Northumberland Yesterday and To-day

by Jean F. Terry

The High Level Bridge allows ships of any height to pass under its lofty and graceful arches, which look so light, but are yet so strong. This splendid bridge is an enduring monument of Robert Stephenson, whose work it was; and the story of its erection, at the cost of nearly half a million of money, makes most interesting reading. It took nearly two and a half years to build, and was opened for traffic in 1849—little more than three years after the first pile was driven in. A few months later, in 1850, the newly built Central Station, with its imposing portico, was opened by Queen Victoria.

Passing down the Tyne from Newcastle, which requires separate notice, and Walker, with its reminiscences of “Walker Pit’s deun weel for me,” we arrive at Wallsend, which in twenty-five years has grown from a colliery village with a population of 4,000 to a town of 23,000 inhabitants. Here are great shipbuilding and repairing yards, chemical works and cement works; here, too, are Parsons’ Steam Turbine Works, where was designed and built the little “Turbinia,” on which tiny vessel the early experiments were made with the new engines; and here are the famous mines which have made “Best Wallsend” a synonym for best household coal all over the land. These mines, after having been closed for many years, were reopened at the beginning of the century, and now turn out upwards of one thousand tons of coal per day.

The church of St. Peter, at Wallsend, is little more than a hundred years old; the old Church of Holy Cross, now long disused, was built towards the end of the twelfth century. But Wallsend itself, as all the world knows, is of much greater antiquity, for was it not, as its name proclaims, situated at the end of the Great Wall? Its name then, however, was not Wallsend but Segedunum.

Willington Quay, further down the river, was, for a time, the home of George Stephenson, and here his son, Robert, was born. At Howdon, which used to be known as Howdon Pans, from the salt-pans there, the painter John Martin and his brothers once worked when boys, being employed in some rope-works. Here, too, the Henzells, a family of refugees who settled in the district in the days of Elizabeth, founded some glass works, for which industry the Tyne has been famous from that day to this.

The River Tyne at Newcastle (showing Swing Bridge Open).

Before the railway on the south side of the river was laid down, passengers who wished to reach Jarrow had to alight at Howdon and cross the river; and a racy dialect song—“Howdon for Jarrow” with its refrain of “Howdon for Jarra—ma hinnies, loup oot”—commemorates the fact. Willington Quay and Howdon carry on the line of shipbuilding yards to Northumberland Dock and the staithes of the Tyne Commissioners, where the waggon ways from various collieries bring the coal to the water’s edge. Tyne Dock, just opposite, and the Albert Edward Dock near North. Shields, provide abundance of shipping accommodation, besides what is afforded by the river itself; and now the river flows between the steep banks of North and South Shields. As the names declare, these two growing and prosperous towns once consisted of a few fishermen’s huts, or “shielings”; but that was long ago, when the north shore of the Tyne was owned by the Prior of Tynemouth, and the southern shore by the Bishop of Durham, and the citizens of Newcastle complained to King Edward I. that these two ecclesiastics had raised towns, “where no town ought to be,” and that “fishermen sold fish there which ought to be sold at Newcastle, to the great injury of the whole borough, and in detriment to the tolls of our Lord the King.” These quarrels between Newcastle and the other settlements on the Tyne continued with varying results, until in the days of Cromwell, Ralph Gardiner of Chirton, a little village close to North Shields, took up the cudgels for the growing towns; and by dint of great perseverance, and in spite of much persecution and ill-will, succeeded in getting most of the unjust privileges of their stronger neighbour abolished.

There were salt-pans, too, on both sides of the mouth of the Tyne, which were worked in connection with the monasteries from very early days; and Daniel Defoe, when he visited the north in 1726, declared that he could see from the top of the Cheviot “the smoke of the salt-pans at Sheals, at the mouth of the Tyne, which was about forty miles south of this.”

North Shields clings haphazard to the steep bank of the Tyne, and spreads away up and beyond it, reaching out towards Wallsend on the river shore and Tynemouth along by the sea, the older parts by the river looking black and grimy to the last degree; but there is a silver lining to this very black cloud—not visible, it is true, but distinctly audible—in the great shipbuilding and repairing works known as Smith’s Dock, one of the largest concerns of the kind in Great Britain, where so many hundreds of men earn their daily bread; and in the fishing industry, which was the foundation of the town’s prosperity, and bids fair to be so for many years to come, as it is increasing year by year. The Fish Quay at North Shields is a sight worth seeing; and, in the herring season, it is increasingly frequented by Continental buyers.