Part 12

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.

[Picture: “The Drunkard’s Cloak”] Despite its smoke and untidiness, the folks of this grimy Tyneside city have a good conceit of it. To them it is “canny Newcastle,” an epithet whose meaning differs from the Scotch, and here means “fine,” or “neat.” The stranger who fails to find those qualities, who perceives instead the defects of dirt and a pall of smoke that blackens everything to an inky hue, and accordingly thanks Providence that his home is elsewhere, is to the Tynesiders a Goth.

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.

[Picture: “Puffing Billy”]

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.

[Picture: Morpeth]

That Morpeth folk still cherish old anti-Scottish sayings is not at all remarkable; for old manners, old sayings, and ancient hatreds die slowly in such places as this, and moreover, the Morpeth of old suffered terribly from Scottish raiders. Later times saw a more peaceful irruption, when Scottish youths came afoot down the great road in quest of fame and fortune in the south. People looked askance upon them as Scots, while innkeepers hated them for their poverty and their canniness. Those licensed victuallers thought, with Dr. Johnson, who did not greatly like them either, that “the finest prospect for a Scotchman was the high road that led him into England.” This bitter satire, by the way, was in reply to a Mr. Ogilvie, who had been contending on behalf of the “great many noble wild prospects” which Scotland contained. Smollett, in his _Humphry Clinker_, shows how greatly the Scots were misliked along this route about 1766. He says that, from Doncaster northwards, all the windows of all the inns were scrawled with doggerel rhymes in abuse of the Scottish nation. This fact was pointed out to that fine Scottish character, Lismahago, and with it a particularly scurrilous epigram. He read it with some difficulty, the glass being dirty, and with the most starched composure.

“Vara terse and vara poignant,” said he; “but with the help of a wat dishclout it might be rendered more clear and parspicuous.”

The country between Morpeth and Alnwick is dotted with peel-towers and their ruins, built in the wild old times when the ancestors of these peaceful Scots came in quest of spoil, laying waste the Borders far and wide. One had but to turn aside from the road at Warrener’s House, two miles beyond Morpeth, and thence proceed eastward for a further two, for ten castles to be seen at once from the vantage-point of Cockle Park Tower, itself a fine relic of a fortress belonging in the fifteenth century to the Ogles, situated now on a farm called by the hideous name of Blubberymires.

The peculiar appropriateness of Morpeth’s name, meaning as it does “moor-path,” is fully realised when coming up the road, up the well-named High Highlaws to where the road to Cockle Park Tower branches off, and where an old toll-house stands, with “Warrener’s House,” a deserted red-brick mansion, opposite. It is quite worth while to ask any passing countryman the name of that house, for then the “Northumbrian burr” will be heard in all its richness. As De Foe remarked, two hundred years ago, Northumbrians have “a Shibboleth upon their Tongues, namely, a difficulty in pronouncing the letter R,” and in their mouths, consequently, the name becomes, grotesquely enough, “Wawwener.”

Causey Park Bridge, over a little rivulet, a ruined windmill, and the remains of Causey Park Tower are the next features of the way before reaching a rise where an old road goes scaling a hillside to the right hand, surmounted by a farm picturesquely named “Helm-on-the-Hill.” Thence downhill on to Bockenfield Moor, and then precipitously down again through West Thirston and across the picturesque bridge that spans the lovely Coquet, into Felton: villages bordering either bank of the river, where the angler finds excellent sport, and where the rash cyclist, regardless of the danger-boards erected for his guidance on the hill-tops, tries involuntary conclusions with the aforesaid bridge at the bottom. A mile onward, up the rising road, is the park of Swarland Hall, with “Nelson’s Monument,” a time-stained obelisk, seen amid the trees within the park fence, and showing against the sky-line as the traveller approaches the moorland height of Rushy Cap. Alexander Davison, squire of Swarland Hall and friend of the Admiral, erected it, “not to commemorate the public virtue and heroic achievements of Nelson, which is the duty of England, but to the memory of private friendship.” Occupying so prominent a position by the roadside, it was probably intended to edify the coach-passengers of old. So to Newton-on-the-Moor—which might more fitly be named Newton-on-the-Hill—with its half a dozen cottages and its coal-pits, and thence by a featureless but not unpleasing road into Alnwick.

[Picture: The Market-Place, Morpeth]

[Picture: Felton Bridge]

It is something of a shock to the sentimental pilgrim, northward-bound, that the entrance to historic Alnwick should be by the gas-works, the railway station, the Farmers’ Folly (of which more shall presently be said), and other unmistakable and unromantic evidences of modernity that spread beyond the ancient confines of the town to form the suburb of Bondgate Without; but man cannot live by medievalism alone. The town itself is gained at that point where the heavy blackened mass of Bondgate itself spans the road, just beyond the elaborately rebuilt “Old Plough,” still exhibiting, however, the curious tablet from the old house:—

That which your Father old hath purchased and left You to possess, do you dearly Hold to show his worthiness. 1714.

[Picture: Alnwick]

XXVII

ALNWICK is a town with a great past and a somnolent present. There are yawns at every turn, echoes with every footfall, and grass growing unbidden in the streets. But there are forces of elemental power at Alnwick, little though the stranger suspects them. There have of late years been periods of storm and stress in the columns of the _Alnwick Gazette_, for instance, respecting the local water-supply, which have drawn forth inappropriately fiery letters from correspondents, together with many mixed metaphors. How is this for impassioned writing?—“The retributive forces of well-balanced justice have, after a dead ebb, returned with a swelling tide, and overtaken the arrogative policy of the freeholders.” But this is nothing to the following striking figure of “the arm of scandalous jobbery steeped to the lips in perfidious dishonour;” a delightful literary image unsurpassed in Ireland itself; or “another hydra of expense arising phoenix-like from the ashes of misgovernment.” Did the word “hydrant,” we wonder, suggest this last period? Is the dulness of Alnwick due to the decay following the corruption hinted at? Perhaps, for, as this publicist next inquires, “How could anything symbolical of greatness, wrapped with ropes of sand, ever and for aye, flourish like the green bay-tree?” Ah! how? It is a difficult question to answer, and so we will leave the question at that.

Alnwick, of course, derives its name from its situation on the romantic Aln: the “wick,” or village on that river. The name is kin to that of many other “wicks,” “weeks,” and “wykes” in England, and has its fellows in such places as High Wycombe; Wykeham (now spelt Wickham) in Hampshire, whence came William of Wykeham; the village of Week, near Winchester; and in the town named simply Wick, in the north of Scotland. Alnwick in these times is a place of a certain grim and lowering picturesqueness. Its grey stone houses are at one with the greyness of the Northumbrian skies, and a general air of barren stoniness impresses the traveller as its chief feature. It is an effect of prisons and jailers which reaches its height in the open space that fronts the barbican of the castle. You look, instinctively, for His Majesty’s prison regulations on the outer walls, and, approaching the gate, expect a warder’s figure at the wicket.