Far greater than the change at Tynemouth is that which has taken place at Whitley, another of our favourite summer resorts, on the delightful Northumbrian coast. What Whitley is now I do not know; but when I last saw it, more than a dozen years ago, it had become a rambling, ugly, ill-built town, chiefly given over to lodging-house keepers, though redeemed by its fine stretch of hard sand. Very different was the Whitley with which I first made acquaintance in 1849. There was no lodging-house in the place; nothing but a sequestered village, which could not boast of church or chapel, and which had only one small shop. My parents used to hire a charming little cottage belonging to the village blacksmith. Its front opened upon the village street, and behind was a garden, full of the simple cottage flowers which are so strangely unfamiliar to those doomed to dwell in towns. A summer-house, clothed in honeysuckle, was one of the features of the garden, and the delicious scent seemed to me in those happy days, when I first reached the cottage on one of our summer holidays, to be as it were the fragrance of heaven itself. Nobody else seemed to visit Whitley in those first years of our sojourn there; so that we had the noble stretch of sands and the long line of cliffs almost to ourselves during the long summer's day, and my father, lying on the yielding turf above the sands, could study his sermon for the coming Sunday at peace, unmolested and almost unseen by any man. There must still, I suppose, be spots somewhere on the long coastline of this island where one might find combined the peace, the seclusion, and the beauty of that bit of Northumberland as I knew it fifty years ago; and yet, whatever my understanding may say, my heart tells me that I shall never again see anything like the Whitley of my youth. [Footnote: Since these pages were penned, the memory of the blacksmith's cottage at Whitley has been vividly brought back to me under rather singular circumstances. In the spring of 1895 I was dining in Downing Street with Lord Rosebery, then Prime Minister. Next to me at dinner was seated Sir James Joicey, the millionaire colliery owner and Member of Parliament. Sir James is, like myself, a Northumbrian, and our conversation naturally turned upon our native county. I spoke of the blacksmith's cottage, and the bower of honeysuckle at Whitley, with the enthusiasm which old memories evoked. To my surprise, there was an answering gleam of pleasure and tenderness on my friend's face. "You lived in the blacksmith's cottage?" said he. "Why, so did we when I was a boy!" We found, on comparing dates, that the Joiceys had followed my own parents as tenants of the tiny house when the latter gave it up. To both of us it seemed a far cry from the honest blacksmith's modest cottage to Mr. Pitt's dining-room in Downing Street.]
It was in the autumn of 1850 that a rather curious adventure befell me, which might well have cut short my career, and prevented these pages from ever seeing the light. We were about to remove from Summerhill Terrace to a house not far distant which had just been bought by my father, and, as it happened, one dull afternoon I was left alone at home, my mother and the servants being all engaged at the new house. I was left with strict injunctions to "put the chain on the front door," and to bolt the kitchen door, which was on a lower level than the other. The first order I obeyed, but the second, under the temptation of an entrancing story in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine which absorbed my thoughts, I entirely forgot. I was devouring this story, as only children do devour stories, when I heard the front door opened. I was sitting in the parlour, at the back of the house, so that I could not see anyone enter the garden. Running to the door, under the belief that my mother had returned, I found myself confronted by two men. They were—or pretended to be—pedlars; and one of them carried a case filled with sham jewellery. Their great desire seemed to be to get me to unchain the door. I was simple enough to tell them that I was alone in the house, but my simplicity did not carry me so far as a compliance with their urgent request. After arguing with me for several minutes, and even endeavouring to bribe me with a trumpery jewel, the men withdrew, muttering. I watched them for a moment, and took note of the keen, earnest gaze they bent upon the house before leaving the garden. But the voice of the charmer in Tait was calling too loudly to allow me to dwell upon anything else, and I was quickly back again in the parlour and deep in mystery.
It might have been twenty minutes later that there fell upon my startled ear a sound which under the circumstances was distinctly sinister—that of a man's foot on the sanded floor of the kitchen passage below. A timid child at all times, there is no need to say that when I crept to the head of the stairs, and, after listening there breathlessly for a few seconds, ascertained beyond doubt that more than one man was moving about in the rooms below me, I was filled with almost a paralysing sense of terror. Here at last the "robbers" of whom I and my brother had so often talked in frightened whispers in our beds, were come in good earnest. What was to be done? And then there flashed upon me, like an inspiration, the recollection of a plan which we had talked over together when discussing the best means of driving the robbers from our house, should they ever enter it. We had both agreed, then, that if we could but induce any ordinary thief to believe that a certain big relative of ours, whose colossal proportions we had often admired, was on the premises, there would be no need to do anything else to make the intruder flee affrighted. My mind was made up. Creeping softly back into the parlour, I seized the tongs. These I hurled suddenly down the kitchen stairs, and when the terrible din thus raised had died out, I cried in my childish treble, "Uncle John! Uncle John! Come downstairs! There are thieves in the house!" There was a cry of rage or alarm from the kitchen, a hurried scuffling of feet on the floor, and then through a window I saw my two friends the pedlars flying through the yard, and pausing not to look behind. I ought, of course, to have forthwith gone downstairs and done my duty by that back door, which I had so shamefully neglected earlier in the day; but I am ashamed to say that my momentary access of courage had entirely died away by this time, and that for no imaginable sum of money would I have dared to descend those stairs, and pass through the dark passage leading to the back door. The thieves were in due time captured and transported for another offence; but my parents refused to prosecute them in order that I might escape the ordeal of a public examination. They were desperate ruffians, and the police declared their belief that if they had known I was alone in the house they would have murdered me.
I now come to my schooldays in the distant years 1852-4. My father, as I have already said, was a minister of religion for fifty years at Newcastle. He was one of the gentlest and noblest of men, one whom I have never ceased to revere as the very pattern and exemplar of a Christian gentleman. But those who follow such a calling cannot expect to gain riches as their reward, and my father was a poor man. Despite his poverty, he was resolved that his sons should have the best education that he could procure for them. That meant that they must be sent to the best school in the town—Percy Street Academy. So when my elder brother in 1848 was of school age, he took him to Mr., not then Dr., Bruce, to enter him as a pupil. I have no doubt that he went with some trepidation, knowing full well that the school fees would be a heavy tax upon his small income. I was sitting with my mother in the drawing-room of Summerhill Terrace when my father returned, and I saw that there was an unwonted brightness on his gentle face. He told my mother how Mr. Bruce, after examining my brother, had pronounced him to be fully qualified to enter the school; and then my father asked about the fees. The answer he received was, "My dear Mr. Reid, I never take a fee from a minister of religion." And so it came to pass that not only my brother James but myself and my two younger brothers were educated at Percy Street without any fee being paid on our behalf. No one will wonder that I cherish Dr. Bruce's memory with unstinted gratitude and reverence.
Schooldays, despite the popular theory, are, as a matter of fact, generally as uninteresting to the schoolboy as their story is to the public, and I shall not detain the reader with much about this period of my life. Dr. Collingwood Bruce, the father, by the way, of Mr. Justice Bruce, was then and long afterwards the most famous school master in the North of England, and under him I received that small fraction of my education which a man usually obtains during pupilage. Percy Street Academy, Newcastle, has long since disappeared, after having counted no inconsiderable proportion of the best-known residents among its pupils. It occupied a series of rambling buildings with an imposing house at the end of the row, in which lived "The Doctor," the assistant masters, and the boarders. But though the school is gone, my old schoolmaster died but recently, enjoying to the last the respect of his fellow citizens and the repose of a happy old age. He is known to fame as the author of the leading work on the Roman Wall, and as an antiquary of high repute. I have a grateful recollection of many of his acts during my school career; and, looking back, there are none I now esteem more highly than the attempts he constantly made to interest his pupils in the general affairs of the world outside the school-gates.
How well, for example, do I remember the school being summoned one morning in November, 1854, to the large writing room! Here the Doctor was standing at his desk awaiting us, armed with a copy of the Times. It had just arrived, and it contained W. H. Russell's brilliant account of the battle of Inkermann. In a few well-chosen words, the Doctor—who was an excellent public speaker—explained that he had called us from our tasks in order that we might listen to the story of a great deed done for England of which every Englishman ought to be proud; and then he read the whole story of the battle as it is told in Russell's graphic narrative, whilst we boys cheered each deed of English valour and groaned at the Russians as lustily as though we had been ourselves spectators of the fight. It was a wise act on the part of Dr. Bruce, and many others besides myself must have been grateful to him for having thus made us participators in the emotion which in those stirring times thrilled the nation.
It was before the Crimean War, however, that we in Newcastle passed through an experience the like of which I shall hardly encounter again. Newcastle was then notorious for its bad sanitation. A great part of the town consisted of houses of extreme antiquity, crowded together in narrow alleys in the neighbourhood of the river. These alleys, I may note in passing, were known as "chares"—a designation which used habitually to puzzle the Judges of Assize when they had to inquire into the circumstances of one of the not infrequent riots which in those days chequered the harmony of life on the banks of the Tyne. It was towards the end of July, 1853, that the rumour spread, reaching even a schoolboy like myself, that the cholera was approaching. A few weeks later it was with us in all its grim reality. Its actual appearance in the town was preceded by an extraordinary phenomenon which may, or may not, have been connected with the epidemic. One hot morning in August, when I left home for school, I was struck by the curious appearance of the atmosphere. No sooner had I stepped out of doors than I found that the strange dimness which pervaded everything was due to swarms of minute flies, which literally darkened the skies and settled in innumerable hosts upon every object animate and inanimate. It was impossible to breathe without inhaling these loathsome insects whenever the mouth was opened, and in order to protect ourselves my brother and I fastened our pocket handkerchiefs over our faces and walked to school in this fashion. We found that most other persons had adopted the same device. The plague lasted in Egyptian intensity for the whole of that day. The next day it had to a certain extent subsided, and on the third the dead flies might have been seen literally in heaps, each one of which must have contained countless thousands, in the corners of halls and passages. Everybody connected this most disagreeable phenomenon with the approach of the pestilence, and, whether they did so rightly or wrongly, the cholera only too certainly followed upon its heels.
Its first appearance raised feelings of terror in many hearts. I confess for myself that when I heard that three persons had died of cholera in the town on the previous day I fell into a small panic; but it was then that my mother, always a deeply religious woman, seeing how things were going with us, called her children together, and in the happiest manner succeeded in converting our dread of an unknown and mysterious evil into a perfect and childlike trust in the protection of a Heavenly Father. What she said I cannot now recall; I only know that from that moment, whilst many of our companions in school and at play went about with pallid faces and unstrung nerves, all our fears seemed as if by magic to have vanished. But the reality of the plague was terrible indeed, and the month of September, 1853, is never likely to be forgotten by anyone who then lived at Newcastle. It was not merely that the mortality was enormous, the deaths on some days being above a hundred, but that the circumstances attending the plague were of a gruesome and harrowing character. Not a few of the scenes in the streets recalled the story of the Great Plague of London. We had the same incidents of the dead lying unburied because there were none left to carry them to the grave. We had the piles of coffins waiting for interment in the churchyard. We had sad stories of men seen wheeling the corpse of wife or child in a barrow to the place of burial. In the evenings workmen carried burning disinfectants through the streets, the blue flames and sickening stench of which heightened the horrors of our situation. And perhaps most awful of all was the suddenness with which the disease slew. One evening in that terrible month my brothers and I were playing in the garden of our next-door neighbour with his children; by-and-by he himself came out to smoke his evening pipe, and as usual he had a kindly word for each one of us. We left him, when we went to bed, sauntering in the placid eventide among the flowers he was wont carefully to tend. When I got downstairs next morning a rough country servant, who was then in our employment, bluntly told me that "that laddie B——" (naming our neighbour) had died of the cholera during the night.
It is easy to conceive the effect which an incident like this necessarily had upon the mind of a child; and there were many such incidents. I verily believe that if we had not been clad by our mother's care and wisdom in that armour of trusting faith, we should have suffered irremediable injury. As it was, it became apparent that we must be removed from the plague-stricken town. But whither could we go? No visitor from Newcastle or any other riverside town could find admittance into any of the lodging-houses on the coast. Happily a port of refuge was open to us in the little blacksmith's cottage at Whitley, and thither, to our great relief, we were transported about the time when the virulence of the epidemic began to abate. My father had himself suffered from an attack of the disease, probably incurred whilst visiting, with quiet but unstinted devotion, the sick, and I also had had a very slight touch of it. The fine air of Whitley and the sunny hours spent on the lonely sands did wonders for us all; and when we returned home it was to find Newcastle restored to its ordinary life, with only the empty places in many households to remind us of the ordeal through which the town had passed.
I have spoken of the resemblance between this outbreak of cholera and the Great Plague of London. Curiously enough, the likeness between the experiences of the northern town in the nineteenth century and the capital in the seventeenth was to be made yet closer. It was just a year after the epidemic had passed away that we were visited by another calamity, infinitely less appalling, and yet at the time of its occurrence far more startling. Sound asleep in the middle of a dark October night, I began to dream, and, naturally enough at the time, my dreams were of the war which had then begun. A Russian fleet escaping from the Baltic had sailed up the Tyne and was bombarding Newcastle. So ran my vision, and its effect was heightened by the firing of the guns I heard in my sleep.