Category Archives: Addycombe Terrace

Photography in the blood

This rare photograph, of the visit to Newcastle in August 1884 of the Prince and Princess of Wales, was taken by Thomas Maitland Laws. This was the visit on which, after passing down Shields Road, North View and Heaton Park Road then through Heaton Park, they officially opened Armstrong Park and Jesmond Dene.

Almost all the images you will see of this famous event are drawings and engravings because to take documentary photographs of moving subjects was still a big challenge at that time. Thomas clearly understood the photograph’s commercial value because within a week of taking it, he had registered the copyright. It is, as a result, held in the National Archives, where we found it.

Prince and Princess of Wales, Newcastle August 1884. Perhaps you can help us identify where it was taken.

Although Thomas was living in the centre of Newcastle at this time, he later lived in Heaton. During this period, he owned a photography business based on Shields Road West.

Early life

Thomas was born in Paddington on 2 July 1855 to Isabella and Peter Maitland Laws. Although both Thomas’s parents were northerners (Peter, Durham born, and Isabella from Cumberland), at this time they were living in London where Peter worked as a carpenter.

However by 1861, the Laws had moved back north with children Henry, Thomas, Sarah and Peter. The family lived in Grainger Street in the centre of Newcastle and Peter was now earning his living as a photographer.

Thomas was thus exposed (forgive the pun) to photography from a very early age at a time when some of his neighbours and indeed his own father were at the forefront of the development and popularisation of a still new medium.

The first mention we have found of Thomas in the press is in July 1867 when, aged 12, he was announced as the winner of the not inconsiderable sum of five shillings, having achieved second place in the ‘Triple Kites’ category of a kite-flying contest on the Town Moor. The previous year a photograph to be taken by his father had been announced as the prize for the various winners.

Pioneering father

Thomas’s father, Peter Maitland Laws, had been a professional photographer for at least eight years at this point. He was listed in the trade directories of 1859-60 as a ‘photographic artist’, living in Pilgrim St and operating from Northumberland Court (which still exists between Waterstones and Jamie’s Italian on Blackett Street), at a time when, although there were a number of ‘photographic artists’ practising in Newcastle, the occupation did not yet appear as a category in the classified listings. (1839 is generally considered the year in which commercial photography was born and it was the year the term ‘photography’ was coined by ‘father of photography’, the astronomer and chemist, John Herschel. But the medium took off slowly at first due to significant technical constraints.)

It was two years later after Laws’ first listing in the trade directories, in 1861, that the Newcastle and North of England Photographic Society was formed. Peter was a member of its original ‘council’ and later became treasurer. At the society’s first meeting, he presented ‘two proofs of his very beautiful views of the ruins of Tynemouth Priory’.

Important technical developments to the art form were still to take place: here in Newcastle in 1864, Joseph Wilson Swan, who owned a ‘chemical and photographic establishment’ on Mosley Street with his brother in law, John Mawson, perfected and patented the carbon process, an early method of producing permanently fixed photographs. It wasn’t for another 13 years, in 1877, that the same inventor perfected dry gelatine-bromide plates which made enlargements possible.

But in the meantime, photography was booming, with small photographic visiting cards becoming hugely popular. Laws’ business, by now based in Blackett Street, must have been doing well because, by 1871, Peter and Isabella’s elder son, Henry, had followed his father into the firm, while 16 year old Thomas worked as a lithographer. This photograph of Thomas Laws’ grandparents, William (born in Wolsingham, Co Durham in 1793) and Sarah (born in Paisley, Scotland in 1790) dates from this time.

William and Sarah Laws, grandparents of Thomas Maitland Laws, 1871

Peter Maitland Laws didn’t rest on his laurels. He was said to be one of the first photographers to take portraits using artificial light when he introduced gas lighting into his studio. In 1879, he advertised ‘Portraits in Dull Weather and at NIGHT with Laws’ “light irradiator”‘ and ‘Portraits in winter equal to summer: gas nights, Tuesday, Friday and Saturday 6-8’. And in February 1880, he made history when he used gaslight to take the first ever photograph of a performance at the Theatre Royal.

He was experimenting with ‘colour photographs’ at around the same time.

Hand colouring, late 1870s

Peter’s ability to innovate as well as his photographic skill meant that, not only did his business continue to thrive, but he continued to be awarded personal accolades and prizes. In 1887 two of his award-winning photographs were included in the Newcastle Royal Jubilee Exhibition.

Peter Maitland Laws died in 1906.

Peter Maitland Laws

Developing talent

By 1881, aged 26, Thomas had followed his father into photography. He was by now married and living in St Thomas Square with his wife Elizabeth, who hailed from the Isle of Bute. The couple were well enough off to employ a live-in servant.

It was around this time of his photograph of the royal visit that Thomas formally became a partner in the family business, which was retitled ‘P M Laws and Son’. In 1887, P M Laws and Son claimed to be ‘the largest and oldest established gallery of photography in the North’.

Reverse of a P M Laws and Son photograph

However, whether because Thomas wanted to move out of his father’s shadow or for some other reason, Thomas and Elizabeth didn’t stay in Newcastle. By 1891, they were living in Staffordshire with their young family: Amelia, aged 9; Maitland, 7, and Angus, 3. Thomas’s business was in Darlington Street, Wolverhampton. A number of his photographs from this time are in the National Archives, notably two of Wolverhampton Wanderers 1893 cup winning team.

Return to Heaton

The family returned north, however, first to Cumberland, where Thomas ran a photographic and art supplies shop, and then, perhaps because Thomas’s father, Peter, had died in 1906, to 24 Addycombe Terrace in Heaton, where Thomas was a self-employed photographer once more, with a studio at 42 Shields Road West. One of his neighbours at no 55 Addycombe Terrace was his younger half-brother, Albert Heath Laws, also a photographer.

By 1911 Thomas and Elizabeth’s 23 year old son, Angus Ferguson Laws, worked as his assistant, the third generation of the family to become a photographer. But sadly Angus, a Private in the Grenadier Guards, was killed in France on 27 September 1918, aged 30, just weeks before the end of WW1. He is remembered at the Grand Ravine British Cemetery, Havrincourt.

Thomas had moved from Addycombe Terrace to 7 Warwick Street a few years earlier but by 1921 the Shields Road West business had closed and Thomas had moved back to the midlands. He died in 1928 in Warwickshire.

Postscript

June Howard, a great great granddaughter of Peter Maitland Laws, who now lives in Australia, kindly sent us some family photographs, including those seen here, and told us that photography ran in her family: ‘My understanding is a few of PM Laws children took up photography. My grandfather, Percy Maitland Laws, certainly did all his own developing. I remember we couldn’t use the bath room as it was his dark room.’

Sources

‘One Hundred Years of Photography in the North’, J Arnold Little, 1960

‘Sun Pictures: the Lit and Phil and the history of British photography’,Anthony Flowers and Alison Gunning; Lit and Phil, 2014

Catalogue of the Newcastle Jubilee exhibition (at the Lit and Phil)

Ancestry, British Newspaper Archives and other online resources

Shakespeare Streets

This article was researched and written by Chris Jackson as part of Heaton History Group’s project to commemorate the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death.

There are a number of streets in the west of Heaton which have names associated with Shakespeare: Bolingbroke, Hotspur, Malcolm, Mowbray and Warwick Streets plus Stratford Grove, Stratford Road, Stratford Grove Terrace, Stratford Grove West and Stratford Villas. We would love to discover why they were so named and we will research and write about some of the people who, like Thomas Maitland Laws, have lived or worked there.

We are also interested in other connections between Heaton and Shakespeare through its theatres, past and present; writers, actors – and of course, the famous brick Shakespeare on South View West.

If you would like to get involved or have any information or memories that you think might be of interest, please contact us, either by clicking on the link immediately below the title of this article or by emailing chris.jackson@heatonhistorygroup.org

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The Photographer and his House

101 Addycombe Terrace

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Heaton used to boast many small shops, often on the corners of otherwise residential streets. Luckily quite a few survive and one of these is at 101 Addycombe Terrace. The photograph below shows William Batchelor and his wife, Margaret, who between them ran the shop for almost 40 years.

Mr and Mrs Batchelor outside 101 Addycombe Terrace

Mr and Mrs Batchelor outside their shop

The photo was passed to us by their great-grandson, Stephen. The original is fragile and this image isn’t very clear, but you can clearly read the name W Batchelor and Co on the left and just about make out North Heaton Stores on the right. Can you see the hand cart on the right hand side as well? And is that a person next to it? Notice the advert for Bovril next to the door.

Durham pitman

William Morpeth Batchelor was born in Kelloe in the south east of County Durham in 1863 and, as a boy, lived in West Cornforth near Spennymoor. His father, who was born in Worthing in Sussex, was a coal weighman. His job was to weigh coal as it came out of the mine and keep a tally of each miner’s work. William followed his father into the pits and through the ten-yearly censuses, we can track his career. Initially he was a labourer (1881). By 1891, he was married and living in Bill Quay, with his wife Margaret Kent Batchelor and his young daughter, Annie. His job was recorded as an under heap keeper. We believe this is a job at the surface of a mine under the direction of the heap keeper but we’d welcome more information. By 1901, he was a colliery weighman, as his father had been, and had a son, Edward. Ten years later, William was still living in Bill Quay with Margaret and still working as a colliery weighman. By now they had 4 children. Annie, now 21, and Emily, 16, were both domestic servants; Edward, 18, an architect’s clerk (Edward was the grandfather of Stephen who kindly copied the photographs for us. He became an architect and property developer but died in 1952 before Stephen was born); and there was now Elsie, aged 6, too. We don’t know why but the family was soon to leave County Durham where William and Margaret had lived the first 50 or so years of their lives.

Grocery store

By 1914, the couple had become the proprietors of a grocery shop on Addycombe Terrace, where they remained for many years. Over time, the shop expanded into 103 and the living quarters into 105. The later picture below shows Elsie, who evidently helped in the shop.

If you click on the photo to enlarge it, you’ll see lots of familiar brand names: Jacobs cream crackers, Bourneville cocoa, Lifebuoy soap, Players cigarettes, Ideal milk, Atora suet. And does anyone remember Melox dog food? William died in 1928. Margaret continued to run the shop until she too died in 1948. They are both buried in Heaton Cemetery.

The shop retained the family name for a few more years still, before being taken over by a George E Fenwick. A Sewell had taken over by 1959 and, from about 1962, it became John Miller’s, first as a grocer and then an off licence. We are hoping some readers will have memories of the shop back then. J L Miller’s off licence was still there in 1988.

But to backtrack, the Batchelors’ North Heaton Stores might have been the most enduring business at number 101 Addycombe but it wasn’t the first. And, although William and Margaret weren’t local, they didn’t come from as far afield as the first proprietor, Henry Richard James.

Indian tea dealer

This stretch of Addycombe Terrace was built at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century and the first owner of number 101 was Henry Richard Jones. We don’t know very much about Henry but what we do know is fascinating and we hope that some day we’ll unearth more about him. The 1911 census tells us that he was born in Billary, Madras in India in about 1872. He was already running the grocer’s shop by this time but he describes himself as a tea merchant and swimming instructor – an interesting and versatile man! Was he already a tea dealer in India? Or once he arrived in Heaton, did he simply employ his knowledge of the subcontinent in a trade where it would certainly have been useful? We don’t yet know. His name suggests that he was of British origin. The was a large British presence in the ‘Madras presidency’ in the late nineteenth century when Britain ruled India. India eventually achieved independence in 1947.

We don’t know when Henry moved to Britain or whether he came straight to Newcastle. We can see from the records though that he was here by 1901, lodging at Mrs Mary Rodgerson’s boarding house at 50 Cardigan Terrace. (Mary, a widow, was assisted in the running of the boarding house by her 13 year old daughter and she had two younger children.) But by 1908, Henry was married to a local woman, Mary Irvine, living further down Cardigan Terrage at number 108 and running a grocery at 182 Heaton Road (what is now Sky Apple cafe and restaurant). The Addycombe Road shop came a couple of years later but by 1914, he had moved on: we don’t yet know where to.

Still going strong

And now, over a hundred years after it first opened, 101 Addycombe terrace is still a grocery store, general dealer and off licence. Omer Hayat has run Omer’s Convenience Store for 21 years. Let’s hope the shop lasts another hundred years!

If you can add to our story or have an old photograph of Heaton to share, please leave a reply or email Chris.jackson@heatonhistorygroup.org