Suddenly my dream and everything else vanished from my mind, driven out by a shock the like of which I had never experienced before. I was sitting up in bed, trembling violently, and wondering what awful thing it was that had broken in upon my slumbers. It was a sound—but such a sound! Nothing approaching to it had ever fallen on my ears before; and even when wide awake I still heard its echoes vibrating around me. My brother James, strange to say, had slept peacefully through the roar of an explosion the noise of which was heard at Sunderland, fourteen miles away. In response to my cries he awoke, and at my urgent request went to the window, which I was myself at the moment too much unnerved to approach. Directly he drew aside the curtain the room was filled with a glare that rendered every object as plainly visible as in broad daylight. We believed that a large building used as a tannery immediately behind our house must be on fire, but the building stood, and we saw that the glare which lighted up the whole heavens was far away. It was shortly after three o'clock on the morning of October 6th, 1854. Presently our natural agitation was increased by a violent knocking on the front door of the house at that untimely hour. It was the old man who "kept" my father's chapel at Tuthill Stairs, and he brought with him a doleful story. Evidently hysterical from the shock he had received, he told my father, amid his sobs, that half of Newcastle and Gateshead had been blown down by a frightful explosion in one of the Gateshead bonded warehouses; that the dead and dying were lying about in hundreds, and that, to crown everything, Tuthill Stairs Chapel had been destroyed.
It was indeed a tale of woe; and though my father promptly discounted it, it was impossible to doubt, with the evidence of that flaming sky before our eyes, that something very terrible had happened. Whether old Dixon expected my father to act as an amateur fireman, or whether he hoped for services of a more spiritual kind, I do not know; but he resolutely refused to return to the scene of the disaster unless my father accompanied him. So by-and-by my brother and I found ourselves accompanying my father and the chapel-keeper on their way to the fire.
A strange spectacle it was which was presented to us. Thousands of persons were hurrying down towards the river side; and upon their faces shone the reflection of the glowing sky. By-and-by, as we came within range of the effects of the explosion, we found broken windows and shattered doorways on every side. It was not, however, until we reached the High Level Bridge, and from the giddy height of the roadway looked down upon the river and the two towns, that we realised the full extent of the disaster which had happened so suddenly. To our right, as we stood on the bridge, raged a fire of immense extent. The flames were roaring upwards from one of the great bonded warehouses of Gateshead, and threatening at every moment to attack the old parish church, which stood like a rock strangely illumined in the glare; to our left, in the crowded streets and alleys of the lower part of Newcastle, I counted no fewer than seven fires burning fiercely in different places, whilst on the river there were three ships in flames. It was wonderful to look up and see burning sparks and fragments hurtling through air, resembling nothing so much (I thought at the time) as a snowstorm every flake of which was a point of fire; it was wonderful, too, to see the shipping in the river, the broad stream itself, and the long lines of houses on either side glowing in the dancing flames. We could hear the rush of the fire heavenwards; we could see the mere handfuls of men—soldiers, police, and what not—who were vainly striving to cope with the terrible enemy they had so suddenly been called upon to face; and even as we looked we saw fresh fires break out, and above the roar of the mighty furnace on the Gateshead side—with the glowing crater which marked the site of the great explosion—could hear at intervals the cries of the workers. Looking back, I think that was upon the whole the most sublimely impressive sight I ever beheld. The two burning towns; the river between them glittering as though its waters had been turned to gold; the dense silent crowds around me—these made up a picture the memory of which can never fade.
Though old Dixon's "hundreds of dead and dying" was the wildest of exaggerations, there had been a most lamentable loss of life as a consequence of the explosion. What had happened was this: about midnight a fire had broken out in a vinegar manufactory in the densely-crowded district of Gateshead lying between the parish church and the river. This fire, baffling the efforts of the fire brigade, spread quickly, until it reached some large bonded warehouses adjoining the vinegar manufactory. By this time it had acquired such proportions that it had been found necessary to summon the military from the Newcastle Barracks to assist in the effort to extinguish it, whilst vast crowds of people assembled, not only in the neighbourhood of the fire itself, but on the bridges and Newcastle quay, from which an excellent view was to be obtained. The fire at last reached a warehouse owned by a gentleman named Bertram, and here it assumed a new character. The exact contents of the warehouse remain undiscovered to this day. At the time it was freely asserted that Mr. Bertram had, in direct breach of the law, warehoused a large quantity of gunpowder; but scientific witnesses who were subsequently examined showed that it was possible that certain chemicals stored in the warehouse, when suddenly combined, as by the falling of the floors, would be quite as explosive as gunpowder itself.
Be this as it may, after one or two slight explosions—those which in my dream were transformed into the cannonade of a Russian force—the whole warehouse with all its contents was suddenly blown into the air by the force of an explosion seldom equalled in its terrible violence. That explosion not only carried the burning materials across the river to Newcastle, where they quickly produced another conflagration as serious in its character as that which was raging in Gateshead, but inflicted terrible injury both to life and property. The persons in the neighbourhood of the burning building, including soldiers, firemen, police, and Mr. Bertram, the owner of the warehouse, were instantly killed; and in many cases not a trace of their remains could afterwards be found. On the bridges and on Newcastle quay the great crowds of onlookers were thrown to the ground by the shock, and several were killed outright; whilst, far and wide, buildings were partially unroofed, windows broken, and a great and populous district reduced to the state in which one might have expected to see it after a bombardment. The exact number of those killed was never ascertained, but I believe that between thirty and forty persons lost their lives.
As I came away with my father and brother from the scene of the fire, my young nerves received the shock which invariably follows the first sight of death. In the Sandhill—the scene of Lord Eldon's elopement with the beautiful Bessie Surtees—a man was lying on the pavement who had been killed by the force of the explosion. As I passed, they were lifting the body into a cart, and the sight of the head, hanging helplessly like that of a dead bird, was one I never forgot. All that day the fires burned fiercely, and it was not until the third day that they were really subdued. Indeed, on the Gateshead side the ruined warehouses smoked and smouldered for more than a week. In all, the value of the property destroyed was something like a million sterling.
Never shall I forget my morning at school on the day on which the fire first broke out. Boylike, it was the wonder rather than the horror of the thing which was uppermost in my mind, and I and my schoolfellows, before the morning bell sounded, eagerly related to each other all that we had seen; those who, like myself, had been early on the ground having much to tell to eager listeners. It was only when we had trooped excitedly into our class-rooms, and found ourselves face to face with our masters, that we began to realise the actual solemnity of a catastrophe the like of which had never before befallen an English provincial town. In the Latin room, where I was due at the opening of the school, I was unfeignedly surprised to see Mr. Garven, our old classical tutor, sitting in tears at his desk, and I can still hear the broken whispers in which he attempted to speak to us of the terrible event.
It came home, I ought to say, very closely to "Bruce's school." More than one of those killed had been pupils, and the son of Mr. Bertram, upon whom already an excited public opinion was seeking to fasten the responsibility for the explosion, was one of our schoolfellows, and had but the day before joined us in our lessons. Suddenly as, in a half-hearted way, we began our usual tasks, Dr. Bruce entered, pale and agitated. "Boys," he said, "a dreadful thing has happened to our good old town. God knows how far the mischief may extend, and what ruin may be wrought; but we know already that more than one old pupil here have lost their lives, and that some of you boys have lost those near and dear to you. There can be no school to-day. It would not be decent——" And then the Doctor's voice fairly gave way, and we found ourselves dismissed to an unexpected—and, for once, an undesired—holiday. These things sink deep into the youthful imagination, and the memory of them can never be lost. As I look back upon the years I spent at school, that dark October morning stands out with a prominence that causes every other day of my school life to sink into insignificance.