Part 6 (1/2)
The Stanley Burn, which enters the Tyne close to Wylam railway station, divides this part of the county of Durham from Northumberland, so that from Wylam to the sea the south side of the Tyne is in the county of Durham. The most noteworthy object at Wylam, or, to be precise, a little way along the old post-road, leading to Newcastle from Hexham, is the red-tiled cottage in which George Stephenson was born in 1781. It stands on the north bank of the Tyne, where it can be distinctly seen from pa.s.sing trains. Its neighbour cottage has been repaired and re-roofed, but Stephenson's cottage remains unaltered.
Mr. Blackett, who owned Wylam Colliery at the beginning of the nineteenth century, took the keenest interest in the question of locomotives, and had tried more than one on his estate before George Stephenson brought them to the point of practical use. At Newburn, just four miles down the Tyne, George Stephenson pa.s.sed many years of his youth; here he learned to read and write, when he was old enough to earn a man's wage and could afford the few pence necessary; and here, in the parish church, may be seen, with an interval of twenty years between them, the entries of his two marriages.
Newburn is important nowadays for its steel works, within whose workshops is incorporated an old building formerly known as Newburn Hall; but in days long past its importance arose from its being on the ford of the Tyne nearest to Newcastle. This ford was frequently made use of, notably by the Scots in the reign of Charles I. Their chief camping ground is pointed out to us by the name of Scotswood, which also describes what Scotswood was like in those days--a great contrast to its present appearance, when the lines of brick and mortar stretching out uninterruptedly from Newcastle make it practically one with that town.
In 1640, the Scottish army, under General Leslie, faced the Royalist troops, under Lord Conway, on the south side of the river. The Scots mounted their rude cannon on Newburn Church tower, and the English raised earthworks along the bank of the river, which was here fordable in two places. The two armies calmly watered their horses on opposite banks of the stream all the next morning, but a shot at a Scottish officer from the English ranks precipitated the battle; and the Scottish army, having made a breach in both earthworks with their artillery, waded across the fords and drove the Royalist troops up the bank, after one spasmodic rally, which, however, failed to check the Scottish advance. The way was now open for the Scottish army to continue down the south bank of the Tyne and attack Newcastle from Gateshead. It had been Lord Conway's task to prevent this, but owing to his incapacity or want of whole-hearted enthusiasm for his cause, he failed entirely.
Not until 1644, however, was a Scottish attack on Newcastle actually made, for on this occasion Leslie, as we have already seen, led his men across the fords higher up the river and marched southwards. The earthworks thrown up by Conway's troops may still be seen on Stella Haughs.
It is supposed that the Romans had a fort here, commanding the pa.s.sage of the river; indeed it would have been strange had this not been the case, for the Romans were not the people to disregard any point of strategical importance, especially one so near their stations of Pons Aelii and Conderc.u.m. Many stones of Roman workmans.h.i.+p have been used in the building of the Newburn church.
From this point to its mouth, nearly fifteen miles away, both banks of the Tyne present an unbroken scene of industry. Between the steel works of Newburn and the iron and chemical works, the brick and tile works of Blaydon and past the famous yards of Elswick, down to the wharves and s.h.i.+pyards of North and South s.h.i.+elds, the Tyne rolls its swift dark waters through a scene of stirring activity; the air is dusky with soot and smoke, and reverberant with the clang of hammers and the pulsing beat of machinery. Some old and world-famed works have been closed or removed, like Hawks' and Stephenson's, but others, many others, have opened; and the map of the positions of Tyne industries, published under the auspices of the Newcastle and Gateshead Chamber of Commerce, is a record of resolute toil and brilliant achievement in the many aspects of industrial life represented on the river.
And, apart from the mere prosperity and commercial supremacy of the district, there is another cause for pride in the many notable inventions which hail from Tyneside; from the locomotive and the ”Geordie” lamp of Stephenson, the hydraulic machinery and the big guns of Armstrong, to the wonderful turbine engines of Parsons; the invention of water-ballast, too, belongs to the Tyne, for it was the idea of a Gateshead man, and first used at Jarrow.
And, in connection with s.h.i.+ps and seafarers, though not in any commercial sense, we may proudly recall the fact that the first Lifeboat was launched on the Tyne and named after the river; and the first Volunteer Life Brigade was formed at Tynemouth. The Worth Eastern Railway is carried across the Tyne by the Scotswood Bridge; and it was on this part of the river that the boat-races, for which the Tyne was once famous, were rowed. At Newcastle, the river is bridged by four huge structures--The Redheugh Bridge, the new King Edward VII. bridge, the High Level, and Swing Bridges,--all connecting Newcastle with the sister town of Gateshead. An interesting sight it is to see the Swing Bridge gradually turning on its central pivot, until it lies in a straight line up and down the stream, allowing some huge liner to pa.s.s, or some new battles.h.i.+p, fresh from Elswick, to sail down the river, on its way to make its trial trip over the ”measured mile” in the open sea at the mouth of the river, and thereafter to take its place among the armaments of the nations.
The High Level Bridge allows s.h.i.+ps of any height to pa.s.s 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.
Pa.s.sing 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 s.h.i.+pbuilding 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 gla.s.s works, for which industry the Tyne has been famous from that day to this.
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE RIVER TYNE AT NEWCASTLE (showing Swing Bridge open).]
Before the railway on the south side of the river was laid down, pa.s.sengers 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 s.h.i.+pbuilding 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.
s.h.i.+elds, provide abundance of s.h.i.+pping accommodation, besides what is afforded by the river itself; and now the river flows between the steep banks of North and South s.h.i.+elds. As the names declare, these two growing and prosperous towns once consisted of a few fishermen's huts, or ”s.h.i.+elings”; but that was long ago, when the north sh.o.r.e of the Tyne was owned by the Prior of Tynemouth, and the southern sh.o.r.e 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 s.h.i.+elds, 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 s.h.i.+elds clings haphazard to the steep bank of the Tyne, and spreads away up and beyond it, reaching out towards Wallsend on the river sh.o.r.e 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 s.h.i.+pbuilding 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 fis.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+elds is a sight worth seeing; and, in the herring season, it is increasingly frequented by Continental buyers.
The fortunes of South s.h.i.+elds and Jarrow, though these towns are not in Northumberland, are yet so bound up with the story of the Tyne that no one would ever think of that river without them. Especially is this the case with Jarrow, which ”Palmer's” has raised from a small colliery village to a large and flouris.h.i.+ng town. In those famous yards, everything that is necessary for the building of the largest ironclad, from the first smelting of the ore until the last rivet is in place, can be done. All Northumbria--Northumbria in the ancient and widest sense of the word--owes a debt of grat.i.tude to Jarrow, for was it not the home of Bede? The monk of Jarrow, who spent all his long life in the same monastery by the Don, coming to it when he was a child of ten, made that spot of Northumbrian ground famed to the farthest limits of the civilized Europe of his day; and scholars from all over the Continent came to learn at the feet of the Northumbrian teacher. Beloved and revered by all, and in harness to the last hour of his busy life, he died in the year 735, just one hundred years after the coming of Aidan to Lindisfarne. ”First among English scholars, first among English theologians, first among English historians, it is in the monk of Jarrow that English literature strikes its roots.”--_J.R. Green_.
The Jarrow of to-day, and all its neighbours of industrial Tyneside, possess no beauty of aspect such as the towns that are more fortunately situated on the upper reaches of the river; they are m.u.f.fled in clouds of smoke and soot, and darkened by the necessities of their toil in grimy ores and the ever-present coal. But no one who has ever looked on these smoky reaches of the Tyne with a seeing eye, or steamed down the river on a day either of gloom or suns.h.i.+ne, can refuse to acknowledge that it has a certain grandeur, a stern beauty of its own, that can stir the heart and the imagination more deeply than any mere prettiness.
From the numberless hives of activity on both sides of the river clouds of smoke roll heavily upward, and jets of steam from panting machinery leap up in momentary whiteness on the dark background; the white wings of flocks of wheeling gulls flash in the occasional suns.h.i.+ne which lights up the scene, and between the clouds there are glimpses of blue sky. Towards sunset, the evening mists drape the darkening banks and crowded s.h.i.+pping in a soft robe of gray, which, together with the glowing sky behind, produces most wonderful Turneresque effects; and the fall of night on the river only changes the aspect without diminis.h.i.+ng the interest of the scene. The blaze from a myriad workshops and forges glows against the darkness, the lamps twinkle overhead on the steep banks, and the lights from wharf and steamer are reflected in a thousand s.h.i.+mmering lines on the dark water, which flows on soundlessly, like the river of a dream.
On a day of wind and sun all these beauties are intensified a thousandfold; the smoke is blown hither and thither in flying clouds, the current seems to rush more swiftly, and a sense of vigorous life permeates the whole scene, giving to the beholder a feeling of keen exhilaration, as of new life rus.h.i.+ng through his veins. Especially is this the case on reaching the mouth of the river and meeting the dancing waters of the open harbour, where the twin piers of South s.h.i.+elds and Tynemouth reach out sheltering arms. Within the wide bay they enclose, the storm-driven vessel may always find comparatively smooth water, how wildly soever the waves may rage and roar outside.
It is difficult to believe that so lately as the years 1858-60, the ”bar” at the mouth of the Tyne was an insuperable obstacle to all but vessels of very moderate draught; and that s.h.i.+ps might lie for days, and sometimes weeks, after being loaded, before there came a tide high enough to carry them out to sea. The river was full of sand-banks, and little islands stood here and there--one in mid-stream, where the ironclads are now launched at Elswick. Three or four vessels might be seen at once b.u.mping and grounding on the ”bar” unable to make their way over. Well might the old song say--
”The s.h.i.+ps are all at the bar, They canna get up to Newcastle!”