Moving Memorial

A memorial stone commemorating the short life of baby Abigail Tizacke lay in what became Armstrong Park in Heaton until, not for the first or last time, it was moved in the 1960s.

Ironically Heaton History Group’s Arthur Andrews came across a mention of this by now scarcely legible stone when he popped into a second hand bookshop after arriving too early for an optician’s appointment. A booklet he picked up told some of the story of the memorial and the Tizacke family but Arthur set out to find out more and discovered that this 350 year old fragment reveals a surprising amount about local history. 

Transcription

The first mention of the stone in the records appeared in ‘The History and Antiquities of the Town of Newcastle upon Tyne…’ by the Georgian antiquarian John Brand.

In a footnote, Brand reported that he had seen a stone ‘in a garden belonging to Captain Lampton near the middle glass-house’ on which the following was inscribed:

‘Abigail Tizacke, 

daughter of John and Sarah Tizacke,

departed this life the 7^th day of the 12^th month,

and in the 7^th weack of her age,

anno 1679’

The book was published in 1789 and so the stone must have been only a hundred or so years old when Brand saw it so why did he think it merited a mention? The context is that the section of the history in which the footnote appears is describing the whereabouts of Quaker meeting houses. He states that at the time of writing there was a meeting house and Quaker burial ground on Pilgrim Street (acquired by the Quakers in 1697) and that a 1723 map shows another one ‘not far from Manor Chare’. Good historian as he was, Brand knew that at the time Abigail died, Quakers were not welcome in Newcastle and also that they refused to use the names of months which were based on ‘heathen’ Roman gods and goddesses, preferring the convention he had seen on Abigail’s memorial stone. This suggested to him that John and Sarah Tizacke were Quakers and perhaps that a Quaker memorial stone in the city dating from 1679 was noteworthy. 

Refugees

In fact, we know that Tizacke (or Tyzacke or Tyzack etc) is a Huguenot name. The Huguenots were Calvinists, French protestants who had suffered serious persecution in their native land from the 16th century. There followed a succession of Huguenot rebellions interspersed with periods of uneasy peace until Louis XIV acceded to the throne in 1643. The king acted with increased aggression to try to force Huguenots and others to convert to Catholicism. Many Huguenots fled during the 16th and 17th centuries, mainly to Protestant states in which they felt safer, if not always completely welcome. In fact, our word ‘refugee’ comes from the French word ‘refugié’ which was specifically used to describe the Protestants who fled France following Louis XIV’s 1685 revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the law that had protected the religious and civil rights of the Huguenots for nearly a century.

But it is believed that members of the Tizacke family, who were skilled glassmakers in their native Lorraine, first came to Tyneside before that. In the early 17th century, Sir Robert Mansell, a wealthy Welsh admiral and Member of Parliament who had been granted a monopoly for the manufacture of glass in Britain recruited them to work for him. The first factory of several he established around the country was on the Ouseburn and he wanted to recruit a skilled workforce.

Certainly there are Tizackes in birth, death / burial and court records in Newcastle from 1620 onwards. And on 21 September 1679 a William Tyzacke along with Jacob Henley and Daniel Tittery, all Huguenots, were recorded not as employees but as owners of the Western Glasshouse on the Ouseburn.  This was the year in which baby Abigail was born and died. The Huguenots had quickly become established in their new country.

This fits well with where Brand reported seeing Abigail’s stone ‘in a garden belonging to Captain Lampton near the Middle Glass-house‘.  According to the Tyne and Wear Historic Environment Record, the Middle Glass House also known as St Lawrence Glass House is thought to have stood on the bank above the big car park next to the Cycle Hub, an area where there is now a modern residential estate.

Quakers

As you can see from the image above, the Tizacke family lived at ‘the Glasshouses’. Abigail’s father, John, was a ‘Broad Glass Maker’. He and Sarah Langford were married in August 1674 and already had two children, Elizabeth and Samuel, by the time baby Abigail was born. They went on to have another son, Nathan. Abigail’s parents might well have both been born on Tyneside and her father was likely an affluent businessman. The information is taken from Quaker records, confirming Brand’s theory.

Huguenots were not Quakers originally. In fact the Society of Friends (whose members are informally known as Quakers) was not founded until the mid 1600s by which time many Huguenots had already left France. But, like Huguenots, right through the 17th century Quakers were often persecuted in England for their radical and ‘non-conformist’ beliefs and behaviour. They had a natural affinity with each other. Some Huguenots converted. Certainly baby Abigail appears to have been born into a Quaker family two or three generations after John’s forefathers came to Newcastle but during a time in which Quakers were still persecuted in Newcastle and throughout most of England.

Famously, in 1657 a Quaker meeting in Newcastle was broken up by the mayor and his officers and those present were escorted to the ‘blew stone’ on the Tyne Bridge which marked the Newcastle boundary with Gateshead. The stone is now on display in Newcastle Castle..

In Gateshead there was less opposition and so it became a Quaker stronghold and explains why Abigail’s birth and death were recorded there rather than in Newcastle where the family lived. There is a memorial to a Timothy Tysack in the chancel floor of St Mary’s Church in Gateshead. It wasn’t until 1698 that Quakers had become accepted in Newcastle and the first Friends Meeting House was built on Pilgrim Street in the city.

Glass Houses

What we don’t know for sure is whether Abigail was originally buried in Gateshead or whether her body and the memorial stone were placed near her family’s home in Glasshouses, where John Brand saw it, from the time of her death. The record of her death confirms only that her father, John, was a ‘broad glassmaker’ of Glasshouses. As Quaker records show that John and Sarah Tizacke left Tyneside for London in 1684, the relocation of the stone, if there was one, must have  taken place within a few years of their baby’s death. It seems more likely that while her death was recorded by the Quaker community in Gateshead of which they were members, their memorial to her was placed close to their home near the Ouseburn from the outset. 

The next person we know of to mention the stone was James Clephan, a former editor of The Gateshead Post and a local historian. In a tract published in 1879 (so 200 years after Abigail died and a century after John Brand saw and transcribed the inscription on the stone) he sheds a little more light on it.

Firstly, he acknowledges his gratitude to John Brand for transcribing the inscription as by now it was difficult to read.

Next, we are indebted to Clephan for pointing out that the dates on the stone are not quite what they seem. The date of Abigail’s death, the ‘7^th day of the 12^th month’ was not 7 December 1679 as you might assume. Before the introduction of the Julian calendar in 1752, the year officially began in March. Therefore, to Quakers who, as John Brand mentioned, would not use the names of Roman gods or festivals in the names of the months, the 12th month was February. So Abigail was born on 21 December and died, seven weeks later, on 7 February 1679.

Clephan wrote two tracts which referred to the gravestone. In his first account, Clephan wrote that ‘a generation ago, when the [Broad and Crown glass] works were in process of extension, an old and unremembered burial-place was found, with remains of an enclosure, fragments of gravestones, and a whole stone inscribed with the Tyzack name’.

But in a later version, Clephan wrote that  ‘Mr Councillor Cook moved into the house in connection with the glassworks. There was an old summerhouse nearby, standing on the green, with a stone step at the door. The site was required for building work and the structure was taken down and the step was removed and on the underside, was found Abigail’s inscription. The attention of Mr Joseph Sewell and Mr Justice Nichol was called to this discovery.’ 

So no mention of a burial ground in the second account. Clephan reported that it was Cook himself who had corrected his earlier account. He went on to say that Cook also told him that it was decided to remove the gravestone to the grounds of Heaton Cottage where Joseph Sewell lived.

Heaton Cottage

Joseph Sewell, who we have written about here before, was primarily a pottery owner but he was also, for a time, manager and shareholder of Sir Matthew White Ridley’s Newcastle Broad and Crown Glass Company close to which, in both of Clephan’s accounts and Brand’s, the stone was reported as having been found. Sewell’s house, Heaton Cottage, was in what is now Armstrong Park, close to Jesmond Vale Lane and the famous Shoe Tree.

In his first account, Clephan continued ‘This memorial of the Hugnenots was removed, with reverent care, to Heaton, and laid by Mr Sewell on a grassy bank adjacent to his residence, by the side of a sycamore tree, growing and spreading roots have broken it in two.’ (Could this even be the first mention of the Shoe Tree in historical records?) He concluded ‘An atmosphere of interest-not to say of romance-surrounds this voice from the forgotten cemetery of the seventeenth century.’ 

Clephan finished his second account with a further correction, stating that Mr Cook informed him that the gravestone was broken before it was transported to Heaton Cottage and thanking him ‘for his contribution to the history of the wandering stone over whose long home at the North Shore now runs the new road to Walker!‘

We can roughly date the removal of the stone to Heaton to between 1835, the date Sewell moved to the cottage and 1858 the year he died.

Armstrong Park

Against the odds, it seems as though the stone survived a change of occupier at Heaton Cottage (We know that chemist John Glover later lived in the property) and then the extensive landscaping which followed the incorporation of the land in which it stood into Armstrong Park. Somehow the stone survived next to what became the park’s refreshment rooms and even their demolition in 1955.

But its stay was not without incident. In a letter to the Newcastle Society of Antiquaries, in March 1893 a Mr S Oswald asked what had become of the gravestone. The Society’s minutes reported that he wrote that ‘after laying on the sward for, he believed, about fifty years or thereabouts, it had disappeared. What had become of it? Alderman Newton, chairman of the Parks’ Committee, did not know and, beyond referring him to a subcommittee did not seem to care. This sub-committee had not condescended to answer his enquiry. He, therefore, asked the society to investigate the matter, and prevent the destruction or concealment of the stone… It was resolved to write to the Newcastle City Council in the matter’. We haven’t been able to discover what the explanation was – maybe the grass needed cutting – but the stone was evidently rediscovered.

And for the next part of its story we are indebted to a longtime resident of ‘Dene View‘, 316 Heaton Road, Olive Carter. It was her history of the former Friends’ Meeting House at 78 Jesmond Road (later known as 1 Archbold Terrace) that Arthur browsed through ahead of his eye test.

Olive reported that in the early 1960s ‘John Philipson, an attender with strong antiquarian interests, suggested that the gravestone of Abigail Tyzack … should be brought from Armstrong Park, where it had lain for several years and in future be preserved in the garden at 78 Jesmond Road’. She wrote that by this time it was ‘less complete than it had been some fifty years earlier, when I remember seeing it and wondering about it on childhood walks in Armstrong Park’. It was agreed to move the gravestone from Armstrong Park in October 1966. Olive described its position at the time she was writing, some 35 years later, as affixed to the north-facing wall of the Meeting House garden ‘under the rather obscuring branches of the pear tree that overhangs the wall from the neighbouring garden’.

That might have been the stone’s final resting place had the Friends not decided that the premises on Archbold Terrace was too big for them. In 2011 they moved to a former Masonic Lodge in Gosforth.

They took with them important fixtures from Jesmond including the above cartouche from their original Pilgrim Street Meeting House and Abigail’s memorial stone. This is now cemented into the wall of the walled garden at the rear of the Meeting House.

The stone hasn’t been complete nor the inscription easy to read for at least 140 years, since even before it lay in Heaton for a century, but nearly 350 years after Abigail died, the crossed bones at the bottom of the memorial, typical of their time, are still clear. Abigail’s memory too lives on and the stone has helped us uncover another small slice of local history.

Acknowledgements

Researched and written by Arthur Andrews of Heaton History Group, with additional material by Chris Jackson. Thank you also to Paul Hopper of the Friends’ Meeting House, Gosforth and Mike Barke, Honorary Librarian of the Society of Antiquities at the Great North Hancock Museum for their assistance.

Can You Help?

If you know more about Abigail Tizacke or anyone or anything mentioned in this article or have memories or photos to share, we’d love to hear from you. You can contact us either through this website by clicking on the link immediately below the article title or by emailing chris.jackson@heatonhistorygroup.org

Sources

‘Abigail & Timothy Tyzack and Old Gateshead’ by James Clephan originally published in the November 1879 issue of the Society of Antiquities of Newcastle-on-Tyne’s ‘Archaeologica Aeliana’.

‘Beyond the Grave’ / by Alan Morgan; Tyne Bridge Publishing, 2004

‘The Blew Stone – 300 years of Quakers in Newcastle’ / by Ruth Sansbury, 1998

‘The History and Antiquities of the Town and County of the Town of Newcastle upon Tyne…’ / by John Brand; White and sons, 1789

‘A short history of what, for most of its life, known as 78 Jesmond Road’ / by Olive Carter, 1991

Ancestry

British Newspaper Archive

Findmypast

Sitelines

http://www.tyzack.net

and other online sources.