Side, whose steep and curving roadway remains to prove how difficult were
the ways of travellers as well as transgressors in the old times. Old
and new jostle here. The Swing Bridge turns silently on its pivot to the
touch of a lever in its signal tower, and a force our grandfathers never
knew performs the evolution; but side by side with this miracle still
stand the darkling lanes and steep waterside alleys of Gateshead and
Newcastle that were standing before science and commerce, mother and
daughter, came down upon the Tyne and transformed it.
A writer in an old-time Northern magazine appears to have been jolted
into a bad humour respecting Newcastle’s precipitous old approach:—“We
have no connection whatever with the coal-trade, and were never at
Newcastle but once, passing through it on the top of an exceedingly heavy
coach, along with about a score of other travellers. But, should we live
a thousand years, it would not be possible for us to forget that transit.
We wonder what blockhead first built Newcastle; for before you can get
into and out of it, you must descend one hill and ascend another, about
as steep as the sides of a coal-pit. Had the coach been upset that day,
instead of the night before and the day after, there would have been no
end and, indeed, no beginning, to this magazine. We all clustered as
thickly together on the roof of the vehicle (it was a sort of macvey, or
fly) as the good people of Rome did to see Great Pompey passing
along:—but we, on the contrary, saw nothing but a lot of gaping
inhabitants, who were momentarily expecting to see us brought low. We
remarked one man fastening his eye upon our legs that were dangling from
the roof under an iron rail, who, we are confident, was a Surgeon.
However, we kept swinging along, from side to side, as if the macvey had
been as drunk as an owl, and none of the passengers, we have reason to
believe, were killed that day—it was a maiden circuit. But, after all,
we love Newcastle, and wish its coals may burn clear and bright till
consumed in the last general conflagration.”
[Picture: Old Newcastle: Showing the now Demolished Town Bridge]
High over head goes the High Level, and the smoke and rumble of its
trains mingle with the clash of Newcastle’s thousand anvils and the reek
of her million chimneys; but there still stands against the sky-line—most
fittingly seen from the Gateshead bank at eventide, when petty details
are lost and only broad effects remain—the coroneted steeple of St.
Nicholas and the great black form of the Norman keep, reminding the
contemplative that Monkchester was the name of the city before the
Conqueror came and built that fortress whose fame as the “New Castle” has
remained to this day to give a title to the place, just as the “new work”
at Newark has ever since stood sponsor for that town. Again, no sooner
have you crossed the Swing Bridge and come to Quayside than other
vestiges of old Newcastle are encountered, in the remains of the Castle
wall and the steps that lead upwards to Castle Garth, where shoemakers
and cobblers of footgear of the most waterside and unfashionable
character still blink and cobble in their half-underground dens, the
descendants, probably, of those whom a French traveller remarked here in
the time of Charles the Second. If, instead of climbing these stairs,
the traveller elects to follow the track of the coaches, he will traverse
Sandhill, which in very early days was an open space by the river, but
has for centuries past been a street. It was at Sandgate close by,
according to the ballad, that the lassie was heard to sing the well-known
refrain of “Weel may the keel row, the boat that my love’s in,” and
indeed it is a district that breathes romance, commonplace though its
modern offices may look. Does not the Moot Hall look down upon Sandhill?
“Many a heart has broken inside those walls,” said a passer-by, with
unwonted picturesqueness, to the present writer, gazing at that hall of
justice.
There is a pretty flavour of romance—compact, it is true, of the most
unpromising materials, like the voluptuous scents which modern science
extracts from coal-tar—still clinging to Sandhill. Just where a group of
curious old houses, very old, very tall, and nearly all windows, remains,
the explorer will perceive a memorial tablet let into one of the
frontages, setting forth that “From one of the windows of this house, now
marked with a blue pane of glass, Bessie Surtees eloped with John Scott,
afterwards Lord Chancellor Eldon, November 18th, 1772.” John Scott was
twenty-one years of age at the time, and was at home on vacation from
Oxford. His father, a successful coal-fitter, had sent him, as he had
already done his elder brother, William, afterwards Lord Stowell, to the
University. He had already gained a fellowship there, which he forfeited
on his elopement with, and marriage to, his Bessie. She descended from
her casement by the aid of a ladder hidden by an accomplice in the shop
below, and they were over the Border and wedded by the blacksmith at
Blackshields before any one could pursue. Bessie’s relatives were
bitterly opposed to the match, and so, nearly without resources, the pair
had to resort to London and live frugally in Cursitor Street while he
studied hard at law, instead of, as originally intended, for the Church.
His first year’s earnings scarce amounted to enough to live on. “Many a
time,” said he in after years, “have I run down from Cursitor Street to
Fleet Market, to buy sixpennyworth of sprats for our supper.” The
turning-point in his career occurred in a case in which he insisted on a
legal point against the wishes of his clients. The case was decided
against him, but was reversed on appeal on the point he had contested.
From that time continued success awaited him, and he eventually became
Lord Chancellor. The clashing Romeo of an earlier day became, however, a
very different person in after years. Much poring over parchments and
long-continued professional strife took all the generous enthusiasm out
of him, and by ways not the most scrupulous he amassed one of the
greatest fortunes ever scraped together by a successful lawyer. Bessie,
meanwhile, had become quite as much of a handful as she had been an
armful.
Romance wanes. As Conservators of the Tyne, the Corporation of Newcastle
have, for the last four centuries, proclaimed their authority by once in
every five years going in procession on the river, in various craft. It
was on these occasions the acknowledged custom that, on returning and
landing, the Mayor should choose the prettiest girl in the crowds of
spectators and publicly salute her with a civic kiss. In acknowledgment
of this favour his Worship presented her with a new sovereign. But the
procession of “Barge Day,” as it was called, was discontinued after May
16th, 1901, and is not likely to be revived.
From Sandhill the coaches journeyed along the Side, which remains as
steep and almost as picturesque as ever, even if not rendered
additionally curious by the gigantic railway arch that spans it and
clears the roofs of its tallest houses. The last mail-coach left
Newcastle for Berwick and Edinburgh, with the Union Jack flying at
half-mast, on July 5, 1847, and those days are so thoroughly done with
that none of Newcastle’s coaching inns are left. Indeed, the whole
character of the place has changed since little over a century and a half
ago, when John Wesley entered the opinion in his diary that it was a
“lovely place and lovely company,” and, furthermore, said that “if he
were not journeying in hope of a better world, here he would be content
to live and die.” Coal had even then been shipped for centuries from
Newcastle, but miles of manufactories had not yet arisen upon the banks
of “coaly Tyne,” and so unprogressive was the town that it was still,
with gardens and orchards, easily comprised within its mediæval walls;
those walls which had many a time withstood the Scots, and even when
Wesley was here in 1745 were being prepared to resist the Pretender.
Newcastle—difficult as it may now be to realise the fact—was then a very
small town, and was governed accordingly. Primitive punishments as well
as primitive government survived until a hundred and fifty years ago,
when scolds still wore bridles or were ducked, and when local tipplers
yet perambulated the streets in the drunkard’s cloak, an ingenious
instrument of little ease which now reposes in the Museum.
Far beyond the ancient walls now extend the streets of the modern city;
Grey Street chief among them, classically gloomy and extra-classically
grimed to the blackness of Erebus; a heavy Ionic pillar at its northern
end bearing aloft the statue of Earl Grey, the Prime Minister who secured
the passing of the first Reform Bill in 1832.
Away from the chief business streets, many of the curious old
thoroughfares may be sought, but they are nowadays the receptacles of
inconceivable dirt, and anything but desirable. The narrow streets
called “chares” answer to the “wynds” of Edinburgh and the “rows” of
Yarmouth. Their name has been the subject of jokes innumerable, and
misunderstandings not a few; as, when a judge, previously unacquainted
with Newcastle, holding an assize here, heard a witness say that he saw
“three men come out of the foot of a chare,” and ordered him out of the
witness-box, thinking him insane, until the jury of Newcastle men
explained matters.
[Picture: “The Drunkard’s Cloak”] Despite its smoke and untidiness, the
folks of this grimy Tyneside city have a good conceit of it. To them it
is “canny Newcastle,” an epithet whose meaning differs from the Scotch,
and here means “fine,” or “neat.” The stranger who fails to find those
qualities, who perceives instead the defects of dirt and a pall of smoke
that blackens everything to an inky hue, and accordingly thanks
Providence that his home is elsewhere, is to the Tynesiders a Goth.
For Newcastle is practical. It has its great newspapers, and has
produced literary men of note; but the forging of iron and steel, the
shrinking of steel jackets upon big guns, the making of ships and all
kinds of munitions of war appeal principally to the Novocastrian who may
by chance have no especial love of that coaling trade which is
pre-eminently and historically his. It is therefore quite characteristic
of Newcastle folks that, in the mid-century, a literary man, since become
famous, was as a boy solemnly warned by a townsman against such a career
as he was contemplating. “Ah’m sorry,” said he, “to hear that ye want to
go to London, and to take to this writing in the papers. It’ll bring ye
to no good, my boy. I mind there was a very decent friend of mine, auld
Mr. Forster, the butcher in the Side. He had a laddie just like you; and
nothing would sarve him but he must go away to London to get eddicated,
as he called it; and when he had got eddicated, he wouldn’t come back to
his father’s shop, though it was a first-class business. He would do
nothing but write, and write, and write; and at last he went back again
to London, and left his poor old father all alone; and ah’ve never heard
tell of that laddie since!”
Of course he had not. What rumours of literary life in London could then
have penetrated to the shores of the “coaly Tyne.” That laddie, however,
was John Forster, the biographer of Dickens.
These practical men of Newcastle have achieved the most wonderful things.
The home of the Stephensons was at Wylam, only nine miles away, and so
the town can fairly claim the inventor of railways among its natives. We
need not linger to discuss the wonders of the locomotive; they are
sufficiently evident. Newcastle men have even changed the character of
their river. There are still those who can recollect the Tyne as a
shallow stream in which the laden “keels,” heaped up with coal, not
infrequently grounded. Nowadays the largest war-vessels are built
up-stream, at Elswick, and take their stately way to the sea with their
heavy armaments, and no mishap occurs. Clanging arsenals and factories
line the banks for many more miles than the historian, anxious for his
reputation, dare mention. The Armstrong works alone are over a mile
long, and employ some sixteen thousand hands. Lord Armstrong himself was
the inventor of hydraulic machinery; and the Swan incandescent electric
lamp, which bears the name of its inventor, was the work of a Newcastle
man. Others of whom England is proud were born here, notably Admiral
Lord Collingwood. To their practicality these men of Newcastle add
sentiment, for they have carefully placed tablets on the houses where
their celebrated men were born, and they have not only erected a monument
to Stephenson, but have also placed one of his first engines—“Puffing
Billy”—on a pedestal beside the High Level Bridge, where the huge modern
expresses roar past the quaint relic, day and night, in startling
contrast. Also, they one and all have the most astonishingly keen
affection for their old parish church of St. Nicholas, in these latter
days become a cathedral.
If you would touch a Novocastrian on his most sensitive spot, praise or
criticise the cathedral church of St. Nicholas, and he will plume himself
or lose his temper, as the case may be. That building, and especially
its tower, with the wonderful stone crown supported on ribbed arches and
set about with its cluster of thirteen pinnacles, is the apple of
Newcastle’s eye. It figures as a stock decorative heading in the
Newcastle papers, and does duty in a hundred other ways. Built toward
the close of the sixteenth century, that fairy-like corona has had its
escapes, as when, during the stubborn defence in 1644, under the Royalist
Sir John Marley, the Scottish general, Alexander Leslie, Lord Leven,
commanding the besieging forces, threatened to batter it down with his
cannon if the town were not at once surrendered. To this Sir John Marley
made the very practical reply of causing all his Scottish prisoners to be
placed in the tower, and sent word to the besiegers that they might, if
they would, destroy it, but that their friends should perish at the same
time. The “Thief and Reiver” bell, a relic of old times when the outlaws
of Northumberland were given short shrift wherever and whenever found, is
still rung before the opening of the annual fair, and recalls the old
custom of giving those gentry immunity from arrest during fair-time; but
it would probably not be safe for any one “wanted” by the police to rely
upon this sentimental survival.
[Picture: “Puffing Billy”]
XXVI
FOR fully a mile and a half on leaving Newcastle the road runs over the
Town Moor, a once wild waste of common, and even now a bleak and
forbidding open space whose horizon on every side commands the gaunt
Northumbrian hills, or is hidden with the reek of Newcastle town, or the
collieries that render the way sordid and ugly. Newcastle’s lovely
pleasance, Jesmond Dene, is hidden away to the right from the traveller
along the road, who progresses through Bulman’s Village (now dignified
with the new name of Gosforth), Salter’s Lane, Wide Open and Seaton Burn
with sinking heart, appalled at the increasing wretchedness and
desolation brought by the coal-mining industry upon the scene. Off to
the right lies Killingworth, among the collieries, where George
Stephenson began his career in humble fashion. His cottage stands there
to this day. At the gates of Blagdon Park, eight miles from Newcastle,
where the white bulls of the Ridleys guard the entrance in somewhat
spectral fashion, the surroundings improve. Here the Ridleys have been
seated for centuries, and from their wooded domain watched the belching
smoke of the pits they own, which year by year and generation by
generation have added to their wealth. Lord Ridley is now the
representative of these owners of mineral wealth, and lord of Blagdon.
Midway of the long park wall that borders the road on the way to Morpeth
stand the modern lodge and gates, erected in 1887; with that relic of old
Newcastle, the Kale Cross, just within the grounds and easily seen from
the highway. The building is not so much a cross as a market-house, and
is just a classical pavilion in the Doric style, open on all sides to the
weather. It stood, until the middle of the eighteenth century, upon the
Side at Newcastle, and marked the centre of the market then held there.
The townsfolk presented it to the Matthew White Ridley of the period, and
here in lovelier surroundings than it knew originally, it stands, the
wreathed urns and couchant lion on its roof contrasting finely with a
dense background of foliage.
Beyond the park, the road crosses the Black Dene, whence Blagdon derives
its name; one of those ravines that now begin to be a feature of the way.
This expands on the right hand into Hartford Dene, to which Newcastle
picnic-parties come in summer-time for brief respite from the smoke and
clangour of their unlovely town. Thence, through Stannington, Clifton,
and Catchburn, and to the long and tortuous descent into Morpeth, lying
secluded in the gorge of the Wansbeck.
Morpeth is little changed since coaching times, but the one very
noticeable alteration shows by what utter barbarians the town was
inhabited towards the close of that era. Entering it, the turbulent
Wansbeck is crossed by a stone bridge, built in 1830, to provide better
accommodation for the increased traffic than the ancient one, a few yards
up stream, afforded. For some five years longer the old building was
suffered to remain, and then, with the exception of its piers, it was
demolished. No one benefited by its destruction, it stood in no one’s
way, and its utility was such that a footbridge, a graceless thing of
iron and scantling, has been erected across those ancient piers, to
continue the access still required at this point from one bank to the
other. It was to our old friends the monks that travellers were beholden
for that ancient Gothic bridge, and their old toll-house still remains,
after having passed through a varied career as a chapel, a school, and a
fire-engine house. Turner’s view shows the road over the bridge, looking
south; with the castle gate-house on the hill-top, a great deal nearer
than it actually is. This, the sole relic of that old stronghold, has in
later years been restored until it looks almost as new as the would-be
Gothic of the gaol, which stands beside the modern bridge on entering the
town and deludes the more ignorant into a belief of its genuine
antiquity. At Morpeth, until the assizes were removed to Newcastle,
justice was dispensed in this sham mediæval castle, built in 1821, and
now, all too vast for present needs, used as a police-station. The old
town gaol, at the other end of the town, facing the market-place, is much
more interesting. Built in the likeness of a church tower, curfew is
still rung from its belfry, beneath the queer little figures on the roof.
Market-day brings crowds of drovers and endless droves of sheep and
cattle to this spot, to say nothing of the pigs, singularly plentiful in
these parts. “He’s driving his swine to Morpeth market,” is an
expression still used of a snoring man in the neighbourhood. Always
excepting market-day, Morpeth is now a curiously quiet and dreamy town.
The stress of ancient times has left its few relics in the mouldering
remains of strong and defensible walls, and in certain proverbs and
sayings reflecting discreditably upon the Scottish people, but the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are more evident in its streets than
previous eras. To those centuries belong the many old inns with signs
for the most part redolent of the coaching age: the “Nag’s Head,” the
“Grey Nag’s Head,” the “Queen’s Head,” “Turk’s Head,” and “Black Bull”;
this last with an odd semi-circular front and a beautiful coach-entrance
displaying some fine Adam decoration.
[Picture: Morpeth]
That Morpeth folk still cherish old anti-Scottish sayings is not at all
remarkable; for old manners, old sayings, and ancient hatreds die slowly
in such places as this, and moreover, the Morpeth of old suffered
terribly from Scottish raiders. Later times saw a more peaceful
irruption, when Scottish youths came afoot down the great road in quest
of fame and fortune in the south. People looked askance upon them as
Scots, while innkeepers hated them for their poverty and their canniness.
Those licensed victuallers thought, with Dr. Johnson, who did not greatly
like them either, that “the finest prospect for a Scotchman was the high
road that led him into England.” This bitter satire, by the way, was in
reply to a Mr. Ogilvie, who had been contending on behalf of the “great
many noble wild prospects” which Scotland contained. Smollett, in his
_Humphry Clinker_, shows how greatly the Scots were misliked along this
route about 1766. He says that, from Doncaster northwards, all the
windows of all the inns were scrawled with doggerel rhymes in abuse of
the Scottish nation. This fact was pointed out to that fine Scottish
character, Lismahago, and with it a particularly scurrilous epigram. He
read it with some difficulty, the glass being dirty, and with the most
starched composure.
“Vara terse and vara poignant,” said he; “but with the help of a wat
dishclout it might be rendered more clear and parspicuous.”
The country between Morpeth and Alnwick is dotted with peel-towers and
their ruins, built in the wild old times when the ancestors of these
peaceful Scots came in quest of spoil, laying waste the Borders far and
wide. One had but to turn aside from the road at Warrener’s House, two
miles beyond Morpeth, and thence proceed eastward for a further two, for
ten castles to be seen at once from the vantage-point of Cockle Park
Tower, itself a fine relic of a fortress belonging in the fifteenth
century to the Ogles, situated now on a farm called by the hideous name
of Blubberymires.
The peculiar appropriateness of Morpeth’s name, meaning as it does
“moor-path,” is fully realised when coming up the road, up the well-named
High Highlaws to where the road to Cockle Park Tower branches off, and
where an old toll-house stands, with “Warrener’s House,” a deserted
red-brick mansion, opposite. It is quite worth while to ask any passing
countryman the name of that house, for then the “Northumbrian burr” will
be heard in all its richness. As De Foe remarked, two hundred years ago,
Northumbrians have “a Shibboleth upon their Tongues, namely, a difficulty
in pronouncing the letter R,” and in their mouths, consequently, the name
becomes, grotesquely enough, “Wawwener.”
Causey Park Bridge, over a little rivulet, a ruined windmill, and the
remains of Causey Park Tower are the next features of the way before
reaching a rise where an old road goes scaling a hillside to the right
hand, surmounted by a farm picturesquely named “Helm-on-the-Hill.”
Thence downhill on to Bockenfield Moor, and then precipitously down again
through West Thirston and across the picturesque bridge that spans the
lovely Coquet, into Felton: villages bordering either bank of the river,
where the angler finds excellent sport, and where the rash cyclist,
regardless of the danger-boards erected for his guidance on the
hill-tops, tries involuntary conclusions with the aforesaid bridge at the
bottom. A mile onward, up the rising road, is the park of Swarland Hall,
with “Nelson’s Monument,” a time-stained obelisk, seen amid the trees
within the park fence, and showing against the sky-line as the traveller
approaches the moorland height of Rushy Cap. Alexander Davison, squire
of Swarland Hall and friend of the Admiral, erected it, “not to
commemorate the public virtue and heroic achievements of Nelson, which is
the duty of England, but to the memory of private friendship.” Occupying
so prominent a position by the roadside, it was probably intended to
edify the coach-passengers of old. So to Newton-on-the-Moor—which might
more fitly be named Newton-on-the-Hill—with its half a dozen cottages and
its coal-pits, and thence by a featureless but not unpleasing road into
Alnwick.
[Picture: The Market-Place, Morpeth]
[Picture: Felton Bridge]