XXV
The remaining miles to Gateshead are made up of the shabby village of Low Fell, where the road begins to rise, and the uninteresting way over the ridge of the Fell itself. By the word “Fell,” North of England people describe what Southerners call a hill. The common land of Gateshead Fell, 675 acres, was enclosed under Acts of Parliament, 1809, 1822.
Many were the gibbets erected in the old days on Gateshead Fell. The last was that on which swung the body of Robert Hazlett, who on this spot, on the evening of August 6th, 1770, robbed a young lady, Miss Margaret Benson, who was returning to Newcastle in a post-chaise from Durham. On the same night a post-boy was relieved of his bags at the same place. Hazlett was hanged at Durham, and his body gibbeted here, twenty-five feet high. For some time afterwards, every day for an hour, an old man was seen to kneel and pray at the foot of the gibbet. It was the wretched man’s father! A beacon was fixed on the Fell in the winter of 1803–4, on an alarm of invasion; hence this height was afterwards known as “Beacon Hill.”
The present-day aspect of the road does not hint at anything so tragical, and is merely commonplace, the last touch of vulgarity added by the trams that ply along it from Gateshead.
The place-name of Gateshead seemed to John Ogilby, in his book, Britannia Depicta, 1676, to require explanation, and he proceeded to say that it was “alias Gate-Side, seated on the Banks of the Tine, by the Saxons call’d Gates-heved, i.e. Caprae Caput, or Goat’s-head, perchance from an Inn with such a sign.”
But perchance not. While the Saxon name certainly was Gatesheved, it meant “road’s head,” either in allusion to the Roman bridge across the river being broken down and passage being possible only by water, or else referring to the abruptly-descending land on either side, where the road would seem to be coming to a sudden end.
Gateshead is to Newcastle what Southwark is to London, and the Tyne which runs between may be likened in the same way to the Thames. Comparison from any other point of view is impossible. Gateshead is nowadays a great deal worse than it was when Doctor Johnson called it “a dirty lane leading to Newcastle.” It may be ranked among the half-dozen dirtiest places on earth, and the lane which the Doctor saw has sent forth miles of streets as bad as itself, so that the geographical distribution of filth and squalor has in modern times become very wide. There are two ways of entering Newcastle since the High Level Bridge across the Tyne has supplemented what used to be the old Tyne Bridge, once, and until fifty years ago, the only way of crossing the river except by boat. When Stephenson flung his High Level Bridge across that stream, as yellow, if not as historic, as the Tiber, he provided a roadway for general traffic beneath the railway, and the old bridge lost its favour, simply for the reason that to cross it the steeply descending West Street and Bottle Lane had to be taken and the just as steeply ascending bank of the river on the Newcastle side to be climbed; while by the High Level a flat road was provided. It is true that all traffic, pedestrian and wheeled, pays a small toll for the privilege, but it is the lesser of the two evils.
Let those who have no concern with old times take their easeful way through the gloomy portals of the High Level Bridge, eighty-five feet above high-water mark. But let us examine the steep and smelly street, paved with vile granite setts and strewn with refuse, which conducts to the Tyne Bridge, or the Swing Bridge as it is nowadays, since the old structure was removed, the channel of the river deepened, and the wonderful swinging portion of the remodelled bridge, 281 feet in length, and swung open or closed by hydraulic power, constructed in 1876. With that work went the last fragments of the Roman bridge built by Hadrian (Publius Aelius Hadrianus) more than a thousand years before; a bridge which, indeed, gave the Roman camp its name of Pons Ælii. His bridge, long in ruins, was replaced in 1248 by a mediæval structure which was destroyed by a flood in 1771.
This way came the coaches, climbing into Newcastle up Sandhill and the 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.”
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.
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.
