We believe this image of Ropner Park showing the fountain and cannon to be c1900s.
Picture Stockton Archive
A Pictorial History of Stockton-on-Tees
We believe this image of Ropner Park showing the fountain and cannon to be c1900s.
The first cannon to come back from Sebastopol came complete with their metal gun carriage. But the later cannon to come to England were just the gun barrels. A simple wooden chassis was built to carry these gun barrels – as in the case of the Stockton cannon.
I have memory of this canon on pre-war visits to the Ropner park, usually to the band stand for a concert. It had gone by the time I was at Richard Hind and doing sports in the park.
There was also a first world war tank standing on a plinth at the Park Road and Clairville Road cross roads Middlesbrough, I gazed in awe at it as we passed on our way by car for a day out at Redcar or Marske . Both went at the beginning of the war, there would be a lot of exotic metal in the canon and most was imported at that time, the tank was probably put back into action now we know how short we were of all things military and that carried over to my time in the Army too.
There was an old canon standing outside the TA centre on the Wilderness Road for years.
When the new A66 by-passed the Wilderness Road, it was decided to bring the cannon back to where it could be seen. For a while it stood outside the Dorman Museum, then it was moved into Albert Park, so it has had quite a nomadic existence.
Yes it would be around that time. I collect old postcards of Stockton, and a card from around the early 1900s shows the cannon next to the fountain. The thing is I don’t think anyone knows what became of the cannon or where it went. If anyone knows please enlighten us.
This cannon was one of 700 guns found in the Russian citadel at Sebastopol and sent back to the UK as trophies of the Crimea War. The Government presented a cannon to any borough requesting one, as well as to major towns in the Empire. But come W.W. II and the appeal for scrap iron, a lot of towns – including Stockton – offered their cannon up for the war effort. Relatively few have survived, the nearest being the one at Middlesbrough which now stands in Albert Park, and one at the headland in Hartlepool. The cannon would have been presented to Stockton in the late 1850s, so where did it stand before Ropner Park opened in 1893 ?