Newcastle Stuff

A pet shop owner who once occupied these premises in Newcastle sent half a million cats to the Western Front in France during World War I.

A large crowd gathered outside the shop on Clayton Street on the morning of April 28th 1904 and watched in astonishment as a troupe of fifteen monkeys scaled the outside wall and ran around on the roof of the Grainger Market. The creatures had escaped from Harris’s Trading Menagerie, and were recaptured by Charles Harris and his assistants with some difficulty.

Charles Harris opened the shop in 1897, selling African Grey Parrots and an assortment of other birds, beasts and reptiles. You could buy a mongoose for thirty shillings, which Charles claimed was ideal for clearing out rats from your home, and he recommended his chameleons for eating grubs off plants in greenhouses. The stock was soon enlarged to include wolves, leopards and hyenas, although it’s not clear what purpose these would serve around one’s home.

In 1902 Charles opened a Lion Department on the top floor, with the arrival of a breeding pair from France. None of his employees dared enter their cage for a week, during which time the animals had become very ferocious and no doubt extremely hungry. Charles went in to feed them and had his back torn open by the male lion and his nose was almost ripped off by the female.

The shop was a hugely popular attraction in Newcastle, with people queuing to see curiosities such as a two-headed cow and the largest dancing bear in the north. Charles Harris was regarded as an expert on wild animals and helped establish a zoo and pleasure gardens at Shotley Bridge. He also helped a lion tamer called the Great Marcus Orinzo to retrieve one of his beasts that had escaped down a drain in Birmingham and was roaming the sewers.

Charles moved to London and opened a shop on Bethnal Green Road, and during the First World War he was given a contract to supply the government with half a million cats. He placed adverts in local and national newspapers saying “Common cats wanted – any number”, and the RSPCA also provided him with the 30,000 stray cats they destroyed annually. War Department trucks arrived at his shop and took the moggies to the Western Front over a period of two years.

The cats were effective in ridding the trenches of rats, but this wasn’t their real purpose. When they weren’t engaged in claw-to-claw combat with their furry foes, their acute sense of smell meant they were useful for detecting gas attacks. They began to whine and their hair stood up on their backs long before the deadly clouds engulfed the soldiers in the trenches, and it’s also said they gave the same reaction to German airships approaching the British lines.

The old photo of Silver Street was taken by Edwin Dodds in 1884 and gives us a rare glimpse of a nineteenth century public netty, which is the whitewashed structure in the centre, next to the wall of All Saints graveyard. The other photo shows the same view today.

‘Netty’ is a Geordie dialect word that originally referred to a toilet outside a home in a brick or wooden enclosure. Residents of Silver Street mostly lived in tenements and lodging houses so they didn’t have this luxury, and had to use a public netty. The one in the photograph was shared by around a thousand people, it was in constant demand and not a place you could relax for half an hour with a book.

It was built by Newcastle Corporation and consisted of a plank of wood with a couple of bum-sized holes and had a wooden screen between the users for privacy. Their doings dropped into a pit containing ash and cinders which were taken away on carts by scavengers who had contracts with the Corporation, and sold for fertiliser or used in local industries.

The worst time to pay a visit was first thing in the morning when the pit was filled to the brim with excrement, as chamber pots were emptied into it by people who didn’t fancy a trip there during the night. Many simply poured their pots out of windows onto the path below, rather than venture anywhere near the netty. The stench on Silver Street at that time of the day was so powerful it drew complaints from people living quarter of a mile away on Grey Street.

Geordies are more sophisticated these days and most of their homes have an indoor toilet, which they still refer to as “the netty”. There are many fanciful theories about the origins of the word: some imagine it’s from the Italian ‘gabinetti’, meaning ‘water closets’; while others claim it’s French or was brought here by the Romans. The truth is less exotic and can be found in dialect dictionaries from the nineteenth century.

These tell us that people in Yorkshire, Cumberland and County Durham used the word ‘nessy’ back then, which is short for ‘necessary house’, a place where life’s necessities were conducted. There are records of necessary houses in Newcastle, but Geordies arrived at the word ‘netty’ from a slightly different angle.

According to the 1829 edition of John Trotter Brockett’s dialect dictionary North Country Words, ‘netty’ and ‘neddy’ were used in this region, both with the same meaning. ‘Neddy’ was the local term for a ‘needy’, which Brockett says was “a place of need or necessity”. The letters ‘d’ and ‘t’ were often interchangeable in the north east of England, and ‘netty’ replaced ‘neddy’ a long time ago.

The Silver Street public netty was one of the most disgusting places in Newcastle. You’d have to be in very desperate need, to do your necessaries there.

This photo of a group of children in Newcastle has baffled people for years. The location is easy enough to identify, they were on Neville Street near the George Stephenson Monument and you can see the Church of St John the Baptist on Westgate Road in the background. But nobody knows what the bairns were gazing at, so it’s time this mystery was finally solved.

The engraving below the photo appeared in the Illustrated London News on February 12th 1898, with no information except that it was by the Newcastle artist Ralph Hedley. The location is also easy enough to identify, it's the same scene as the photo but from a different angle, with the Express Hotel now in the background. It shows the bairns were watching a Punch and Judy show.

The show was likely provided by Mawson, Swan and Morgan who sold stationery and fine art, but also boasted the largest roster of entertainers outside of London. Their shop at that time was a couple of hundred yards away on Grainger Street West. They employed a Punch and Judy man called Professor Huli who was accompanied by a performing dog called Toby; there's a smartly dressed dog in the engraving, perched on the booth with that name on his coat.

The company's Punch and Judy shows were usually watched by better-off children whose parents could afford to hire them for birthday parties, but during the Festive Season they entertained the town's waifs and strays free of charge. These poor bairns were given Christmas presents too, a small toy for the girls and an orange for the boys.

Mawson, Swan and Morgan advertised their entertainers as being "refined" and free from vulgarity. The urchins in the photo would have been disappointed if this were true, they seem to be enjoying Punch and Judy screeching insults and braying the living daylights out of each other.

Currently located next to the Castle Keep, the Lowping-on Stone stood outside the Golden Lion in the Bigg Market for several centuries and is circled in red on the old photo. It has been carved into a set of steps which people climbed before leaping - or 'lowping', in the Geordie parlance - onto a horse.

The Golden Lion and its next-door neighbour the Unicorn were a pair of Elizabethan inns on the west side of the Bigg Market, a few doors up from Pudding Chare. They supplied beer and a bed for the night to the farmers who travelled on horseback from Northumberland and Durham to attend the many markets in Newcastle.

The Lowping-on Stone is clearly ancient but the word ‘lowp’ is much older still, coming from the Old Norse 'hloup', meaning ‘leap’. The initial ‘h’ disappeared over time and old maps of Newcastle show Dog Leap Stairs as Dog Loup Stairs, a term referring to a strip of land that was so narrow a dog could loup across it. The word is still commonly used by Geordies with the modern spelling ‘lowp’, as is the variation 'lop', which means a leaping flea.

The old photo was taken in 1880, two years before both inns were bought and demolished by the shotgun manufacturer William Rochester Pape and replaced with a showroom and warehouse for his business. Pape’s weapons are still highly prized but he’s more famous for organising what was reputedly the world’s first Dog Show at the nearby Town Hall in 1859.

He donated the Lowping-on Stone to the Society of Antiquaries, who placed it next to the Castle Keep.

The old photo was taken in the Spring of 1892 by Edgar G Lee at the west end of Neville Street, with the Central Station in the background. It shows four women selling oranges, which were the fast food of the day and popular with passengers on the trains. They were so popular that Newcastle’s first litter laws were introduced after a spate of accidents caused by people slipping on discarded skins.

The intriguing thing about the photo is the name ‘Thomas Bolton’ scrawled in chalk on the wall to the right of the women. If you zoom into the photo you can see the name copied below in sloppier handwriting, as though someone was being taught how to write it. We can never know for certain who this graffiti artist was, but the 1891 Census provides a suspect.

The surname wasn’t common in Newcastle at the time but there was a Thomas Bolton living half a mile away near Westgate Road, who would have been ten years old when the photo was taken. He had older brothers and sisters, one of whom may have been helping him spell his name. His father was a bootmaker, also called Thomas, and subsequent Census returns show that young Tommy followed in his shoes, so to speak, and became a bootmaker too.

There are several photos from around town during this period with words chalked on buildings in childlike writing. Literacy rates were unusually high among children in Newcastle towards the end of the nineteenth century, but access to pens and paper would have been limited in the homes of poorer families.

A stick of chalk and a stone wall would have provided a good substitute for bairns wanting to practise their skills.

Newcastle’s First Fish & Chip Shop: The building on the right of the old photo can claim this title, although strictly speaking it was a fish and roast potato shop when it opened. Chips hadn’t been invented and were added to its menu a few years afterwards.

People in Newcastle ate a lot of fish because the town is handy for the coast, but it had a very short shelf-life before fridges became commonplace. Fishmongers discovered they could add an extra couple of days by frying the fish before it went off. This made it ready to eat, so fried fish became a popular takeaway snack in Newcastle around the middle of the nineteenth century.

John Caiger was a fishmonger from London where fish had already been paired with potatoes to turn the snack into a meal. John and his wife Ellen brought this innovation to Newcastle in 1867, opening a shop on Westgate Road. The Black Bull – nowadays known as The Bodega – was immediately to his right, and the newly opened Tyne Theatre was a couple of doors to the left; both providing plenty of passing trade.

His takeaway became a local institution and the Tyne Theatre had a pantomime song about it:

There is a shop, a canny little shop,
Next door to the Tyne Theatre,
They sell fried fish, pickles in a dish,
And a ha’penny roast potato.

Caiger was popular with his customers and used to serenade them in his shop, he claimed to have sung professionally in London before moving north. He was less popular with the authorities, who fined him five pounds in 1868 for keeping a refreshment house without a licence. He must have got his paperwork in order because he continued to trade there for another decade or so until his death in 1880 at the age of seventy.

The sign on the front of the shop in the photo says ‘AC Thornton’. This refers to Albert Thornton who had been frying fish and chips at his takeaway around the corner in Caxton House on Cross Street before moving into Caiger’s premises in 1891.

Late night takeaways are often hotspots for violence and this was also the case in the nineteenth century. Albert had his fair share of bother in his Cross Street shop, including an incident where a police officer was struck on the head with a bottle by one of his customers at 11.20pm on a Saturday night.

Andrew McGiveny was taken into custody where he told the desk sergeant he wished he’d smashed the copper’s skull in. Nevertheless, it was claimed that the wrong man had been arrested and several of his mates backed this up so the case was dismissed in court.

The three old cottages in the top photo were demolished in March of 1893 and replaced by the building in the bottom photo.

On This Day In Newcastle: An advert appeared in the Newcastle Courant on September 14th 1782 offering the Castle Keep to be let, with the suggestion it could be converted into a windmill or a brewery.

The Castle Keep was a wreck in the eighteenth century. It was described in 1739 as being roofless and all the floors had fallen in except the ground floor, which formed the ceiling of a jail in the basement. The building was technically in Northumberland and prisoners from that county were kept in the jail awaiting trial or ex*****on, in conditions so squalid that people paid money to gawp at them.

By the time the advert appeared in 1782 the Castle’s chapel was being used as a beer cellar by the nearby Three Bulls Heads, and other parts of the building housed a cabbage garden and an ice house.

The advert didn’t attract any interest and the Keep was bought by Newcastle Corporation 1809 for £600. They added a roof to the building with battlements in the Gothic Revival style of architecture that was fashionable at the time, destroying its historical integrity because it had never had battlements in the past.

The people of Newcastle were concerned by a railway company’s plan to build a line through the Castle Garth, so the Corporation leased the Keep to the Society of Antiquaries to save it from destruction. The Society employed John Dobson in 1848 to spruce it up so that it could be opened to the public; they are still one of its custodians today.

The engraving is from a painting by Luke Clennell, it shows the Castle Keep being restored in 1812. The newspaper cutting is from the Newcastle Courant.

The Home for Destitute Boys was located on Pandon Bank, a little north of City Road, providing a refuge for urchins from the streets of Newcastle. It was a charitable institution, similar in nature to the Home for Friendless Girls on Percy Street.

The building was originally known as Pandon House and was built in the 1820s for the sailmaker William Proctor, it was occupied by him and his business until 1844 when he moved to Sandhill. It then became the home of George Tallentire Gibson, who was only bettered by Richard Grainger when it came to redeveloping Newcastle.

He rebuilt the west end of the Quayside with John Dobson following the Great Fire of 1854 and created St Nicholas Street after the High Level Bridge opened. He also developed the area around Pandon House which he named Gibson Town, and died in the house in 1865 after being stabbed by a business associate.

Pandon House then became the Home for Destitute Boys, owing its existence to the Newcastle Shoeshine Brigade. The Brigade was established in 1857 and aimed to rescue boys found begging or destitute on the streets and offer them a home and employment, shining people's shoes.

The home could accommodate around fifty boys, who were clothed and fed by charitable contributions from the public. The interior was wrecked in 1919 by a gang of youths armed with axes and hammers who were looking for fuel for a bonfire, and the inmates were removed to newer premises on Westmoreland Road in 1921. The building became a club house and was finished off when a fire was started by burglars in 1926.

The new building at the bottom of Pilgrim Street isn’t Earl Grey’s cup of tea.

On This Day In Newcastle: The former World Heavyweight Boxing Champion Joe Louis arrived in Newcastle to appear in cabaret at La Dolce Vita nightclub.

The club was making a fortune from its casino and could afford world class entertainment for its punters, bringing some of the biggest names in showbiz to Newcastle. He arrived here on September 1st 1965 in a private jet owned by the nightclub for his only cabaret shows in the UK that year.

“I dance a little and I sing a little”, he told The Journal, “and I answer questions about myself.” The owners of the Dolcey wouldn’t reveal the fee but said he had asked for a lot of money. “Who would argue with Joe Louis”, one of them said.

Joe had decided to try his hand at cabaret when he was in Las Vegas a few months previously watching Sonny Liston train for a world heavyweight championship fight. “I had a few rough fights”, he said, “there’s little difference between the ring and the stage.”

He was here for a week before flying back to America, playing the drums at the club as part of his show.

On This Day In Newcastle: A Siamese elephant called Mademoiselle D'Jeck arrived in this town after walking from Edinburgh, having deliberately killed a man on the way.

A huge crowd gathered at Barras Bridge when she entered Newcastle at noon on August 25th, 1830 and the streets were lined with admirers as she proceeded to the old Theatre Royal on Mosley Street, where she was to star in a play called ‘The Fire Fiend’ for a week. The entrance to the theatre had been enlarged to accommodate her and the stage reinforced to take her weight.

Mademoiselle D'Jeck was supposed to have been shipped from Edinburgh but high seas prevented her being put on the vessel so she set off on foot with her attendants, one of whom was an Italian called Baptiste Bernard. She and Bernard had an uneasy relationship, he’d stabbed her in the trunk with a pitchfork when he was drunk three years previously.

She bided her time until taking revenge when the two were alone in a coach house at the Phoenix Inn at Morpeth, where she grabbed him around the waist with her trunk and crushed him so hard that several of his ribs were broken and he vomited blood. He died of his injuries two days later.

An inquest at the Phoenix Inn recorded a verdict of accidental death and Mademoiselle D'Jeck was fined five shillings for her part in it. Her infamy attracted large audiences to the Theatre Royal and after her appearances there she was shipped to London for shows at the Adelphi Theatre and then toured America and Europe.

Life on the road took its toll on Mademoiselle D'Jeck and her behaviour deteriorated. She killed another man in France and in 1837 she broke a priest’s ribs in Geneva, for which she was put on trial and sentenced to death. Attempts to kill her with pistols failed, so she was lured in front of a cannon.

According to a contemporary account, “there was a great tongue of flame and a cloud of smoke, and through the smoke something as big as a house was seen to go down – the very earth trembling at the shock.” Those present then feasted on her meat.

On This Day In Newcastle: Doric House opened for business on August 24th 1922, it sat on a toilet on St Nicholas Street for almost half a century.

It was built for the Robert Sinclair To***co Company on the roof of a public convenience and named after a brand of baccy called Ogden’s Doric Mixture. They also sold Ogden’s Tabs, which Geordies loved so much that they still refer to ci******es today as ‘tabs’.

The building was never meant to be permanent, Sinclair obtained a ten-year lease for the site and it was an experiment in the use of terrazzo. This process involved mixing chips of marble with cement which was polished to achieve an opulent look on the cheap. It was commonly used in the interiors of Art Deco buildings, but this was the first time it had formed the main structure of one.

The architect was Robert MacKellar, he’d designed many of Newcastle’s iconic buildings including the Pilgrim Street Police Station and what’s now the Vermont Hotel, but this was his favourite. “It’s the only thing I’ve built on top of a netty”, he said.

Its last occupant was ‘Syd The Watch’. A professional trombone player by night, Sydney Allsop spent his days mending watches in the shop which he rented from the council. The building by then was in very poor condition, and the stench from its downstairs neighbour made it an unpleasant place to visit.

The photo above shows it being demolished in June 1966.

My photo of Morrisons in Byker came out better than expected.

On This Day In Newcastle: Patrick Rogers was pushed down a toilet on the Quayside and drowned in the River Tyne.

Patrick was known by the nickname ‘Needle Jack’ because of his occupation selling sewing needles on the streets of the town. He’d been drinking on the afternoon of August 18th 1862 at the Bridge End pub (pictured above) on the Sandhill end of the Georgian Tyne Bridge, when nature called and he paid a visit to a public toilet next to the building.

This convenience was known locally as the High Crane netty, it consisted of a plank of wood with six bum-size holes cut in it and was designed so that excrement dropped several feet onto a slope and slid down to the river where it was carried away by the tide. This was to be Patrick’s fate too that day.

He was often teased by locals because he’d spent time in prison, and two of them – John Dixon and Thomas Miller - followed him into the netty where they set fire to his hair for a lark while he sat on the toilet. A witness heading towards the netty heard their laughter and then there was the sound of a splash and both men came running out, having pushed him down the toilet.

Another witness was crossing the bridge when he saw Patrick in the river, who raised an arm to draw attention to himself and then sank without trace. His body was hauled out of the river with grappling irons a couple of days later, half a mile downstream near the mouth of the Ouseburn.

The two culprits were quickly apprehended in Gateshead, Dixon was lying on the floor at his home pretending to be drunk when the police arrived. The pair appeared at the Assizes four months later where they were found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to ten years each in prison.

On This Day In Newcastle: A workman fell from the High Level Bridge, but his trousers saved him from almost certain death.

John Smith was helping put the finishing touches to the new bridge on the morning of July 28th 1849. He was working on the railway deck in wet weather when he stepped on a loose plank and was propelled over the side.

He would have fallen 120 feet into the river but one of his trouser legs caught on a large nail sticking out from the bridge. He dangled there by his leg for some time, swinging perilously in the wind, before he was noticed by his workmates who threw a rope over the side and hauled him up.

The lucky escape made him a hero in the national press, he was interviewed shortly after his adventure and asked if he’d kept the nail as a souvenir. “Nay”, he replied, “it was the hand of God that held me up”.

The tailors Joseph & Co on Grey Street had other ideas and quickly published an advert in The Journal, claiming it was the excellent quality of the trousers they’d sold him that had saved his life. This was rubbished by Smith, who replied with a letter to the newspaper setting the record straight: “I beg to state that I bought the trousers from Messrs Spence & Son, No. 1, Sandhill.”

The photo of the High Level Bridge is from 1865 and was taken from the Gateshead side of the river. The Georgian Tyne Bridge is in the background, it was later replaced by the Swing Bridge.

Old Newcastle Customs: For many years it was customary for bevvied-up Geordies to put traffic cones on the George Stephenson Monument every Friday and Saturday night. Nobody knows why.

Photo from Newcastle Stuff magazine, 2004.

On This Day In Newcastle: Suffragettes attempted to blow up the Post Office at Barras Bridge in the early hours of June 10th, 1913.

A couple of policemen heard an explosion and hurried to the scene next to the grounds of St Thomas’ Church. The cops noticed a strong smell of gunpowder and found the remains of a fuse on top of a pile of bricks. The attack was unsuccessful, the Post Office was having an extension built and the bomb merely scattered some of the building materials and scorched the stonework.

The Suffragettes did a more thorough job on Kenton Station three months later, which they burned to the ground. A note was attached to a nearby lamppost saying the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, was to blame for their actions.

The Barras Bridge building was a toll house on the Great North Road until the appropriately named Thomas Stamp converted it into a Post Office in 1834. But it became an unpopular building in later years, many felt it spoiled the view of St Thomas’ Church from the northern approach to the town, and Newcastle Corporation wanted rid of it.

The lease ran out in November of 1934 and the Post Office closed down, which was good news for the Corporation, but it was the actions of some women on its final day that caught the attention of the local press. Three friends made a bet on which of them could be the Post Office’s last ever customer, and refused to leave when closing time arrived at 8pm. Miss J Rollin, from nearby Eldon Place, outstayed the other two.

The building was demolished in January 1935 and the Post Office business transferred to St Mary’s Place.

There’s a strict dress code at Bar 22 on Shields Road in Byker according to this sign on the door.

On This Day In Newcastle: A professional ghost called George Cairns was convicted of theft on April 5th 1881, having stolen a pair of tights and a magic wand from a ghost shop on The Side where he was employed.

People were fascinated by the supernatural and the paranormal at the time, and ghost shops used clever illusions to conjure up apparitions and terrify paying customers. George worked in the shop for two months and his employer, John Franklin Reed, told the magistrates that he’d been a very useful ghost.

But he’d quit the job and the theft came to light when the replacement ghost couldn’t find the tights and wand. The magistrates took into account his previous good character, and noting Mr Reed’s wish for them not to be too hard on his ghost, they fined spooky George ten shillings.

The photo shows The Side in 1881.

I got a history lesson on the Metro this afternoon. When we stopped at Wallsend a lass in the seat opposite me asked her boyfriend why there were foreign words on the station.

“It’s Latin”, he explained, “it’s to dee wi' the Romans”. She looked puzzled by this. “What’s the Romans got to dee wi’ Waallsend like?”

“They built a greet waall that ended at Waallsend”, he told her, but she wasn’t having any of this. “Divint be daft man. Everyone knaas the greet waall’s in China.”

This isn’t a joke, it was a genuine conversation.

On This Day In Newcastle: The Flying Man came to Newcastle on December 7th 1733 and he launched a donkey from the roof of the Castle Keep, a stunt that killed a young girl.

A large crowd had assembled in the Castle Garth when he announced he was going to fly from the top of the Keep, but they were disappointed when he simply abseiled down the building. The crowd grew restless so The Flying Man decided to up his game and took a donkey onto the roof.

The donkey was lowered on a rope with several heavy weights attached to its legs to speed up its descent, but The Flying Man lost control of the beast. It reached the ground safely but one of the weights struck a young girl on the head, killing her instantly and causing injuries to several other spectators.

They got little sympathy from the Newcastle Courant, who said the death and injuries were the result of the carelessness of people not getting out of the way, despite ample warnings from The Flying Man.

His true identity is unknown, several people were performing similar daredevil feats at that time and styling themselves “flying men”. Thomas Pelling can be ruled out, he was killed at Pocklington in Yorkshire in April of 1733. He descended from a church tower with a pair of homemade wings, reaching the ground a lot more quickly than he’d intended.

Newcastle’s Flying Man was probably Robert Cadman, who “flew” from the top of Edinburgh Castle the same year with the help of a rope. He performed similar stunts around the country from 1732 until February ¬¬9th 1739, when the rope snapped during a descent from the steeple of a church in Shrewsbury and he plunged to his death in front of thousands of people.
He was buried at the church where he fell and there’s a commemorative plaque with a ten-line epitaph, to which someone added these words:

“Good-night, good-night, poor Robert Cadman.
You lived and died just like a madman”.

On This Day In Newcastle: William Glover killed himself on December 6th 1852 in a bizarre accident caused by a trap he’d set for burglars. He connected the trigger of a gun to his front door handle with a long pole, so it would kill any thief who entered his home. He nipped out for some milk and forgot all about it, shooting himself in the heart.

Glover was a joiner who lived on the top floor of a tenement building in Northumberland Court behind Blackett Street, he’d been burgled several times so he decided to knock up this lethal contraption. There was a complicated knack to opening the door without firing the gun, which Glover explained to his neighbours and family, in the unlikely event they’d pay him a visit.

This was the second time he’d shot himself in the same circumstances. His cousin told the inquest into Glover’s death that he’d shown him a gunshot wound on his leg, caused by a similar contraption and a bout of forgetfulness a couple of months previously. There was a lesson to be learned from his first mishap, but one he didn’t heed: Glover bought a more powerful gun and ended up dead.

Northumberland Court is long gone, it’s marked on this 1899 Goad Insurance Plan: