the district, with a cow being killed by “electric fluid” at Over Dinsdale. In Reeth, “the rain descended in torrents, and the becks and rivers were fearfully swollen”.

The D&S said: “The Arkle Beck was, it may be said, a repetition of the great flood on Whit Monday 1864, but no damage of any serious extent has been heard of anywhere in the dales.”

The most vivid description of the storm came from the D&S’ Weardale correspondent: “The ‘brattles’ of thunder were loud and alarming, whilst the fire, which was both forked and chain, was vivid and distinctly seen in the clouds. It was an ‘awsome day’, as the country people say, and such a one as has not been witnessed for some time.”