The Northumbrians

Not much in the way of ‘theses’ but a fascinating heap of facts and connections.

unlike Yorkshire, the Vikings raided, but did not settle Northumbria north of the Tees. The most obvious evidence of this is the absence of Scandinavian place names—all those ‘-thorpes,’‘-thwaites’ and ‘-bys’ scattered across maps of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire peter out at the Tees. In contrast, Anglo-Saxon ‘-worth’ endings predominate in Northumbria, such as Backworth, Killingworth, Heworth, Usworth, and Hunstanworth

Or in the Second World War where some Northumbrians believed that ‘St Cuthbert’s Mist’ had shielded Durham and Newcastle from Luftwaffe bombing raids.

John Cleveland, who wrote in 1653 that ‘England’s a perfect world, hath Indies too; Correct your map, Newcastle is Peru!’

The symbiotic Scoto-Northumbrian relationship was reinforced by large scale migration into Northumbria from as early as the 1500s when there were hundreds of Scots living in Newcastle, including John Knox who was appointed a preacher at St Nicholas’s Church in 1550.

Sir Thomas Malory, the author of Le Morte D’Arthur, has Merlin’s master, the hermit Blaise, dwelling in the forests of Northumberland and locates ‘the Joyous Gard,’ Sir Lancelot’s castle, somewhere in the north, probably at Bamburgh,

Consider too the former slave Olaudah Equiano—who wrote to the Newcastle Chronicle in 1792, giving, as he put it, ‘his warmest thanks of heart glowing with gratitude to all of the people of Newcastle for their fellow feelings for the Africans and their cause’—and Frederick Douglass who made a special visit to the town in 1846 to meet ‘the two ladies who were mainly instrumental in giving me the chance to devoting my life to the cause of freedom. These were Ellen and Anna Richardson, of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.’

The VI Legion, which embarked from Germany in 122 accompanied by Hadrian himself and the new governor of Britain, A. Platorius Nepos, sailed up the Tyne and landed at a site eight miles inland where the Legions would build a crossing—‘Pons Aelius’ (the only bridge outside Rome named after a Roman Emperor)—that would eventually grow into the city of Newcastle.

It was on this visit in 122 that Hadrian decided to construct a wall between the Tyne and the Solway to sustain the peace, and this massive structure, fully eighty-four miles long, was completed by the Roman Army in just six years.

There’s a reason why no purely domestic medieval buildings survive in Northumberland, so it is no wonder then that after Wallace’s own brutal execution in London’s Smithfield, one quarter of his body was sent to Newcastle to be hung on the old Tyne Bridge, as well as an ‘unmentioned part’ which was put on display in the castle keep.

When the Norman keep was strengthened by Henry II in the later twelfth century he called upon ‘Maurice the Engineer,’ the architect of Dover Castle,

The epic wars with Scotland made Newcastle the usual mustering ground for English armies marching north (typically on the ‘Shield Field’ to the east of the town).

The King himself was a regular visitor to the King’s Manor (now the site of Manors Metro Station)

and places like Redesdale and upper Tynedale became the Helmand province of medieval England

The need to patrol these grazing lands, and launch retaliatory raids against trespassers when necessary, created a very different, and much more violent society than the rest of England, with societal structures more akin to warlordism than the usual manorial system.

And when robbers were pursued—in what was known as a ‘hot trod’ or posse (a shortening of posse comitatus ‘the force of the county’)—those that were caught could expect no mercy and blood was usually spilled, hence the expression ‘caught red-handed.’

It is from these events, one of the last sieges of an English walled city, that Newcastle adopted the motto Fortiter Defendit Triumphans (she triumphs by a brave defence).

Only London supplied more men for Nelson’s Royal Navy than the towns of North and South Shields, Newcastle and Sunderland.

Throughout the 1830s the British state waged a sort of war against the miners of Northumberland and Durham.

‘Tyneside has become one of the world’s greatest centres for the production of weapons of death’ and from the 1880s it was the only place where a battleship could be built and armed from scratch on one site.

some 100,000 men were killed in British pits between 1850 and 1950, and many thousands more seriously injured.

the enduring Blackadder interpretation of the conflict as a futile and unrelenting slaughter has, perhaps, obscured the views of the 88 per cent of British soldiers who served and returned, the majority of whom may well have believed in the cause they were fighting for.

There is even a legend that Northumbrian troops were used there as ‘code talkers’ (much like the US Army used Navajo soldiers in the Pacific to communicate sensitive information), as North East dialects were indecipherable by the Germans.

Newcastle had more printing presses than any town in England, after London, Oxford, and Cambridge and by 1790 the town boasted twenty printers, twelve booksellers and stationers, thirteen bookbinders and three engravers. The town had seven subscription libraries and three circulating libraries, plus the Thomlinson Library attached to St Nicholas’s parish church with its 5,000 books—one of the oldest in England, and housed in Newcastle’s first classical building.

Jean Paul Marat, who practised as a vet—and occasional doctor—in Newcastle in the early 1770s

Anne Milbank, the daughter of the High Sheriff of Durham, received an ambitious education at Elemore Hall near Pittington, in classics, maths and science. Her daughter Ada, Countess of Lovelace is now widely regarded as the world’s first computer programmer for her work with Charles Babbage and others on analytical engines, but Anne herself had such a formidable intellect that her husband (and Ada’s father) Lord Byron dubbed her his ‘Princess of Parallelograms.’

Spence was also an agitator and controversialist. When in 1775 he presented a lecture to the Newcastle Philosophical Society on the people’s right to property (there were moves afoot to enclose the Town Moor), the members voted his expulsion at their next meeting, and he ended up getting punched by Thomas Bewick after a heated debate in a Bigg Market pub.

Ludwig Wittgenstein who lived and worked in Newcastle during the Second World War.

Gladstone Adams, the Whitley Bay photographer who invented the windscreen-wiper after a snowy drive back up north after watching Newcastle United lose the 1908 FA Cup Final.

It was fitting that the vital spark that lit the firebox of the Locomotion came from a Darlington navvy, Robert Metcalf, who used his pipe-glass, a little magnifying lens with which he could light his pipe using the rays of the sun; ‘so it was that the first locomotive to be fired on the world’s most celebrated railway was lit with celestial flame stolen by Prometheus and given to man so that he might liberate himself.’

Even the landing craft used on D-Day were designed by Susan Auld from Tynemouth (1915–2002), the first woman to graduate as a naval architect from Armstrong College in Newcastle.

In 1902, two Parsons 1500-kilowatt steam turbine driven turbo-alternators, then the largest in the world, were used at Neptune Bank on the Tyne, the first real central power station with integrated control in Great Britain, and the only British power station to provide electricity for industrial purposes (rather than for domestic use or street lighting).

the Tyneside-born philosopher John Gray remarked on BBC Radio 4 in 2018 that ‘I’m prouder of what I’ve read than of what I’ve written’,

that no man needs knowledge more than he who is subject to those who have. That if there is one man in the world who needs knowledge, it is he who does the world’s most needful work.

Durham miner Sid Chaplin: They take a little and go into the belly of Leviathan. They take a lamp into the most terrifying darkness and they are not afraid. They take a little light because underground they know their poverty. Without light their arms are useless. In the strata they meet a darkness like a velvet pad pressed against the open eye, and this darkness, without a little light, is impenetrable and eager. At 200 fathoms the sun takes no levy nor gives of his majesty … All is without form and void.

Northumbria in the age of Cuthbert and Bede was the Tibet of the British Isles.

The local taste for Palladianism was certainly conservative but the façades of Northumbrian country houses were almost always plain and ‘astylar’ (meaning without columns) in contrast to the more elaborate fashions espoused by Robert Adam and James Wyatt.

and it suffered the second biggest single civilian loss of life in the Second World War after a direct hit on an air raid shelter in 1941.

Emerging from Alma Place—and passing Keel Row Books (the finest bookshop in North East England)

Knott’s Flats is similarly unusual. Built on a vast scale by Charles Holden (famous for 55 Broadway and Senate House in London), it was completed in 1938 and constructed, tellingly, out of fire-resistant materials with integrated air-raid shelters.

Charles Dickens too had walked to the coast from Newcastle on one of his frequent visits to the city: We escaped to Tynemouth for a two hour sea walk. There was a high wind blowing and a magnificent sea running. Large vessels were being towed in and out over the stormy bar with prodigious waves breaking on it, and spanning the restless uproar of the waves was a quiet rainbow of transcendental beauty. The scene was quite wonderful.

This usually quiet station is thronged at weekends by visitors to the Flea Market that takes up the whole concourse; prime mooching territory, and the regular Book Fair is always worth penciling in.

… Collingwood the sentinel—with its inscription from Nelson, ‘see how that noble fellow takes his ship into action’

Three Kings were buried on the magnesian slab of Pen Bal Crag: the Northumbrian warlords Oswin and Osred, and Malcolm III of Scotland (look out too for the gravestone of Alexander Rollo, the man who held the lantern at the burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna).

The natural drama of the sea edge here was and is heightened by the buildings on the shore, not least engineering feats like the 900m-long harbour-mouth pier itself, fifty odd years in the building, and the prodigious galleries, promenades and sea-defences from the headland to South Parade, a concrete mantle as forbidding as Hitler’s own Atlantikwall.

The architecture of Whitley (the ‘Bay’ was added in 1903 to stop it being confused with Whitby)

In the late nineteenth century drunkenness proceedings averaged 62 per 10,000 persons across England but stood at 207 per 10,000 for Newcastle.

As Terry Collier once said to Bob Ferris in the Tyneside TV comedy The Likely Lads, ‘I’d offer you a beer but I’ve only got six cans.’

The Russian novelist Yevgeni Zamyatin lived in Jesmond in the First World War (he was supervising the construction of icebreakers on the Tyne for the Tsarist navy). His work was much influenced by his time on Tyneside, especially his satire of middle-class conformity in Newcastle, ‘The Islanders,’ which opens with a vicar intoning that ‘life must be like a well-run machine and lead us to our goal with mechanical inevitability.’ His dystopian novel We was read with fascination by George Orwell and inspired much of Nineteen Eighty-Four. One Zamyatin expert notes that the all-seeing time-discipline of the shipyards must have sparked the idea for the ‘Table of Hourly Commandments’ in the walled-city of his ‘One State’ where privacy is non-existent and every hour is accounted for, and outside the walls the ‘gaunt ruins have a Northumbrian feel of castles and pele towers, while remains of ovens and industrial flues recall more recent episodes in the history of the area. Zamiatin [sic] conflates all this into the debris of the ‘two hundred years war,’ a powerful echo of the centuries of Anglo-Scottish conflict.’

‘Quicquid rex habet extra, episcopus habet intra’ (the King’s prerogatives outside are the Bishop’s inside) was the maxim of the time, and as ‘King in Durham’ Dunelm had his own council, exchequer and courts (where, uniquely for a prelate, the bishop could pronounce sentence of death), his own steward, sheriff, and chancellor, his own hunting ground and his own parliament; indeed, Durham sent no MPs to Westminster till 1676.

(The French writer Marcel Proust was fascinated by the sonority and evocation of high lineage of certain ancient titles and was always delighted when he came upon the name of the Duke of Northumberland, which he thought had a ‘sort of thunderous quality.’

</div>

a new generation of coal-owners stepped forward to create an even more powerful cartel called ‘the Vend’ which established arrangements for agreeing prices and output which lasted until the 1830s.

Martin Luther King received his only honorary degree outside the USA from Newcastle University in 1967, where, in the Armstrong Building, and in front of the Duke of Northumberland presiding as Chancellor, Dr King brought a message that struck a chord with his Northumbrian audience of the ‘inescapable network of mutuality,’ and the ‘beautiful symphony of brotherhood’ that would hasten the day ‘when all over the world justice will roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.’

‘One thing gives me unqualified satisfaction,’ William Gladstone was supposed to have remarked of the miners, ‘it is that the workmen know how to select their leaders. They do not choose charlatans to represent them in Parliament.’76

Then came the Methodist lay-preacher Peter Lee (1864–1935), another powerful figure who, via his leadership of the Durham Miners Association and the first Labour county council in the 1920s, assumed the role of ‘chief of the civic life of Durham and leader of its people,’ who, through his oversight of public works—building houses and hospitals, even a reservoir in Weardale to supply clean water to the pit villages and fight typhoid—espoused a ‘demotic socialism focused on practical solutions to everyday problems,’ and sought ‘accommodation with capitalism rather than its overthrow.’ The Durham Miners showed their appreciation and built him a spacious pile—Bede’s Rest—overlooking Durham Cathedral, but the County Council went further and, thanks to the Labour Government’s New Towns Act, they named the new town of Peterlee after him.

To be sure, Labour would go on to win the 1929 General Election, with Ramsay MacDonald newly elected in Seaham as Prime Minister,

In his 1982 hit ‘Shipbuilding’ Elvis Costello expressed a certain Leftist frustration with the durability of the old system, and what they regarded as the conservative docility of the British working classes, as the yards worked overtime readying the ships of the Naval Task Force to recapture the Falklands. ‘The Devil’s Destroying Angel Exploded’ by the radical Tyneside poet Tom Pickard was even fiercer in its denunciation of the timid and reactionary Old Guard who ran the unions and the Labour Party in the North East: producers of heat confused in the cold the coal you hewed should have burnt them alive instead you begged another shilling you should have thrown it in their faces like a bomb fed your children joyful stories

Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust employs 14,000 people alone—fully 20% of the North East’s working age population, and the highest percentage of any region in England

There is, too, a tendency to over-exaggerate any economic green-shoots, as in the case of the burgeoning tech cluster in the North East, which has undoubted strengths but, as one local tech journalist observed, around which there is a ‘current of embellishment [and] hyperbole,’ for although the North East may be ‘the fastest growing tech hub in the UK … really, after Wales, we’re the second smallest!’

This is changing, not least through a new and diverse generation of Northumbrian women in Parliament—from the trenchant Brexiteer Conservative MP for Berwick, Anne-Marie Trevelyan (who lives in the seventeenth century Netherwitton Hall, the ancestral seat of the Trevelyans, near Morpeth), to the Geordie-Nigerian former-engineer and Remain supporter Chi Onwurah, Labour MP for Newcastle upon Tyne Central.

As the two biggest centres of English population separated by the greatest geographical distance, London and Newcastle have long had a fascination with each other

In a 2019 survey Newsweek magazine ranked the best 100 hospitals in the world, eight of which were in the UK—and of these eight, two were in Newcastle (The Royal Victoria Infirmary and the Freeman Hospital)

The political voice of the region will continue to be ignored unless and until the bourgeoisie of places like Corbridge and Jesmond, Low Fell and Durham City, Tynemouth, Cleadon and Seaburn take a more active part in Northumbrian political life.