Ketton Ox: Animal & Pub, Pt 2 (NZ419129)

© Copyright Gordon Hatton and licensed for 

reuse under this Creative CommonsLicence.

The Ketton Ox public house, a fine-looking affair at No.100 High Street, Yarm, has a history stretching back, in various forms and under many names, some 400 years.  It must have enjoyed its fair share of custom during the town’s long reign as one of the region’s premier coaching stops – to say nothing of Yarm’s status as the Tees’ primary port before the rise of Stockton and Middlesbrough.

However, as elegant as it looks today, the establishment has dark associations with the once rampantly popular sport of cockfighting. Indeed the place was well-known for its gory gatherings when it was a legal pastime; but come a rather inconvenient change in the law in 1835, it had to move with the times… the landlord switching the venue to another room – conveniently fitted with a trapdoor to permit escape if the place was raided!

Being over four centuries old, the pub is, of course, haunted, with all manner of ghostly going-on, it would seem. Many put this down to the fact that the pub was once used as a morgue, primarily for bodies which, from time to time, found themselves floating lifeless in the River Tees.

Ketton Ox: Animal & Pub, Pt 1 (NZ419129)

The oldest inn / public house in Yarm is probably The Ketton Ox, neatly situated at No.100 High Street. It is named after the famous bull of the same name which is illustrated above.

This immense animal, better known in later life as the Durham Ox, lived during 1796-1807, and was an early example of what came to be known as the Shorthorn breed of cattle. Bred by Charles Colling of Ketton Hall, near Darlington, it hit the headlines after being exhibited in Darlington in 1799. In 1801, John Day bought the beast and renamed it the Durham Ox, showing it to gawping crowds far and wide across the land – spending most of 1802 in London alone.

Its weight was variously given as 171 stone – 270 stone, but its bulk was to prove its undoing when, in February 1807, it damaged its hip getting out of a carriage and had to be slaughtered several weeks later. It was said to be 189 stone dead weight.

Its legacy lives on in many an etching and painting (its image was even set in porcelain) – and in dozens of pub names around the world. Astonishingly, a town in Australia is even named after it.

Important Pub Meet (NZ419128)

© Copyright Pauline Eccles and licensed for 

reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

The little silver plaque betwixt window and entrance says it all:

S.&.D.R.

In the commercial room of this

hotel, on the

12^th Day of February, 1820

was held the

Promoters’ Meeting

of the

Stockton & Darlington

Railway –

The first public railway in the world.

Thomas Meynell, esq., of Yarm, presided.

Strangely enough, though, it wasn’t the first meeting of the railway pioneers for the construction of the famous S&DR – but it was the one from which the third, and successful, plan emerged which would eventually be approved by Parliament in April the following year.

Port of Yarm (NZ417131)

Though it may seem utterly unbelievable today, the town of Yarm, in the very depths of North-East England (and eighteen winding miles from the sea), was once the premier port of the River Tees. The industries of Middlesbrough, Stockton and Billingham – all downstream – now far outstrip Yarm in terms of river traffic, yet for centuries this was far from the case.

Until the building of the bridge at Stockton in 1771, the aging structure at Yarm was the nearest crossing point on the Tees to the sea. Furthermore, Yarm represents pretty much the tidal (and navigational) limit of the river, so the town understandably became an important spot for trade and commerce. However, it probably owes its ancient foundation to its easily defendable position in an inverted ‘U’ in the river’s course.

A royal charter granted in 1207 gave the Yarm its weekly market and two annual fairs; and the Black Friars settled in the town in the 13^th century, remaining until the 1580s.  The old stone bridge – still standing – was built in 1400, and the settlement grew and prospered until, essentially, merchant ships became too big to make it up river – with first Stockton, then Middlesbrough taking over the role as the River Tees’ main port. Yarm, however, remained prominent as a coaching stop – as is evidenced, at least historically, by its high number of inns and pubs.

Yarm looks anything but a port these days, yet is still as charming as ever.

An Infant Hercules (c.NZ494210)

Yes, “Middlesbrough in 1832”.  To the uninitiated, it seems incredible.  The former medieval village had shrunk to little more than a farmstead by the turn of the nineteenth century, but would soon see its population boom beyond belief in the ensuing decades…

Yarm was, Stockton is, Middlesbrough will be.

[Old Teesside proverb, believed to have been uttered by industrialist Joseph Pease in the 1830s]

Population of Middlesbrough:

1801:   25

1829:   40

1831:   131

1841:   5,500

1851:   7,600

1861:   19,000

1871:   40,000

1881:   58,000

1891:   75,000

1901:   90,000

1932:   139,000

Present:  c.140,000

A growth rate believed to be unprecedented in Victorian England.

This remarkable place, the youngest child of England's enterprise, is an infant, but if an infant, an infant Hercules.

[William Gladstone, 1862]