Public screening of The David McLaren diaries (1911-1913)

About The David McLaren diaries

In 2010, while looking for bargains at a car boot sale in Hull, Brian Powdrell came across, and subsequently purchased, a set of three neatly handwritten antique diaries. The stall holder selling the diaries reported that they had come into his possession after being recovered from a waste skip, retrieved from a house clearance in Harrogate.

Once Brian got home and started to read the diaries more fully, he realised their potential historical importance and wanted to find them a permanent home within a library or heritage organisation based locally to where the diarist, responsible for them, had clearly once lived. This was a location unknown to Brian, the small village of Thorpe Thewles, in southeast County Durham. After a short internet search, Brian got in contact with Thorpe Thewles History Group (TTHG). He subsequently gifted the diaries to the group on the agreement that they would transcribe, research and hopefully, in time, make their contents fully available to all.

Thanks to the award of a grant from the National Heritage Lottery Fund, in 2024, TTHG have now been able to fulfil Brian’s wishes. With the assistance of Lonely Tower Film and Media, community volunteers and subject matter experts from Beamish Museum, The Northern Echo and The Green Howards Museum, TTHG have produced a 90-minute documentary about the discovery of the diaries, their contents and the life and times of their writer. This documentary is planned for public release in early 2026 along with the publishing of a limited print run of David’s transcribed diaries which will be donated free to selected local and national libraries and heritage organisations.

The diaries were written in 1911, 1912 and 1913 by a teenage boy, David McLaren, who lived at Manor Farm, Thorpe Thewles. David was the oldest son of Hannah and William McLaren who were tenant farmers in the village. David was the oldest of the couple’s three children, the young ones being Peter and Janet. At the time of writing his diaries David was a senior pupil at Stockton Grammar School. In 1914, he took up a scholarship to study Agriculture at Durham University’s Armstrong College in Newcastle. However, by the end of that same year, he had enlisted into the army’s Officer Training Corps and subsequently went on to serve as a frontline officer in France, during the Great War. A war in which he was to play his part with honour but with profound and devastating consequences.

David’s diaries present a vivid account of a young man’s life in what was then a semi-rural part of southeast County Durham in the years immediately leading up to the Great War. They record much of the young diarist’s detailed daily life along with accounts of both local, regional and international events of interest (many of a sporting nature) as well village gossip and scandals.

Their contents touch on many significant regional, national plus several international matters which David thought were of importance. Amongst these are the Pontypridd railway disaster, Britain’s first national railway and coal miners’ strikes, Captain Scott’s ill-fated expedition to the South Pole, the sinking of the Titanic, the Senghenydd colliery disaster and what David intuitively perceived to be the growing political ‘storm clouds’ in Europe, which ultimately led to the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. The diaries contain a veritable ‘gold mine’ of information for historians interested in northern England, particularly southeast County Durham.