Easby Abbey owner's fury at broken down train

AN exasperated RHW Jacques, of Easby Abbey, wrote to the D&S Times 100 years ago this week to tell of the terrible experience he, and 500 fellow passengers, had endured at Darlington station as they tried to get home to Richmond.

The express from London had landed him on time at Bank Top at 10.15pm ready to catch his 10.50pm connection to Richmond. When there was no sign of it at 11.30pm, Mr Jacques confronted the stationmaster who told him the engine had broken down two hours earlier at Cowton, and that the only spare engine had just set off to collect it.

It wasn’t until 12.45 on Sunday morning, that Mr Jacques left Darlington, arriving in Richmond half-an-hour later.

“It will thus be seen that the time occupied in getting from Darlington to Richmond was exactly three hours – distance a dozen miles – the same time as the Great Northern Railway train took to carry me from London to Doncaster – a distance of about 165 miles, or approximately 14 times the distance,” he railed at the end of the letter.

To make him angrier still, Mr Jacques had written a similar complaint to the D&S exactly a year earlier.

Mr Jacques – he only signed his initials but his full name was Robert Harold Whetham Jacques – was the fourth generation of his family to live at Easby Hall, with dramatic views down to the abbey, but for much longer their family seat had been in the neighbouring St Trinian’s Hall on the estate.

Last week, the D&S reported how St Trinian’s has just gone on the market with Hewetson and Johnson with a guide price of £2.5m. It is “a majestic family home full of character and architectural interest”, but it also has a quirky name that is more usually associated with saucy schoolgirls and jolly hockeysticks.

St Trinian's, on the edge of Richmond, is on the market with a guide price of £2.5m

In the early 17th Century, the Robinson family named the first property on the site St Ninian after a 5th Century saint who was a missionary among the Picts of Scotland. In Gaelic, his name was Trinnean.

Around 1630, their heiress, Margaret Robinson, married into the long-established Richmondshire Jaques family who adopted the Gaelic name for the property.

The change was reinforced when the old property burned down in 1680, and the new hall of St Trinian’s rose from its ashes by 1706. This is the Grade II listed building that stands today, although the Jaques family added to it considerably over the decades, and the current owners, Peter and Sue Mothersill, have spent the last 20 years lovingly restoring it.

In 1816, Robert Jaques bought the Easby Abbey estate for £45,000 – £4m in today’s values – and Easby Hall became the family’s principal seat with St Trinian’s usually housing the eldest son until he inherited.

Easby Abbey in 1962. It was part of the Jacques estate which included St Trinian's Hall

When our letter writer RHW Jacques inherited Easby Hall in 1916 he was aged 41 and unmarried and so had no need for a spare hall – he did marry Bertha in 1918 but she died in Monte Carlo in 1923 when they were on a touring holiday.

Our Mr Jacques sold St Trinian’s to Sir Everard Radcliffe, a Newcastle stockbroker, who had been captain of Yorkshire Cricket Club in 1910. Hopefully Sir Everard, a 5th Baronet, was a better stockbroker than he was cricketer because in his first class career, he made only 826 runs at an average of 10.86 and took just two wickets at an average of 67.

He wouldn’t even get into the current England team with figures like that.

During his time at St Trinian’s, Sir Everard must have been hit for six as the obscure saint’s name became associated with schoolgirl sauciness due to the work of cartoonist Ronald Searle.

In the early 1940s, Searle had met a couple of pupils of St Trinnean’s boarding school for girls in Edinburgh who told him about their punishment-free education which began each day with eurythmics on the lawn. He began drawing cartoons of the naughty antics of the gymslip-clad girls which became so popular they were turned into a series of films, starting with The Belles of St Trinian's in 1954.

Richmond station in 1952 - now you dine on the tracks. Picture from the Station archive

Sir Everard died at St Trinian’s in 1969, which was the year that the last train ran on the Richmond line. Indeed, just down the B6271 from St Trinian’s was the Broken Brea level crossing which may once have been an unofficial halt for the Jacques family on a late night train home – perhaps that’s why our letter writer 100 years ago was in such a miserable mood when not only was his train two-and-a-half hours late, but he had to get off in Richmond as well.

Broken Brea.