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.
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.