When, on 18 September 1901, HMS Cobra sank on its maiden voyage on route from Newcastle to Portsmouth, it was a huge shock for the country and a particular tragedy for the north-east, but nowhere was the loss felt more keenly than in Heaton.
Steam
Only four years earlier, Charles Parsons had amazed onlookers by gatecrashing Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee Fleet Review and racing his yacht,Turbinia, between the lines of the officially invited vessels at speeds of up to 34 knots.
Sir Charles Algernon Parsons (1919) by Walter Stoneman (National Portrait Gallery)
Turbinia was powered by marine steam turbines invented at C A Parsons and Co in Heaton by Parsons himself alongside other great engineers such as Gerard Stoney, whose home, as well as his office, was in Heaton and Robert Barnard, who worshipped at Heaton Congregational Church.
Turbinia
Turbinia’s spectacular demonstration of speed prompted local armaments and shipping firm Armstrong Whitworth to build a torpedo destroyer to be fitted with a turbine engine, confident that a buyer would quickly be found. The ship’s design was based on those of two other vessels built at Elswick and it was launched on 28 June 1899. Six months later the ship was offered to the Admiralty. However, the turbine machinery on board was much heavier than the machinery on the earlier ships (183 v 110 tons) and 30 tons more than expected. Despite the assurances of the designer, Philip Watts, who was head of the Elswick shipyard and the firm’s chief naval architect, that the weight was within tolerance limits, the prospective purchaser expressed a number of concerns including about the strength of the upper deck.
Viper
While what was to become HMS Cobra was being modified on the quay at Elswick, a collier ship accidentally collided with her, delaying completion by another seven months. This misfortune allowed a sister ship, HMS Viper, ordered by the Admiralty from another Charles Parsons company, Parsons Marine (who subcontracted the building of the hull to a third local firm, Hawthorn Leslie) to become the world’s first turbine-driven warship. Sadly on 3 August 1901, HMS Viper was grounded on rocks during naval exercises in fog off Alderney in the Channel Islands. The crew were forced to abandon ship as she sank.
HMS Viper
Disaster
Less than seven weeks later, at 5.00pm on 17 September 1901, HMS Cobra was deemed ready to leave Newcastle for Portsmouth, where she was to be armed and commissioned. On board were 79 men, 24 of whom were from the north-east, mainly employees of Armstrong Whitworth, the shipbuilders, and Parsons, the turbine builders.
HMS Cobra
As the weather deteriorated and the ship began to roll, the thoughts of many of those on board must have turned to the recent demise of the Viper, a ship well-known to the Parsons contingent in particular. Conditions, however, began to improve at first light until a sudden shock was felt throughout the Cobra. Within seconds, the ship had broken in two. There wasn’t time to launch any of Its five lifeboats but twelve men, including the ship’s chief engineer, John J G G Percy, were able to scramble into a small dinghy. They were the only survivors. Sixty seven men lost their lives, twenty three of them from ‘contractors’, mainly Parsons.
Local
Among those known to have Heaton connections were:
John Abel
John originated in Brighton, Sussex and, aged 28, worked for Parsons as a ‘steam engine maker and fitter’. His daughter had been born in Portsea, Hampshire in December 1899 so it’s possible that the family hadn’t been in Newcastle long. At the time of the 1901 census, they were living at 12 Morley Street but by the time John lost his life on the Cobra, they were at 44 Denmark Street.
Robert Barnard
The Essex born marine engineer was the senior Parsons Turbine representative aboard the Cobra. He was manager of Parsons Turbine Works, Newcastle and Wallsend. He had assisted in the design of Turbinia and superintended its construction. During its trials, he usually acted as steersman alongside Gerard Stoney and Parsons himself.
Barnard had also superintended the erection of the works at Wallsend and supervised the building and engineering of the Viper and the King Edward as well as the Cobra. Aged 38, he had been ‘associated with the development of the modern steam turbine from the very first. No one next to Mr Parsons believed more in the possibilities’. He was also, until shortly before his death, treasurer of Heaton Congregational Church. He is buried in Preston Cemetery, North Shields with his wife, Mary.
Alfred Bryans
Alfred’s was one of the first six bodies to be found and it was formally identified in Grimsby Hospital mortuary by the coroner’s jury three days after the disaster. An envelope addressed to him at his home address of 25 Meldon Terrace, Heaton was found on him. Alfred was born and raised in Co Durham but in 1901, aged 25, was living in Heaton with his widowed mother. He described himself as a ‘steam engine maker and fitter’. ‘Regarded as an exceedingly promising and capable young man’, he had worked as an electrical engineer at Parsons for five years and was previously on board the Viper ‘superintending work in connection with the dynamos’ when it sank.
He had then been sent to Stockport to be in charge of the dynamos of the new electric car system there and had just returned to Tyneside to travel to Portsmouth aboard the Cobra ‘in the same capacity as he had worked on the Viper’. He had three brothers, one of whom was a doctor at the Middlesbrough hospital where some of the survivors of the Cobra disaster were taken. His older brothers were also engineers, one in London, and the other on a railway in South America. Alfred was among the first to be buried. His funeral took place at Bishopwearmouth Cemetery. Among the mourners at his funeral were Gerard Stoney, John Barker, manager of Parsons Turbine, and Sir Richard Williams who, in 1889, had moved from Clarke and Chapman with Parsons to help him set up his own company.
Edward Lee
Edward was a foreman fitter from C A Parsons and Co. He lived at 21 Morley Street.
George McGregor
Aged only 17, George was the youngest of the Heaton victims. He lived with his widowed mother, younger brother and two sisters at 69 Molyneux Street and was an apprentice fitter at Parsons. His older married brother, David McGregor, aged 29, who lived nearby at 33 Algernon Road was also a fitter at the firm.
John W Webb
John, a 32 year old Parsons fitter, lived at 9 Fifth Avenue with his wife, said to be ‘of delicate health’ and his sister in law. He was reported to be ‘well known and highly respected in the eastern part of the town’, a member of Bainbridge Memorial Wesleyan Church and superintendent of the Sunday school.
Aftermath
Among the first announcements after the disaster was one the following day from the Admiralty declaring that they would ‘cease naming vessels after the snake tribe – first the Serpent, next the Viper and now the Cobra’ (HMS Serpent had run aground and sank in a storm off Galicia in Spain in November 1890, less than two years after going into service. 173 of her 176 crew lost their lives).
Locally, Charles Parsons headed to London immediately and the whole Parsons workforce was given the rest of the week off. There were reports of ’the horrors of scalding steam’ adding to the other dangers experienced by those on board. ‘The Evening Chronicle’ reported that Charles Parsons had foreseen this risk and insisted that the steam pipes on the Viper (on which no escape of steam was reported) were fixed as flexibly as possible. However, on the Cobra, the Parsons Company, as engine builders ‘were bound to follow specifications and these provided that the steam pipes should be as rigidly fixed as possible.’ The war of words between the various interested parties had begun.
The Admiralty immediately absolved the ship’s captain of any blame or navigational error, reporting that the ship was in deep, clear water when it sank. It conceded that it could have struck a wreck or some floating obstruction. A Captain Smith of a Yarmouth herring drifter which was the first vessel on the scene said that he might have seen a shark’s tail but it was impossible to know. A wounded whale, seen in the area, was also implicated until it was discovered that it had been landed a week earlier. The inquest jury expressed ‘an informal opinion that the Cobra was too lightly built and hoped the government would build stronger destroyers’.
Meanwhile a special memorial service was held at Heaton Congregational Church on Sunday 22nd, led by the Reverend William Glover.
Appeal
And on Saturday 21st, a public meeting was announced by Councillor Thomas Cairns, to be held at the Victoria Hotel on Heaton Road ‘with a view to forming a committee to give assistance where necessary to the families deprived of their bread-winners by the loss of HMS Cobra’. The meeting was said to be crowded. Letters of support had been received from the Mayor, the Sheriff, MP Mr Crawford Smith, eminent trades unionist and Heaton resident Alexander Wilkie and the Reverend J Robertson of St Gabriel’s Church among others. Councillor Cairns made a stirring speech which concluded by assuring listeners that the organisers wished to alleviate distress only where it existed and so prompt enquiries into the circumstances of every case would be made. It was stated that the appeal would only be on behalf of the bereaved of the ‘Tyneside district’. A committee was elected and a further meeting convened.
However, a few days later it was announced that a national relief fund had been opened in Portsmouth. When Councillor Cairns contacted the mayor to ask that the Heaton committee be left to support its own bereaved as they better understood individual needs and appealed for the national fund not to appeal for donations for Parsons’ families, he was told the 600 letters had already been sent to national and local newspapers and that the fund would be for the widows and orphans of all those lost, not just the naval men. Cairns responded that Newcastle wouldn’t have dreamt of setting up a national fund. ‘If it had been set up in London, that would be different’. An agreement was soon made for the Heaton executive committee to be broadened to include the mayors of all the Tyneside boroughs. Mr Alfred Howson of 8 Heaton Road was appointed secretary and local councillor Thomas Cairns, treasurer.
Armstrong Whitworth contributed £1,000 to the Tyneside fund.
Court Martial
On 10 October 1901, the naval enquiry or court martial opened at Portsmouth. The Hon Charles Parsons was in court to hear his company absolved of any blame for the accident but Philip Watts, the designer of the ship for Armstrong Whitworth, endured lengthy questioning about the strength of the vessel and what might have caused it to sink. Watts said that he believed that wave action alone could not have sunk the Cobra because of where the ship broke and he maintained that the disaster could not have been caused by striking a rock as the shock felt by those on board would have been greater still. His best guess was that the destroyer had struck some drifting wreckage perhaps with an iron mast attached. He believed that if the aft half of the boat, which was still missing, were to be found, the likely damage would show this to be the case.
Parsons then gave evidence to the court. Perhaps undiplomatically, he said that he believed destroyers like the Cobra were intended to be ‘fine weather vessels but that gradually, having been found to survive heavy seas , they were not taken the same care of as they were originally.’ He clarified that he meant that they were designed to shelter in bad weather. When pressed on the fact that heavy seas were to be expected around the British Isles, he confirmed it ‘would become a necessity to ensure that the strength of these vessels is sufficient to stand any stress they may be likely to come across.’
He confirmed that the turbine machinery installed exceeded the original estimate of 155-160 tons, being 183 tons.
The enquiry concluded that Cobra didn’t meet with any obstruction and that there was no navigation error but ‘the loss was attributable to the structural weakness of the ship’. The court also found that the ‘Cobra was weaker than other destroyers and, in view of that fact, it is to be regretted that she was purchased into his Majesty’s service.’
Defence
Armstrong Whitworth immediately contested the court martial’s findings. The company pointed out that similar boats had sailed to Australia and Japan without incident.
Asked about Parsons’ comments the following day, an Armstrong Whitworth representative said that Parsons had meant that destroyers fitted with the turbine system of propulsion were constructed essentially for their high speed and this high speed could only be obtained in smooth water.
The company authorised Philip Watts, the ship’s designer, to conduct a search operation to try to restore its and his damaged reputations. However, the missing aft section, which could have provided evidence of a collision and exonerated both Watts and the firm, wasn’t found.
Tutor
However, Armstrong Whitworth was invited to submit an article to a literary and current affairs magazine ‘The Monthly Review’. It commissioned John Meade Falkner, the English novelist best known for ‘Moonfleet’, the classic children’s story of shipwrecks and smuggling, written just a few years earlier, to write the piece.
Why him? Well, soon after the Wiltshire born, Marlborough educated Falkner had graduated in history with a third class degree from Hertford College Oxford in 1882, he was introduced to an Eton schoolboy who was struggling to prepare for his Oxford University entrance examination. The boy was John Noble, son of Sir Andrew Noble, physicist, ballistics expert and partner of Sir William Armstrong.
John Meade Falkner
Falkner came to Newcastle to be a tutor both to John and to Sir Andrew Noble’s other children. You can see the 32 year old listed among the large extended household living in Jesmond Dene House on the 1891 census, even though by this time the youngest of the Noble children at home was 20 year old Philip who was recorded as being at Balliol College.
Falkner’s occupation then appears to read ‘MA Oxon Secretary’. There is a second census entry for him as a lodger in Elswick and ‘secretary to engineering company’. He had become company secretary to Armstrong Mitchell in 1888. ‘Moonfleet’ was published in 1896.
By the time of the Cobra disaster in 1901, Falkner was living in Divinity House, Palace Green, Durham and described as a ‘mechanical engineer’ and an ‘employer’. At some point during that year, he became a director of what was now Armstrong Whitworth. His persuasive writing skills were undoubtedly a reason for him being chosen to pen the piece.
Like the naval enquiry, Falkner, in his article, quickly exonerated Parsons and the turbines but questioned the credibility of the court by drawing readers’ attentions to its members’ lack of knowledge of marine engineering. He went on to cast doubt on the competence of the naval divers who had dragged the wreck into deeper waters, searched in poor visibility and, in one case, ‘a foreigner, and his evidence, which seemed naturally vague, was rendered still more obscure by difficulties of interpretation.’
Falkner called for a ‘properly qualified tribunal’ … ‘which will command respect, and the country will accept nothing less’. The truth would then be uncovered ‘on better authority than the verdict of a casual court-martial.’
His words fell on deaf ears but Armstrong Whitworth survived the blow to its reputation and, like Parsons’ turbine business, went from strength to strength in the following decades. Falkner succeeded Sir Andrew Noble as Chairman of Armstrong Vickers in 1915. He later became Honorary Reader in Paleography at the University of Durham and Honorary Librarian to the Dean and Chapter Library of Durham Cathedral.
Sixty seven men, including twenty four from Parsons and at least six who lived in Heaton, weren’t so fortunate.
Acknowledgements
Researched and written by Chris Jackson, Heaton History Group.
Can You Help?
If you know any more about the people named in this article or the sinking of HMS Cobra, 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
Ancestry
British Newspaper Archive
‘The Cobra Trail’ / George Robson and Kenneth Hillier in ‘The John Meade Falkner Society Journal’ no 9, July 2008
‘Down Elswick Slipways: Armstrong’s Ships and People 1884-1918’/ Dick Keys and Ken Smith; Newcastle City Libraries, 1996
‘From Galaxies to Turbines: science, technology and the Parsons family’ / W Garrett Scaife; Institute of Physics Publishing, 2000
The grandly titled City Stadium is a well-used green space at the south end of Heaton. In all weathers, you’ll find runners, cyclists, walkers, outdoor gymnasts, playing children, allotmenteers and many others enjoying the fresh air and perhaps a coffee.
City Stadium, April 2021 (Copyright: Chris Jackson)City Stadium, April 2021 (Copyright: Chris Jackson)
But it’s not always been like this. We asked Heaton History Group’s Keith Fisher to delve into the archives and his memory bank to tell its story:
‘Having friends and associates on both sides of the water, I’ve always been rather impressed with the degree of separation caused by the River Tyne. Despite the arrival of the tunnel in 1967 and now that I live in North Shields, getting to friends’ homes in South Shields still requires at least thirty minutes of driving (plus tolls) to cover no more than a mile as the crow flies.
What has this got to do with Heaton, you may well ask; well, even today, the Ouseburn valley presents a somewhat similar – albeit less severe – impediment. And 100 years ago it was a distinctly difficult obstacle during journeys east to west and vice versa. Between the city centre and Heaton there were few options that didn’t require labouring first down and then up a very steep bank.
Uphill Struggle
A typical symptom of the enthusiasm to avoid Byker Bank for example can be seen by the number of people paying the pedestrian toll to cross the Byker Railway Viaduct (yes, folk paid to walk over) which was approximately 72,000 per year. So the first option was the building of the Byker Road Bridge in 1878 – you had to pay to use that as well, of course. Admittedly the toll was withdrawn in 1895 when the city corporation bought the bridge and it soon had to be widened because of increased traffic: a very familiar modern-day story.
The City Road route was relatively level, so you could bypass Byker Bank by crossing over Glasshouse Bridge and cutting across the western edge of Byker and Heaton with only the slope of Albion Row to contend with. OK, maybe we can consider that as an option, but if you needed to deliver anything by handcart from the town centre to Craigielea on Heaton Road then that was a long way out of your way on a cold and windy day.
I mention pushing heavy laden handcarts because my maternal grandfather, having retired as a lion-tamer in the circus, took to the variety theatre boards and would transport his props on a handcart. His sons, my uncles, were commandeered to labour on his behalf and they complained to me about it until they died.
Fortunately for the waggoneers, in the same year as Byker Road Bridge opened, another improvement arrived, as did so many, from Lord Armstrong: I never stop waxing lyrical regarding his unstinting benevolence, despite his motives being held to doubt in certain quarters. He had apparently bowed to the demands of Lady Armstrong – who was horrified by the sight of poor old horses dragging carts of coal up Benton Bank – and built Armstrong Bridge at his own expense, before giving it to the city council, insisting it remain toll-free.
Back in 1900, as far as the council were concerned, a more central route to all the new industries and residencies in Heaton from the town was desirable, but the best that was going to be achieved would still involve a steep bank.
Shieldfield, like the city centre, is far lower down than the centre of Heaton, and if we think that Warwick Street is steep today, imagine what it must have been like a century ago with a 30 metre deep Ouseburn Valley across its way. In mitigation, the new route would only be an uphill struggle in one direction; it would create new land for housing development; plus, it would provide a waste disposal facility in the centre of the city for 40 years.
Rubbish
During my youth in the ’50s and ’60s, everyone referred to the City Stadium as ‘The Tip’ because for the previous 40 years it had been the destination of both domestic and commercial refuse while the 100 foot deep valley was brought up to Shieldfield’s level. We didn’t generate much waste back then, did we? Couldn’t afford to!
The council’s plan to develop the infilled valley with houses never came to fruition because building regulations stiffened and residential development on infilled land was forbidden.
Concrete
But first, culvert the Ouseburn. And to do that city engineer F J Edge decided that François Hennebique’s system was the method of choice: what we know today as reinforced concrete. The French Hennebique system was pioneered in this country by L G Mouchel with offices in Jesmond; work was initially executed by engineering firm W T Weir and Co of Howdon.
Actually, my mention of Craigielea on Heaton Road was not without significance. Its first resident, Joseph Lish, was an early pioneer of reinforced concrete and has many buildings to his name: up here, the best known being the Dove Marine Laboratory in Cullercoats. As early as 1874, he had exhibited his own invention: ‘Tilo-Concrete’. Lish was prominent in his profession both regionally and nationally. At one stage he was the President of the Society of Architects, whose Gold Medal he was awarded. He died in 1922 at the age of 80.
The Corporation might have saved themselves a great degree of trouble if they had awarded the contract to Lish, and we shall see why as we move on; although I suspect that the real problem was city councillors expecting the impossible by yesterday for no more than the price of a pint of beer and a bag of pork scratchings.
Ouseburn culvert, City Engineers drawing
Looking at the above plan it can be seen that filling up the narrowest portion of the valley came first (‘WORK No.1’). This allowed an extension of Newington Road to link with Starbeck Avenue in Sandyford. It is also apparent that the burn had travelled a good way west before turning towards the Tyne in the south, slowly eroding away the bank and creating the large loop that the engineers by-passed by hugging the steep bank at the end of Stratford Grove. The shading and black bars are mine. The following picture shows the original river course in the foreground running left to right. Also apparent is the height of Newington Road above the valley floor, and it is at the foot of Warwick Street: hard going, even for horses.
Building the Ouseburn culvert
The tunnel is 2,150 feet long. Construction used 850 tons of steel and 17,000 cubic yards of concrete. It is 30 feet wide and 20 feet high; at its apex it is only 8 inches thick, supporting 90 feet – or 2·5 million cubic yards – of compacted waste material. Started in 1906, it was interrupted by flooding and old colliery workings and became a huge financial embarrassment to the corporation, resulting in a stoppage of work and a change of contractors very early on… sound familiar?
What did they do with the water in the meantime?
There were two pre-existing facilities: one was a large bore sewage pipe heading for the Tyne. Yes! Who remembers the smell of the Tyne on hot days before the interceptor sewer was built? Or what was worse, the smell of the Ouseburn which itself was an open sewer until the middle of the 1970s when a big pipe was buried running from one end of the valley to the other. It is not always 100% sealed, as many folk will probably be aware when walking past various manholes at certain times, but I still vividly recall, from my early years, the large, open, vertical grills of the outlet pipes choked with unmentionable material that was the norm back then.
The second was a weir and sluice gate in Jesmond Vale – as it happens, mere yards from the beginning of the future culvert – which diverted full-flow water into a mill-race that more or less paralleled the burn, passing alongside the original large lead works, then under the railway bridge where it powered a flint-mill. That mill does not look big enough to warrant construction of a 3,000 foot long race, so who contributed to the cost? Early maps show nothing definite, even though the race is in existence by 1859. It’s curious: why take a mill-race all that distance to power a rather insignificant flint-mill that is only yards from the burn itself? There are many references in old newspaper accounts of ‘washing tubs’ and I suspect they are referring to the mill-race heading for the original lead works before it moved under the railway bridge and straddled the burn itself. Maps are full of interesting activity around the burn; there are all sorts of mysterious doings – both old and new; and also up the hill a-ways, where we find a huge brick-works I never realised had been there. The red rectangle on the OS map below indicates the point where the Ouseburn absorbs the Sandyford Burn, coming down the back of Portland Road from Lambert’s Leap on Sandyford Road. It is now culverted under Grantham Road.
The above picture shows us the sewage pipe (bottom left) carrying its share of the burn while in the distance, top right, can be seen the original route of the burn and mill-race. All of the property visible was compulsorily purchased and demolished; much more, it would turn out, than had been initially anticipated.
The following pictures give us a good idea of the construction process. Reinforcing poured concrete with iron bars is a fairly common sight nowadays but back then it was relatively novel and the entire endeavour was officially photographed for posterity.
The next photo shows tipping activity; and the inset shows ‘scrannin on the tip’ (as it was known) by folks foraging for usable material. In the background can be seen the slowly submerging parabola of the culvert roof. Many people will remember the smell of the tip; I can certainly remember the smell of similar activity as they began to widen Lansdowne Gardens at the other end of Jesmond Vale; I believe that was still going on through the ’70s: dreadful!
The Ouseburn tip while the culverting was still underway
All things considered, it was a relatively unsatisfactory project: original cost estimates spiralled out of control; work was halted; suggestions it be abandoned were voiced. The council had been anxious to get cross-roads established as soon as possible: that was achieved in the first six years; and having rapidly built heavily above the Jesmond Vale section, repairs soon became necessary in order to strengthen the walls.
If you look closely at this aerial photo from 1938 you can see how the extension to Warwick Street was accomplished; it is also apparent why getting an extension from Newington Avenue up to Starbeck Avenue was achieved so quickly as the valley is comparatively narrow at that point.
The white border on this 1945 photo shows the extent of the area being filled; these two aerial shots indicate the lack of progress during the war years, as it seems it remained untouched; so where was all the rubbish going?
Shelter
Speaking of war: during my youth, many folk told me that the culvert had been an air-raid shelter during the war, as many of them used it – but most of us are completely unaware of the extent of the facilities provided.
Marian Jones describes what must have been the finest public air -raid shelter in existence: a concrete floor was laid across the tunnel sealing off the burn below and thick concrete blast-walls were installed across the entrances. Gangways accessed a space big enough to accommodate up to 3,000 people. As well as lighting, there were benches, bunk-beds, a canteen/shop and a well equipped and manned hospital room.
Susan Bright tells of an office for air raid wardens, a youth club, a religious space, and a staging area for musical performances. And, in 1943, a library and reading room were added. Entrances were under the railway bridge and at the foot of Warwick Street, with gangways giving access to the shelter.
Many people didn’t even wait for the sirens and simply headed down there every night – with blankets, pillows, flasks of tea and cocoa etc – when the bombings were at their worst. In 1941 this unplanned and intense activity unfortunately led to a crack 100 feet long appearing in the wall of the tunnel and that section had to be cordoned off. Even so, this was as luxurious an accommodation as was possible during such fearful times; a lot better than those in Anderson Shelters in back gardens or even the Victoria Tunnel. Better again than the London Underground tunnels, as the culvert shelter was purpose built and exclusive… hence the extraordinary facilities.
Post War
Today’s evidence of the culvert’s existence is decidedly removed from the original construction. When I was a nipper exploring my vast dominion, the entrance to the culvert was mostly unchanged, except for the metal railings preventing access at the Sandyford entrance. You could see the construction but that was all. The exit under Byker Bridge, however looked like this in the early 1960s.
Ouseburn Culvert, 1960s
We little lads can find adventure wherever, along with wet shoes, muddy knees and diphtheria.
Now the picture is very different, most evidence of the entrance and exit has been obliterated, except what you see in my 2021 photos.
The first is the Vale.
Ouseburn Culvert images (Copyright: Keith Fisher)
The south exit is even more inaccessible, which has a lot to do with raves held there around 2017. Ubiquitous graffiti provides further disguise.
Ambitious Plans
With the war over and housebuilding on the tip forbidden, what could be done with the land created by the culverting and levelled by infill? How about a sports stadium? Here’s an ‘Evening Chronicle’ sketch from the 1950s of the plans.
City Stadium plans from the 1950s
Seating for 86,000 people (Yes, eighty six thousand!) was augmented by a further space for 8,500 standing. Car parking was to be on three floors below the stands. Indoor sports, ice rinks (yes, plural), and badminton courts were also planned. T Dan Smith proposed spending £500,000 to prepare such a stadium for the British Empire Games. (Renamed the British Commonwealth Games by the time 1966, the year he was targeting, came round). ‘The best intentions’ right? We got a wooden hut and a cinder track, plus the grand name.
Build by Numbers
I passed our – so called – City Stadium on an almost daily basis riding the Number 1 or 2 bus to and from town during the ’60s and early ’70s, and remained mystified by the enormous forest of stone blocks, all numbered in white figures, scattered over the near corner of the unrealised City Stadium. It turned out they were the Royal Arcade waiting to be resurrected at some future time and place. I was equally mystified by their disappearance sometime during the ’70s; at least I assume it was then because I was in and out of Newcastle throughout that decade and was gone almost for good by the ’80s: just like the Royal Arcade, the prestigious City Stadium and our Empire!
Now, if you drop by ‘the tip’ you’ll see the unmistakeable signs of gentrification, the most recent phase of the rich history of this patch of Heaton. What went before has almost, but not quite, been forgotten. But should we be making more of our heritage? The Victoria Tunnel has become a tourist attraction. Perhaps I’m biased but I reckon the City Stadium and Ouseburn Culvert has an even more exciting history. Conducted tours anyone?’
Acknowledgements
Researched and written by Keith Fisher, Heaton History Group. Thank you to Carlton Reid for information about the washing tubs.’ Photograph of the Victoria Tunnel courtesy of ‘The Evening Chronicle’.
Can You Help?
If you know more this part of Heaton 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
The author’s personal archives
‘The Ouseburn Culvert and the City Stadium’ by Marian Jones; ‘The Newsletter of the Ouseburn Trust Heritage Group’, Spring 2008.
‘Bridging the Ouseburn’ by Sue Bright; Ancestors Publishing, 2013
Funny, isn’t it, how once something becomes generally accepted it gets, well, accepted? Take Armstrong Park’s ‘cattle run’: according to an interpretation panel in the park, this distinctive feature was sunk for bovine use by Victorian industrialist Lord Armstrong.
The livestock, goes the story, were herded through this costly railway-style cutting because the route had long been used for leading cows to pasture.
Armstrong Park interpretation panel, 2010
‘When [Lord] Armstrong was given the land’ the panel explains, ‘he had this deeper channel dug so that cattle could follow the old track and be kept apart from visitors and their carriages.’
Using archive materials, period maps, and copious illustrations, local resident Carlton Reid explains why the lottery-funded interpretation panel is, in all likelihood, wrong:
Bullshi…
‘For centuries, cattle had been driven down to pasture by the River Ouseburn from the fields above the valley,’ states the interpretation panel. The moss-covered panel is situated to the side of the upper of two bridges which span the 200-metre-long sunken feature in Armstrong Park. In the 19th Century this lozenge of land which now sports the ‘Shoe Tree’ was known as Bulman’s Wood.
Even though I argue here that the feature wasn’t designed for cows, I refer to it throughout this piece as the ‘cattle run’. Another descriptive convenience is the interchangeable use of Armstrong Park and Bulman’s Wood for roughly the same 29-acre plot of land.
There’s a linear east-west feature marked on the large-scale map attached to the Deed of Gift of September 1879 in which Armstrong gave this woodland in perpetuity to the people of Newcastle, but it’s not labelled as a ‘cattle run‘.
Plan from Lord Armstrong’s Deed of Gift, 1879
The feature was constructed not in the 1850s, which the interpretation panel seems to suggest, but in 1880 when the council — then known as Newcastle Corporation — owned the land.
Armstrong may have handed Bulman’s Wood to the people of Newcastle via the council’s stewardship but, ever the canny speculator, he inserted a clause in the deed allowing him to continue draining the parts of Heaton which he wished to later develop for housing.
I also speculate that, with the Victorian equivalent of a nod-and-a-wink, the Corporation incorporated Armstrong’s pre-designed linear feature into their plans for what they named Armstrong Park.
Remarks on a cutting
The cutting today known as the ‘cattle run’ starts on Ouseburn Road, rising and curving to finish unceremoniously in a quagmire forming the southern boundary of the plots administered by the 103-year-old Armstrong Allotments Association. Waterlogged and overgrown, this patch of land is understandably little-visited today. (Wear wellies.)
As the interpretation panel rightly points out, the cutting’s high-quality sandstone blockwork is reminiscent of Victorian railway infrastructure.
Armstrong Park ‘cattle run’
Some of the sandstone blocks and their coping stones have fallen to the ground — or, more likely, were pushed — and they lie scattered on the feature’s floor, an ankle-twisting deterrent to those wishing to walk along the ‘cattle run’.
There are two pillars at the Ouseburn Road entrance of the ‘cattle run’, eight courses high and capped with flat coping stones.
If you brush fallen leaves to one side, you’ll uncover rusted remains of iron railings where, within living memory, a gate once closed off the sunken feature at the roadside pillars, one of which is decoratively triangular.
At the opposite end of the ‘cattle run’ the sandstone blocks fade almost to ground level. This entrance is marked by stumpy, ivy-covered pillars, only one of which is now easily visible. This pillar, only a couple of courses high, is capped with a pyramid-shaped coping stone.
Eastern end of the ‘cattle run’
‘The quality of the stone work was intended to be seen,’ an archaeologist told me, ‘but not by agricultural labourers and cows.’
Hanna Steyne specialises in 19th Century landscapes. I sent her a great many photographs of the ‘cattle run’ and surroundings, including drone shots, and she also accessed period mapping to get the contemporary lay of the land.
‘I would not expect decorative column features on a structure only to be used for agricultural purposes,’ she pointed out.
On several period Ordnance Survey maps, Armstrong Park’s elongated feature is marked with a finger-shaped 100ft contour line. It’s likely that the masonry of the ‘cattle run’ shored up what was once a natural feature in Bulman’s Wood, a feature that the ‘Newcastle Daily Chronicle’ in 1884 called a ‘deep gully’.
As shown on the map from Armstrong’s 1879 Deed of Gift, this gully contained a linear feature prior to the following year’s construction of the ‘cattle run’.
Landscape artist
Hydraulics innovator and arms manufacturer Lord Armstrong was, of course, a noted philanthropist. Five years after handing Bulman’s Wood to the people of Newcastle he gifted the larger Jesmond Dene to the city. This provision of an amenity for his fellow citizens was generous but, back in 1878 when he first discussed the gift, would he really have commissioned a channel in a deep gully to keep cows away from people in a park he was soon to give away? It’s far more likely that when he charged his agents with designing the cutting, he and they had something else in mind.
By the time the cutting was built in 1880 the land was owned by the Newcastle Corporation. The council had no need for such a feature so it was likely to have been built on Armstrong’s orders, and with his cash, on the undocumented understanding that he had a commercial use for it.
Kraal rangers
According to a Historic Environment Record, the ‘cattle run’ is a ‘stone-lined animal kraal which took Armstrong’s cattle from grazing land to the east to the lower pasture land to the west, without disturbing visitors to the park. What was the historical source for this citation? ‘Pers. Comm. Jesmond Dene Rangers, 2004,’ says the record. There’s nothing wrong with using such local knowledge — especially when such ‘personal communications’ were gleaned from folks out there in all weathers looking after our parks and who, in the course of their work, probably hear their fair share of handed-down history — but it’s odd that the entry only cites unnamed 21st century rangers rather than providing 19th century sources.
For Lord Armstrong to go to the considerable expense of sinking a bovine passageway, it would, you might think, have to be a feature in regular use and therefore would have been of at least passing interest to the local press. Yet not in any of the long and detailed descriptions of Armstrong Park in contemporary newspapers have I found mentions of a ‘cattle run’, a ‘kraal’ or any other bovine-related use for the feature.
Nor have I found any period maps, not even those of the largest scale, that mark the feature as a ‘cattle run.’ The only maps to do so are modern and crowdsourced such as OpenStreetMap, a volunteer-edited online resource founded, coincidentally, in 2004..
Don’t have a cow, man
Might there have been a time-out-of-mind cattle track through the deep gully of Bulman’s Wood? Maybe. According to an 18th Century field-name map, there were two large fields to the west of what became Heaton Road: North Cow Close and South Cow Close, both of which belonged to Low Heaton Farm. On the other side of Heaton Road there was a P-shaped field called ‘Cow Loan’ belonging to Heaton Town Farm.
Detail from a plan of Heaton believed to be by Isaac Thompson, c 1800. Redrawn by Frank Graham, 1952. Included in ‘Maps of Newcastle’ by Frank Graham, 1984.
There was also Benton Bridge Farm, which according to the censuses between 1891 and 1911 was a dairy farm. The farmhouse was at the junction of Ouseburn Road and the Newcastle to Benton turnpike, today’s Coast Road. It is now a house called Woodburn, that, in exterior design, is little changed from the 1890s.
Bingo, you might think, cows. However, the existence of these three field names and dairy farms in the vicinity does not necessarily mean that cows would be taken to pasture on fields beside the Ouseburn.
Might cows have been taken down to the Ouseburn not for pasture but to drink? Thomas Oliver’s 1844 map of Newcastle shows Heaton Road, Heaton Hall’s garden that would become Heaton Park’s bowling green, and Ouseburn Road and, close to where the cattle run would be later built, there’s a field boundary.
Detail from Thomas Oliver’s 1844 map of Newcastle, showing Heaton
There’s no path marked at this point, for cows or otherwise, and it’s possible that cows might have been herded along the edge of this field and down to the river.
But as there were several water sources in or near the cow-themed fields was there any real need to lead cattle to a stream? Archaeologist Hanna Steyne thinks not:
‘From the topography identifiable from mapping, it seems highly unlikely that cows would be heading for pasture down by the river — there seems to have been plentiful farm land on which to graze cows.’
The three large fields may have corralled cows in the 18th century but, by the mid-19th century, only one of them — Cow Loan — was still being used for that purpose, and this only fractionally. According to an 1868 document mapping Armstrong-owned land in Heaton, only about an eighth of the fields worked by Heaton Town Farm and East Heaton Farm were devoted to pasture. (Today, these fields are mostly in the area around Ravenswood Primary School and the Northumberland Hussar pub on Sackville Road.)
As has been discussed previously on this website, Heaton Town Farm was an arable and dairy farm, owned through the 18th and most of the 19th Centuries by the aristocratic Ridley family once of Heaton Hall.
Sir Matthew White Ridley, the fourth Baronet, was the farmer of the family. He had a ‘thorough liking for agricultural pursuits, and took a deep interest in all matters relating to the farm’, reported an 1877 obituary ‘As a breeder of cattle, he was known throughout the whole of the North of England.’
Ridley sold Heaton Town Farm’s land and buildings in 1865. All were either then or soon after that owned by Sir William Armstrong. From the 1840s to the 1860s, the farm was leased by the 4th Baron Ridley to George Cairns. In the 1861 census, Cairns (who also features in records as ‘Carins’) was listed as working 145 acres of mixed farmland, employing ‘4 men, a boy and women labourers.’ Cairns lived with a housekeeper, a ploughman, a 19-year-old Irish dairymaid and a 14-year-old ‘cow keeper’. By 1881, it was still a dairy farm but was now just 27 acres.
Clearly, there were cows in this part of Heaton when Armstrong or his agents commissioned the feature which became known as the ‘cattle run’, but by the 1870s there would have been just a small number of them rather than herds so large and potentially disruptive that they required a cow cutting.
In the 19th Century, ‘dairy farming was seen as a fairly abhorrent activity,’ said Steyne, ‘and one which should be hidden from the delicate middle classes.’
Armstrong himself owned several Newcastle farms, at least two of which had cows on them. He kept small herds at Castles Farm (near to today’s David Lloyd fitness club) and at Benton Place (underneath today’s HM Revenues and Customs building off Benton Road). However, it’s unlikely these herds would have ventured as far as Bulman’s Wood, so we’re left with the small number of cows at Heaton Town Farm and Benton Bridge Farm. (By 1916, Benton Bridge Farm housed just three cows, said to be ‘shockingly emaciated’.)
‘The idea that cattle would be walked through a formal Victorian park is fairly strange,’ suggests Steyne.
‘The whole point about Victorian parks was that they were controlled “natural” environments — nature made beautiful — but deliberately separated from the reality of the [actual] natural environment.’
Even if the much-reduced number of cows in the locality during the 1870s and 1880s still used a ‘traditional’ route through the steep-sided gully in Bulman’s Wood, why would Armstrong care to preserve this? Cows are not eels, and the Ouseburn is not the Sargasso Sea. For a practical man like Armstrong, and probably for countless others before him, the sensible herding route would have been down the long-existing Jesmond Vale Lane.
Pedestrian pleasures
If the ‘cattle run’ wasn’t for cattle, what was it for? An 1880 newspaper report about the opening of Armstrong Park explains that it was for pedestrian use. The ‘Newcastle Daily Chronicle’ was clear: it was a ‘sunken footpath’.
The ‘new park is rapidly progressing towards completion’, began the report.
‘The ivy-covered mill on the eminence immediately above [the bank] has for many years been a conspicuous object of interest from the vale beneath’, explained the period writer, meaning the old windmill in Armstrong Park.
‘Beyond this ground, the boundaries of the park terminate at a hedge growing on the border of a fine grass field [where] it is intended … to erect villa residences, and in order to render these accessible from the Ouseburn road, a sunken footpath, which will be finished from plans suggested by Sir William, is at present being made.’
(That’s it: the ‘cattle run’ was a sunken footpath for villa owners; quest over. True, but let’s carry on anyway, there’s plenty more to parse.)
The 1880 writer continued:
‘This path runs immediately through and underneath the park, but is in no way connected with the public pleasure ground.’
According to this contemporary description, a ‘wooden bridge forms a portion of the carriage drive over the path, which is also crossed in the middle path by a neat rustic bridge.’
Today, these two bridges are the large upper one over the ‘cattle run’ at the carriage road and the smaller one down the path from the Shoe Tree. Both bridges now have metal railings, and both are made from stone not wood. The bridges have been rebuilt some time after 1880, but let’s continue with the contemporary description.
Bridge over the ‘cattle run’, Armstrong Park
‘An elegant waterfall will be seen from both structures,’ wrote the correspondent.
Water surprise
Wait, what, a waterfall? Where? It ran parallel to the ‘cattle run’. To confirm its existence I pulled back some of the overgrown foliage to unveil the vertical rock face over which the cascade once ran.
Site of former waterfall, Armstrong Park
Just like the well-known waterfall in Jesmond Dene — the subject of countless paintings and photographs — the hitherto unknown one in Armstrong Park was built rather than being wholly natural.
Given similar landscape shaping in Jesmond Dene, it’s possible that the cascade was Armstrong’s idea, or perhaps that of his friend, the naturalist John Hancock, co-founder with his brother Albany of the museum which until recently bore their name. Some of the Dene’s naturalistic features, such as its ornamental rockeries, were either designed in whole by Hancock or in association with Armstrong.
The 1880 newspaper report has a vivid description:
‘The water, which is obtained from the fields beyond, will flow through a 15-inch pipe, placed for a distance beneath the sunken footpath, and then securing an outlet between the carriage drive and the rustic bridge, will dash merrily onwards over an ingenious arrangement of rocks, falls and ferns, until it at length mingles the purity of its stream with that of the singing burn beneath.’
(The original rocks remain, and there’s still a pipe in situ, although it’s a modern one, concreted into place.)
The waterfall pre-dated Newcastle Corporation’s ownership of Bulman Wood. According to a report in the ‘Newcastle Daily Chronicle’ of October 1878, the waterfall — described as a ‘small cascade’ — was fed by a spring that ‘runs evenly the whole year through’.
Armstrong Park has several perennial springs. Heavy rain landing on year-round saturated ground is now channeled by numerous drains but, before these were constructed, Bulman’s Wood would have been almost permanently boggy, and, during high rainfall events, there would have been a rapid runoff of stormwater down the deep gully.
Water on the brain
Bulman’s Wood, according to the ‘Chronicle’ report, was owned by a Mr. Potter. (Actually, it was owned by Armstrong, who had inherited the land in 1851.) The Mr. Potter in question was Colonel Addison Potter, who lived with his large family and many servants at Heaton Hall, once the seat of the White-Ridley family but bought in 1840 by Colonel Potter’s father, the coal owner and industrialist Addison Langhorn Potter, Armstrong’s uncle.
Armstrong bought land in Jesmond and Heaton as it became available, adding to the land he inherited from his father’s close friend Armorer Donkin, a rich Tyneside solicitor.
Armstrong Senior and Donkin were town councillors, and thick as thieves. In the 1820s and 1830s, the Armstrong family would spend holidays at Donkin’s country retreat in Rothbury. Young William developed a taste for open water fishing in the Coquet River during these holidays and loved the area’s hills, weirs, and waterfalls, a landscape he would later go on to recreate in Jesmond Dene before doing similar at Cragside.
Armstrong Junior had a lifelong fascination with water’s potential for motive power. From a young age, he was afflicted with ‘water on the brain’, joked his family.
After leaving school, Armstrong was articled with Donkin, a bachelor who treated the bright youngster as his adoptive son, heir to his fortune and his land in Heaton. Armstrong worked for some time as a solicitor in Donkin’s firm but his real vocation was as an inventor and engineer with an abiding interest in the growing science of hydraulics.
Donkin lived in Jesmond Park, a grand house in Sandyford with gardens and woodlands sloping down to the Ouseburn. Jesmond Park was famous among Tyneside’s elite for ‘Donkin’s ordinary’, a weekly Saturday luncheon where the great and good — and the rich and influential — would meet to exchange ideas as well as contacts and contracts.
Armstrong, eager to ditch his legal work and forge a living as an engineer, was a habitual attendee at these dinners, no doubt enthused after talking with visiting Victorian luminaries including Isambard Kingdom Brunel. For the young Armstrong, it would have been a short stroll down the slope from Jesmond Park to the deep gully that later became the ‘cattle run’.
There’s a linear feature in the gully shown on the 1864 Ordnance Survey map. The 200-metre-long feature is drawn like a road, with parallel lines. But it’s too narrow to be a road and isn’t dotted, so it’s not a footpath, either. Nor is it a field boundary. The nearest equivalent, on this particular map, would be a mill race.
While there’s a mill race in Jesmond Vale, opposite the gully and one of several mill races in the Ouseburn valley, there’s no known water mill in Bulman’s Wood.
The linear feature on the map was too straight to be natural and, if you were looking down from the lower bridge, it curved to the right as it neared Ouseburn Road. This “J”-shaped tail — which can still be seen on the ground today — curved in the opposite direction to the later ‘cattle run’.
There are footpaths marked on the 1864 map that follow and cross over the linear feature and its J-shaped tail. Many later maps plot both the tail and the ‘cattle run’.
The feature shown on the 1864 map is narrow, about the width of the mill race opposite. It’s probably an open-to-the-elements storm drain, yet large enough to be plotted on a map.
Detail from 1864 Ist edition OS map
‘[The] little stream which runs through [Bulman Wood’s] dell is sunk deep in a stone-lined channel,’ reported ‘Newcastle Daily Chronicle’ in 1884, adding that it had been built because it had been ‘difficult to prevent the rivulet when flooded from breaking the banks away.’
The ‘Chronicle’ didn’t give a date for the stone-lined channel’s construction but as it’s marked on the 1864 map, it must have been built sometime before 1858 when the OS map had been surveyed.
Could the channel on Donkin’s land have been used by Armstrong — or constructed, even — for experiments in hydraulics? Maybe. Armstrong certainly cited the Ouseburn as a stream that could power machinery.
‘The transient produce of useless floods’ Armstrong told an 1845 meeting at Newcastle’s Literary and Philosophical Society ‘could become available as a permanent source of mechanical power.’
He wanted to harness the ‘vast quantities of water which pour down brooks and watercourses … in time of rain.’
A newspaper report of the meeting said Armstrong ‘proceeded to point out the advantages which would result from the principles of impounding surplus water and causing it to act as a column, by referring to … the Ouseburn.’
‘Suppose,’ posited Armstrong to the august audience, ‘that instead of having a succession of six mill races and six falls, as was the case on the Ouseburn, the first mill race were continued along the banks of the stream gradually getting higher and higher above the natural channel of the brook, to within a short distance of the Tyne where a single fall of upwards of 100 feet might be obtained.’
There’s no documentary evidence to connect Armstrong’s 1845 desire for a high mill race to the probable storm drain down the gully in Bulman’s Wood, but he would have been well aware of the water feature’s existence.
The run-off from the storm drain was later employed for the scenic waterfall introduced above.
‘The stream of water,’ continued the 1880 newspaper report, ‘has been diverted along a channel of masonry almost at its highest point after entering the grounds, and it is brought along its artificial bed until opposite the larger of the two rustic bridges, where it is thrown over a rocky ledge in a high fall.’
While undoubtedly scenic, the waterfall also had a practical purpose. The storm drain which created it was said to also drain the upper field, which today is the waterlogged patch of ground between the end of the ‘cattle run’ and the multi-coloured plots belonging to the Armstrong Allotments Association.
Armstrong Allotments, 2020
‘Ingenious drainage [in Armstrong Park] has in several instances converted marshy, sodden land into pleasant places,’ reported the ‘Chronicle’
If this ‘ingenious drainage’ dates back to the 1840s or 1850s that’s only a decade or two after the introduction of the transformative Deanston method of agricultural field drainage. The work of James Smith of Deanston in Perthshire used drain tiles and narrow pipes beneath fields. Smith created the technique in 1823, but its use only became widespread after a journal published details in 1831.
‘Smith o’ Deanston’s the man!’ exclaimed a character in ‘Hillingdon Hall’, a now-forgotten but popular-in-the-1840s novel by Robert Smith Surtees of Hamsterley Hall, Rowlands Gill. ‘Who ever ‘heard o’ drainin’ afore Smith o’Deanston inwented it?’ continued John Jorrocks, an upwardly-mobile, country-sports-loving businessman who, wrote Surtees, couldn’t pronounce the ‘v’ sound.
The new method of drainage led to a revolution in British farming, financially boosted in 1846 by the Public Money Drainage Act. This largesse enacted by parliament extended generous farm improvement loans to landowners. (Many parliamentarians owned large estates at this time.) Previously soggy and unproductive land became highly profitable arable fields which, for 15 or so years, made the rich even richer.
The ‘now common accompaniment of a country gentleman,’ pointed out Surtees in ‘Hawbuck Grange’ (1847) was a ‘draining-pipe.’
After going ‘boldly at the Government loan’ another Surtees character was said to have transformed a ‘sour, rush-grown, poachy, snipe-shooting looking place’ into land ‘sound enough to carry a horse.’
Deanston’s method of introducing smaller-bore, more frequently placed drains was an improvement on former methods, wrote the landed Surtees, who described ‘gulf-like drains as would have carried off a river … but there was no making head against wet land with stone drains, the bit you cured only showing the wetness of the rest.’
The stone-lined watercourse in Bulman’s Wood was more likely to have been a storm channel than one that could drain a field, but contemporary descriptions are divided on the subject.
Even though, according to the 1864 map, it looked like one, the watercourse wasn’t a mill race, Duncan Hutt, a local watermill expert told me. ‘There is no clear evidence for any feature nearby being a conduit for water to feed a mill.’
He added: ‘The [cattle run] is far too steep to be a watercourse for a mill, [it’s] more likely something to help provide some surface drainage in times of heavy downpours in the past.’
Archaeologist Steyne agreed:
‘The identification of a drainage watercourse and a decorative waterfall to the north of the line of the cattle run, would correlate with the information in the mapping indicating earlier drainage from the land to the east, and then a later stone-built feature running alongside.’
An 1894/95 OS map shows the ‘cattle run’ to be a full-on watercourse, printed blue. This was probably a mistake by the map makers. (Mistakes were common — on the same map, Hadrian’s Wall is marked not as the Roman Wall but as the Romam Wall.)
‘It is very possible that the earlier drainage feature became less visible and was confused in the mapping with the later cattle run,’ suggested Steyne.
‘Land was not completely resurveyed for each new map, only changes added. The fact that both were perhaps unused, or fell into disrepair shortly after construction might explain [the anomaly on the 1894/95 OS map],’ she said.
‘Land for housing’
During the first 75 years of the 19th Century, the British landed aristocracy were the wealthiest class in the world’s richest country. For the last 25 of those years this wealth had at least partly come from the huge profits enabled by government-sponsored field drainage. But the good times for many of these landed elites did not last. A dramatic fall in grain prices following the opening up of the American prairies to cultivation led to a steep decline in British agriculture. This agrarian depression started in the 1870s and continued until the mid-1890s resulting in British fields that had previously been money-spinners losing much of their value.
Between 1809 and 1879, 88 percent of British millionaires had been landowners; from 1880 to 1914 this figure dropped to 33 percent.
‘Land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure,’ complained Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde’s 1895 ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’.
For the elites, it became prudent to sell land rather than farm it.
Urban farmland, in particular, could generate huge one-hit profits, with expanding cities such as Newcastle in desperate need of space for housing.
Heaton landowners Colonel Addison Potter, Sir Matthew White Ridley, and Lord Armstrong and others could — and did — make handsome profits by selling off their fields for building plots. These three in particular were voracious sellers of land, especially Armstrong who employed agents that developed housing estates on his behalf.
Armstrong, of course, also gave away land to the people of Newcastle, but the gift of his extensive Jesmond Dene ‘garden’ wasn’t perhaps as purely philanthropic as it is usually portrayed — creating an attractive country park from a steeply sided valley that might have proved too deep to fill and flatten was a savvy move for a housing developer.
‘The more he bestows, the richer [Lord Armstrong] becomes’ , a magazine calculated in 1889.
Creating the amenity of Jesmond Dene as a sweetener to help sell the plots on his extensive housing developments in Jesmond and Heaton made perfect business sense. Likewise, Armstrong Bridge wasn’t commissioned by its namesake to ease the burdens of packhorses climbing Benton Bank — a backstory usually attributed to the kindness of Lady Armstrong — but as a high-level road approach for the prestigious properties Armstrong planned to develop on both sides of the Ouseburn valley.
On the plus side, his shrewd philanthropy prevented any infilling of Jesmond Dene. Many of Newcastle’s other denes disappeared under landfill — a third-of-a-mile segment of the Ouseburn valley near Warwick Street was culverted in the early 1900s and crammed with rubble and other rubbish. However, the land created on top of the Ouseburn Tip — which is now the ‘City Stadium’ — proved too unstable for housing.
Similarly, today’s plots owned by the Armstrong Allotments Association only exist because the land they were carved from proved unsuitable for building use.
Armstrong originally planned to develop this land to create Heaton Park Estate, an exclusive neighbourhood of mansions overlooking the Dene.
In 1878, Armstrong instructed his architect Frank W Rich to ‘lay out villa residences upon the land to the eastward of the park,’ Rich had ‘already marked off into building plots the whole of the land which lives above Bulman’s Wood,’ reported the ‘Newcastle Courant’. but, as has already been discussed on this site, these villas would not be built.
Problem: ‘the ground here forms a natural basin, and a spring rises just above it, and runs evenly the whole year through,’ revealed the ‘Courant’, adding that the land was ‘soft and swampy.’
Solution: ‘The water … is now carried away to form a small cascade,’ reported the ‘Newcastle Daily Chronicle’
This cascade was the waterfall parallel to the ‘cattle run’. The waterfall, and the rivulet that formed it, were carried through one of the two arches beneath the lower of the two Armstrong Park bridges. The second arch spans the ‘cattle run’.
Bridge in Armstrong Park over the ‘cattle run’ and former waterfall
Except, remember, it’s not a ‘cattle run’, it was a sunken footpath, reported the period newspaper mentioned earlier. A sunken footpath from Ouseburn Road to Armstrong’s putative posh villas; a sunken footpath for use by the villa owners, or perhaps to be used as a hidden-from-view passageway for servants or tradespeople.
‘The quality and style of the stone work would support [the] suggestion [that this was a] pedestrian route to link the road to proposed housing,’ concluded Steyne.
The sunken footpath was built by Newcastle Corporation in 1880, working to plans drawn up by Armstrong or, more likely, his agents. Although decorative and with its own sylvan cascade, the expensive railway-style cutting didn’t help sell the plots — the thirteen posh villas never got built.
By 1884, Rich had modified the plan, dividing the development into 41 plots. However, after fresh surveys revealed the land to be unsuitable for housing, this plan, too, fell by the wayside.
The sunken footpath was itself sunk, with no longer any reason to exist.
Armstrong died in 1900. His will stipulated that part of what would have been the Heaton Park Estate should become allotments. Other parts of the would-be development lay fallow until the 1920s when almost 100 houses were erected on the land that had been deemed unsuitable forty years previously.
Heaton Park Estate never made the jump from Rich’s drawing board, but a similar development to the north of Armstrong Bridge proved more successful. In 1894, Rich (probably acting for Armstrong) was advertising ‘Villa SITES for Sale on Jesmond Park Estate.’ Significantly, the adverts stressed that on these plots the ‘drainage [was] perfect,’ which suggests that the drainage for the plots on Heaton Park Estate had not been perfect.
Jesmond Park Estate was a commercial success, and some of the large houses that stand back from the roads Jesmond Park East and Jesmond Park West are among the most expensive properties in Newcastle.
White elephant
The ‘cattle run’ was built in advance of the prestigious housing it was designed to service, perhaps constructed early to act as a sales tool to attract rich house hunters. It had been built on land owned by the city council by railway engineers who were working to plans commissioned by Lord Armstrong via his jobbing architect Frank W. Rich.
It’s possible that work on the cattle run was done by Rich’s assistant, H.G. Badenoch.
‘When Lord Armstrong presented the beautiful Jesmond Dene to Newcastle, the erection of the lodges, making of footpaths, and building of bridges was … in Mr. Rich’s hands, and I superintended most of the work,’ remembered Badenoch later in life.
Badenoch also reported that he had conducted ‘all the surveying, levelling, and setting out of streets’ for Lord Armstrong’s housing developments in Jesmond and Heaton.
The unsung Badenoch might have also been responsible for converting what had been a pre-1860s storm drain in Bulman’s Wood into Armstrong Park’s scenic waterfall.
There has never been a ‘cattle run’ in Heaton. The linear feature now known by that name was built as a sunken footpath next to a tumbling cascade. The cascade may have tumbled for some years, but it failed to drain the sodden field above it, and as the sunken footpath ended in a quagmire and not, as was planned, at the foot of thirteen posh villas, it too was a flop.
Knowledge of the ‘cattle run’’s true purpose was lost soon after its use became moot. Ordnance Survey maps didn’t label what was — and remains — a distinctive ground feature. A large-scale OS map of 1907 managed to pinpoint small items such as urinals but didn’t state the use of the feature that ninety or so years later became known, wrongly, as the ‘cattle run.’ A 1942 OS map got the closest, labelling the feature a ‘subway.’
Other Armstrong-commissioned subways exist, including the fully-covered one from his Banqueting House to St. Mary’s chapel, and another in Jesmond Dene to Blackberry crags.
Sorry, Newcastle City Council, but the lottery-funded interpretation board you installed in 2010 is incorrect — the ‘cattle run’ was built for people, not cows. But let’s look on the bright side: while Armstrong Park loses a bovine superhighway, it gains a long-lost waterfall.
Researched and written by Carlton Reid. Photographs by Carlton Reid. With thanks to Marek Bidwell, Sarah Capes, Ann Denton, Keith Fisher, Henrietta Heald, Duncan Hutt, Chris Jackson, Alan Morgan, John Penn, Yvonne Shannon, Hanna Steyne, Les Turnbull, and Will Watson-Armstrong.
He’s also a historian – his recent books include ‘Roads Were Not Built for Cars‘ and ‘Bike Boom’ both published by Island Press, Washington, D.C. The ‘cattle run’ isn’t the first infrastructure he has shown to be wrongly labelled: in 2017 he discovered the existence of hundreds of miles of 1930s-era Dutch-style cycleways paid for by Britain’s Ministry of Transport but which fell out of use so quickly that they became buried under grass or were misidentified as service roads.
Newcastle and Tyneside in general, is rightly famous for the inventions produced here. From the railways to the hydraulic crane and from the first turbine driven ship to the electric light bulb (and many others besides), Tyneside was the home of some of the most important inventions in human history. But the last invention mentioned above would be of little use to use without a switch to help us turn it on. Thankfully that was also invented. And the place where it was invented? Yes, Newcastle again, not far from Heaton, by a man with strong links to Heaton itself.
John Henry Holmes Copyright: Newcastle Libraries, Local Studies
That man was John Henry Holmes, an engineer, Quaker and inventor. Holmes was born in Newcastle on 6June 1857 and grew up first of all in Gateshead and then in Jesmond. His father was a ‘paint and color manufacturer, glass and oil merchant’ with his own factory. John attended the Friends School in Bootham, York, where he was taught the rudiments of science. Holmes must have absorbed much of what he was taught as, at the age of 16, he won a place at the Durham College of Physical Science, later Armstrong College, now Newcastle University. Two years later, having completed his studies, Holmes was apprenticed to Head, Wrightson and Co of Stockton-on Tees.
Light switch
It was at Head, Wrightson and Co that Holmes began to handle electrical apparatus. Then in August, 1881, Holmes became an electrical engineer, working for John S Raworth of Manchester. His first work with Raworth was helping to fit out a new ship, City of Rome, built by Barrow Shipbuilders in 1881, with 16 arc lamps and 230 Swan lamps.
In April 1883, John made a bold decision. Having built upon his successful work with City of Rome by continuing to install lamps both onshore and in ships, Holmes decided to establish his own company in Newcastle, along with his father and two elder brothers, Alfred and Theodore. So it was that an electrical engineering business under the name of J H Holmes was established. The company was to last until 1928, fully 45 years, until their work was taken under the wings of A Reyrolle and Co Ltd. Consequently, the work initiated by Holmes went on for over 50 years under his supervision and in some respects continues to this day.
It was the following year that Holmes invented his light switch, the first in the world, at his workshop on Portland Road, Shieldfield, just outside Heaton. This switch enabled electric light to be easily used. In1883, Holmes had installed electric lighting in ‘Wellburn’, the family home in Jesmond, which thus became the first house in Newcastle to be lit by electricity. This work caused Holmes to develop what is now the familiar quick break switch. He patented this invention in Great Britain and the United States in 1884.
Holmes’ light switch, the Discovery Museum
This was a huge breakthrough, in helping people to use electric lights. This new technology ensured that what was known as electric arcing was prevented, by causing the internal contacts to move apart quickly enough. This was very important as electric arcing could cause fires or shorten the life span of a switch. You can still see Holmes’ original invention at Newcastle’s Discovery Museum.
Prolific inventor
Holmes didn’t restrict his work to this country. The Suez Canal was opened in November 1869 and by the late 1880s had become an important transport artery for the British Empire, cutting travel time for ships between the Indian subcontinent and Britain. In 1889, Holmes visited Egypt, where he studied the requirements of vessels traveling along the canal at night. Subsequently, Holmes ‘designed and supplied portable lighting apparatus that effectively increased the capacity of the Canal by greatly extending its use in the dark hours’.
Holmes then moved on to finding ways of lighting trains and producing electroplating dynamos. These are described as being, ‘designed for low potential and high current intensity. They are wound for low resistance, frequently several wires being used in parallel, or ribbon, bar or rectangular conductors being employed. They are of the direct current type. They should be shunt wound or they are liable to reverse. They are sometimes provided with resistance in the shunt, which is changed as desired to alter the electro-motive force.’ So there, now you know… However you describe Holmes’ work, he was certainly developing a reputation for pioneering electrical engineering work.
Holmes was indeed a prolific inventor. In 1897, Holmes commenced the sale of ‘Lundell’ motors under patent from the USA. This has been seen as a ‘pioneering step in the electric driving of industry’ and indeed one of the early and most interesting uses of this motor was in electric cabs.
The following year Holmes was at it again! This time he invented something which would help the publishing industries, for it was in 1898 that the Holmes-Clatworthy 2-motor system was patented and this would go on to drive newspaper presses for many of the world’s most important newspapers.
As the twentieth century dawned, so the company continued to develop and Holmes remained involved. It has been said of Holmes that his, ‘personal influence on its engineering side was invaluable because of his almost passionate love of good mechanical ideas’.
Holmes was known as a kindly man, with a reputation for having a quiet, retiring nature. Indeed it has been said of him that his nature prompted Holmes to perform, ‘many kindly acts and caused him to take a particularly keen interest in young people, and his orderly mind compelled him to do his best in all that he undertook and enabled him to play a notable part in the spread of a new way of doing things’.
Holmes and Heaton
So we have learnt that John Henry Holmes invented the light switch very close to Heaton in neighbouring Shieldfield, but what links did he have to Heaton itself?
Holmes had at least two close links with Heaton. The 1901 census shows us that his brother Ellwood was living in High Heaton at ‘Wyncote’ on Jesmond Park East. It describes him as being 35 years of age and an ‘employer’. He is described as an ‘Electrical Engineer and Paint and Colour Manufacturer.‘ He is evidently working in the family business. At this time, Ellwood has a 28 year-old wife called Edith, a son called Charles, aged three, and two sisters, Margaret and Ada, aged 30 and 24 respectively, living with his family. In 1911, Ellwood was still on Jesmond Park East and had added ‘licensed methylator’ to his list of occupations. This is someone licensed to manufacture and sell methylated spirits.
In 1928, when John Henry Holmes was 71 years old, his company, J H Holmes and Co, was incorporated into A Reyrolle and Co in Hebburn as a wholly-owned subsidiary. So it was that six years later, in the last year of his life, Holmes’ work gained a direct Heaton connection. It has been noted that, ‘A Reyrolle and Co established Parolle Electrical Plant Co Ltd as a private company for construction of electrical and other plant with the specific aim of acquiring shares in C A Parsons and Co from the executors of the estate of the late Sir Charles Parsons. Two directors were appointed by Reyrolle and one by Parsons.’ So Holmes’ work became directly connected to Heaton’s most famous company.
Legacy
John Henry Holmes’ eventful life ended in 1935. He is buried in Old Jesmond Cemetery.
John Henry Holmes’ grave, Jesmond Old Cemetery Copyright: Janet Burn and Heaton History Group
As the saying goes, ‘if you want to see his legacy, look around you’. If you are reading this somewhere indoors, it shouldn’t be too difficult to see an electric light switch. It has been noted that Holmes’ ‘quick break technology remains in use in domestic and industrial light switches modern times.’
Sources
‘A Fine and Private Place: Jesmond Old Cemetery‘ / by Alan Morgan; Tyne Bridge, 2000. 1857951557
‘The Northumbrians: North-East England and Its People: a new history’ / by Dan Jackson; Hurst, 2019. 1787381943
Researched and written by Peter Sagar, Heaton History Group with additional material by Arthur Andrews. Thank you to Newcastle Libraries for the image of John Henry Holmes.
Can you help?
If you know more about John Henry Holmes or anyone mentioned in the article or have photographs 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
How did a Newcastle greenhouse come to be mentioned in the same breath as the Summer Palace in St Petersburg? And how was Heaton, as so often, at the centre of the story? To find out, we need to wind back to the early eighteenth century and news of a development in faraway Devon that caused huge excitement here in the north-east.
It was in 1712 that a young ironmonger called Thomas Newcomen, combining the ideas of fellow Devonian, Thomas Savory, and the French physicist, Denis Papin, first demonstrated his ‘atmospheric engine’, created to pump water from Cornish tin mines in which flooding had long been a major problem. News of the invention spread quickly, with mine owners around the country immediately recognising the potential for their own industry. The first commercial model of the steam engine was built by Newcomen and his business partner, John Calley, at Conygree Coalworks in Dudley in the West Midlands.
Ridleys of Heaton
Among those who set about acquiring the so-called ‘fire machine’ for themselves were the Ridley family, who had interests in mines at such places as Byker and Jesmond as well as owning an estate in Heaton, although here they did not own the rights to mine and profit from the coal that lay underground.
Heaton Hall, 1793
Nicholas Ridley senior (Be warned: the same few names, principally Richard, Matthew and Nicholas constantly recur in the Ridley family tree), who in 1692 had bought part of Heaton Manor including the manor house itself from the then owner, Robert Mitford, had died just a few years earlier. His eldest surviving son, Richard inherited and, in 1713, rebuilt Heaton Hall and, with his younger brother, another Nicholas, continued to manage the family’s many interests, including the extensive coalfields beyond Heaton.
But getting hold of the new engine wasn’t easy for the brothers. Demand was high and Newcomen and Calley were busy fulfilling existing orders. (Sound familiar?) Despite being prepared to pay an annual licence of £400, the building and operation of the engine was to be overseen by Calley’s sixteen year old son, Samuel, something the Ridleys weren’t at all happy about, as Marten Triewald later explained.
‘This Calley though he was, one might almost say, reared in the fire-machine was, however, rather young and did not, with all his practice, possess the very least of theory’.
But a meeting in London led to a significant upgrade.
Swedish engineer
Mårten Triewald had been born in Stockholm in 1691, the son of a farrier and anchorsmith. By this time he was a merchant, engineer and amateur physicist and, in 1717, was in London on business and to study. There he met Nicholas Ridley, ‘who had known me from early childhood, and moreover was aware with what diligence and zest I had been studying natural science and mechanics in London’. According to Triewald, the Ridleys were ‘perturbed because of the youthfulness of his engineer‘ but also feared that his competitors and other mine owners in the neighbourhood ‘would get an opportunity to corrupt this youth, so that he would not serve him faithfully’.
The result was a job for Triewald, which was beneficial to both parties. Ridley promised ‘to promote me to the knowledge of how to construct fire-machines, and I, for my part, promised to serve him loyally against a fair reward.’
According to Triewald, just a few days later, he arrived in Newcastle where ‘construction of the first fire-machine in this district was in full swing.’ He said that for over a year he didn’t allow anybody else to gain commercial advantage by learning anything at all about how the machine worked while he acquired a better understanding than even the inventors themselves.
Soon Ridley wanted an engine larger than the biggest Newcomen and Calley had built – and larger than the developers themselves believed to be possible. Triewald, however, with his greater understanding of the physics behind the technology, was able to work out improvements which would allow a scaling up to the required size. Ridley persuaded the inventors to allow Triewald to form a partnership with the younger Calley so that production could go ahead. A copy of this agreement is held by Northumberland Archives.
Although Triewald wrote of being recruited by Nicholas Ridley, who, being the second son, had not inherited the Heaton estate on his father’s death (We haven’t yet been able to ascertain where he lived at this time. Later his Northumberland residence was near Blyth), he also referred to being employed by ‘Messrs Ridley’ suggesting Richard Ridley of Heaton Hall was also involved. And we know that the very first ‘fire-engine’ in Northumberland, so the one Triewald first oversaw, was at the Ridley’s Byker Colliery, just north of Shields Road. (At that time what became Tynemouth Road was the boundary between the Byker and Heaton royalties.) A few years later, in 1724, Sir John Clerk noted three such engines on his visit to Byker.
Fire-engines at South Gosforth, roughly on the site of St Mary’s School, 1749 (Thanks to Les Turnbull)
Within a few years, Triewald had built more for the Ridleys (We aren’t sure of their whereabouts) and at least another three were built locally by Ridley’s great rival, William Cotesworth, on what are now the Ouseburn Road allotments immediately west of Heaton Park, land owned by the Ridleys but for which Cotesworth held the mineral rights. There was another just a short distance away on the Jesmond side of the Ouseburn. Heaton History Group’s Les Turnbull has written that Heaton, Byker and Jesmond had ‘the greatest concentration of steam power in the world at this time’.
Homeward bound
In 1726, Triewald returned to Sweden, where his understanding of the new technology ensured he was in great demand. He is still well known in his home country as the builder, in 1728, of the first steam engine in Sweden at Dannemora iron mines in Uppsala. Soon after that he set up a diving company and wrote about the use of diving bells and other equipment under water. He also took up and wrote about bee keeping.
Marten Triewald by Georg Engelhard Schroder (Thank you to National Museum of Sweden)
But perhaps Triewald’s greatest contribution to Swedish scientific and cultural life was the part he played in the founding of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1739. He had been a great admirer of the British Royal Society and a member since 1731 (his letter to Sir John Sloane canvassing to be admitted is in the British Museum) and was determined to set up something similar in his home country. He persuaded the great Swedish botanist, Carl Linnaeus, and others to support him in his endeavour with the result that the society opened its doors in 1739 and is now known worldwide as the body which awards the Nobel prizes in physics and chemistry.
Greenhouse
But what of this entry in Wikipedia?
‘Early hot water systems were used in Russia for central heating of the Summer Palace (1710–1714) of Peter the Great in Saint Petersburg. Slightly later, in 1716, came the first use of water in Sweden to distribute heating in buildings. Marten Triewald, a Swedish engineer, used this method for a greenhouse at Newcastle upon Tyne.’
Naturally, knowing that Triewald worked for the Ridleys,whose family seat was Heaton Hall, we wondered if Heaton could have been the location of one of the first buildings in the modern world to be heated by hot water pipes. Were the Ridleys growing, not only the oats, wheat, barley and turnips that we know was cultivated in the eighteenth century on the farms of their Heaton estate, but also pineapples or other exotic fruit and vegetables in a heated greenhouse?
But Google ‘Triewald’ and ‘greenhouse’ or similar, and while there are plenty of results, they all use almost identical wording to the Wikipedia entry and there are no references to primary sources.
A search of the British Newspaper Archive yielded no results either. Surely something as significant would have been reported in the local or even national papers at the time. A trawl of the Ridley collection in Northumberland Archives proved equally fruitless. There are lots of entries in the index for glasshouses but they all appear to refer to glass making establishments in the Ouseburn in which the Ridleys had a financial interest.
An email to Blagdon Hall went unanswered. Correspondence with the Newcomen Society led to an English translation of a work by Triewald which refers to his time in England working for the Ridleys but no mention there of a greenhouse.
An authoritative history of the greenhouse dates the first use of hot water to heat greenhouses much later. It refers to steam heat being invented by a Mr Wakefield of Liverpool in 1788 and accredits hot water heating to Frenchman, M Bonnemain in 1777 (Apparently he used it to keep his hens’ eggs warm). There is a reference to St Petersburg : ‘Prince Potemkin’s greenhouse near St Petersburg was said to have been heated by a mixture of flues in walls and pillars and “earth leaden pipes… incessantly filled with boiling water”’. The quote is from ‘The Encyclopedia of Gardening’, 1822 but the greenhouse was apparently built around 1780. Potemkin lived from 1739-1791, well after Triewald worked for the Ridleys and the dates given in Wikipedia.
So was the whole story a modern mistake or even a hoax?
A glimmer of hope came in the definitive (and luckily well-indexed!) English tome on the history of building services engineering ( No stone rests safe from disturbance by Heaton History Group researchers). The authors, Neville S Billington and Brian M Roberts refer to Bonnemain and his eggs in 1777 and go on to say ‘Despite Triewald’s experiment, it was not until 1816 that hot water heating was introduced into Great Britain, by the Marquis of Chabannes, who had, four years earlier, used it to heat a house in St Petersburg’. If hot water pipes really were used by the Ridleys in or around 1716, the technology was still considered innovative a hundred years later.
But the key passage in their book is ‘The first successful use of hot water as a medium for conveying heat is recorded by Tomlinson to be Sir Martin (sic) Triewald’s application to a greenhouse in 1716’. So who was Tomlinson, when was he writing and what source material was he using?
Charles Tomlinson (1808-1897) was an eminent scientist and academic, a Fellow of the Royal Society and one of the founders of the Physical Society of London (later merged into the Institute of Physics). But his ‘Rudimentary Treatise on Warming and Ventilation’ was published in 1850, so well after Triewald‘s time and he does not give a source for the assertion about Triewald, quoted by Billington and Roberts.
But there is one more important indication that the story has some basis in reality: the house in which Triewald lived, ‘Triewald’s malmgard’, still stands on the outskirts of Stockholm and is open to the public. A plaque on the wall includes the legend: ‘steam heated greenhouses and central heating were other inventions’. But it doesn’t mention Newcastle.
There, unlike a heated greenhouse, the trail goes cold at least for now. We cannot, as yet, prove one way or another whether Triewald heated a Newcastle, let alone a Heaton, greenhouse with hot water or whether the Ridleys grew pineapples. But what we can say is that Marten Triewald, one of the greatest engineers that Sweden ever produced found himself working for the Ridleys of Heaton Hall in the early 18th century and helped ensure our area possessed the ‘greatest concentration of steam power in the world at this time’. Even if no more information comes to light, that’s pretty amazing.
Can you help?
If you know more about Marten Triewald, especially his time working for the Ridleys or his work on heating or greenhouses, 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
British Newspaper Archive
‘Building Services Engineering: a review of its development‘ Neville S Billington and Brian M Roberts; Pergamon, 1982
‘A Celebration of our Mining Heritage: a souvenir publication to commemorate the bicentenary of the disaster at Heaton main Colliery in 1815′ Les Turnbull; Chapman Research, 2015
‘Coals from Newcastle; an introduction to the Northumberland and Durham coalfield’ Les Turnbull; Chapman Research, 2009
‘Glass houses: a history of greenhouses, orangeries and conservatories’ Mary Woods and Arete Warren; Aurum, 1988
Northumberland Archives
‘Rudimentary Treatise on Warming and Ventilation: being a concise exposition of the general principles of the art of warming and ventilating domestic and public buildings, mines, lighthouses, ships etc’ Charles Tomlinson, 1850
‘Short Description of the Fire- and Air-Machine at the Dannemora Mines‘ Marten Triewald, 1734; Newcomen Society, 1928
Acknowledgements
Researched and written by Chris Jackson, Heaton History Group. Copyright Chris Jackson and Heaton History Group except images for which permission to reproduce must be sought from individual copyright holders.
As you wonder whether to venture out in the pouring rain, stop for a moment instead to remember a son of Heaton living when even car rides in rain and snow would barely be tolerable. In fact, it was such a car journey back to Heaton from London that led to an invention we all take for granted. To make matters worse it followed yet another cup final defeat for Colin Veitch’s Newcastle United. But the subject of our research, one Gladstone Adams, was notable for much more than the inventor of windscreen wipers.
Gladstone Adams
Early life
Gladstone was born on 16 May 1880 and baptised at All Saints Church in the east end of Newcastle upon Tyne on 6 June 1880, one of ten children born to John and Agnes Adams. For many years the Adams family lived in St Ann’s Row, Ouseburn. Although, John ran his own business, life was hard: at the age of 16, Gladstone contracted typhoid and almost died.
The family business of marine salvage seemed to offer little scope to an ambitious and bright young man and so, after school, Gladstone Adams became apprenticed to Matthew Auty, a well known photographer in Tynemouth. (Apparently many years later after the photography business had closed, renovation work revealed some writing on a beam that seemed to be a log of Auty’s employees over the years. It included the name of Gladstone Adams, suggesting that he started work there in 1896, aged 16 and left in March 1901.)
Young Gladstone lived at a number of addresses in Heaton. At the time of the 1901 census, he was living with his mother and father and older sister, Grace, at 29 Eversley Place, Heaton.
Eversley Place home of Gladstone Adams and his parents
Gladstone’s father died in 1902 and mother in 1909. They are buried together in All Saints Cemetery.
When Gladstone joined the Lord Collingwood Masonic Lodge in 1907, his address was given as 39 Lesbury Road (opposite pioneering Trade Union leader and MP Alexander Wilkie at number 36).
Adams’ 39 Lesbury Road residence
At this point, aged 28, he was described as an ‘art photographer‘. A later electoral role shows him in 1913 at 82 Heaton Road.
Photographer
Although he lived in Heaton as a young man, the photography business Gladstone set up in 1904 was based in Whitley Bay. Adam’s reputation as a photographer was such that three years later, he was asked to take the official photographs of the newly launched ‘Mauretania’, leaving the Tyne. The image below apparently made him more than £1000 and has been acclaimed by ‘Photography’ magazine as a future ‘Old Master’.
Adam’s business expanded with several more studios opening. By the end of the 1920s he employed in the region of 90 people. His work was extremely varied and besides the usual family and wedding portraits, he produced postcards of local scenes, worked as a commercial photographer for newspapers, police records and industrial organisations, as well as being the official photographer for Newcastle United, hence that difficult journey back from the cup final.
Gladstone Adams’ photograph of Newcastle’s R W Thomas (who only played one game for the Magpies)
Adams (far left) at a meeting of Newcastle Photographic Society
Gladstone went on to be Chairman of the Professional Photographers Association. His business flourished for over 60 years until camera ownership became common and Whitley Bay had declined as a holiday destination.
Inventor
And so it was in his capacity as successful businessman and official photographer to Newcastle United that, at the end of April 1908, Adams found himself driving back from Crystal Palace in his 1904, French made Darracq motor car. It was such an unusual sight that apparently the car was put on display while he was at the match.
A Darracq like that driven by Adams
As if watching the reigning champions unexpectedly lose to Wolverhampton Wanderers wasn’t bad enough, the weather conditions for the journey home were atrocious with unseasonal snow falling. The only way Gladstone could clear his windscreen was with his hands, necessitating many stops. But much good came out of what must have been a miserable weekend. For it was on this arduous drive that Gladsone Adams said he came up with his inspired idea for a windscreen wiper (although it has to be admitted that in the USA, a Mary Anderson had patented a windshield wiper blade a few years earlier. These things are rarely straightforward!)
Adams’ windscreen wiper at the Discovery Museum (courtesy of the ‘Evening Chronicle’)
The prototype of Adams’ mechanism is on display at The Discovery Museum in Newcastle. Three years of development later, in April 1911, a patent was registered by Sloan & Lloyd Barnes, patent agents of Liverpool for Gladstone Adams of Whitley Bay.
Military
In 1901, aged 21 Adams joined the Northumberland Yeomanry, which was a locally raised cavalry force. This enabled him to improve his horse riding skills and he won several competitions. He was about to have been sent to the Boer War but fortunately the war ended. Gladstone remained in the Yeomanry until 1910, retiring with the rank of Corporal and a good conduct certificate.
In 1914, aged 34, he volunteered to serve in WWI. Because of his photographic skills, he joined the Royal Flying Corps as a reconnaissance photographer with the 15th Wing in France. In April 1918 he was stationed at the front, close to where the German flying ace, Baron Manfred von Richthofen, was shot down and killed. Adams was given the unenviable task of photographing the deceased pilot to prove that ‘The Red Baron’ had really been killed. He was then involved in the preparations for the pilot’s burial, with full military honours, at Bertangles Cemetery, near Amiens. After the war, Adams’s military service was recognised by the award of the permanent title of ‘Captain’ on his discharge papers.
By the outbreak of WWII Gladstone was approaching 60 but he nevertheless he served as Flight Lieutenant with the 1156 Air Training Corps in Whitley Bay.
Marriage
In 1914 at the age of 34, Gladstone had married the talented artist, Laura Annie Clark. He had served in the Royal Flying Corps alongside Laura’s brother, Joseph, also, like their father, Joseph Dixon Clark senior, an artist.
Laura was a notable painter of miniatures whose work was exhibited at the Royal Academy and Paris Salon as well as provincial galleries, including the Laing. Her 1923 miniature on ivory depicting herself and her son, Dennis, entitled ‘The Green Necklace’ was given a place of honour at the 1923 Royal Academy exhibition between portraits of George V and Queen Mary. Laura was also a talented musician and composer. She worked as a colourist at Gladstone’s photographic studio. The Adams’ married life was mostly spent in Monkseaton. Dennis, born in 1920, was their only child.
Other achievements
in the 1950s, after hearing that a squad of Royal Marines were tragically run down by a lorry on a dark road, Adams developed a prototype fluorescent belt for pedestrians to wear at night. He and his brother also invented the ‘trafficator’, a forerunner of the car indicator, as well as the sliding rowing seat.
Adams was one of Whitley Bay’s longest serving councillors, holding St Mary’s Ward from 1937 to 1948. He also served in other wards in the 1950s and early 1960s, finally losing his seat in 1963. He was also a Northumberland County Councillor. Gladstone and his son, Dennis, were councillors together for a period of time.
Gladstone Adams died, after a very eventful life, aged 86, on 28 July, 1966,. A commemorative plaque is located on the west facing, gable end of the Ouseburn Mission building, very close to the house in which he was born.
Acknowledgements
Researched and written by Arthur Andrews, Heaton History Group.
Can you help?
If you know more Gladstone Adams, especially his early life in Ouseburn and Heaton, or have photos to share, we’d love to hear from you. Please get in touch either by clicking on the link immediately below the title of this article or by emailing chris.jackson@heatonhistorygroup.org
Sources
North Shields Library – Local History Section
‘The Journal‘ 10 April 2008 Report by Tony Henderson that a significant amount of memorabilia belonging to Gladstone Adams was to be auctioned.
‘The Artists of Northumbria’ / Marshall Hall; 2nd ed, 1982.
‘The Toon: a complete history of Newcastle United’ / by Roger Hutchinson; Mainstream, 1997
‘That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind’ 20 July, 1969
Famous words but in the millions spoken or written to mark the 50th anniversary of men first landing on the moon, few have mentioned the importance of a former employee of CA Parsons in Heaton, Francis Thomas Bacon. Yet after the event Tom Bacon met President Nixon, who put an arm around his shoulders and said ‘Without you Tom, we wouldn’t have gotten to the moon’.
Tom and his wife Barbara also received an invitation to 10 Downing Street to meet the astronauts, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins during their world tour. Tom was presented with a signed, framed photograph of Neil Armstrong’s first step onto the moon, with the words ‘To Mr Francis Bacon with best wishes from the Apollo crew’.
But it was a mention of Tom receiving an honorary degree from Newcastle University (without any mention of his part in Apollo 11 only 11 years after the event) in a ‘Journal’ article, celebrating the 900th anniversary of the foundation of Newcastle and the building of its castle, that prompted Heaton History Group’s Arthur Andrews to dig a bit deeper into the life and achievements of a distinguished engineer with Heaton connections.
Francis Thomas ‘Tom’ Bacon
So who was this former Parsons apprentice and worker and what role did he play in one of mankind’s greatest achievements?
Pedigree
Francis Thomas Bacon was born in Billericay, Essex on 21 December 1904, son of Thomas Walter Bacon, a land owner and an electrical engineer and a direct descendant of Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626), the famous philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist and author.
Young Francis (known as Tom) was educated at a preparatory school in Broadstairs before going on to Eton from 1918-1922 and winning the school physics prize before taking the Mechanical Sciences Tripos at Trinity College, Cambridge .
Parsons
After graduation in 1925, Bacon was offered an apprenticeship at C A Parsons in Heaton, Newcastle upon Tyne, during which he worked in the drawing office, engineering workshops and also did outside installation work. As a scientific engineer, he did work on improving reflectors for searchlights and lights used in the film industry. From 1935-1939 he was in charge of the production of silvered glass reflectors. He lodged in nearby Jesmond before, on his marriage to Barbara Papillon in 1934, buying Acomb House near Hexham.
The renowned British scientist, inventor and judge Sir William Robert Grove had discovered the principles behind the operation of fuel cells between 1839 and 1842 but these were not pursued until Bacon became intrigued with their potential while working for Parsons.
In 1937 he wrote a report, ‘Proposed Electric Storage Battery’, for the directors of Parsons, suggesting that a workable fuel cell might be developed as part of an energy storage system, which released energy from the electrolysis of water into hydrogen and oxygen. The proposal was rejected as not being relevant to the business.
Tom, however, was financially independent and could help finance some of his own experiments. So undeterred, he carried out early experiments at home but discovered that to continue was impractical because of the high pressures and temperatures involved. Soon, without permission, he began carrying out his experiments at the Parsons works. He made arrangements to be warned if the managing director, F G H Bedford was nearby. This worked for a time but on one occasion the MD saw the apparatus but not Tom Bacon, as he was in hiding. Fortunately, no awkward questions were asked.
In 1940 a second report was sent to the directors and Bacon admitted that he had been doing experiments in his employer’s time. This time, the managing director F G H Bedford (who worked at Parsons for 60 years!) gave Bacon an ultimatum, either to stop working on the cell or leave Parsons, so he left. History would show that this was very much Parsons’ loss.
Bacon went on to do experimental work on hydrogen-oxygen cells at King’s College, London and for Merz and McLellan before becoming an experimental officer with H M anti-submarine establishment and then consultant on fuel cells to the National Research Development Council. His ideas were developed further by US firm, Pratt and Whitney.
Brain drain
‘The Daily Mirror’ on Wednesday 14 February 1973, ran an article with the headline:-
‘As yet another invention reaches crisis point..WHO CASHES IN ON BRITISH BRAINS?’
The article states that it’s one of the clichés of world industry that the best inventions are British – for the simple reason that they make fortunes for everyone but Britain.
It goes on to mention many British inventions that were not financed in the UK and went on to make millions in other countries. Examples given were the refrigerator, celluloid, aniline dyes, the self-winding watch. In bold, the article continues:
‘Francis Bacon, without whose revolutionary fuel cell the Apollo moon-landings would have been impossible, toiled away in agonies of frustration for thirty years. He even got the sack from one firm (C A Parsons) in 1940 for devoting himself to his invention. The Electrical Research Association gave him a grant and then withdrew it. Then the NRDC helped him as much as their budget allowed. But once again, the Americans came along and their millions finally made Bacon’s Fuel Cell, the “magic battery” work.’
And the rest is moon landing history!
Space race
Fuel cells are ideal for space travel applications because, unlike heat engines, they have rising efficiency with decreasing load. The Bacon Cell, as it became known, was the first to be powered by hydrogen-oxygen, which was, therefore, much more powerful than earlier versions. It allowed Saturn V, the rocket which propelled the Apollo 11 crew into space, to take off, and of course, hydrogen and oxygen gases were already on-board for propulsion and life support. The by-product, water, was used for drinking and humidifying the atmosphere of the capsule.
Bacon was a modest man. At the many awards ceremonies he attended, he would say: ‘Well I had nothing to do with it, it was all up to the engineers at Pratt and Witney’.
Yet without his dogged perseverance there would not have been a super-efficient fuel cell in the Apollo command and service modules. Certainly NASA recognised his contribution: at a dinner in London, Tom was presented with a gold-plated miniature of his fuel cell, mounted on a teak stand.
Tom also received a letter from Dick Foley, of Pratt and Whitney saying, ‘Please accept my personal congratulations for the contribution your fuel cells made to Apollo 11.’
Honours
Francis ‘Tom’ Bacon received the following honours:-
1965 – S G Brown Award and Medal from the Royal Society
1967 – OBE (Civil Division)
1969 – British Silver Medal from the Royal Aeronautical Society
1972 – Churchill Gold Medal from the Society of Engineers
1973 – Became a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS)
1976 – Received Royal Australian Chemical Institute Medal
1978 – Vittoria de Nora Diamond Shamrock Award from the Electrochemical Society
1980 – Honorary DSc from Newcastle University
1990 – First Honorary Member of the European Fuel Cell Group
1991 – Received first Grove Medal at the second Grove Fuel Cell Symposium
Francis ‘Tom’ Bacon died on 24 May 1992.
He is buried in All Saints Churchyard, Little Shelford, along with his wife Barbara and their son Francis, who pre-deceased them. The family lived in Little Shelford from 1946. They also had a daughter, Daphne and Edward. a younger son.
Acknowledgements
Researched and written by Arthur Andrews, Heaton History Group.
Sources
Royal Society Biographical Memoirs
2. Find a Grave
3. National Newspaper Archive
4. Findmypast
5. Newcastle Journal 11 February 1980
Can you help?
If you know more about Tom Bacon and especially if you have stories or photographs relating to his time at Parsons, 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
Keith Fisher has vivid memories of growing up in Heaton in the 1950s and ’60s. Here he recalls an encounter with an old Heaton business that most of us won’t have been aware of – and brings its story up to date:
Travelling south on Heaton Road there’s a final block of houses and shops on your right just before you cross the railway line. It used to accommodate the Co-op chemist, barber Peter Darling, Gazzilli’s ice-cream parlour, and finally, at the end, a shop that never attracted much attention who sold ball-bearings if I remember correctly: well, I suppose someone had to.
Just before that unassuming outlet for little steel balls, there remained a couple of houses; at one time, of course, they may all have been houses, with the possible exception of the pharmacy. One of these houses – until then quite unregistered in our existence – opened its door to us after our gran had treated my sister and myself to ice-cream on an evening in coldest, darkest December. We were led into a front room lit by a tired gas mantle plus a fire in the range attended by an old lady sitting in a dark corner.
Val and I were about five or six years old, so it was still the 1950s, and Gran must have been about fifty five – which we thought was terribly old; but that lady in that gloomy room must have been eighty five at least, and, just like our great gran: ancient beyond our conception.
However, not all of this was inconceivable to us, considering the majority of Byker was still without electricity; and Shieldfield folk, where our maternal grandparents and assorted family lived, were still comfortably co-existing with those big old black-leaded ranges that were the forerunner to our Agas. We’d seen ironing done on the kitchen table with a pair of flat irons heated on the range; and eaten Yorkshire Puddings cooked in a big, square, cast-iron dish from the ‘oven bottom‘ (the finest I’ve ever eaten); we’d heard the whistle of the kettle hanging above the coals; and smelt the overwhelming aroma of kippers cooked on a rack over a glowing wood fire; all just part of the life our father’s parents, then our mother, had left behind to live in new-build semi-detached flats on the Heaton Hall Estate.
Aladdin’s cave
So back in that unfamiliar house the air of mystery was not the anachronistic room, nor the presence of the old lady, but the reason for our presence there, which was very quickly established as we looked around walls lined with trestle tables piled high with cheap cardboard boxes; the open ones on the top revealing Christmas decorations of the streamer, paper globe or bells variety, plus assorted novelties associated with Yuletide occasions like the inevitable glinting silver and gold tinsel, and – obviously – brightly coloured glass baubles shining like treasure in the firelight: an Aladdin’s Cave!
Peering up, we wandered along the rows of boxes while gran handed things down for us to examine, suggesting this one or that, some of these or some of those, and all the while accompanied by the old lady deftly pulling out box upon box of festive magic and stacking them on an empty table; until finally, we were done; brief words were exchanged between gran and herself, and away we went… empty-handed, taking none of the treasure with us… it was all left behind!
Recollecting many years later, I asked my grandfather what it was all about, and he told me it was a company he did business with: The Heaton Paper Company, who sold him his paper bags. The treasure left behind had all been delivered to his shop of course, and would subsequently materialise at our house and gran’s house a few days later; just in time to decorate the freshly arrived Christmas trees, festoon the living rooms with streamers, and hang the paper ornaments from lights and window bays.
Now then, fast forward fifteen years to a fine house in Gosforth where two friends lived: Danny and Mark Jacobson. Remarkably, it turned-out their father owned The Heaton Paper Company, and I learned that the impromptu wholesale showroom in that house on Heaton Road was set up each December to allow local traders to choose stock for the Christmas season; my grandfather, being a wholesale customer, had access to this facility for his own personal consumption of course.
So, fast forward yet again to the present – or at least to the present present, which is 2018 – and let me tell you what I learned recently from Mark Jacobson, who I am happy to say remains a good friend, even though I see very little of him, and even less of Danny:
Their father (an engineer) got out of Poland before the Germans arrived and was in London when an old acquaintance from Warsaw suggested he to come up to Newcastle where he owned a toilet-paper factory and needed the skills of an engineer. At some point thereafter, this fellow took off for South Africa; the business went down the toilet; and Mr Jacobson found himself unemployed.
Crossing Shieldfield one day, he saw a workman on a building site making a bonfire out of empty cement bags; knowing a thing or two about paper by then he asked the fellow if he could have the bags. He returned the following day to consult the gaffer and was told he could have all he could take away. So, from then on, he commandeered all the empty paper sacks he could, because he knew that they were made up of multiple layers of paper that could be separated from the inner and outer contaminated layers, providing him with good clean paper… free. Starting off in his lodgings, he cut up the sheets, glued the edges with flour paste and produced paper bags which he then sold to local businesses – my Grandfather’s included. When Danny and Mark retired recently, they sold what had become an enormously successful company manufacturing and distributing a vast array of products.
A remarkable conclusion to a misty memory; and a wonderful success story.
Acknowledgements
Researched and written by Keith Fisher, Heaton History Group.
Can you help?
If you know more about The Heaton Paper Company or any historic Heaton business, we’d love to hear from you. Please either leave a reply on this website by clicking on the link immediately below the article title or email chris.jackson@heatonhistorygroup.org
Most people in Newcastle have heard of Sir Charles Parsons, the eminent engineer whose invention of a multi-stage steam turbine revolutionised marine propulsion and electrical power generation, making him world famous in his lifetime and greatly respected still. Parsons’ Heaton factory was a huge local employer for many decades. It survives today as part of the global firm, Siemens.
But, of course, Charles Parsons did not make his huge strides in engineering alone. He was ably supported by a highly skilled workforce, including brilliant engineers and mathematicians, some of whom were much better known in their life times than they are today.
Two that certainly deserve to be remembered were siblings, Edith Anne Stoney and her brother, George Gerald. Edith worked for Parsons only briefly but her contribution was crucial. Her brother worked for Parsons and lived in Heaton most of his adult life. This is their story.
Family background
Dr George Johnstone Stoney (1826-1911), the siblings’ father, was a prominent Irish physicist, who was born near Birr in County Offaly. He worked as an astronomy assistant to Charles Parsons’ father, William, at nearby Birr Castle and he later taught Charles Parsons at Trinity College, Dublin. Stoney is best known for introducing the term ‘electron’ as the fundamental unit quantity of electricity. He and his wife, Margaret Sophia, had five children whom they home educated. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Stoney children went on to have illustrious careers. Robert Bindon became a doctor in Australia; Gertrude Rose was an artist; Florence Ada ( awarded the OBE in 1919), the first female radiologist in the UK. But it is George Gerald and Edith Anne who have the Heaton connection.
Edith Anne Stoney
Edith was born on 6 January 1869 and soon showed herself to be a talented mathematician. She won a scholarship to Newham College Cambridge where, in 1893, she achieved a first in the Part 1 Tripos examination. At that time, and for another 50 years afterwards, women were not awarded degrees at Cambridge so she did not officially graduate but she was later awarded both a BA and MA by Trinity College Dublin.
After graduation, Edith came to Newcastle to work for Charles Parsons. There is, in Newcastle University Library, a letter sent by Charles Parson to Edith’s father, George Johnstone Stoney, in 1903. Parsons pays tribute to:
‘your daughter’s great and original ability for applied mathematics… The problems she has attacked and solved have been in relation to the special curvature of our mirrors for obtaining beams of light of particular shapes. These investigations involved difficult and intricate original calculations, so much so that I must confess they were quite beyond my powers now and probably would have been also when I was at Cambridge… Your daughter also made calculations in regard to the gyrostatic forces brought onto the bearings of marine steam turbines…’
It looks like the sort of reference someone might write for a perspective employer except that, a sign of the times, it doesn’t mention Edith by name and is addressed to her father.
Edith, Florence and George Johnstone Stoney
After working in Heaton, Edith went on to teach mathematics at Cheltenham Ladies’ College and then lecture in physics at the London School of Medicine for Women in London. There she set up a laboratory and designed the physics course.
In 1901, she and her sister, Florence, opened a new x-ray service at London’s Royal Free Hospital and she became actively involved in the women’s suffrage movement as well becoming the first treasurer of the British Federation of University Women, a post she held from 1909-1915.
During WW1, both sisters offered their service to the British Red Cross to provide a state of the art radiological service to the troops in Europe. In the x-ray facilities at a new 250 bed hospital near Troyes in France, planned and operated by her, she used stereoscopy to localise bullets and shrapnel and pioneered the use of x-rays in the diagnosis of gas gangrene, saving many lives.
She was posted to Serbia, Macedonia, Greece and France again, serving in dangerous war zones for the duration of the war. The hospitals in which she worked were repeatedly shelled and evacuated but she continued to do what she considered to be her duty. Her war service was recognised by several countries. Among her awards were the French Croix de Guerre and Serbia’s Order of St Sava, as well as British Victory Medals.
After the war, Edith returned to England, where she lectured at King’s College for Women. In her retirement, she resumed work with the British Federation for University Women and in 1936, in memory of her father and sister, she established the Johnstone and Florence Stoney Studentship, which is still administered by the British Federation of Women Graduates to support women to carry out research overseas in biological, geological, meteorological or radiological science.
Edith Anne Stoney died on 25 June 1938, aged 69. Her importance is shown by the obituaries which appeared in ‘The Times’, ‘The Lancet’ and ‘Nature’. She will be remembered for her pioneering work in medical physics, her wartime bravery and her support for women’s causes. Although her time in Newcastle was brief, she deserves also to be remembered for her contribution to the work in Heaton for which Charles Parsons is rightly lauded.
George Gerald Stoney
But Edith’s elder brother had a much longer association with Parsons – and with Heaton.
George Gerald Stoney was born in Dublin on 28 November 1863, the first child of Margaret and George Johnstone Stoney. Like his sister, he was educated at home and gained a particularly good grounding in science. For example at a young age, he learnt about the silvering of mirrors which was to become very useful in his working life.
In 1882, when 19 years old, he went to Trinity College, Dublin. After four years he left with a first class honours in mathematics and a gold medal in experimental science. The following year he was awarded an engineering degree.
After working for a year with his uncle in Dublin, he came to England in 1888 to work alongside the more senior Charles Parsons for Clarke, Chapman and Company in Gateshead, earning ten shillings a week as an apprentice draughtsman. Here he first became acquainted with the compound steam turbine and did associated drawings for Parsons.
When, the following year, Parsons left the firm, after a disagreement on the pace at which work was progressing in the turbine field, to set up his own company in Heaton, Stoney was one of a dozen or so Clarke Chapman employees to follow him. He first worked as a fitter, earning £2 10s.
The 1891 Census shows Stoney living as a lodger at 69 Seventh Avenue, Heaton in the home of widow, Jane Beckett and her two working sons, John and William.
Key figure
There is ample evidence of Gerald (as he was known) Stoney’s importance to Parsons even in the early days.
In 1893, an agreement was made whereby Parsons agreed to employ Stoney who, in turn, agreed to work for Parsons for five years in the capacity of electrical engineer, ‘the duties which shall comprise the management of the mirror and testing departments, the carrying out of experiments and other such duties…’
A year later, he was given a share option. He put £200 into the company, which was matched by Parsons. And, in 1895, aged 32, he was named Chief Designer of the steam turbine department and Chief Electrical Engineer for high speed dynamos and alternators.
Stoney’s application, on 28 November 1895, to become a member of The Institution of Civil Engineers (his proposer was C A Parsons) states:
‘…appointed Manager of their Mirror Works for the manufacture of mirrors for search light projectors for English and foreign governments and is also manager for testing all dynamos and engines and technical adviser in the design and manufacture of all the steam turbines and dynamos made by the firm amounting to a yearly output of over 10,000 horsepower. These posts he now holds.’
He was elected Associate Member on 4 February 1896 when his address was given as 118 Meldon Terrace, Heaton.
Turbinia
It was around this time that Parsons was finally successful in his almost obsessive quest to apply the steam turbine to marine engineering. He had conceived and built ‘Turbinia’ which he was determined to make the fastest ship in the world. There were many trials of the ship in the Tyne and off the Northumberland coast at which Parsons and Stoney were always among the small group on board. After each trial modifications and improvements were made and the vessel was put to sea again. At every stage, Stoney was at the forefront.
Finally on 1 April 1897, as ‘Turbinia’, with Charles Parsons on the bridge and Gerald Stoney next to him as usual, made its way back up the Tyne after its latest sea trial , ‘at the modest pace allowed by local regulations‘ it was noted that ‘the river was nearly empty, the tide slack and the water smooth’ so Parsons decided to do a full power run along a measured nautical mile. A mean speed of 31.01 knots and a top speed of 32.6 knots was recorded, a record speed for any vessel. Charles Parsons had achieved his aim of adapting the steam turbine for marine propulsion.
Parsons’ first big opportunity to show his ship to the world was to come a couple of months later on 26 June 1897, when a review of the fleet to celebrate Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee was held at Spithead off Portsmouth. A hundred and fifty vessels were present, in an orderly procession when, with Parsons at the helm and Stoney in his customary position alongside him, ‘Turbinia’ made the move, which was to secure its place in naval folklore.
As the ‘Times’ put it:
‘At the cost of deliberate disregard of authority, she contrived to give herself an effective advertisement by steaming at astonishing speed between the lines A and B shortly after the royal procession had passed. The patrol boats which attempted to check her adventurous and lawless proceedings were distanced in a twinkling but at last one managed by placing herself athwart her course… Her speed was, as I have said, simply astonishing.’ (27 June 1887).
In fact, Parsons denied deliberate lawlessness. He maintained that the watching Prince Henry of Prussia requested that ‘Turbinia’ be brought alongside his flagship and show a turn of speed. Permission was apparently given by the admiralty but there is no doubt that there were a number of close shaves as ‘Turbinia’ squeezed between other crafts at previously unknown speed.
Turbinia with Gerald Stoney below Charles Parsons on the bridge
Growing recognition
Stoney continued to be indispensible to Parsons. For all Parsons’ genius and drive, Stoney seems to have had the better understanding of theory and he could also apply it in practice. In fact, there is evidence that, on occasion, Parson’s intransigence even held Stoney and his own company back when he refused to agree to their suggestions. If a solution to a problem had been found by a competitor, especially a foreign one, rather than adopt it and move on, Parsons more than once insisted that his engineers found a different, original answer. For the most part, Stoney seems to have accepted this trait in his employer and risen to the challenges it posed.
In 19 December 1900, Stoney became a full member of the Institution of Civil Engineers. He was now General Manager of C A Parsons and living at 7 Roxburgh Place, Heaton. By 1902, according to the Electoral Register, the Stoneys had moved to ‘Oakley’, an imposing, three storey, semi-detached villa on Heaton Road.
‘Oakley’ on Heaton Road
In 1903 Stoney was involved in the establishment of the ground breaking Neptune and Carrville Power Stations, which were so crucial to the economy of Tyneside. And in 1904, Parsons again rewarded his trusted lieutenant. He opened a bank account for him into which he deposited £5,000. 4.5% interest could be drawn half yearly or yearly. If Stoney stayed at the firm for another ten years, the capital would be his.
Stoney was by now well known in engineering circles. He published many papers and submitted patent applications and he gave lectures throughout Britain and Ireland.
In 1905, George Gerald Stoney and Charles Parsons were joint recipients of the Institution of Civil Engineers’ Watt Gold Medal for excellence in engineering and in 1911 Stoney, by now Technical Manager of the entire Heaton works, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) by his peers, evidence that his part in Parsons’ work was recognised outside as well as within the firm.
Temporary departure
But in 1912, ‘in a moment of extreme vexation’ as he later put it (rows between senior staff at the company seemed common), Gerald Stoney left C A Parsons. At first, he set up as a consultant and he was secretary of one of the Tyneside Irish battalions before, in 1917, being appointed to the Chair of Mechanical Engineering at the Victoria University in Manchester. Stoney’s eminence is shown by a photograph, taken at this time, being in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery.
George Gerald Stoney (courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery)
However, Stoney’s wife Isabella, was by this time an invalid and didn’t make the move from Newcastle. Stoney increasingly had to travel between the two cities and when, in 1926, Charles Parsons became aware of the toll this was taking, he offered his old employee the chance to return to Heaton as Director of Research. Stoney’s career had turned full circle as, in his new role, he found himself once again conducting experimental optical work, this time for the recently acquired Grubb Telescope Company, now called Grubb Parsons. He eventually retired in 1930 following the death of his wife.
George Gerald Stoney died on 15 May 1942 at his home ‘Oakley’ on Heaton Road. He is buried in Corbridge Cemetery alongside his wife.
The Stoneys grave in Corbridge
At the time of his death, he was the last surviving member of the original Turbinia crew. Obituaries and tributes show that he was widely appreciated as one of the pioneers in the development of the steam turbine and high-speed dynamo electric machines. We hope that by retelling his story here, Gerald Stoney, like his sister Edith, will be remembered once again in Heaton and beyond.
Can you help?
If you know more about Edith or Gerald Stoney including their connections with Parsons and the Heaton area, we’d love to hear from you. Please either leave a reply on this website by clicking on the link immediately below the article title or email chris.jackson@heatonhistorygroup.org
Acknowledgements
Researched and written by Arthur Andrews and Chris Jackson, Heaton History Group.
This article is part of Heaton History Group’s project ‘Brains, Steam and Speed: 250 years of science, engineering and mathematics in Heaton‘, funded by Heritage Lottery Fund, with additional funding from Heaton History Group and the Joicey Trust
Pupils from local schools will study mathematicians, scientists and engineers associated with Heaton and produce artworks, inspired by what they have learnt, some of which will be exhibited at the People’s Theatre in July 2018.
Key Sources
From Galaxies to Turbines: science, technology and the Parsons Family / by W Garrett Scaife; Institute of Physics Publishing, 2000
Scope (December 2013) ‘Edith Stoney MA; the first woman medical physicist’
William George Armstrong was born on 26th November 1810, just as the Industrial Revolution on Tyneside was really getting into full swing. The Northumberland and Durham coalfield was expanding, William Hedley, Jonathan Forster and Timothy Hackworth would soon be working on their famous ‘Puffing Billy’ locomotive at Wylam and soon after George Stephenson would be working on his own ‘Rocket‘ locomotive. With the Literary and Philosophical Society established in 1793, Tyneside was in terms of both scientific achievements and progressive ideas about society, becoming a world leader. Armstrong would add to this in a number of ways – but also leave a darker legacy.
Lord Armstrong, 1890, with permission of the National Portrait Gallery
As an inventor, Armstrong is perhaps most famous for his development of a hydraulic system enabling the famous Swing Bridge on Newcastle’s Quayside to open – and the Tower Bridge in London too. Armstrong’s hydraulic machinery was dependent upon water mains or reservoirs for power and so in 1850 he invented a hydraulic accumulator. It is noted that, ‘it comprised a large water-filled cylinder with a piston that could raise water pressure within the cylinder and in supply pipes to 600 pounds per square inch (42 kg per square cm)…..thus machinery such as hoists, capstans, turntables, and dock gates could be worked in almost any situation.’
Armstrong’s Swing Bridge opened in 1876
Armstrong invented this because he had to use high water towers for the use of his cranes, on building sites where no water was available. However he hit a major problem when trying to use cranes at New Holland on the Humber Estuary, as the towers would have to be built in sand, which would not provide steady enough foundations. Accordingly, as is often the case, a problem brought forth a solution, which was in the form of a new invention, the weighted accumulator.
It is also claimed that Armstrong was an early environmentalist. Despite the huge importance of coal-mining to the local economy, Armstrong was one of the very first advocates of moving away from fossil fuels to water and solar power. Indeed Cragside, his large home near Rothbury in Northumberland, was the first house in the world to be lit by electric light – powered by hydroelectricity! So keen and visionary was Armstrong when it came to renewable energy that he claimed that coal, ‘was used wastefully and extravagantly in all its applications’, while he also predicted in 1863 that Britain would stop producing coal within two centuries. Armstrong did not only advocate hydroelectricity; he was also a great supporter of solar power, claiming that the solar energy received by 1-acre (4,000 m2) in tropical areas would ‘exert the amazing power of 4,000 horses acting for nearly nine hours every day’.
The light bulbs at Armstrong’s Cragside House were provided by his friend Joseph Swan, who demonstrated the first electric light bulb in the world at the Lit and Phil Society building near to Newcastle’s Central Station. Nearby Mosely Street was of course, the first street in the world to be lit by electric lights…
Sadly, Armstrong also had his downside. He was the inventor of modern artillery and had many weapons built in his Tyneside factory. He was also arguably the world’s first major arms dealer selling deadly weapons to governments around the world. Perhaps the only mitigation we can claim for Armstrong is that in his day, the weapons would have been used almost exclusively against other combatants and he operated before the wake-up call that was the First World War, really brought home to people just how deadly a business war is.
Armstrong and Heaton
The most obvious link between Lord Armstrong and Heaton comes with the parks, next to Heaton Road, one of which bears his name (originally Heaton Park was part of Armstrong Park) , and the nearby Armstrong Allotments. During Victorian times the area around the Ouseburn Valley, was home to many rich and influential people. These included Sir Andrew Noble, Armorer Donkin and of course Lord and Lady Armstrong. Andrew Noble, was Armstrong’s right hand man and had the house which is now Jesmond Dene House Hotel built for him, it being designed by John Dobson.
The park forms part of a continuous area of land by the sides of the Ouseburn river, from South Gosforth to Warwick Street, which is not built upon. Armstrong acquired this land at various times throughout the 1850s and enclosed it, before planting exotic plants and shrubs and laying paths and building bridges.
Heaton Park, originally part of Armstrong Park, on land donated to the city by Lord Armstrong
Armstrong and his wife, Margaret Ramshaw, lived in a house called Jesmond Dean, which he had had built in 1835 in preparation for his marriage. As he got wealthier, so Armstrong was able to acquire most of today’s Jesmond Dene, enclosing the land and transforming it into his own private garden. Together with his wife, he created a garden with rapids, waterfalls and a mysterious ghetto, while they also organised the laying of miles of paths and the planting of hundreds of trees and shrubs. Lady Armstrong, described as a ‘lover of nature’, supervised much of this work, with trees and shrubs, ‘culled from the gardens of the world’. Meanwhile, Armstrong’s banqueting house, completed in 1862, was used as a venue for entertaining both his employees from the Elswick Works and later a number of foreign clients. With reference to his employees, it is argued that, despite the business he was in, Armstrong was regarded as an enlightened employer. He built good quality housing for his workers and provided schools for their children.
The banqueting hall, is of course a significant feature of Jesmond Dene. It was built so that he could entertain the aforementioned high value clients as his own house, on the other side of Jesmond Dene Road was too small. The hall remained in regular use until the 1970s when it was damaged by fire. The remaining sections of the building are now home to a thriving artists community. Tyne and Wear Building Preservation Trust have plans for a full restoration of the site, subject to being able to raise the funds.
For thirty years, Armstrong used Jesmond Dene as his own private park, but he did allow the public in twice a week – on payment of a small sum of money! Eventually he decided that he could be a little more generous with this valuable environmental asset and in 1883, the main part of Jesmond Dene was presented to the people of Newcastle as a gift from Lord Armstrong, with the park being officially opened the following year. Armstrong essentially retreated to his home at Cragside, after the death of his wife Margaret in 1893.
When Lord Armstrong died on 27th November 1900, he also left us with the bridge bearing his name. The bridge was given as a gift to the citizens of Newcastle by Armstrong and opened on 30th April 1878.
Armstrong Bridge from Benton Bank
It is reported that, ‘the contractors for the masonry were Messrs W E and F Jackson. It is a lattice girder bridge, 550 feet in length with a 25 foot carriageway. Varying in height from 30 to 65 feet, it is supported on seven columns 70 feet apart – each end of the bridge rested on massive masonry abutments and, despite its solid construction, presents a light and ornamental appearance.’ The bridge was also notable as the first bridge in the world specially mounted to move in the heat…
Legacy
Unfortunately, it is hard to deny that part of the legacy of Lord Armstrong’s life and work is that Britain has been for many years , one of the five biggest arms manufacturing and dealing nations in the world, often second only to the United States. However carefully the business of selling weapons is done, there has too often been too little scrutiny and monitoring on ways in which arms have been sold on again and whose hands they have ended up in. Consequently, it is impossible to tell just how many innocent children and adults have been maimed or killed by weapons made in this country and indeed by the other nations who are major manufacturers and dealers of arms. Armstrong himself felt no guilt about his role in world history, choosing to not believe that arms manufacturing might inevitably lead to war. It is reported that he once said: ‘If I thought that war would be fomented, or the interests of humanity suffer, by what I have done, I would greatly regret it. I have no such apprehension.’ Subsequent history has taught us otherwise. As arguably the world’s first major arms dealer, we should not hide from the fact that this is sadly part of the legacy of the life and work of Lord Armstrong.
Arms in Armstrong Park
Happily, however, there are many other more positive aspects to the legacy Armstrong has left us. It was said of Christopher Wren, the architect behind the famous dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, ‘if you seek his monument, look around you’. In some respects, the same could be said for Armstrong. We can see his legacy, in the bridge, which spans the Ouseburn Valley and in the parks next to Heaton and at Jesmond Dene itself. We can also see Armstrong’s legacy in every crane we can see rising over the skyline of Newcastle, as yet another student accommodation building is constructed…
Can you help?
If you know more about Lord Armstrong, including his connections with the Heaton area, or any of the people or places mentioned in the article, we’d love to hear from you. Please either leave a reply on this website by clicking on the link immediately below the article title or email chris.jackson@heatonhistorygroup.org
Acknowledgements
Researched and written by Peter Sagar, Heaton History Group.
This article is part of Heaton History Group’s project ‘Brains Steam and Speed: 250 years of science, engineering and mathematics in Heaton‘, funded by Heritage Lottery Fund, with additional funding from Heaton History Group and the Joicey Trust
Pupils from local schools will study mathematicians, scientists and engineers associated with Heaton and produce artworks, inspired by what they have learnt, some of which will be exhibited at the People’s Theatre in July 2018.