Tag Archives: Heaton Presbyterian Church

A Peacock’s Tale

It’s a two minute walk from 44 Third Avenue to 19 Cheltenham Terrace, 150 metres if that. Like most buildings in this part of Heaton, the two properties date from the late nineteenth century. And it’s easy to imagine what they, one a Tyneside flat, the other a terraced house, would have looked like in, let’s say, 1904, when the families occupying both included a young boy.

After revisiting his birthplace many decades later, one of the boys wrote:

‘ The terrace seemed little changed except that the entrance to it had been barred for motor traffic. It consisted of about thirty close-built houses on each side of a road [He failed to notice that the houses immediately opposite number 19 were replacements for those destroyed during the Second World War] , the original surface of which was made of granite sets. Number 19 stood well and firm, looking fresher than I remembered it… in our period of residence, most outside and inside paintwork was a dull yellow or brown because light colours would soon tarnish in the dust and smoke of Newcastle, a sooty industrial town.

Each house in the terrace had a miniature garden about four feet wide in front of it, showing signs of care and cultivation. In our time, they were mainly scratch places for cats and dogs, as the soot and even coal dust in the atmosphere precluded successful gardening. Those householders who managed to grow some privet or tatty chrysanthemums were counted as skilled horticulturalists, making use of the horse manure gathered in the street. There were three front steps to each dwelling leading to a small tiled level surface before the front door. These and the gardens raised the tone of the terrace, as in many streets in Newcastle there was only one front step from the pavement to inside the house’. NB p2

19 Cheltenham Terrace in November 2020, no sign of the ‘small tiled level surface’ or 3 steps.

While the other recalled:

‘That part I knew first, the south side, started with a grocer’s shop on the corner, ran past some eighty front doors arranged in twos, one for the upstairs flat, one for the down and each pair separated from the next by the downstairs garden.These gardens were just narrow fenders of soil laid around the buttress of the bay window but they were magnificently defended from depredation by low brick walls, coped with granite slabs each sprouting a complicated fence of spiked railings. The Edwardian builder imitated magnificence even in the cheapest house. Between them lay cement aprons in front of the doors.’ KL p16

44 Third Avenue in November 2020, the spiked railings long gone.

If you were walking between Chillingham Road and Heaton Road down Third Avenue and Cheltenham Terrace back in 1904, you might well have encountered two year old Jack Common on the street. For, as many readers will know, 44 Third Avenue was his home and he wrote:

‘ …when you could call and totter, you always made for the street whenever the door was open. Over the rough cement path, down the step not the wonderfully smooth pavement, perhaps again to the cobblestones into the middle of the road. As soon as you got into that dangerous area, however, some girl would come to lift you up and totter with you back to safety. They were your street guardians, the little girls.’ KLp15-16

Much has been written about Jack Common, including on this website. He went on to become an acclaimed writer. Local children even learn about him at primary school.

But further on you might well have caught sight of a slightly older boy. Basil Peacock of 19 Cheltenham Terrace, would have been six years old:

‘There were few children’s playgrounds, and only well-to-do people had gardens so we played in the streets and back lanes. There was little traffic except for the occasional tradesmen’s carts so it was comparatively safe’. NB p57

Contradicting those words somewhat, both Common and Peacock described the wide variety of visitors to their street. Peacock remembered the the striped-aproned butchers’ boys, white-clad grocers’ boys, the bell-ringing muffin man, the milkman on his horse-drawn float, bonneted nurses and midwives in starched cuffs, policemen in high-collared tunics and tall helmets, organ grinders, a hurdy-gurdy man with a bear on a chain and, of course, Cullercoats fish wives but it was a Heaton postman who really captured his imagination:

‘The postman came three times a day and wore a smart, blue tunic and trousers with a red stripe down the legs and what I thought an enviable head-dress, a kepi similar to that of an old-fashioned French soldier, with a peak back and front which turned the rain from his house and neck. I once thought of becoming a postman so I could wear such a uniform. The Cheltenham Terrace postman carried a large sack over his shoulders in which were parcels as well as letters; and one of my first girlfriends, aged six, informed me confidentially that he also had babies in it which he delivered to those who wanted them.’ NB p32

Additionally, Jack Common recalled the rag and bone man, coal carts, doctor’s trap, firewood seller, tin whistler and a German band.

Both also described in some detail the games they played on the streets. Here, Basil Peacock’s memories of marbles:

‘Most marbles were then made of pot (fired clay). – the glass ones were too expensive, and much prized if obtained. In addition to a pocketful of small ones, every lad had a “plonker”, which was a large one used to pitch at the others. A cheap plonker could be had by breaking up a lemonade bottle and obtaining the glass stopper… In addition to the normal game in which small marbles are placed inside a chalked circle and knocked out with plonkers, we played one which took place in street gutters… the drain gratings were hazards, as ill-judged shooting led to marbles being lost forever down them.’ NB p61-62

And Jack Common’s:

‘The marble millionaires gambled untold wealth at Big Ring, increasing the stakes as the evening wore on until there was a fortune out there on the cement, whole constellations of fat milks and coloured glass-alleys with twinkling spirals down their centres and clear sea-green or water-white pop-alleys winked in the shaky gaslight, nothing less than these high counters allowed in the big games, stonier and chalkies definitely barred’. KL p37

School

Both boys attended Chillingham Road School. Jack Common, in his autobiographical novel ‘Kiddar’s Luck’, was famously negative about some of his school experiences.

Basil Peacock wrote that from the age of three as ‘some schools administered by local authorities were prepared to take toddlers into the baby class providing they were properly weaned and toilet trained.’

‘Coming from a “respectable” family, and being rather a timid and retiring child, I found it difficult at first to associate with more robust and turbulent pupils coming from less orderly homes, who spoke in extreme Geordie dialect, so I dwelt on the words of my school teacher, which I could understand, and gained her approbation as a “bright pupil”’. NB p76

He didn’t say much more.

Both authors, however, said they were keen readers at an early age:

Jack Common recalled:

One day, however, I made a discovery. I could read myself! I was four years old now, I suppose, thin, rather weakly, too feminine in appearance for the taste of the local matrons but undeniably bright; and while sprawling on the floor with a comic open at the pictures of Weary Willie and Tired Tim, or Dreamy Daniel, or Casey Court, or the Mulberry Flatites, I found that the captions under suddenly began to read themselves out to me. Marvellous!’ KL p 27

while Basil Peacock wrote:

‘Early in life, I became a voracious reader, especially of adventure stories, once I had advanced beyond the ‘Tiny Tots’ sort of publications. Children’s comics were proscribed in our household, though I read them in secret if I obtained copies; with the result that I was introduced to better literature, such as stories and serials written by first-rate authors in the famous “Boys Own Paper” when younger than most of its readers.’ NB p19

Parallel lives just 150 metres and four years apart.

Divergence

There were differences between the two boys’ upbringing, however. The Peacocks considered themselves middle class. Basil’s mother came from a family of sailors. Her father and brother were master keelmen. Basil’s father was privately educated at elementary school and although he had to leave school early because his family weren’t well off enough for him to continue, eventually he was able to set himself up in business because of his wife’s dowry.

The Peacock Family c 1899. Basil is third from the left, next to his mother.

In explaining how the family was considered prosperous, Basil Peacock described the area in which he grew up as follows:

‘The working men were factory hands, pitmen, shipyard workers and artisans. White-collar workers were comparatively few and tradesmen, office workers and particularly, council employers were considered well-to-do… On Saturdays the gutters were strewn with helpless drunks … the pitmen, delving and sweating miles underground, were a race apart; they took their beer in quarts, needing the liquid to replace the copious perspiration they lost during working hours.’ TM p6

We can see from the 1901 census that the Peacock’s neighbours on Cheltenham Terrace included two booksellers, a sailor, a commercial traveller, a draper, a manager in an iron foundry, an overseer at the Admiralty, a clerk to an oil merchant, an agent for Cook’s Tours, two butchers and a self employed builder. Diverse occupations but definitely no pitmen!

Jack Common, on the other hand, always stressed his working class credentials. The neighbours of his parents in that same census included: a self employed grocer (like James Peacock, Basil’s father, on Cheltenham Terrace), a butcher, a self employed dairyman, several commercial clerks, a foreman potter, a master mariner, a sailor, a ships’ surveyor, a marine engineer, an electrical engineer, a telegraph clerk, a pupil teacher, a meat and egg importer, an iron turner and bricklayers, as well as several who, like John Common, Jack’s father, an engine driver, were employed on the railways, mostly as clerks.

The occupations are just as diverse as those on the next street. It perhaps suited both men, later in life, to give a particular impression.

Another difference between the two is that, while Jack Common lived in Heaton throughout his childhood and adolescence, Basil Peacock’s family relocated to the west end when he was seven years old. This may be an explanation for some of the things he wrote about Cheltenham Terrace and its environs not quite ringing true: when he left, he was simply too young to understand the economic and social nuances of Heaton and its people and he hadn’t built a memory bank to compare with that of Jack Common.

Military

A third crucial difference is that, at the start of World War One, Common was not yet 12 years old while Basil Peacock was already 16. So, while Common wrote of the excitement of North Heaton School being commandeered as temporary barracks and of school being reduced to half days, Peacock joined first the Junior Training League and then Durham University OTC before signing up, ‘aged seventeen and a half’ and eventually serving as a commissioned officer with the Northumberland Fusiliers. This experience undoubtedly shaped his whole life.

An army instructor suggested that Peacock study medicine when the war was over and that, after qualifying, he apply for a regular commission in the Royal Army Medical Corps. Peacock tried to follow his advice but, because he didn’t yet have the Latin qualification that was required at that time, he was accepted instead for dentistry. He studied at Durham University Dental School, which was based in Newcastle.

On qualification, Peacock moved south to find work but remained a member of the Territorial Army. In WW2 he served in the far east, where he was imprisoned by the Japanese military and forced to work on the construction of the Burma Railway, a project on which about 16,000 allied prisoners and up to ten times that number of Asians died. Peacock returned to dentistry after the war and in the 1950s, he was seconded by the NHS to North Borneo.

Writer

After retirement, Basil Peacock’s life once more converged with that of Jack Common. From the 1960s he became a successful writer, broadcaster and public speaker. And it was as an octogenarian that he visited Newcastle to deliver a lecture on ‘Soldiers and Soldiering in Ancient Times’ to a ‘Society of Senior Male Citizens’ at Heaton Presbyterian Church, where he had attended Sunday school over 70 years earlier.

Heaton Presbyterian Church, taken from the corner of Cheltenham Terrace.

After the talk, he and his brother crossed over the road, apparently on impulse, and knocked on the door of their old childhood home at 19 Cheltenham Terrace. The visit led to his ‘A Newcastle Boyhood 1898-1914’ – there is no indication in the book that he was aware of Common’s earlier work. So we are lucky enough to have published accounts of, not one, but two writers who spent their early years in Edwardian Heaton.

Basil Peacock died in 1990, aged 92. You can still find his books in libraries and in secondhand bookshops.

Acknowledgments

Researched and written by Chris Jackson, Heaton History Group.

Can You Help?

If you know more about Basil Peacock 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

‘Kiddar’s Luck and the Ampersand’ by Jack Common; Frank Graham; rev ed, 1975

‘A Newcastle Boyhood 1898-1914′ by Basil Peacock; Newcastle upon Tyne Libraries and London Borough of Sutton Libraries and Arts Services, 1986

‘Tinker’s Mufti: an autobiography’ by Basil Peacock; Seeley Service, 1974

10 Sefton Avenue: a time-line

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It seems fitting that the first owner of 10 Sefton Avenue was the daughter and granddaughter of at least two generations of watchmakers who had lived in a place that, in the nineteenth century, was synonymous with monitoring the passage of time. For studying the history of buildings to help us understand those who have inhabited them fascinates the current owner of the house. Conversely the stories of those who have lived and worked in a building over time can breathe life into inanimate bricks and mortar.

The discovery in his loft of a large collection of objects and documents that had belonged to a previous owner aroused Jules Brown’s curiosity.

10 Sefton Avenue, 2017 (undergoing a loft conversion)

What we came to call the ‘Sefton Hoard’, along with the deeds and other documents relating to the property were the starting point for our investigation. But we’ll begin before the house was built.

Little Broom

Plan of Heaton which accompanies the deeds of 10 Sefton Avenue

In October 1894 Lord Armstrong had passed on his land in Heaton, including Heaton Town Farm, to his great nephew, William Armstrong Watson-Armstrong. In 1907, the plot which became 10 Sefton Avenue was sold by Watson-Armstrong to a local builder, Peter Grant Tulloh. By comparing the above plan accompanying the house deeds to modern maps, we have calculated this plot to have been part of Heaton Town Farm, somewhere in field 95, formerly pasture known as Little Broom.

Peter Tulloh had been born in Forres in Moray, Scotland in 1859 but had moved south as a young man, first to Bishopwearmouth and, by 1891, to 28 Falmouth Road in Heaton at which time he described himself as a ‘traveller’, which we think means what we later called a ‘commercial traveller‘ or ‘travelling salesman‘. Ten years later, he described himself as a ‘traveller’s manager’ and was living at 48 Heaton Road.

We don’t know when or how he became a builder and property developer but he was soon successful. By 1912, he was living at 330 Heaton Road, a house later demolished for the building of the Coast Road, ending his days at Eastwood on Jesmond Park East. He died on 13 April 1939, leaving almost £30,000 in his will. Peter is buried in Byker and Heaton Cemetery with his wife, Isabella and young daughter, Olivia.

The time traveller’s daughter

In January 1907, Peter Tulloh sold 10 Sefton Avenue to 32 year old Fanny Louise Baker. Fanny had been born in Newcastle in c1874 to parents who had moved from the midlands. Her father, William, had worked as a finisher in the watchmaking industry as did his father before him, at a time when the area around Spon Street, Coventry, where they lived, was one of the oldest and most important centres of the industry in the world. Old watchmakers’ houses still stand in this historic quarter of the city and the Coventry Watch Museum tells the fascinating story of the industry and the people employed in it.

But specialist skills were also in demand in the rapidly expanding cities of the north and so William and his wife, Frances, were assured of a bright future when, around 1867, they set off for Newcastle, three young children in tow. (Fanny herself was born some seven years later.) The family settled in Elswick, where William continued to work as a watchmaker. He eventually died in September 1905 leaving £635 6s 9d in his will, a sum that would secure his family’s future by enabling Fanny to buy the brand new house (10 Sefton Avenue cost her just £575 ) she was to share with her now 72 year old mother and her older sister, Elizabeth, a schoolteacher and the only wage earner in the family. By 1911, they had been joined by a boarder, Reuben Charles Salmon, whose rent would have been a welcome supplement to the household income.

The power of love

So, what brought Reuben to Newcastle? He had been born in Bethnal Green, Middlesex in 1881 and by the age of 20, still at home, he was an apprentice electrical engineer. Ten years later and now in Heaton, he described himself as ‘electrical engineer (electric supply)’. For an ambitious young man in Reuben’s relatively new line of work, Newcastle, was the place to be.

As early as 1860 Sir Joseph Wilson Swan had developed a primitive electric light bulb. But it took him almost twenty more years to develop the incandescent electric light bulb, which would stand the test of time. He patented it in 1878 and a year later, Mosley Street in Newcastle became the first street in the world to be lit by electricity.

Cragside, the Northumberland home of Lord Armstrong, former owner of the land on which 10 Sefton Avenue was built, was famously the first house in the world to be lit by electricity. The picture gallery was illuminated by arc lamps by 1878. And in 1887, 45 of Swan’s light bulbs were installed to light the whole house, the power generated by hydraulics, Armstrong’s own speciality. But Armstrong was interested in physics more generally and he also worked with Professor Henry Stroud, who lived at 274 Heaton Road, on research into the nature of electricity.

But it was one thing generating the power to serve one wealthy person’s home, another to produce enough to cost-effectively service heavy industry. But once again this area was at the forefront of developments. In 1901 Neptune Bank Power Station was built at nearby Wallsend by the Newcastleu pon Tyne Electric Supply Company. Servicing shipyards and other local industry, it was the first in the world to provide electricity for purposes other than domestic and street lighting. It was also the first in the world to generate electricity using three-phase electrical power distribution at a voltage of 5,500 volts. In 1902, two 1,500-kW Parsons steam turbine driven turbo-alternators, developed and made in Heaton, were added. They were the largest three-phase steam turbine driven alternators in the world, as well as the first of a revolutionary barrel type, rotary design. But they weren’t enough.

In 1904 Carville Power Station was built, again using Parsons’ steam turbine alternators from Heaton. The first electricity produced by the station was provided to the NER for the very early electrification of the railway line that passed through Heaton. Carville was extended in 1907 and, in 1916, with demand for electricity soaring because of the war, a second power station, Carville B, was built. This was the largest power station in the UK at the time and was considered to be the ‘first major generating station in the world’, as well as the largest and most economical in the UK. The power supply industry may have been what brought Reuben north. It was certainly where he made his living. However, he found more than work in Newcastle: in 1913, Reuben Charles Salmon married Fanny Baker, his landlady. They lived on Sefton Avenue for eight more years, before moving to Bristol.

Self-made

In October 1921, the house changed hands for the first time. It was bought by Henry Lowery, aged 35, variously described as a ‘ship breaker’ and an ‘iron and steel merchant’, whose business was based in Gateshead. Born in Newcastle on 16 June 1886, Henry had grown up locally – in Byker. Aged 4, he was living with his widowed mother, Mary Ann, described as a ‘hawker’, and three elder siblings. Aged 14, Henry was described as a painter. In 1911, he was married and still living in Byker but now working as a clerk in an iron and steel merchants.

His wife, like his mother, was called Mary Ann (nee Wilde). And they had daughter called? You guessed it: Mary Ann! Ten years later, now with his own business, he had done well enough for himself to buy a very nice house in Heaton, initially with the help of two sisters from Berwick, Isabella and Barbara Forbes Atchison, his relationship to whom we don’t yet know.

Henry repaid the sisters a year later and lived at 10 Sefton Avenue for 28 years before retiring to Gateshead. When he died, aged 73, he left over £17,000 in his will, very much a self-made man.

Wanderer

The next owner, George Arrowsmith Barnet, had been born on 8 April 1911 in Bishop Auckland. He married Moira H Ashley in Lambeth, London in 1935 and by 1939 the couple and their three children were living in Portsmouth, where George was a cafe manager. Soon afterwards, however, they returned to Bishop Auckland before, in 1949, buying 10 Sefton Avenue from Henry Lowery. George was now described as a ‘catering manager’. But the Barnet’s didn’t stay in Heaton long. Post-war austerity and rationing won’t have made his job easy and Canada was eager to attract new workers: George and his wife, like another half a million Britons in the thirty years following WW2, made the brave decision to emigrate. After giving Moira Power of Attorney so that she could manage his affairs, including the sale of 10 Sefton Avenue, on 13 May 1953 George sailed from Liverpool to Quebec on SS Franconia. Four months later, Moira and their four children followed him. George Arrowsmith Barnet died aged 77 in White Rock, British Columbia, thirty six years after leaving Heaton.

Hoarder

The person who Moira Barnet sold the house to was Robert Edward Topping. He and his wife Greta (nee Gerner) moved the short distance from 10 Roxburgh Place to 10 Sefton Avenue in August 1953. And for the first time we have more than archival records to help us tell their story.

But first we need to jump ahead around sixty four years. Thinking of expanding his living accommodation, current owner Jules Brown, ventured up a ladder to survey the available roof space. To his amazement, as he arced his torch in the darkness, objects began to emerge from the shadows: some boxes but also individual items, large and small: once-treasured books, many of which were inscribed: some birthday gifts to a young Robert from his father and others presented to Greta for excellent attendance at Sunday School; photographs and personal letters; journals; home made tools, furniture and electric lamps; a canvas rucksack; toys and games, again some home-made; part of a lantern slide projector with slides and a couple of cine films; even a bike. Many of the items seemed insignificant, but clearly all had had meaning enough to become keepsakes for someone. All now black with the dust and soot of more than half a century.

Jules Brown examining the contents of his loft

Luckily for us, Jules works for Historic England and North of England Civic Trust as a conservation manager. Naturally, he was intrigued by the finds and what they might tell him about his home and those who had lived there before him. He invited Heaton History Group to help sift through the items and decide what had a historic value and who might appreciate it. He wondered whether it was fanciful to think descendants of the hoard’s owners might be traced.

It soon became apparent that most of the objects in the loft had belonged to a Robert Topping and his wife, Greta. Some items were fit only for the tip. Time hadn’t treated them kindly. But there was a small pile relating to C A Parsons, journals, engineering text books, pencils, a slide rule. They were gladly accepted by Siemens’ Heaton Works historian, Ruth Baldasera. The North East Land Sea & Air Museum said they’d love the old BSA (Birmingham Small Arms) military bike.

Reunited

Another group of items related to Heaton Presbyterian Church – Robert and Greta’s religious conviction was clear: there were books about the church, tales from the New Testament, a prayer book but also sermons, hand-written in pencil. We remembered that the daughters of Olive Renwick, of whom we have written before, were parishioners. Would the church like the items and did they happen to know of a Robert Topping? Of course they did. Robert was only their uncle!

He was Olive’s brother and the son of Isabella and Frank Topping, the railway signalman who featured in another article we’ve published.

Olive, Robert and Sybil Topping with their mother Isabella c1925

And so, over a cup of tea a few nights later, Robert’s nieces, Margaret and Julia, put flesh on the bones of what we’d already pieced together about ‘Uncle Rob and Auntie Greta’ and were reunited with photos, letters, cine films and other personal effects.

Julia & Margaret, Robert Topping’s nieces with Arthur Andrews & Chris Jackson of HHG

Robert was born on 5 March 1922. He worked as an engineer at Parsons for many years but he’d also served in the Royal Navy during and after the second world war. Jules’ next door neighbour, who had known Robert as an elderly man, believed he had been a submariner. Robert had told Margaret and Julia that too. But his nieces also recalled that he had a vivid imagination and told many fantastic stories, many of which they suspected to be made up to entertain and impress them.

Amongst the documents in the attic were letters that showed Robert had been at a naval base in Virginia in the USA, a postcard addressed to him as an Engine Room Artificer (a fitter, turner or boilermaker) on HMS Queen Elizabeth and a telegram addressed to him aboard HMS Hargood at Rosyth naval dockyard, suggesting he served on ships in the Royal Navy rather than submarines.

Robert Topping in the Royal Navy

But there was also a ship’s diary, hand-written in Spanish, in which the author recounted watching the German Graf Zeppelin in the sky above Reykjavik in 1931, on its way to carry out research into the Arctic. Robert would have been nine years old. ‘Perhaps some of those fantastic stories of a life of adventure were true!’, joked Margaret. Julia remembered with affection her uncle’s sense of humour: ‘He was the only one who could make Aunt Sybil laugh!’ As we looked at family photos around Jules’ kitchen table, we could feel his jovial, larger than life presence in the room.

Robert Topping in later years

Some of Robert and Greta’s belongings have now been returned to the family and others donated to specialists who would appreciate them but Jules has kept a few items ‘for the house’. He will restore the home made bird box and put it in the garden. And five books by Ramsay Guthrie will be cleaned up and returned to the now converted loft.

Ramsay Guthrie was the alias of John George Bowran (1869-1946), a Primitive Methodist Minister from Gateshead, who wrote many novels set on Tyneside. They feature miners, ship builders and other working class characters and were concerned with morality and redemption. They were written around the time the house was built and, like the lives of the house’s former inhabitants, help to tell its story.

Post-script

Robert Edward Topping died in 2002, while still living at 10 Sefton Avenue. The house was then home to first the Kemptons and later the Kemps from whom Jules Brown bought it. Their life stories will add another layer to the fascinating history of 10 Sefton Avenue in due course.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Jules for sharing his finds with us and to Julia and Margaret for supplying photographs of their uncle and adding to what the ‘Sefton Hoard’ had told us about him.

Researched and written by Chris Jackson and Arthur Andrews.

Can you help?

If you can add to the story of 10 Sefton Avenue and those who have lived there – or you would like us to look into the history of YOUR house, either leave a reply on this website by clicking on the link immediately below the article title or email chris.jackson@heatonhistorygroup.org

The signalman and his daughter

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Little did we think, when we published ‘Dead Man’s Handle’, the story of a railway accident that took place almost ninety years ago, that we’d be put in touch with someone who clearly remembered that night – and so much more besides. Olive Renwick was born in September 1916, so she is now approaching her 99th birthday – and she has lived in Heaton all her life.

Olive as a young child

The signalman

Olive is the daughter of Isabella and Francis Walter (Frank) Topping. Frank was the signalman who, on 8 August 1926, saw a passenger train coming towards his box at full speed seconds before it crashed into a goods train near Manors Station. Olive was nine years old at the time and reminded us that nobody had phones back then and so when her father didn’t return from work, the family could only sit and wait. ‘My mother didn’t send my sister and me to bed’ she remembered ‘I think she was worried and wanted company’.

The train hit the box in which her father worked, damaging one of its supporting ‘legs‘ but luckily Frank Topping escaped unscathed. He alerted the emergency services and helped rescue passengers before eventually arriving home to his anxious family. ‘But he thought he was a goner’ said Olive. You can read the full story here: Dead Man’s Handle

Olive told us more about her father: he was Heaton born and bred, growing up on Simonside Terrace.

North View School, 1890s?

On this school photo, he is second from the left on the back row. ‘I think it might be North View School but I’m not sure’. (Does anybody know?) Frank had started his career on the railways in 1900, aged 16, as a learner signal lad. ‘I was always very proud of him. He was trusted with one of the biggest signal boxes, with four lines to look after.’

But he didn’t remain a signalman. Frank became branch secretary of Newcastle Number 2 NUR branch, senior trustee for the Passenger Signalmen’s Provident Society and was, for almost 20 years from 1931, Secretary of the NER Cottage Homes and Benefit Fund. Locally, in 1911 he was ordained an Elder of Heaton Presbyterian Church, then a session clerk from 1946 until shortly before he died. In WW2, he served in the Home Guard.

Frank Topping, Home Guard, 1942

Olive showed us photographs and newspaper cuttings relating to her father including an account, with photographs, of him opening railway cottages in Hartlepool on a street named after him.

Frank Topping officially opening railway cottage in Topping Close, Hartlepool

Frank Topping officially opening a railway cottage in Topping Close, Hartlepool

She had also kept a tribute, published in a railway magazine after his death, in which her father was praised for:

‘ his inimitable character, his understanding and judgement, his forthright speaking, his general cheerfulness and his desire to help his fellow man’

Francis Topping died in 1957.

Olive’s childhood

It was fantastic to find out more about Frank Topping and to hear Olive’s memories of her father but we couldn’t pass up on the opportunity to hear more from someone who has lived in Heaton for almost a century. Imagine the changes she has seen.

Olive was born on Warton Terrace but spent most of her childhood on Ebor Street and then Spencer Street, ‘The railway terraces. In those days, you had to be on the railways to live there’.

Olive with her brother, Rob, outside their house in Ebor Street.

Olive (right) with her sister Sybil, Ebor St c1923

She remember the street traders, who sold all manner of things on the front street and back lanes. And, like Jack Common, a few years earlier, she recalls itinerant musicians: ‘women, they were usually women, in shawls, women who were poorer than us, who came round door to door, singing and collecting money.’

As a child, Olive was allergic to cow’s milk. She remembers that her mother walked to Meldon Terrace everyday with a jug to collect milk from a woman who kept a goat in her back yard.

One of her earliest memories was climbing on the cannons that used to stand in Heaton Park. She cut her leg badly and, because she feared her parents would be annoyed with her, dashed straight to the outside toilet in the hope of stemming the flow of blood. Naturally though she couldn’t hide the injury for long. ‘I was carried off to hospital for stitches. And my father wrote to the council to complain the cannons were dangerous’ Olive told us, ‘And soon after they were removed!’

Olive on the cannon in Heaton Park

‘And I remember my mother taking me to the Scala for a treat to see “Tarzan” but I ran up and down the aisle, shouting “Tarzan!” and had to be taken home in disgrace’. (This must have been an older version than the famous Johnny Weismuller films of the 1930s and ’40s, perhaps ‘The Adventures of Tarzan‘ (1921), the silent movie version which starred Elmo Lincoln.)

Olive attended Chillingham Road School and later Heaton High:

Olive (middle) & friends in Heaton High uniform, late 1920s

The original buildings of what became Heaton Manor School

‘I was in my first year when the King and Queen came to officially open the school.

King and Queen open Heaton Secondary Schools, 1928

We were all gathered in the hall and Miss Cooper, the head teacher, told us that the queen would be presented with a “bookie”. What on earth’s a bookie, I wondered. Only later did I realise she meant a bouquet!’

And she remembers, without much fondness, the many rail journeys of her childhood. ‘With my father’s job, the whole family enjoyed subsidised travel.. I say “enjoyed” but I hated it. We went all over, to places like Edinburgh, but trains made me sick: it was the smell. So I wasn’t allowed to sit in the carriage. I was banished to the guard’s van – with a bucket. I can still smell that smell now – and it still makes me feel sick!’

Coincidence

It was as we were leaving that Olive mentioned, in passing, her maternal grandparents: that they were called Wood, came originally from Ayton in Berwickshire, lived in Seventh Avenue and that her mother’s uncle Bob (Walker) grew potatoes on a field near Red Hall Drive. Could they be the same Woods that we’d researched and written about as part of our ‘Heaton Avenues in Wartime’ project. Surely they must? And indeed they were.

Isabella and David Wood

On a return visit, Olive told us more about her grandparents, David and Isabella Wood. She confirmed that they had an allotment on railway land. She told us about visits to her great aunts in Ayton and she recounted family stories about a visit to her Uncle Robert in hospital, where he was to die from wounds received on the battlefield. Best of all, she was able to show us photographs of both grandparents, more of which we will add to the article ‘The Woods of Seventh Avenue’.

It’s been a pleasure to meet Olive, pictured here with daughters, Julia and Margaret, in 1953:

Olive with daughters, Julia and Margaret in 1953

And here in 2015:

Margaret, Olive and Julia, 2015

We hope that we’ll meet again soon and that she’ll be able to add even more to our knowledge of Heaton’s history.

Can you help?

If you have knowledge, memories or photographs of Heaton you’d like to share, we’d love to hear from you. Either contact us via the website by clicking on the link immediately below the title of this article or email chris.Jackson@heatonhistorygroup.org