Henry King Spark
| Henry King Spark | |||||||||||
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| Born | 1824 | ||||||||||
| Died | 1899 | ||||||||||
| Residence |
Colliery Office, Darlington Greenbank, Darlington [1866] | ||||||||||
| Occupation | business | ||||||||||
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Contents
Notes
Office Notes
House Notes
Notes From Elsewhere
Landowner and Colliery Owner
Darlington & Stockton Times: In 1864, the Thompsons went into liquidation and it was then sold to Henry King Spark. Spark purchased the paper to raise his own political profile in and around the Darlington area.
In 1867, the D&S Times was instrumental in both Darlington's Incorporation and its creation into a Parliamentary borough. But both campaigns brought the paper into conflict with local industrial barons, the Peases, who responded by creating The Northern Echo. In 1878, following a decade of feuding between the two factions Spark was made bankrupt and was forced to sell the D&S Times to the Northern Echo proprietor John Hyslop Bell.
...Henry King Spark 1824-1899 is the Darlington business man who owned the local ironstone mine in Guisborough, Cleveland, at one time. He was quite famous around here and I assume you know all about him from the web. I thought that you might like to know that we have discovered a boundary stone in the local forest, which is marked HKS and is quite clearly to do with the ownership of the mine back in the 1860's
...Joseph Love, who sounds a fascinating fellow. He was born in New York (on Tyneside) in 1796, and worked underground until he married a Miss Pearson, from South Shields.
With her relative, Joseph Straker, he moved into timber and colliery-owning, with pits at Willington, Oakenshaw and Sunnybrow.
Then he fell into partnership with Henry King Spark, one of this column’s heroes. Spark was a maverick meglomaniac who believed he was the man to bring down the ruling Pease family in south Durham. Using his newspaper, the Darlington and Stockton Times, he attacked them at every opportunity.
Love and Spark bought Shincliffe Colliery, but Love soon saw that Spark had delusions of grandeur and ended their working relationship.
Spark tried to get himself elected unsuccessfully as Darlington mayor and then Darlington MP, while imagining that his Merrybent Railway was going to make him rich by exploiting mineral reserves near the village of Barton. It didn’t, and debts crowded in on him.
By contrast, Love prospered, building Mount Beulah in North Road, Durham, for himself to live in – it is now St Leonard’s School.
Love died in 1875 leaving a staggering fortune of £1m (that’s about £100m today).
But just before he died, Spark slapped in a £1m writ against Love making all sorts of malicious slurs. According to a High Court judge in London, this writ “harrassed out” the life from Love.
Spark was defeated in court, and although he sent Love to an early grave, Love’s name lives on in these highly prized bricks.