Historian Thom Hatch writing about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

Most people who read the title of this piece will offer a resounding “no” in response and of course you would be correct. But the mother of Robert LeRoy Parker certainly was born a Geordie.

Ann Campbell Gillies was born around 1847 into a Scottish family living in Newcastle at 25 Hill Street, close to where Newcastle United’s ground, St James Park, now stands. This street was demolished in 1937 to make way for what would become the Scottish & Newcastle brewery, which alas disappeared itself to make way for an office block and hotel. At some point, the family moved upmarket to 49 Brandling Place, Jesmond, a Georgian terraced cottage that still stands near Newcastle’s Royal Grammar School. The family lived there until Ann was 9 and then moved to 50 Dundas Street in Sunderland, now the site of a Stagecoach bus depot.

The Gillies family became members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, more commonly known as the Mormon Church, in the 1840s, when it was establishing itself in northeast England, a significant centre of early Mormon missionary activity. Ann’s father, Robert Gillies, born in 1819, joined the church in 1842 and subsequently became involved in ‘missionary’ work in northeast England, becoming in 1848 the president of the North Shields (a town I’ve written of several times) branch of the church, and later of the Easington Lane (a coal mining village in County Durham) branch.

So how come the family ended up in the USA? Well, at the time, the Mormon community encouraged church converts from Britain to travel and join the growing Mormon community in Utah, so Robert Gillies and his family, including now 12-year-old Ann, emigrated to Utah in 1859. While part of a larger movement, it was still an enormous undertaking, as Utah was then an extraordinarily remote destination compared with urban Newcastle and the increasingly industrial northeast England.

In Utah, Ann met another British immigrant in the Mormon movement, Maximilian Parker, born in 1844 in Accrington, Lancashire, to Robert Parker and Ann Ruth Hartley Parker. Like the Gillies, the Parker family became involved with the Mormon church in England and, like the Gillies, emigrated to the United States. Research indicates that Robert Parker sadly died in the USA during the journey to Utah. However, the rest of the family continued their journey and, as with the Gillies, faced the extraordinary transformation from industrial Lancashire to the frontier of Utah, where Maximilian eventually settled to become part of the developing Mormon agricultural community.

Ann Gillies, who would have been around 18 and Maximilian, aged 21, married in 1865, and their first child, Robert LeRoy Parker, was born the following year to eventually become the eldest of 13 children, 7 boys and 6 girls, with the youngest of the family born when Robert was 28 and serving time as Butch Cassidy.

One historical account states that the young Parker family initially lived at a ranch on North Creek near Beaver, where Maximilian established himself as a farmer and rancher. The Washington County Historical Society describes his occupations as stockman, farmer, rancher, mail carrier and freighter. A busy man indeed, and Maximilian’s work as a freighter and mail carrier is particularly interesting, as before modern roads and motor vehicles, communities in southern Utah depended heavily on people with the logistical ability to move mail, equipment, supplies, and livestock across huge distances. It indicates Maximilian needed to be highly competent in such organisation, and as it turned out, Robert/Butch would also put such frontier knowledge and logistical acumen to other uses.

The Parkers eventually settled in Circleville, Piute County, living in a close-knit agricultural community as committed members of the Mormon church. This is one of the striking contradictions in Robert/Butch’s biography: his parents were deeply religious, respectable, hard-working pioneers, yet he eventually became one of America’s most notorious outlaws.

We don’t know why Robert turned to crime, but it seems to have begun in his teens. Of course, the attraction to crime might well have been that oh-so-common rebellion against authority that many young people have (although most don’t take it as far as Robert), and one imagines his parents’ beliefs led to a strict home environment. It’s also unknown why he changed his surname. However, it is known he became acquainted with Mike Cassidy, an older cowboy and cattle rustler believed to have taught Robert about the illicit side of ranching; Robert may then have adopted the surname Cassidy in honour of his ‘mentor’. The origin of ‘Butch’ is also uncertain, although one theory is that it came from a period when Robert worked in a butcher’s shop.

And it has to be said there are also uncertainties over precisely which robberies Butch personally took part in during his criminal career. Still, it’s known that during the early 1880s Robert drifted between ranches in Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Montana and Nebraska, working as a cowboy, but increasingly became involved in horse theft and cattle rustling, where the vastness of the country, weak law enforcement and complicated ownership of livestock created opportunities for rustlers.

In 1894, Robert, now going by the name Butch, was accused of stealing a horse worth only $5 (around $140 today) in Wyoming. The circumstances are somewhat murky, and he maintained that cattle interests had framed him to drive him out of the area. Nevertheless, he was found guilty and sentenced to two years in the Wyoming State Penitentiary at Laramie. He served about 18 months of his sentence and was released early for good behaviour. There is a story that he promised authorities he would abandon crime and behave himself; instead, he emerged from prison at exactly the moment when the network that would become the Wild Bunch, or Hole in the Wall gang, was taking shape.

This was not a fixed gang as such, but a loose association that at various times included the likes of Harry Longabaugh (the Sundance Kid), Harvey Logan (Kid Curry), Ben Kilpatrick (the Tall Texan) and Flat-Nose George Curr, with Butch’s greatest talent being organisation and planning, with careful study of the target and planned escape route and a change of horses etc. It’s doubtful that Butch personally participated in every robbery attributed to the Wild Bunch. The belief is that he was the gang’s planner and organiser, with members sometimes carrying out robberies without Butch’s direct involvement at the scene.

The great turning point, as described by the Library of Congress, and the first major robbery attributed to Butch came in June 1889 when he and his associates Matt Warner and Tom McCarty robbed the San Miguel Valley Bank in Telluride, Colorado. Reports say the haul was approximately $20,000 (about $725,000 today), an enormous amount of money at the time.

The next Wild Bunch robbery in which it’s known that Butch participated was the Bank of Montpelier robbery in Idaho in 1896. Sources vary on the precise amount stolen, but estimates are around $7,000 (circa $250,000 today).

The next was a year later, although it may or may not have included Butch. It was the robbery of the Pleasant Valley Coal Company payroll at Castle Gate, Utah, netting the gang circa $10,000 (today, circa $360,000).

In 1899, the gang turned to robbing trains, seeing them as perfect targets because they transported enormous amounts of cash and precious metals through relatively isolated countryside. In June of that year, the Wild Bunch, again, there is no evidence that Butch was present, attacked a Union Pacific train near Wilcox, Wyoming, using dynamite to blow open the express car’s safe. The haul was approximately $50,000 (1.8m today), making the gang a national sensation. The following month, the gang robbed a train near Folsom, New Mexico, with a haul reported at approximately $70,000 (circa $2.5m today).

The following year, members of the gang, and again Butch may not have been present, attacked another Union Pacific train near Tipton, Wyoming, using dynamite to open the express safe and collecting a haul of approximately $55,000 (circa $2m today). This robbery had something of a coincidence with Wilcox's, as the employee inside the train’s safe car was the same as in that robbery.

Despite no direct evidence that Butch was present at any of the railroad robberies, the Union Pacific Railroad in 1900, according to the Library of Congress, considered offering him amnesty from prosecution and even work as a train guard.

As it turned out, the USA’s leading detective agency, Pinkerton, with its nationwide network of agents, led the way in seeking out members of the Wild Bunch and especially Kid Curry because of his willingness to use violence. Pinkerton’s agents ramped up the pressure on the gang by circulating photographs and descriptions and piecing together their movements. The Wild Bunch now faced something they had never faced before: a nationwide surveillance system. The American West was changing: the remote frontier that had allowed outlaws to disappear was disappearing itself.

It didn’t help that some members of the gang decided to have their photograph taken when dressed up to the nines.

It all started with the robbery of $32,000 in gold coins from the First National Bank in Winnemucca, Nevada, on September 19, 1900, and although there is some mystery about the robbers’ identities, all evidence points to Butch, Sundance, and Will Carver. The three then headed south, believed to be by train, to Fort Worth, some 1600 miles from Winnemucca, where they could go about unrecognised and there they were by Ben Kilpatrick and Harvey Logan. At the time, Logan had the biggest reputation, being wanted for murder, armed robbery and jailbreaks in no fewer than seven Western states or territories.

The five stayed together for a number of weeks, and then for some reason on November 21 they decided to dress up and have their portrait taken in one of the city’s professional studios. (There is no doubt about this date, as it is printed on the individual mug shots subsequently reproduced for the Pinkerton circulars.) It turned out to be an appalling lapse in judgment.

The portrait studio they picked was John Swartz’s gallery above Sheehan’s saloon, where the five, possibly well lubricated, may have thought up the photograph idea. Once in the studio, the five arranged themselves with Longabaugh, Kilpatrick and Cassidy seated in front, left to right, and Will Carver on the left and Harvey Logan standing behind them. There’s a hint of their possible lack of sobriety in Logan’s eyes, which appear unfocused, and the rakish angle of his bowler.

Soon after the photograph was taken, the five left Fort Worth, not realising that Swartz liked his portrait of the five strangers so much that he displayed a copy in a prominent place in his waiting room.

There are many stories of how that photgraph became more widely circulated but the most likely is that the first person to recognise it’s importance was Fort Worth detective Charles R. Scott, a veteran of the town’s Police Department in charge of the department’s “Rogue’s Gallery,” that held mug shots of every perpetrator arrested in town, as well as photos sent to Fort Worth by other agencies.

It was Scott’s job to take criminals to Schwartz for their mugshot sittings, and it was on such an occasion he caught sight of the Wild Bunch photo. As a veteran detective, he had seen enough wanted circulars of Harvey Logan and Will Carver to recognise them.

Taking the photo from Swartz’s waiting room, he rushed back to headquarters to check it against his files. Then, elated at recognising the men, he sadly learned they had left Fort Worth, so all he could do was get word out to other agencies who could use the information.

One of those was the nearest office of the Pinkerton Agency, in Denver, and the portrait was what one Pinkerton man, interviewed later by the San Antonio Light, called their “first real break”. Pinkerton then issued the first wanted circulars for Parker, Longabaugh, and Logan, each with a cropped mug shot and details such as height, build, complexion, and eye colour.

Meanwhile, the Wild Bunch’s last reported robbery was a train in Montana in July 1901, near Wagner, from which the gang reportedly stole circa $40,000 ($1.5m today). But there’s no evidence Butch was involved, as by this point he and Sundance were already considering leaving the United States, realising it was becoming too likely the authorities would catch them.

As for the others in the photograph, authorities in Sonora, Texas, cornered and killed Will Carver on April 2, 1901. Ben Kilpatrick was arrested in St. Louis on November 5 that year, convicted of passing stolen federal banknotes and sentenced to 15 years in the penitentiary, of which he served 10. While Harvey Logan was arrested near Jefferson City, Tennessee, in December 1901, escaped from jail in Knoxville in June 1903, and was then shot down near Parachute, Colorado, in June 1904 after robbing one more train. At the time he was, as historian Jay Robert Nash puts it, “the most hunted outlaw in America.” The downfall of all three began with the Fort Worth photo, as did Butch and Sundance’s. It’s no wonder a Pinkerton agent dubbed it the “bad-luck picture.”

Butch and Sundance, with Sundance’s partner Etta Place, sailed to Argentina on 20 February 1901 from New York aboard the RMS Herminius, bound for Buenos Aires. In the Cholila Valley of Patagonia, in what is now Argentina’s Chubut Province, they purchased, or at least became involved with, a ranch, and at least for a while they appeared to be trying to become legitimate ranchers. Butch even wrote a letter describing their new life as their “little family of 3,” and included a description of a four-room log cabin and a ranch stocked with 300 cattle, 1500 sheep, and 28 horses. Quite some ranch. But for whatever reason, the ranching didn’t last, and the supposition is that the Pinkerton agency circulated photographs and descriptions of Butch and Sundance across South America, and the Argentine authorities began to take an interest in the three Americans.

And let’s look for a moment at Etta Place, who travelled with Sundance and Butch to South America in 1901, lived alongside them, and then disappeared from the historical record. We don’t even know her real name with certainty, as Etta Place was almost certainly an alias, given that no birth certificate, marriage certificate, or other document establishes her identity beyond doubt. Her age, birthplace, family, and early life remain uncertain, although various theories suggest she was a schoolteacher, a governess, a rancher’s daughter, or a sex worker.

By 1900, Etta was known to be associated with Sundance in Texas, and some evidence suggests they may have married or at least presented themselves as married, with Sundance sometimes using the name Harry A. Place. The Library of Congress has a photograph of Etta and Sundance (some speculate it is a wedding photograph), taken in 1900 in Buffalo.

Pinkerton investigators later found evidence that while in Argentina, Etta grew homesick and wanted to see her family, although the detectives could not determine who her family was. However, it’s known that in March 1902, she and Sundance returned to the United States aboard the SS Soldier Prince, arriving in New York and then returning to Argentina together in July 1902.

The most widely accepted account of Etta leaving Sundance and Butch is that, in 1906, Etta and Sundance travelled back to San Francisco in the United States, and this is close to the last point at which we can confidently follow Etta’s life. Evidence indicates that Etta remained in San Francisco, while Sundance returned to South America to rejoin Butch.

Etta appears to be still in San Francisco in 1907, but after that she disappears; while there are theories and alleged sightings, her disappearance is so complete that one historian described her fate as one of the most intriguing riddles in Western history.

One particularly fascinating story is that in 1909, a woman matching Etta’s description apparently contacted the American consul in Antofagasta, Chile, seeking help in obtaining a death certificate for Harry Longabaugh, apparently to settle his affairs. But the woman’s identity was never conclusively established, and no definitive certificate was issued.

So let’s return to Butch and Sundance, who in turn returned to robbery in Argentina and neighbouring countries, although the evidence is considerably less certain here than even for the American robberies. One robbery ascribed to Butch and Sundance occurred at Villa Mercedes, Argentina, in December 1905; some accounts include Etta and another associate as participants, and approximately 12,000 pesos (circa $240,000 today) were taken. But the story should be treated cautiously.

The final episode of Butch’s criminal career supposedly took place in Bolivia, where he and Sundance were reportedly involved in a payroll robbery near San Vicente. Pursued by Bolivian authorities, the two men took refuge in a building, and a gun battle followed, with the conventional account of the killing of both men on 6 November 1908.

Then a great mystery emerged because there was no conclusive identification of the bodies of the two Americans killed in Bolivia. Some people then claimed Butch survived and returned to the United States under another name, and other alleged sightings followed, including some from people who said they met him decades later.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Butch is that he became an outlaw by choice rather than circumstance, given that he came from a respectable family of successful ranchers and was intelligent and capable. He was apparently well-liked, and it’s no stretch to believe he could have become a farmer, rancher, or businessman. There is a story that butch apparently used some of his Ill-gotten gains to purchase a ranch in Wyoming. So, for a while at least, he appears to have tried to establish himself as a legitimate rancher. But for whatever reason, the ranching venture did not work out, and he gradually returned to crime, or maybe he just preferred that life.

And it was a life that could provide enormous amounts of money and excitement. His extraordinary reputation ultimately rests on roughly a dozen years of increasingly sophisticated criminal activity. Yet, the legend has him responsible for far more crimes than the evidence can actually support. If you add it up, then Butch and his compatriots stole an enormous amount of money, but we must remember that newspapers frequently exaggerated the Wild Bunch’s crimes, attributing virtually every robbery in the western United States to the group and the value of those robberies. One recent assessment argues that the Wild Bunch was probably responsible for approximately four major bank robberies, four major train robberies and a coal-company payroll robbery, rather than the enormous number sometimes attributed to them. Butch and the Wild Bunch became mythological super-outlaws, partly because newspapers blamed them for crimes that they had nothing to do with.

So, what happened to Butch’s family? Well, his mother Ann predeceased Butch, who was in South America by that time, dying in 1905, aged about 57. Butch’s father, Maximilian, lived to an extraordinary age for his generation, dying at Circleville in 1938 at age 94 and living long enough to see his son transformed from a local Utah minor criminal into one of the world’s legendary outlaws.

Where we have to be careful is how Butch’s family viewed him. Plenty of stories exist about the Parker family, who remained prominent in southern Utah, but far less reliable documentation exists of Maximilian’s private feelings. However, given his beliefs, it is tempting to imagine Maximilian as a disappointed father sitting on his Utah ranch reading newspaper stories about his son’s life of crime. And after all, Maximilian spent his life helping to build the settled society of the American West while his eldest son became famous for robbing the institutions of that society. However, one interesting story, if true, concerns what happened when, after the false accusation that Robert stole a horse in Colorado as a young man, Maximilian did not simply abandon Robert but travelled to give evidence on his behalf.

Robert’s ability to succeed in the criminal world was partly the product of the frontier-life experience his father had created for him. Butch’s sister, Lula Parker Betenson, became an important source for later accounts of his life, which means much of what we know about him as the individual behind the legend comes through her.

We know from the photograph above that Butch looked nothing like Paul Newman who played him in the classic 1969 film ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’ and my feeling is that Butch would not have sounded very like him either. Born to a Scottish father and a northeast English mother, I think Butch would have had an accent shaped by both. A flight of fancy, of course, and I also wonder what might have happened to Butch if his parents hadn’t emigrated and he grew up in Newcastle, from which they moved. The contrast between the barely inhabited American West and the bustling Newcastle of the 1880s when Robert LeRoy Parker would come of age was stark. Newcastle was in its golden age of coal, railways and shipbuilding, and who knows, Robert may have become a ‘captain of industry’ in one of those areas. Culturally, the city offered the Lit & Phil, already celebrating its centenary; socially, there were two grand theatres, several music halls, football (Butch Cassidy on the terraces of St James' Park!), and plenty of pubs. As a port, it was also a multicultural city. Maybe these attractions might have kept Butch from straying into a life of crime. But if he had, and there were plenty of criminals around in the city, it would have been of a petty nature. Bank and train robberies that might net a large amount of cash were almost unheard of given the level of policing.

So, fun to speculate, and if his parents had stayed, then who knows, Robert’s skill in organisation and planning might have seen him become a leader of industry and innovation. Of course we wouldn’t then have the legend of Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid and the Wild Bunch. Or maybe we’d have the latter with another name as leader.

And with Newcastle in mind and that wonderful 1969, one of the people who became fascinated by it was Mike Bell, a Newcastle-born researcher who decided to dig into Butch and the history of the American West and has done so for more than 50 years, receiving the Wild West History Association’s international research and writing prize in 2019. Given Butch’s parentage, I think there’s something rather apt about that.

A week or so back, I had a ‘behind the scenes’ tour of South Shields Museum & Art Gallery, a small museum which tells the story of South Tyneside, an area of northeast England with quite a history. Occupied by the Romans, who built a grain store so large it was capable of feeding all the soldiers guarding Hadrian’s Wall. Later, fishing became the region's lifeblood, and settlements expanded as a result. Later still came the mining and shipping of millions of tons of coal from the region. At the same time, it also became an important shipbuilding centre. But it wasn’t just industry; South Shields also had beaches to which pleasure seekers flocked for a dose of Vitamin Sea.

Quite a history, but before I explore South Shields Museum specifically, I’d like to offer a view of why such small local museums are a significant benefit to their community. And I’ll declare an interest here, given I volunteered in one in Wiltshire for some years after I retired and saw that benefit firsthand.

Well-run local museums and art galleries can become the heart of a community by helping local people understand the heritage of everyday life in their area. Going far beyond simply displaying old objects or paintings, local museums safeguard history from the ‘bottom up’ and the social relationships of ‘ordinary’ people, demonstrating that history isn’t only the biographies of Presidents, monarchs, and famous people.

Through what might seem mundane artefacts, photographs and documents, local museums keep alive the stories of a region that might otherwise disappear. It’s the sort of stuff that large museums cannot cater for, as they offer a view of the grand sweeps of history and major historical figures.

Local museums can bring a region’s history to life by exploring its industries and the day-to-day work and leisure lives of local people in greater depth. Showing how a region may have developed or indeed regressed over time. Helping residents develop a feeling of pride and belonging and answering the question, ‘What makes this place special?’ For example, in my Wiltshire museum, a lot of space was given to the farming, dairy and cloth-making industries, all quite different from the industrial activities of South Tyneside that the South Shields museum focuses upon. Local museums can also look more deeply into why people from different areas elsewhere in Britain or even from overseas moved to their region, or why some of the locally born population chose to move away.

I recall that visiting a local museum as a child in the 1960s could be pretty tedious, even though I was interested in history. A visit today is very different, given the creative approaches museums now take to make a child’s understanding more vivid by connecting history to the here and now. And local museums also give adults opportunities to discover aspects of their region through talks, workshops, tailored exhibitions, and guided tours they may never have encountered before. For older people especially, such activities can also provide opportunities for social exchange and intellectual stimulation, encouraging people of all ages to keep learning throughout their lives.

Local Museums can also offer a good introduction to art, especially by promoting local artists. This is especially important for people who might otherwise have little opportunity to see original works of art. Seeing pieces ‘in the flesh’ offers a very different experience from seeing them reproduced in a book or on a screen, and it can also inspire people to try an art form themselves, like drawing, painting, photography, or crafting.

At its best, a local museum and gallery is a community’s memory, classroom, meeting place and creative space all at once. It reminds us that culture shouldn’t belong only to people who can afford to travel to major cities. Everyone should have the opportunity to encounter history and art close to home.

So, sermon over, let’s have a closer look at South Shields Museum and Art Gallery, which is free to enter (as are many local museums and galleries) and conveniently stands in the centre of the town.

The building in which the Museum and Gallery is now housed began life in 1860 as the Mechanics’ Institute. Such institutions were part of a Victorian ambition to offer opportunities for the less well-educated to ‘improve’ themselves through learning by attending lectures and participating in debates. In 1873, the building became a free public library with a small museum section, and three years later the whole building was formally established as South Shields Museum and Art Gallery. I think this progression is important because it was not created as an establishment for wealthy collectors, but was connected to the idea that ‘ordinary’ people should have access to knowledge and culture.

The quotation at the beginning of this piece offers the museum’s aim and in my opinion, the wide range of offerings on view certainly achieves that.

For example, there is a recreation of the terraced street where the writer Catherine Cookson, born in South Shields in 1906, one of Britain’s most successful novelists, and a great friend of the museum, lived her early years. There is also a recreation of the parlour /kitchen of that terraced house, which brought back memories of my own parents’ terraced house kitchen, especially the large coal-fired ‘range’ on which my mother cooked everything from bread to roasts to singing hinnies. Cookson’s novels frequently drew on the social scene of northeast England and for millions of readers her fictional world became their imaginative introduction to the region. The museum also boasts Cookson’s Emmy for the 1991 television adaptation of her ‘The Black Velvet Gown’

But let’s start with the world of work and the three industries closely tied to South Shields, the oldest of which is fishing, stretching back to the medieval period and connecting the town to the wider fishing economy of northeast England. While many today see South Shields as a seaside resort, it was once a working maritime community defined by the Tyne and the North Sea. In fact, fishing in the South Shields area is considerably older than the modern town, and evidence of both river and sea fishing dates to the early 12th century, including salmon fishing using ‘yares’, structures used to trap fish in tidal waters.

A charter of 1154, issued by Henry II, confirmed the Bishop of Durham’s rights over fisheries and navigation on the southern bank of the River Tyne. These rights became important because the burgesses of Newcastle, on the north bank of the Tyne, repeatedly disputed control of the river and its resources.

A document from 1256 describes a settlement on the south side of the mouth of the Tyne containing houses, ovens, breweries (this is northeast England we’re talking about), and, significantly, a place where fish was sold wholesale, showing fishing wasn’t simply something people did to feed their families; it had already become a commercial activity, and that medieval settlement was to become South Shields.

From those early beginnings, South Shields’ growth from fishing was remarkable, as by 1565, a survey of the ports belonging to the Bishop of Durham suggested that South Shields had more fishing boats than either the bigger settlements of Hartlepool or Sunderland.

I’ve already mentioned salmon fishing, but that was just one of many types of fish caught, including cod, haddock, skate, and conger eels, etc, with the precise catch changing according to season and fishing grounds. But of all the fish caught, herring would eventually become enormously important to the Tyne fishing industry, both north and south of the river. While it’s true that North Shields became the principal commercial fishing centre, South Shields was part of the same maritime world. The Tyne wasn’t a boundary separating two independent maritime cultures. It was the centre of a shared one.

As a port, South Shields saw people from all over the world, some of whom, such as Yemeni sailors in the 19th century, stayed. The Museum includes this multicultural maritime history and the town’s Yemeni community, which is one of the oldest Muslim communities in Britain.

Of course, life at sea was (and still is) hazardous, and after a disastrous shipwreck on 14 March 1789, when a violent storm drove the Newcastle collier ‘Adventure’ onto the Herd Sands just off South Shields, a local initiative was launched (no pun intended) that transformed rescue at sea.

In 1785, Lionel Lukin, a London coachbuilder and inventor, patented what he called an “unimmergible boat”, a modified Norwegian yawl that incorporated watertight compartments, air-filled spaces, buoyant gunwales and a false iron keel to improve stability.

The intent was to build a boat that would stay afloat even when flooded and to make it safer in rough water. A coble, a flat-bottomed fishing boat used much in northeast England, was adapted to his design for use at Bamburgh, Northumberland, to save people from shipwrecks.

So while a boat based on Lukin’s principles was used in an attempt to save lives off Bamburgh, it had its limitations and was not adopted more widely. It certainly was of no use to the ‘Adventure’, which proved so horrifying a wreck because even though the ship was extremely close to shore and people gathered in the hope of offering aid, the breakers were so violent that the boats available at the time could not safely reach the vessel, leaving the crew clinging to the ship’s rigging. One by one, exhausted and freezing, they fell into the sea while people could only watch, powerless to help.

Watching sailors die when they were close enough to see them shocked the people of South Shields, so a group of local businessmen known as the Gentlemen of Lawe House organised a competition to design a boat capable of going through the dangerous surf to wrecked ships to rescue those aboard, granting a prize of two guineas (roughly £400 today) for the best design of such a boat.

Two local men then became central to the story. One was William Wouldhave, a parish clerk and inventor, whose boat design was particularly ingenious because it developed Lukin’s design with improved buoyancy using cork, self-righting characteristics, and, importantly, a keel designed to make the boat much easier to manoeuvre and to launch and recover from a beach. The other contestant was Henry Greathead, a South Shields boatbuilder whose design also incorporated several highly practical features.

The committee decided that neither man’s design was entirely satisfactory. Instead, they combined ideas from both and offered each man half the prize. However, William refused the prize because he believed his contribution was undervalued and constituted more than half. Henry, who knew how to turn an experimental concept into a working boat, then received a commission to build the first lifeboat based on the combined design, known as the Original, and stationed at South Shields. Its first recorded rescue came on 30 January 1790, when its crew rescued the crew of a wrecked vessel, proving the design worked.

The museum has the original 1789 tin model submitted by William during the competition and a model of what became known as the Shields-pattern lifeboat built by Henry. That model is of the seventh lifeboat to come from his yard and built for Bawdsey Haven in Suffolk in 1801. He eventually built 30 lifeboats to that design for communities around Britain and overseas. Sadly, however, William never accepted that Henry deserved sole credit, and today, albeit too late for William, who sadly died a very poor man, it’s recognised that Henry’s first lifeboat is essentially the one William designed, and for which Lionel Lukin paved the way.

But it wasn’t just lifeboats that were built at South Shields, as during the Industrial Revolution the area became heavily involved in shipbuilding, with the museum preserving ship models and shipbuilding artefacts and tools that reveal the history of the industry from the perspective of the people who actually built the ships and, during the 19th century, made South Tyneside one of the world’s great shipbuilding regions.

The most poignant maritime artefact for me is the watch bell from HMS Kelly, a famous Royal Navy destroyer built on South Tyneside and commissioned in 1939 under the command of Lord Louis Mountbatten. The ship survived a devastating torpedo attack in May 1940 in the North Sea and managed to limp back to Tyneside for repair, which saw the watch bell removed and, for some reason, not refitted. Sadly, the German Navy sank the Kelly during the Battle of Crete in 1941, with heavy loss of life.

Mountbatten’s account of the 1940 torpedo attack and the badly damaged Kelly’s subsequent slow and painful return to the Tyne directly inspired the Noël Coward/David Lean film ‘In Which We Serve’, with the Kelly becoming the fictional destroyer HMS Torrin and Mountbatten becoming Captain Kinross, played by Noël Coward. Interestingly, the film includes actual footage of Kelly.

Of course, like so many towns in northeast England, the history of South Shields cannot be separated from the northeast coal industry, given that the Tyne became one of Britain’s great coal-exporting rivers, with coal mined throughout the Durham and Northumberland coalfields brought to the river and loaded onto ships headed for markets around Britain and the world.

South Shields sat at the end of an enormous industrial chain that began at the coal mine, continued along wagon/railways to staithes on the banks of the Tyne, where it was loaded onto keels that sailed down the river, and ended with its loading onto colliers moored at South Shields. The museum’s collection includes miners’ equipment, mining banners and photographs showing both the practical and social sides of the industry from its early days to the closing of the pits through the later 20th century.

Of course, every museum seems to have something of the macabre, and in the case of South Shields it’s a gibbet used to display William Jobling after his execution in 1832, in one of the most controversial episodes in the history of northeast England, at a time when the area was experiencing serious industrial unrest. Coal miners were fighting the owners over their employment contracts, wages, and working conditions, and wished to form unions or ‘combinations’ to improve their lot. The colliery owners tried to prevent this by preventing any miner in a union from working in the pits; not surprisingly, this led to considerable tension between miners and the owners.

William was one such miner denied work, and on 11 June 1832, he and another miner, Ralph Armstrong, encountered Nicholas Fairles, a local magistrate and colliery official, as he was riding near Jarrow Colliery. William approached Fairles and asked for money, to which Fairles responded with an aggressive refusal and other derogatory comments. At this, Armstrong then attacked Fairles and gave him a severe beating, from which he died ten days later.

After the beating, Armstrong fled, and all record of what may have happened to him disappears, while William stayed, and reports say he sought to aid Fairles. However, when the authorities arrived, they arrested William and accused him of aiding Armstrong. William’s trial was at the Durham Assizes, and convicted of being an accessory to Fairles’ murder; he received a sentence of death, with the judge ordering the gibbeting of William’s body, after his execution, near the place of the murder. The judge explicitly presented the extra ‘punishment’ as a warning to other members of the mining community not to resort to violence.

As per the sentence, William’s hanging at Durham took place the following month, and his body was then taken the 25 miles from Durham to Jarrow in a horse-drawn wagon accompanied by soldiers because the authorities clearly feared that the mining community might attempt to ‘rescue’ the body.

Eventually the party breached Jarrow Slake, the extensive tidal mudflats beside the Tyne, and the body was covered in tar and placed in an iron cage and raised on the gibbet in an extraordinarily conspicuous location near the scene of the killing and within sight of Jobling’s home, from where his widow, Isabella, could reportedly see the gibbet.

The intention was clearly to make the punishment visible to the community and particularly to Jobling’s family and fellow miners. It became a grim landmark, described at the time as a “most appalling sight”, visible to people on boats moving down the Tyne and those travelling along the roadway.

The authorities were concerned that William’s fellow miners or relatives would attempt to recover his body and therefore stationed soldiers to guard the gibbet, and circulated a notice warning people that seven years’ transportation would result for anyone taking the body from the gibbet.

Roughly a month after William’s gibbeting, the guards withdrew, and that was the moment for which his friends and supporters had been waiting, as that night William’s body disappeared from the gibbet. While exactly what happened is unclear, it’s believed a group of William’s friends and relatives cut through the ironwork holding the cage and brought the body down.

According to one account, there was then a temporary burial of William’s body in the mud of Jarrow Slake before its later recovery and secret burial elsewhere. One story says the burial was near Jarrow Quay, adjacent to Jarrow Slake, while another associates his secret burial with the area around a public house called The Commercial, close to where the Tyne Tunnel now stands. But the evidence isn’t conclusive for either; however, what is a fact is that nobody faced prosecution for removing the body.

Only a few weeks after William’s gibbeting came that of James Cook in Leicester, and William and James proved to be the last two people gibbeted in England after an enormous adverse public reaction to both cases. Two years later, gibbetting was formally abolished.

Let’s turn to brighter subjects and the ‘Art Gallery’ part of the museum’s name, and its collection of approximately 500 items, the earliest acquisition of which dates from 1873, when the former Mechanics Institute building reopened as South Shields’ first free public library. The collection includes a wide variety of paintings and prints from the local area and beyond, with many of the paintings being maritime subjects.

That first acquisition was an oil painting of around 1800 of South Shields Market Place by an unknown artist, and over the years the collection has grown to include works by nationally recognised artists such as Charles Napier Hemy, Thomas Sidney Cooper and Harold Harvey, as well as northeast England-based artists such as John Scott, Ralph Hedley, and Robinson Elliott. And to return to novelist Catherine Cookson, the museum has one of her paintings; before she found recognition through her writing, she tried her hand as a commercial artist.

A recent highlight for the museum, and recognition of its importance alongside the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle, was the loan of Claude Monet’s 1872 impressionist masterpiece, ‘The Petit Bras of the Seine at Argenteuil’, as part of the National Gallery Masterpiece Tour celebrating the NG's 200th anniversary.

Leaving aside all the history and art, my earliest memories of South Shields are of visiting the seaside, and the museum has many artefacts celebrating the fact that the beach near the town is still a place for such recreation. Among many other seaside memorabilia, the museum has a couple of the older arcade amusements on display: a laughing policeman and a fortune teller. Once upon a time they cost a pre-decimal penny; these days it’s ten ‘new’ pence, but as simple as they are, the amusements still attract the attention of both children and adults

South Shields Museum also now benefits from being part of Northeast Museums, which manages twelve museums and galleries across the region, and the Tyne & Wear Archives. This regional museum network is one of the great strengths of museum-going in northeast England, as, by working in partnership with the local authorities of Gateshead, Newcastle, Northumberland, North and South Tyneside, and Newcastle University, it can offer visitors a joined-up museum experience of northeast England.

South Shields Museum and Art Gallery, like many local museums, doesn’t have the international fame of, say, the British Museum or the artistic masterpieces of the National Gallery, but that isn’t its purpose; its importance lies in preserving the stories of people who otherwise might leave little trace behind. The miner, the shipyard worker, the sailor, the factory worker, the family living in a terraced house. The seemingly unimportant objects they used throughout their lives are indeed important. A photograph of a child on a beach in 1950 can be as historically revealing as a photograph of a famous politician. A mining banner tells us about collective identity as the Bayeux tapestry tells us of great conquest. A household object shows us how people lived far more than a glimpse of the crown jewels. A shipyard tool can tell us how people actually built the HMS Victory or Warrior, and can be as fascinating as tales of the battles in which they fought.

In the end, local museums tell what I think are the extraordinary stories of so-called ordinary people.

From the Scriptores Historiae Augustae, Vita Hadriani

Walking the Hadrian’s Wall path has become an immensely popular long-distance walk, allowing people to visit some of the most important Roman archaeology in the UK while enjoying the beautiful countryside of Cumbria and Northumberland.

The path, which generally follows the line of Hadrian’s Wall, runs for 84 miles (135 km) from Segedunum (a name of Celtic origin, meaning strong or powerful fort), a Roman Fort at modern-day Wallsend, to the east of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and where the wall took a sharp bend to go part of the way into the River Tyne, to Bowness-on-Solway on the Cumbrian coast. However, many walkers may not realise that the path between Wallsend and Hebburn-on-the-Wall, on the western outskirts of Newcastle, deviates from the Wall's route for some 12 miles, taking them down to the River Tyne.

I assume the planners of the path felt walkers might prefer a more scenic, and arguably safer, stroll by the river, avoiding Newcastle's urban sprawl. But it means walkers miss some fascinating Roman frontier archaeology, so in this piece I’m not taking you all along the walk, just the 12 miles of the Wall across Newcastle that walkers miss if following the official path.

When I was young, in northeast England, the wall was simply ‘The Roman Wall’ and garnered little attention. I’m not sure when its ‘builders’ name became more commonly used to describe the Wall, but its popularity as a place to visit and walk alongside soared after it was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the late 1980s.

It’s believed construction began around CE 122, during the reign of Emperor Hadrian, and it stretched for roughly 73 Roman miles, or about 80 modern miles, across northern Britain as a complex frontier system of forts, milecastles, turrets, and gates, with associated civilian settlements, and thousands of soldiers from across the Roman Empire stationed along it. The path walkers follow is slightly longer than the ancient wall because of modern diversions, as I’ve mentioned.

The Notitia Dignitatum, written around the end of the Roman occupation of Britain, records that Segedunum was built in 127 CE as an extension of Hadrian’s Wall to help guard the mouth of the River Tyne. The fort replaced the earlier eastern terminus of the wall at Pons Aelius near the centre of modern-day Newcastle-upon-Tyne, some three miles to the west.

Archaeological interest in Segedunum began in the late 1800s, when antiquarians tracing Hadrian’s Wall identified the eastern end of the wall, and small finds (inscriptions, stones, altars) hinted at what lay beneath a large estate of Victorian terrace houses built directly on top of the fort.

However, after the demolition of those houses in the 1970s, large-scale excavations led by local authority archaeologists and supported by what is now Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums identified the full fort plan with barracks blocks, the commanding officer’s house (praetorium), and granaries (horrea), along with defensive features such as walls, gates, and ditches. Because the excavation was extensive rather than piecemeal, Segedunum became a model site for understanding Roman fort layouts.

Excavations also uncovered a diverse array of everyday and military artefacts, including pottery and cooking vessels, coins from various centuries, personal items such as brooches and tools, and altars and inscriptions that reveal the identities of units stationed there. One of those units was the Fourth Cohort (typically around 500 soldiers) of Lingonians who came from the Roman province of Gallia Belgica, in what is now north-east France. Their capital was at Langres. They were among 21 units stationed in Britain in AD 130 or 131, hailing from areas as diverse as modern-day Belgium, Spain, Romania, Croatia, Syria and Iraq.

To deter desertion, a Roman military unit formed in one province was usually assigned to serve in a different province, often thousands of miles away. The career paths of higher military officers and civilian administrators also transported individuals across vast distances within the Empire, as demonstrated by the career of Statius Priscus, who once commanded the Fourth Cohort of Lingonians at Segedunum and held 18 different posts in seven provinces.

It is believed that the occupation of Segedunum lasted until the Roman withdrawal from Britain in the early 5th century, although historians can’t rule out a slightly earlier evacuation due to the massive empire-wide recall of troops at the end of the 4th century. At its peak, Segendunum would have held up to 600 troops, divided into 120 cavalry and 480 infantry. In the 2nd century, recruits from Belgium largely manned the fort, while in the 3rd and 4th centuries, it was mainly recruits from the Alsace region of France.

The fort stood on a small plateau overlooking the north bank of the River Tyne, at the point where it turns to run to the Coast at South Shields and where the Romans built Arbeia (of which I wrote in A Striking Site). The location chosen commanded views eastwards down the river towards Arbeia and upriver towards Pons Aelius.

Before the Romans built Segedunum, the area was farmland, lying within the territory of the Brigantes, a large tribe whose lands stretched from Yorkshire to Northumberland. Archaeologists have found evidence of ploughing and hand-dug furrows in preparation for sowing crops, suggesting the local people did not expect a fort to be built there. It’s suspected that the Romans confiscated the land, and the farmers had to move elsewhere.

After the Romans withdrew from Britain in the early 5th century, traces of the fort gradually disappeared from the landscape. In the late 19th century, houses were built on the site for the people involved in shipbuilding, for which Wallsend became famous. Those houses were demolished in the 1970s as shipbuilding declined and people moved away, and it was then that extensive excavations revealed the fort’s remarkably well-preserved foundations.

So, let’s now head west from Wallsend and follow the Fossway to the Newcastle suburb of Byker that I’ve mentioned in several Meaders over the years and its own ‘wall’ that I wrote of in A Delve into the Archives. And by the way, Fossway comes from fossa, the Latin word for a ditch, a reference to the Vallum, a huge earthwork running south of Hadrian’s Wall that consisted broadly of a central ditch flanked by substantial banks. Deliberation continues as to its precise purpose, given it was on the Roman side of the Wall.

At Byker Hill you continue down the Shields Road that runs along what would have been the northern ‘barbarian side’ of the Wall. And Shields does not have a Roman connotation but refers to North Shields, which again I have written of in my two-part, “A Town Where None Ought to be”. Halfway down Shields Road, you can see the only visible evidence of the Wall in the eastern end of Newcastle: a small section uncovered during building work in 2000.

At the end of Shields Road, the Wall heads into the Ouseburn Valley, crossing the burn near where the Ouseburn Farm stands today. Sadly, there are no longer any visible remains of the Wall in Ouseburn, but close to Ouseburn’s Tanners Arm pub, the remains of a Turret of the Wall were discovered that would have once stood some 30 feet (circa 9 metres high)

Leaving Ouseburn, we now enter the centre of Newcastle and arrive at Newcastle Castle, built upon the site of the major Roman fort, Pons Aelius, on a sandstone bluff above the River Tyne.

The Roman fort was smaller than the later Norman castle, whose keep you can still see today, but its position was just as strategically valuable. From the fort, the Romans controlled the Pons Aelius bridge and the Roman road system, along the Tyne Valley towards Corstopitum (modern-day Corbridge) and to the south, the already mentioned Arbeia, the huge Roman grain store.

As we continue west, the next ’sight’ of the Wall is outside the Mining Institute beside the Lit&Phil library. Discovered during building work, that section of the Wall was recovered again for preservation purposes; a plaque marks its position, and its direction takes us towards Newcastle’s Central railway station. However, before reaching that wonderful Victorian building, the Wall took a sharp right to head up what today is Newcastle’s Westgate Road.

I’ll spend some time on this road whose name comes from the medieval West Gate, one of the principal entrances through Newcastle’s enormous town walls constructed in the early 13th century and expanded in the early 15th century. The walls, which featured six major gateways, numerous towers, and smaller posterns, enclosed the medieval town, and the road through the West Gate led west along the route associated with the old Roman frontier.

The sketch above shows that the West Gate was a substantial defensive structure and, by the 16th century, had also become something of a supplementary prison to the city’s notorious Newgate Prison, holding mainly troublesome youths and miscreant military personnel; later, it also served as a munitions magazine. It was demolished in 1812, as, like so much of Newcastle’s medieval fortifications, it increasingly obstructed the expansion of the growing city.

As you continue the walk along Westgate Road, you pass one of the Roman milecastles, small fortified enclosures positioned at roughly one Roman mile intervals along Hadrian’s Wall that provided accommodation for a small garrison. On Westgate Road stands the Milecastle pub, but it’s not where an actual milecastle on the wall stood; that’s a hundred metres or so further along, and you can see evidence of it in the courtyard of Newcastle Arts Centre.

Continuing along Westgate Road, you pass ‘through’ where the former medieval West Gate would have stood and continue uphill until you reach the site of a fort that in Roman times would have matched the size and imprint of Pons Aelius. This fort was Condercum, which means ‘place with a fine view,’ and from the site on the top of the hill on which it was built, you certainly do have a fine view, as would the Romans guarding their Northern frontier.

Condercum covered approximately 5.6 acres (circa 23 thousand square metres), and would have comprised the usual buildings within a Roman fort: the principia, the praetorium, the horrea, etc while outside there would be a vicus, a civilian settlement that was essentially a small Roman town attached to the fort.

Sadly, today little of Condercum is visible as it lies beneath a reservoir and modern housing, but what is visible makes it possible to understand how Hadrian’s Wall functioned as a frontier, with perhaps a Vallum crossing its most remarkable surviving feature as the only such crossing that you can still see, which comprises a stone-built causeway and arched gateway on which hung double doors.

The crossing remained in use throughout much of the Roman period, even after modification and partial infilling of the Vallum itself, and is important archaeological evidence of the physical control of people and goods moving between the vicus and the militarised area.

For much of its existence, Condercum was manned by Ala I Asturum, a unit drawn from the Astures, a people from northern Spain. The word ala means ‘wing’, indicating a complement of potentially several hundred cavalry.

Close by, east of the fort, stood a modest temple built around 180 CE and dedicated to a deity called Antenociticus, who appears to have been a local British god, possibly associated with the region around the Tyne, although it’s not known exactly what he represented. It’s rare to know the name of a native god worshipped in a particular place, suggesting that the Romans allowed indigenous beliefs to exist alongside their own and even assimilated them. This cultural complexity is reflected in Tineius Longus, a cavalry prefect who served at the fort and dedicated one of the temple's altars.

The temple, now surrounded by modern housing, was small, measuring only about 130 square feet (circa 12 square metres) internally, with a semicircular apse at one end. The altars found there are now held in the Great North Museum: Hancock, along with the head of a statue of Antenociticus; replica casts of the altars are now at the temple site.

Another intriguing building, with a central nave and aisles and measuring around 27 thousand square feet (circa 250 square metres), was found near Condercum. Believed to have been built around 200 CE, one interpretation is that the building was a mansio, an official lodging house for travellers connected with imperial communications. However, the interpretation is uncertain; it may instead have been an inn, a villa, or another type of civilian building. If it were, however, a mansio, it would reinforce Condercum’s importance as a communications centre connecting the military frontier with the wider Roman road network.

Roman occupation at Condercum lasted until the early 5th century, and after that the area where the fort stood eventually became part of the settlement of Benwell (first recorded in 1050 as Bynnewalle, meaning ‘Behind the Wall’). The area remained rural for centuries until the discovery of coal, and was ultimately absorbed as a suburb of Newcastle as the city expanded westwards. I’ll note a family connection to the area here, as my paternal grandparents lived in Benwell (the house they occupied still stands) from the late 19th century through to the mid-20th century, and my father ran for Benwell Harriers in the 1920s.

But back to Condercum, which should be seen as important to Newcastle’s history because it demonstrates that Roman occupation of the area extended well beyond the fort of Pons Aelius, with two other major forts guarding a Roman military corridor. While I understand there is a reason, I think it’s a shame that the Hadrian’s Wall path bypasses such history.

If walkers had taken this urban route from Segedunum past Pons Aelius to Condercum, then they would now continue westwards to Heddon-on-the-Wall, where they pick up the official Hadrian’s Wall path again.

And just a little on the rest of the trail as it continues west. Some 26 miles west of Newcastle stands the already-mentioned Corbridge and the Roman town of Corstopitum. Although not on the Wall itself, it was still a major settlement and supply centre close to the frontier. Further west, the trail reaches Chollerford, near the spectacular Roman fort of Chesters, one of the best-preserved Roman cavalry forts in Britain, whose most famous remains are the bathhouse.

Generally considered the most spectacular and most physically demanding part of the Hadrian’s Wall path is the section between Chollerford and Birdoswald, the great highlight of which is Housesteads, perhaps the most spectacularly situated Roman fort in Britain, whose remains include the praetorium, horrea, and a valetudinarium (hospital).

Just south of the Wall and slightly off the main trail lies Vindolanda, an important archaeological site associated with Roman Britain and which predates the wall. Once a major Roman fort and vicus, it is famous for the wooden writing tablets found there. They are a collection of letters, military reports, and everyday messages written by people living on the Roman northern frontier in Britain nearly 2,000 years ago. One of the most famous is a birthday invitation from one woman to another, reminding us that the people living near Hadrian’s Wall were not simply anonymous soldiers.

Finally, the western end of the path leads to Carlisle, where another Roman fort and substantial vicus stood. However, as with Newcastle, the route of the path through the city is not directly alongside Hadrian’s Wall, which continues to the Solway marshes and eventually reaches Bowness-on-Solway, the official western terminus of Hadrian’s Wall, although the wall becomes increasingly difficult to see.

And that ye shall not come into our pilgrimage for no particular profit to your self nor to do any displeasure to any private person but by counsel of the commonwealth nor slay nor murder for no envy but in your hearts put away all fear and dread and take afore you the Cross of Christ and in your hearts His faith, the restitution of the church, the suppression of these heretics and their opinions by all the holy contents of this Book.

Robert Aske

Many people will have some passing knowledge of Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries, but maybe not the Pilgrimage of Grace and those who rebelled against it. Today we might see Henry’s Dissolution as a hostile takeover of the Catholic Church, with Thomas Cromwell as a latter-day Elon Musk looking to make efficiency savings as head of Henry’s ‘Commission’, a latter-day DOGE. Once the acquisition had happened, Henry and Cromwell then effectively asset-stripped the monasteries and pensioned off the clergy. Of course the two of them weren’t the first to take that sort of action. The Vikings, circa 800 years before, saw the monasteries as easy targets for their own sort of asset stripping, and the Vikings even saved on employee costs by enslaving or slaughtering the occupants.

At the time, Henry saw his move to create a Church of England as an act of love, as he’d lost his head over Anne Boleyn. Unfortunately for Anne, she also lost her head because of Henry. And that’s true of Thomas too. Trump and Musk’s falling out led to an exchange of angry words, whereas Henry took things a little further.

Anyway, let’s get more serious and look at how the Dissolution arguably had more wide-ranging consequences in northern England compared to the rest of England when, between 1536 and 1540, centuries of monastic life came to an end, culminating in the confiscation by the Crown of enormous amounts of land and wealth and the destruction of many religious buildings.

In 1534, Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy, declaring Henry the Supreme Head of the Church of England, following which Thomas Cromwell began ‘investigating’ the monasteries. The official justification for the Dissolution focused heavily on alleged corruption and abuses within religious houses, but the enormous wealth they controlled was the obvious attraction, with the Crown ultimately seizing their lands, buildings, livestock, and anything else of value.

In many southern areas of England, the Crown and Cromwell could present the Dissolution as an opportunity for landowners and merchants to acquire valuable property. In the north, where time-honoured religious loyalties persisted, the process appeared as an assault on the fundamental foundation of society. And while Cromwell’s connections in the south were strong, that was not true in the north, and we must also remember that Henry himself never visited the north during his reign; here he was just a name and a vague image.

By the early sixteenth century, the northeast of England had an unusually strong attachment to Catholicism, with several important ecclesiastical establishments offering a close connection between the people’s spirituality and their history. To many people in the north, the Dissolution did not simply mean the closure of a few religious houses; it represented a fundamental attack on institutions whose history stretched back to the foundation of Christianity itself. Institutions such as Lindisfarne, founded by St Aidan in the seventh century, Durham Cathedral and Priory, and Tynemouth Priory, to name but a few, had moulded the region’s identity for centuries.

Leaving aside the major religious houses, by the time Henry VIII’s Commissioners arrived in Newcastle, there were also several friaries and one nunnery. The Dissolution effectively ended all of these religious communities, although it must be said these establishments were already in some decline, with reportedly fewer than sixty occupants across them.

Virtually all traces of the buildings are now gone, save for that occupied by the Dominican Blackfriars, founded in Newcastle in 1239, which, as a survivor of the Dissolution, gives us an extraordinary glimpse of what the town’s ecclesiastical landscape looked like before the Reformation. After the friary was dissolved, its buildings escaped destruction because they were leased to the town’s craft guilds, who adopted them as their headquarters. Then in the seventeenth century, the buildings were subsequently used for the Holy Jesus Hospital, an almshouse for retired Freemen and their families.

The Franciscan Grey Friars priory, founded in the thirteenth century, stood close to today’s Newcastle’s Pilgrim Street. After the priory’s dissolution in 1539, the property was acquired by the wealthy Newcastle merchant Robert Anderson, who demolished it to build a substantial mansion called New Place, later known as Anderson Place, on the site. That mansion became notable in its own right as Charles I was a prisoner of the Scots there after the end of the English Civil War. Opposite the Grey Friars priory was St Bartholomew’s Nunnery, a Benedictine community and, according to some accounts, one of Newcastle’s oldest religious houses. It too was a victim of the dissolution, and its property again passed into the hands of Robert Anderson, with the nunnery buildings demolished as part of the creation of Anderson Place.

Eventually, Anderson Place was demolished in the nineteenth century as Newcastle underwent its great ‘Grainger Town’ redevelopment. The site is now occupied by a branch of Lloyds Bank.

Newcastle also had a Carmelite friary known as the Whitefriars because of the colour of the friars’ habits. The dissolution caught up with them ultimately too, and their property was demolished during later developments in the city. The Augustinian (Austin) Friars were another of Newcastle’s medieval religious communities whose buildings and lands subsequently passed into secular ownership and were progressively demolished as the town modernised.

And we mustn’t forget the unusually named Friars of the Sack, a small and relatively obscure order whose house was in the south-western part of the medieval town, and there was also a Trinitarian religious house in Newcastle, although at the time of the Dissolution there was only the Prior. Nothing of these buildings survives.

Henry VIII’s Commissioners’ arrival at Durham Cathedral saw the dismantling of the magnificent shrine of St Cuthbert and the stripping of it of its gold, silver and jewels. Once removed, the Commissioners then opened Cuthbert’s coffin expecting to find only dry bones but instead, according to the contemporary account preserved in the ‘Rites of Durham’, they found what appeared to be Cuthbert’s body still intact and undecayed. When one of the Commissioners was instructed to “throw down the bones”, he apparently refused because he could not bear to do so.

Finding the body seemingly undecayed presented the Commissioners with a serious problem, as part of their purpose was to dismantle the shrine and suppress the cults of saints. According to Durham Cathedral’s account, the Commissioners ordered the monks to move Cuthbert’s body to the vestry while the Commissioners awaited further instructions from the King. What they were, we don’t know, but although the magnificent medieval shrine was dismantled, Cuthbert’s remains weren’t ‘thrown down’ but reinterred in a much simpler grave.

Just as an aside, Cuthbert’s remains were eventually examined again in 1827, when the coffin was opened, and a remarkable collection of objects was found, including textiles and other artefacts that the monks of the time must have hidden from the Commissioners. Some of these artefacts, along with Cuthbert’s coffin, are now preserved as the ‘Treasures of St Cuthbert’ in Durham Cathedral while Cuthbert is interred under a modest stone slab bearing his name in Latin.

Another great religious figure of northeast England was the Venerable Bede, who died in 735 at the monastery of Jarrow and was buried at nearby Monkwearmouth. At some point in the early medieval period, his remains too were moved to Durham Cathedral, probably because it was becoming the great centre of northern English Christianity and the resting place of St Cuthbert.

By the twelfth century, Bede’s relics were apparently being venerated at Durham, and in the 14th century they were placed in a tomb in the Galilee Chapel, at the western end of the Cathedral. When Henry VIII’s commissioners arrived at Durham, Bede’s tomb appears to have escaped the same fate as Cuthbert’s, probably because Bede was not the focus of an enormously wealthy pilgrimage cult with a gold-covered shrine. His importance was primarily as a scholar and historian, rather than as a miracle-working saint whose shrine attracted large offerings. His tomb was therefore probably of much less financial interest to the commissioners. As with Cuthbert, Bede’s tomb was opened in the 19th century, and the bones found were believed by some to be Bede's remains, although historians and archaeologists cannot prove beyond doubt that the bones are actually Bede’s, as there is no continuous evidence linking the remains back to the eighth century. The tomb that can be seen in the cathedral today is a later construction marking the traditional location of his burial.

The fate of Tynemouth Priory illustrates how the dissolution could radically change the function of an important religious site. Henry’s Commissioners confiscated its lands and possessions and destroyed the shrine of St Oswine. Yet the buildings did not simply disappear, as their important location at the mouth of the River Tyne made it valuable for military purposes, and the former priory became incorporated into Tudor coastal defences.

The story of Hexham Abbey, whose history stretches back to the seventh century, when St Wilfrid founded a monastery there, is rather different. In the medieval period it became an Augustinian priory, but unlike many monastic churches, the main church survived because it was taken over for use as the parish church of Hexham, and some of the monastic buildings were hidden behind a fake wall and ‘buried’, which is why visitors today can still walk into Hexham Abbey and experience a little of its medieval past.

Of course, while some of their buildings may have disappeared, the monks, nuns and priests did not simply vanish. Some received pensions; some male priests took up alternative positions in the Church of England while others moved to a secular life. As ever, though, the experience of the individual varied enormously according to their status and the wealth of the institution in which they lived. A prior or abbot might receive a relatively comfortable pension, while ordinary monks and nuns received much less. However, there is an interesting twist to the story at Durham Cathedral, where the clergy simply joined the Church of England and changed roles after the dissolution. The monks became canons, and the prior became the dean.

The great monasteries also supported many people who were not clergy, such as tenants, suppliers, and those who worked for the monasteries. Their closure therefore undoubtedly caused economic and social disruption with the loss of local employment. The dissolution also caused the long-term transformation of welfare in England, which increasingly became the responsibility of parish churches and local government, eventually resulting in the development of the poor laws.

One could also argue that the dissolution led to a great cultural loss, given that monasteries were centres of learning, housing large libraries and scriptoria. After the dissolution, some books were preserved and some sold, but many were destroyed.

In response to this perceived attack on what people saw as their very way of life came the Pilgrimage of Grace, one of the most serious challenges ever faced by Henry VIII and a demonstration of just how unpopular his religious changes were in northern England.

In truth, the Pilgrimage of Grace had several causes, including grievances over taxation and political control as well as opposition to the generally disliked Thomas Cromwell, yet the defence of traditional Catholicism was central.

The first major rebellion against the Dissolution broke out in Lincolnshire, where rebels forced local officials to join them in presenting their concerns against the religious changes and the approach of Thomas Cromwell and his Commissioners. Henry responded angrily, condemning the protesters as traitors; a remark that meant they soon backed off, effectively ending the Lincolnshire rising; however, it was the spark that triggered a much larger revolt in Yorkshire.

The lawyer for the leaders of the Lincolnshire rebellion was Robert Aske, a well-educated, articulate, and deeply religious man from an established Yorkshire family. He became persuaded of the rebels’ cause and began to encourage people in Yorkshire to join another rebellion against the Dissolution.

He sensibly did not present this as an insurgency seeking to overthrow Henry VIII. On the contrary, he and his followers declared themselves loyal subjects of the King and presented their movement as a religious pilgrimage. They carried banners that included images of the five wounds of Christ, and wore badges showing those wounds. The movement sought to defend Catholicism against what they saw as Henry’s corrupt advisors and demanded the removal of unpopular ministers especially Thomas Cromwell (there is a belief that anti-Cromwell feelings were so strong that Henry did for a while consider replacing him), an end to the dissolution of the monasteries, a parliament to be held in York (a Tudor Number 10 in the north) and a general pardon for those taking part.

While the exact number of participants is uncertain, estimates suggest that the movement may have involved up to 40,000 people. At that size, the government could not simply march into Yorkshire and suppress the rebellion by force, especially when it grew to include parts of Durham, Northumberland, Cumberland, Lancashire and Westmorland

A humiliating moment for Henry VIII and his government came when the rebels/pilgrims took control of York, the religious capital of northern England and one of the most important cities in the country, with remarkably little resistance. Another important episode was the surrender of Pontefract Castle, one of the great royal fortresses of northern England, by Thomas Darcy, one of the most important noblemen in Yorkshire. This was enormously significant, as such a surrender demonstrated that the rebellion had support not simply among ordinary people but also among members of the northern elite.

The crisis reached its peak in early November 1536, when Henry VIII sent an army north under the command of the Duke of Norfolk, whom Henry believed, despite Norfolk’s age, was his best military leader, and thus brought Norfolk out of retirement. The royal army had far fewer men than the rebel forces when the two sides confronted one another near Doncaster, but instead of a major battle, negotiations began between Norfolk and Robert Aske. The King, on Norfolk’s advice, offered a general pardon and an opportunity for Robert to present his grievances personally to Henry.

This was enough to persuade Robert to disband the Pilgrimage of Grace, and indeed he was able to present his case to Henry in London. However, while still there, a second rebellion, known as Bigod’s Rebellion, led by Sir Francis Bigod, changed the situation. Bigod accused Robert of caving in to Henry by disbanding the Pilgrimage of Grace, and in response Robert then offered to Henry that he would join any battle against Bigod. As it was, Bigod’s rising was small in number and poorly organised, so it was easily defeated by Norfolk’s army, and Bigod was executed.

Whether it was this second rebellion that changed Henry’s mind about Robert or whether Henry always planned to arrest him at some point, we don’t know. What we do know is that in March 1537, Robert and Thomas Darcy were asked to return to London, where they were both arrested. Although they had received a pardon for the Pilgrimage of Grace, this time they were accused of being part of the Bigod Rebellion.

Robert’s nemesis, Thomas Cromwell, conducted the interviews with Robert, who felt confident that he had publicly declared himself against the Bigod Rebellion. However, Cromwell, being the devious chap he was, argued that letters Robert sent to his followers instructing them to “stay at home” and not join the rebellion were also instructions for them not to support the king, and thus the letters were treasonous, as was anyone who had ‘stayed at home’. And of course the court saw it Cromwell’s way.

You will not be surprised that what happened next was brutal, with the execution of what Henry saw as the rebel leaders, Thomas Darcy, Sir Robert Constable, Sir John Bulmer and Sir Thomas Percy, the brother of the Earl of Northumberland. Robert Aske’s punishment was particularly gruesome, as on the mound on which Clifford’s Tower in York stands, he was hanged, drawn and quartered and somewhere in amongst all that castrated too.

It was a deliberate warning to anyone else who might challenge the King’s Dissolution of the Monasteries. In the end, and no matter how heartfelt it was by the people involved, the rebellion’s only achievement was to demonstrate that Henry VIII’s religious revolution was far from universally accepted. Indeed, we see the to-and-fro between Catholicism and Protestantism all the way through to the reign of James II and even beyond. It’s noteworthy that Andy Burnham is Britain’s first Catholic Prime Minister (or Chief Minister) in more than 500 years, since Queen Mary I attempted to reverse her father’s English Reformation.

However, although it failed in its aims, what the Pilgrimage of Grace illustrates is the two different visions of the English people of the time. On one side was Henry VIII’s increasingly centralised Tudor state dismantling independent religious institutions and transferring their wealth to the Crown and private landowners. On the other was an older world in which religion and community were inseparably connected. A world that Robert Aske and his followers were trying to sustain.

Although it would be wrong to say that the Dissolution created the coal mining industry in northeast England, well established by the 1530s, it did have an important long-term effect on development given the change it brought to the ownership of the coal-bearing land.

Before their dissolution, a significant proportion of northeast England’s monasteries and priories controlled its mineral wealth. Tynemouth Priory, for instance, was a major landowner with long-standing coal mining interests, shipping coal as early as the thirteenth century. Like other monasteries, its estates were confiscated by the Crown, which retained some land and mineral rights, but over time much was sold or ‘granted’ to wealthy individuals, helping create a new class of landowners while also enabling existing landowners to expand their holdings. In northeast England, this contributed to the emergence of new landed families and altered patterns of land ownership that would influence the region for centuries.

But just to note an exception to this ‘land-grab’ was Durham Cathedral Priory, whose monks had been involved in coal mining from at least the fourteenth century, leasing mines around places such as Rainton, Lumley and Ferryhill. These mines were largely ‘drift’ mines, where you could walk into the shaft to extract the coal, but experiments with methods of dealing with water in deeper workings were beginning. Interestingly, for long after the Dissolution, the ‘reassigned’ clergy of Durham Cathedral were allowed to retain the land and mineral rights.

But that was the exception, however, as after the Dissolution coal-bearing estates increasingly passed into the hands of noble families, gentry and private investors who were keen to expand the industry and increase the return on their investment in supplying an ever-important commodity to London and other parts of England. While the monastic houses had mined coal, their primary purpose was not to build a modern coal industry; this was not true of the more commercially driven new owners.

There is some evidence of a significant increase in northeast England coal production after the Dissolution, with one account reporting coal shipped through the Tyne remaining relatively stable at around 15,000 tons annually from 1377 until the Dissolution and then, thirty years later, the reported figure was 35,000 tons. While the change in land ownership was not the only influence on the increase, the timing suggests that the transfer of ecclesiastical land was a component of accelerated production in the industry.

And then there’s the role of the Hostmen of Newcastle, who emerged from the city’s medieval merchant community and became powerful because of the opportunity they saw in the increasingly valuable coal trade after the Dissolution.

The word Hostman originally referred to a merchant who, from around the 15th century, acted as an intermediary or ‘host’ for visiting traders to Newcastle who wished to buy or sell goods. They would often need a local merchant to provide introductions and help manage the trade through the town’s commercial rules. Over time, a group of Newcastle’s merchants began to specialise in ‘hosting’ southern-based coal merchants as intermediaries between the coal mine owners (at the time predominantly the clergy) and the ship owners who transported coal on behalf of the southern-based merchants.

By the sixteenth century, Crown charters effectively prevented any other town along the Tyne from trading in coal; thus, Newcastle’s Hostmen were able to turn their mercantile influence into something approaching a monopoly. So much so that by 1508, they had formed an unofficial guild arranging the transport of coal from mines around the region and then down the Tyne in keelboats for its subsequent shipment by sea to London and continental Europe.

This gave the Hostmen enormous influence over the market for coal, and this was further cemented in 1583 when Elizabeth I granted a lease of the former Church-owned Palatinate mines at Gateshead and Whickham to two Newcastle merchants, Henry Anderson and William Selby, who subsequently divided interests in the mines among the Newcastle Hostmen. This became known as the ‘Grand Lease’, after which the Hostmen became so dominant that they acquired the nickname the ‘Lords of Coal.’

Finally, in 1600, Elizabeth I granted the Hostmen a royal charter that gave them considerable political influence as well as their significant economic influence, making them one of the most powerful political groups in northeast England. Up until the mid-18th century, the Hostmen's monopoly was so strong that repeated attempts to challenge their privileges became a recurring source of political conflict long after the dissolution.

The Darlington and Stockton Times writing of Arthur Wharton

In the recent World Cup, Ghana held out solidly against England and, had refereeing decisions gone more Ghana’s way, they might well have sneaked a win. Many Ghanaian players have also become household names playing in the English Premier League, but long before them came Arthur Wharton, a now somewhat unknown figure, yet once regarded as one of the great pioneers of modern sport: the world’s first recorded fastest man and the world’s first black professional footballer, when organised football was in its infancy.

Born in October 1865, Arthur’s father, Henry, was a Grenadian who moved to what was then the Gold Coast (now Ghana) as a Wesleyan minister, while Arthur’s mother, Annie, was born into an influential Gold Coast family.

Henry died when Arthur was just eight years old, and his uncle stepped in to look after his education alongside Annie. That education began at the prestigious Mfantsipim School in Ghana, the same school that many years later the former Secretary General of the UN, Kofi Annan, attended.

While accounts differ slightly over the precise circumstances and date of Arthur’s first arrival in Britain, common belief is that his education continued at Dr Cheyne’s School in London between 1875 and 1879.

After spending time with his family in Grenada in the West Indies, Arthur returned to Britain in 1882 to train as a missionary teacher at Shoal Hill College in Cannock, Staffordshire, before moving the following year to Darlington, a town in northeast England, to attend Cleveland College.

Darlington arguably became the place where Arthur’s British sporting story really began, as it was while at Cleveland College that he discovered his extraordinary natural talent for sport. That talent would completely transform the course of his life.

Arthur began his sporting career in 1883 as a goalkeeper for the Darlington Cricket and Football Club under a man called Manny Harbron. It was Manny who discovered that Arthur was an outstanding track athlete as well as a great goalkeeper and became his mentor.

After competing in local track competitions, Darlington area newspapers started to suggest Arthur could win the national sprint title, and it was clear he should be competing at the highest level.

And, just as an aside, a little on Darlington that became famous for its role in the birth of the railway age. In 1825, the Stockton and Darlington Railway, the world’s first public railway to use steam locomotives for both passengers and freight, opened with Locomotion No. 1, designed by George Stephenson, making its first historic journey from Darlington to Stockton.

By the time Arthur moved to Darlington, the railway had transformed it into a major industrial centre, particularly for locomotive building and railway engineering. As the 1800s progressed, the railways had helped develop sports such as cricket and football into the professional leagues and associations that we recognise today. While these sports had their origins before the growth of the railway network, it was that network that provided the opportunity for teams to travel greater distances to play other teams and for supporters to go along to watch.

For example, cricket’s All England Eleven was travelling by train as early as the 1840s, promoting the game to a larger audience, while the English football league, established in 1888, saw teams travel across the country to play fixtures. Railway companies welcomed regular, profitable passenger traffic and catered for spectators by providing special excursion trains to popular sports events, such as the London-based FA Cup final.

But let’s get back to Arthur, athletics and the Amateur Athletics Association (AAA), established in 1880 at a time when the sport was rapidly growing in popularity. On 3 July 1886, Arthur competed at the AAA Championship at Stamford Bridge in London, running in the 100-yard sprint and becoming the first black AAA champion by winning the Prince Hassan Pacha Cup with a recorded time of 10 seconds dead and thus the world’s first official fastest man. The following year Arthur successfully defended his title after equalling his own world record at Sturbridge Cricket Ground, a record that stood for more than 30 years.

As well as his track success, Arthur’s spectacular goalkeeping for Darlington Cricket and Football Club attracted attention, and contemporary press reports are extremely enthusiastic. During the 1886-7 season, Arthur helped the club win the final of the Cleveland Challenge Cup and become champions of Cleveland, which was the name of the English county in which Darlington was situated at the time. His incredible performance for Darlington led to recognition by the press, who described Arthur in terms suggesting that he was an outstanding and unusual goalkeeper, with one match report praising him for producing “one of the best exhibitions of goalkeeping” seen for some time. His style was apparently unconventional, with one description saying that he would crouch at the side of his goal and then suddenly rush out to make a save, his speed undoubtedly helping him. He also had an exceptionally powerful punch, according to later accounts.

At the time, being an amateur allowed Arthur to play for more than one club, so in 1886 he also signed for Preston North End (PNE) and played for the club for two seasons. It has to be said his decision was not a popular one in Darlington, with that town’s Northern Echo reporting him ‘a great loss to Darlington’, but his time at Preston furthered his career by playing for arguably the best team in the country, known as the ‘Invincibles’ and managed by William Suddell, who in much the modern style recruited players from across the country both as professionals and amateurs.

During his first season with PNE, Arthur played in six FA Cup matches, reaching the semi-final. Later in the season, PNE offered him a contract as a semi-professional, making him the first person of colour to be a paid footballer.

Yet he did not stay with PNE, which was to become dominant in English football at the beginning of the professional era. We can only speculate on what his involvement might have been if he had remained with a team that helped define the transition from Victorian amateur football to the organised professional game of today. He might have been part of the famous side that won the first Football League title and FA Cup double in 1888–89.

And just as another aside, there is also a connection of Arthur with Newcastle, as while playing for Darlington in the 1885–86 season, his goalkeeping ability led to him being selected for the prestigious Newcastle and District team, then regarded as the strongest team in northeast England before the formation of Newcastle United, still some six years away. So, before his move to the mighty Preston North End, there was wider recognition of Arthur as an outstanding goalkeeper in northeast England’s sporting world.

However, in 1888 Arthur left football to concentrate on his career as a runner, becoming one of Britain’s most celebrated sprinters and a genuinely elite athlete whose football career was only one part of his sporting life.

Yet a year later, for reasons unknown, Arthur signed as a full professional footballer for Rotherham Town; perhaps the word ‘professional’ suggests why he returned to football, as it offered him a regular income. His decision confirmed his place as the world’s first black professional footballer. Arthur was not necessarily the first black player to play football in Britain, as other black players, including the Scottish international Andrew Watson, were already playing. But Arthur was the first to receive money for playing and, along with that, the first black player to appear in the English Football League.

Yet Rotherham did not sign Arthur as a goalkeeper but as a forward, which demonstrates his versatility. However, it wasn’t long before he returned to goalkeeping duties after an injury to Rotherham’s goalkeeper. In Arthur’s first season at Rotherham, they reached the fourth round of the FA Cup, and later the club won the newly formed Midland League twice, with Arthur playing in goal. Notably, on 1 September 1892, Liverpool Football Club played their first match at the now-famous Anfield, and in goal for Rotherham Town that day was none other than Arthur. His career at Rotherham lasted several years, and during the football off-season, he played professional cricket, again demonstrating what a multi-talented sportsman he was. Alas, disputes over pay and recognition eventually led Arthur to request a transfer from Rotherham to Sheffield United.

While playing for Rotherham in 1890, Arthur married Emma Lister, and, like many athletes of his time, he also had to seek work outside of football to make a living. In 1891, records show he was the landlord of the Albert Tavern in Rotherham, while later, he and Emma ran a tobacconist’s business. More income came from Arthur’s cricket career, as in 1896 he signed as a professional for Stalybridge Cricket Club. We must remember this was a period when elite athletes often had to combine several sporting careers to make a living, and Arthur probably played his first cricket long before he took up athletics or football, when at school in Ghana.

Arthur’s move to Sheffield United was not as the club’s first-choice goalkeeper but again as a forward. The goalkeeping position belonged to the enormous and celebrated William ‘Fatty’ Foulke, who later became one of the most famous goalkeepers of the Victorian era. Arthur played on the wing, and contemporary descriptions emphasised his athleticism and explosive movement. In this position, Arthur made several first-team appearances, one of which was his most historically significant game against Sunderland in the First Division. That appearance made Arthur the first black player to play in England’s top division, a landmark often overlooked when discussing the history of English football.

After leaving Sheffield United, Arthur continued to move around the football world, playing again for Rotherham Town, Stalybridge Rovers, and Ashton North End. Primarily as a goalkeeper but at times as a winger.

His final Football League club was Stockport County, where he played in the Second Division in the 1901–02 season. His last recorded match came in February 1902, and while his surviving Football League statistics are modest by modern standards, his statistics do not tell the full story. Football in Arthur’s time was still developing. Records are incomplete, players moved between clubs frequently, and the modern concept of the professional footballer registered to one club had barely emerged.

Arthur’s retirement from football did not mean that he suddenly stopped being involved in sport, far from it. After his football days were over, cricket became particularly important to Arthur, and in 1907, for example, he was still playing cricket for Rotherham Town Cricket Club. Indeed cricket and running remained important parts of his life, and he continued to compete and take an interest in athletics well into later life. His last cricket matches were playing for the Edlington Colliery team. One later account recalled that even in his fifties he was still extraordinarily quick; an eyewitness supposedly remarked that he “could catch pigeons.” .

There is also an interesting story from 1914, when Arthur was in his late 40s, and received an offer of work as a cricket coach in County Durham. He did not take the position, however, because he could not find sufficiently well-paid employment in the area to supplement the coaching income. This gives us a glimpse of the economic difficulties he was facing, as even his sporting expertise was not enough to provide him with a secure livelihood. In a sense, Arthur never really stopped being a sportsman; he simply lost the ability to make a living from sport. As it was when the Great War broke out, Arthur became involved with the Volunteer Training Corps, a civilian organisation often described as a precursor to the Home Guard of the Second World War.

The decisive change in Arthur’s life came when he moved to Moorthorpe in West Yorkshire, with Emma (they had no children). He gained work in the coal mining industry sometime before 1915 (surviving biographies are not entirely consistent on the circumstances/timing) at Yorkshire Main Colliery in Edlington, near Doncaster, as a haulage hand. Work that was a long way removed from the glamorous side of Victorian sport. Colliery haulage was physically demanding industrial labour, involving the movement of coal and mine tubs underground or around the pit workings.

Arthur worked at the colliery right up until the final days of his life, and he appeared to have become a full part of the mining community, with surviving evidence suggesting that people knew him not simply as a famous former footballer but as Arthur, a popular mine worker.

There is no clear record of Arthur suffering overt racial abuse during his sporting career, and it would be misleading to claim that we know exactly how much direct prejudice he personally experienced. However, it would be naive to think that he did not face a degree of racial prejudice, even if contemporary reports don’t exist. The press sometimes mentioned his race, occasionally referring to him as a “coloured” or “negro” player. The language was typical of Victorian Britain but inappropriate today, treating his race as an unusual characteristic and something worth mentioning rather than simply describing him as they would a white player.

After all, Arthur was a black man competing in elite British sport at a time when ideas of European racial superiority were widespread. Arthur’s extraordinary athletic achievements gave him a status as a genuinely elite sportsman, and in that sense, his talent may have protected him to some degree from discrimination. But that should not be confused with equality. His story is therefore not simply one of overcoming racism through sporting talent; it is also a story about how a society can celebrate an exceptional black individual while still maintaining deeply prejudiced attitudes. Admiration as an exceptional individual is different from being free from prejudice, and he may have suffered the quieter, systemic form of racial prejudice that limited the recognition and opportunities available to black people. Importantly, his teammates appear to have seen Arthur not as a black man but simply as a popular figure and with evident respect for his ability, which no one could easily ignore.

Arthur died on either the 12 or 13 December 1930 at the age of 65 after his admission to Springwell Sanatorium in Balby, near Doncaster, and was described as suffering a long and painful but unspecified illness. Although representatives of some of his former sporting clubs attended Arthur’s funeral, there was no headstone on his grave in Edlington Cemetery. A contemporary obituary in the Doncaster Chronicle reportedly described him as taking a keen interest in sport in the village and being “very popular.” However, his social position had changed dramatically.

He had begun life in Ghana in a relatively privileged family, gaining a good education and achieving international sporting fame; however, professional sport did not make him wealthy. There are some accounts that Arthur developed a drinking problem in later life, but if true, the precise extent of the problem is difficult to establish from the surviving evidence. It should therefore be treated cautiously, as while there may be some truth to it, his change in circumstances was also determined by the fiscal realities of professional sport in his era and after their playing days the lack of any meaningful pension or financial security net for former athletes, Whatever their colour, any professional sportsman of his era was in a precarious position of receiving little monetary reward within an insecure profession, and many white athletes also experienced hardship as Victorian and Edwardian professional athletes earned nothing like the money available to elite sportspeople today. My own father, a youth player for NUFC in the mid-1920s, chose to leave the professional game for firefighting as it gave a more reliable income.

As it was, Arthur died living in relative poverty. One sad account is of Arthur’s rejection for a civil service position in the Gold Coast Colonial Administration, with his sporting activities reportedly regarded as inappropriate for a colonial official. If accurate, this suggests that his sporting success itself may have conflicted with contemporary expectations about the role of a black colonial subject. It’s reported that Emma survived Arthur and died in 1944, and her grave is in Rotherham.

After Arthur’s death, the world then effectively forgot a man who had been a world-record-setting athlete and sporting pioneer, breaking racial barriers at the very highest level of Victorian sport. He demonstrated, through sheer sporting ability, that the racial concepts of his age were nonsense, yet his subsequent obscurity also demonstrates how easily the achievements of black pioneers could fade from the historical record.

It was not until 1997 that a headstone appeared on Arthur’s grave, following a campaign by Football Unites, Racism Divides (FURD). Then the revival of interest in Arthur gathered pace, and a particularly important figure in that was Arthur Wharton Foundation founder Shaun Campbell, who helped campaign for greater recognition of Arthur’s achievements.

In 2003, Arthur received full recognition of his contribution to football with his induction into the English Football Hall of Fame, placing him alongside people such as Alan Ball, Herbert Chapman, Bobby Robson, Gary Lineker, Pat Jennings and Peter Schmeichel. His inclusion was important because it formally recognised him as an important figure in the history of the sport.

Just over 10 years later a 16-foot statue of Arthur was unveiled at St George’s Park, the home of the Football Association’s national football centre as a striking symbol of a footballer from 19th-century Ghana, who had once been buried in an unmarked grave, but now has a prominent place at the heart of English football and effectively and appropriately placing Arthur in the sphere of the modern game that he helped pioneer more than a century earlier.

Bill Muckle - one of the ‘wreckers’

It was to Newcastle’s Theatre Royal a week or so back to watch a production of ‘The Cramlington Train Wreckers’ as part of that theatre marking the centenary of the 1926 General Strike.

The play has been one of the most successful pieces of regional theatre in recent times with a sell-out tour in 2024, so it was apt that this local story should return to grace one of the country’s finest Victorian theatres.

Written by Ed Waugh and directed by Russell Floyd (who also performs), the play tells the story of eight Northumberland miners imprisoned after derailing the Flying Scotsman during the General Strike, little-known historical episode. But rather than presenting a dry, heavy historical account, the play has rightly earned praise for combining historical truthfulness with accessible storytelling as Waugh explores the incident through the social background of the time and the life of miners and their families, adding humour and song while not diluting the hardship of the times, the fortitude of the imprisoned miners and the solidarity of mining communities.

It continues Ed Waugh’s track record of northeast English drama and his other plays, Wor Bella, Carrying David, and Hadaway Harry. The Cramlington Wreckers again draws on northeast England’s history while examining universal themes about justice and loyalty. Although rooted in a specific event in Northumberland, its examination of ordinary people facing extraordinary circumstances has found an affinity with audiences well beyond the region.

While the derailment is clearly the nub of the play, the drama focuses less on the accident than on the social background and human consequences: the barely subsistence wages of the miners, the harsh imprisonment of some after the ‘wrecking’ and the impact on their families. The play questions whether the severe sentences handed down were fair or intended as a political act to make an example of working-class activists during one of Britain’s most turbulent industrial disputes.

I’ll come back to the play, but first let’s look at the incident that became one of the most controversial episodes of the 1926 General Strike to understand why the derailment happened and to gain an appreciation of the mood of northeast England at that time.

Following the Great War, the coal industry in northeast England fell into decline, with the result that private mine owners sought to both reduce miners’ wages by 40% and lengthen their working hours, arguing that falling coal prices left them with little alternative. The miners refused to accept such a change in their conditions. As recorded in parliament at the time the average wage in the coal mines was 53 shillings a week (around £200 today), this was in comparison to a bricklayer at 97 shillings (£380 a week today), a train driver at 72 shillings (£285 a week today), an engineering labourer at 70 shillings (£277 a week today) and a docker at 66 shillings (£255 a week today). It’s therefore no surprise the miners refused the requested drop in wages, and I’ll declare an interest here as my maternal grandfather, a coal miner since 1907 and a veteran of the Great War, happened to be one of those who refused.

When negotiations between mine owners and miners’ leaders collapsed, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) called a General Strike, which began on 4 May 1926 when around 2 million workers walked out in support of the miners, with railways, newspapers, transport and heavy industry severely disrupted.

However, under government pressure, the TUC and newly founded Labour Party decided to end the General Strike after only nine days, leaving the coal miners to continue with their strike alone and indeed remain locked out of the mines for months afterwards.

In Cramlington, which is a town some 9 miles north of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and many other mining towns and villages, emotions were running high with miners believing that so-called ‘blackleg’ labour, workers who continued working despite the strike, were moving coal on the railways.

At a fateful union lodge meeting in Cramlington, miners gathered to listen to William “Bill” Golightly, head of the Northumberland Miners’ Union (and incidentally a grandfather of the actor Robson Green). “Stop all wheels turning,” said Golightly, with the intent to halt railway traffic carrying coal and thus preventing the undermining of the miners’ strike. Bill Muckle, one of the miners at the meeting, wrote about the incident in his autobiography ‘No Regrets.’ Bill went ‘down the pit’ aged 13 and had originally had to purchase all his own equipment, including candles. He had bitter memories of an earlier coal miners’ strike and their defeat in 1921 and of having to beg, poach, and go to soup kitchens to get by. He and many other miners had experienced desperate poverty and were determined to see this coal mining strike successful.

On the afternoon after the lodge meeting, a large group of striking miners from Cramlington removed a length of rail from the British East Coast Main Line just south of Cramlington Station with the intent of stopping what they believed to be a freight train loaded with coal. To prevent an accident, the men stationed one of their number on a bridge over the track to wave a red flag and alert the train driver to stop, as danger waited ahead.

Unknown to the miners, however, was that the next train to pass would be the prestigious Flying Scotsman passenger service travelling from Edinburgh to London and carrying 281 people. Hauling the train was not the later-famous locomotive that we now know as Flying Scotsman, but a Northeastern Railway locomotive No. 2565, Merry Hampton. While the train driver and his assistant were experienced in their work, the two firemen were volunteers, one named Robert Aitken, a student at Edinburgh University, and another called Hird. Firemen had a safety responsibility to keep a lookout, not just to shovel coal, so this might be significant in what happened.

A gang of volunteers working on the railway line had already stopped the train some 300 yards north of Cramlington Station, flagging it down to warn that they had seen a large group of miners near the track and there may be trouble ahead. The driver therefore continued at much reduced speed. However, for whatever reason, either the volunteer firemen failed to see the man on the bridge waving the red flag or didn’t understand it as a signal to stop. Although only travelling at 20mph, when the locomotive reached the missing rail, the engine overturned, and several coaches left the rails. Many passengers were shocked, but only one suffered a minor injury when his luggage fell onto his foot.

Unsurprisingly, the government rapidly launched a search to find the perpetrators; however, although the act of removing the rail involved some 30 men and police questioned large numbers of the local population for weeks, nobody spoke out to identify those responsible. Then, after a month of such questioning, six men who participated in the incident, when offered immunity from prosecution, agreed to turn ‘King’s Evidence’, allowing prosecutors to bring charges against eight others.

One of the men who turned ‘King’s Evidence’ to save himself from prison was Lyle Sidney Waugh, with others named Wardle, Taylor, and Dodds, all of whom were widely viewed as traitors by the local community. Because a family member of Waugh was a police constable and another a police inspector, it was widely believed they pressured him to cooperate. Bill Muckle, talking many years later, offered, “They obviously told him to turn King’s evidence and save his own skin. It was a dirty, rotten trick!”

In court, the eight accused argued that over 30 people had taken part, including the very witnesses giving evidence against them, so why were they the only ones on trial? One of the accused said Lyle Waugh was heard to shout: “Hadaway lads, lift the rail oot!” and Bill Muckle said, “Waugh was involved in the derailment. He was there with me! He knocked the last chock out. Everyone knew.” The accused also insisted they had thought it would be a coal train coming along the tracks, and that they had warned the driver with enough time to stop.

At the first court hearing, Waugh said under oath he was only eight yards from the scene, but then, when giving testimony a second time, he said he was 300 yards from the scene. The other prosecution witnesses also changed their evidence in that way. Given that the jury had to issue a guilty verdict ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’, the decision rested on the credibility of the prosecution witnesses, all of whom admitted they’d changed their stories.

Technically, it was perjury, but the Judge was dismissive. All eight accused received verdicts of guilty of endangering life and were given sentences of between four and eight years. Those sentences were to be served 300 miles away in Maidstone jail, with the men housed alongside murderers in squalid conditions. Such a distance from Cramlington made it exceedingly difficult for the families of the men to visit them, while one of the imprisoned miners later described their treatment in prison as comparable to that of violent criminals.

Even for the time, these sentences shocked many observers since they believed the men committed ‘a political crime’ rather than an ordinary criminal offence, with many maintaining that the sole intent of the punishment was to discourage industrial action in the future.

The International Class War Prisoners Aid Society (ICWPA) took an immediate interest in the case. ICWPA was an international campaign launched in the UK by the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in 1925. The society paid for the visits of those miners’ families who wished to travel to Maidstone, although visits were limited to only 30 minutes, so many didn’t. The families asked for an extension to an hour given the distance they had to travel, but the authorities only granted an extra 10 minutes. In place of family visits, members of the ICWPA would visit the men and help raise their spirits and those of their families by passing information between them.

ICWPA members also forcibly ‘lobbied’ the Home Secretary, although some of the miners’ families were uncomfortable with this, and one of the mothers of an imprisoned miner wrote a letter to the Home Secretary denying any accusation of being a ‘red’ and asserting her and her son’s Christian values.

However, it wasn’t just the ICPWA, as growing pressure from trade unions, politicians and other campaigning organisations arguing the punishments had been excessive eventually led to reductions in the men’s sentences and by December 1929 all had been released.

Cramlington welcomed the men home with rallies and celebrations, and the eight men remained well known in the area as heroes who had stood up for their fellow workers during one of Britain’s greatest industrial disputes. Some of the men publicly showed their remorse for their actions, whereas others claimed justification of their actions because of the poverty they and their community faced,

“We were not violent men and had the middle class ‘plus four’ train crews and platelayers not sought to break the strike; the incident would never have occurred. Our aim was to stop blackleg coal trains only, and for this we have no regrets. We were on starvation wages and fighting to preserve ourselves and our families from further degradation”

Lyle Waugh, the chief prosecution witness, returned to the Cramlington area after the trial and later worked and even played football alongside some of the very men he had sent to prison. Another who gave evidence against the miners actually lived next door to the wife of one of the imprisoned men while he was serving time. Overall, however, while the convicted miners harboured lifelong resentment against those who turned King’s Evidence, they saw little point in confronting them. In 1939, Waugh was still living in Cramlington West Village and believed to be a salvage worker at the Wrightson Pit site. He was then lost to history until he died in 1957.

Others in Cramlington were not so forgiving, feeling that giving evidence against the eight miners was unforgivable. Those who gave evidence had been lifelong friends of the accused, playing together as youngsters and later working together when they became miners. That searing, heartbreaking level of betrayal by the turncoats, as those in Cramlington called them, was still felt by many, decades later, and it’s recorded that families even openly celebrated the death of one of the ‘witnesses' years after the trial.

Over the decades, many outside of Northumberland forgot the story until it began to attract renewed attention after the broadcast in 1969 of a BBC documentary ‘Yesterday’s Witness: The Cramlington Train Wreckers’, which caught on film the memories of some of the surviving participants, both from the train and the ‘wreckers’.

So, let’s return to the theatre production which presents the story of ordinary men caught in extraordinary circumstances. There is plenty of humour in the play alongside the hardship, and the script captures the wit but also the determination of the mining community without ever descending into sentimentality, with dialogue that sounds genuine and rooted in the rhythms of Geordie and Pitmatic.

The performances from Russell Floyd (a man of many parts), Micky Cochrane and Alex Tahnee were uniformly strong, with the ensemble conveying well both the fellowship of the mining community and the emotional cost of the harsh sentences imposed on the men.

The staging of the production does not rely on an elaborate set. Only a couple of chairs and tables are used, allowing the historical events and characters to take centre stage. Russell Floyd uses a few props to help the audience distinguish between some of the real-life characters he portrays, and overall this simplicity is highly effective, holding the audience in the story without distraction.

If the play has a weakness, it is that some of its historical exposition occasionally slows the momentum, and a handful of speeches explain rather than dramatise the issues at stake. Yet these are minor reservations in a work whose sincerity and emotional honesty are never in doubt.

Overall, the play is much more than a history lesson; it is a tribute to the dignity of working people living in borderline poverty and whose story deserves remembering. It is a story of a bitter industrial conflict that divided Britain in the 1920s and illustrates how desperate people became caught up in an historic event whose consequences resounded far beyond their own village.

For me, the play also demonstrates that some of the finest theatre does not require spectacle; it simply needs a powerful story, well told.

Fortiter Defendit Triumphans

The motto of Newcastle-upon-Tyne

The Coat of Arms of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, granted in August 1575, displays a striking red shield with three silver towers or castles. They are among the city’s oldest and most recognisable symbols. Above the shield stands a lion atop a castle holding the banner of Saint George, while to either side are two mythical seahorses, added much later to acknowledge Newcastle’s maritime trade and importance as a port.

Yet early Medieval Newcastle’s first common seal depicted only a single castle, and it wasn’t until the thirteenth century that the seal featured three. So was this increase due to the heraldic tradition of repeating symbols on a shield to create a balanced, visually striking design, or were there indeed three castles in Newcastle’s history?

Well, it was the Romans who first recognised the strategic position of a particular hill above the lowest crossing of the River Tyne and thus built on that hill what might be seen as the first ‘castle’ or fort around BC 122 to guard the bridge they built below (Pons Aelius - named after the family name of Hadrian) that stretched across the Tyne from Ad Caprae Caput meaning ‘At the Goat’s Head’ or modern Gateshead as we know it today. Pons Aelius stood where today’s Swing Bridge is located.

Although there is limited documentary evidence, a settlement called ‘Monkchester’ (sometimes spelt Munecceaster or Monkceaster) appears in medieval records, showing the continuity of occupation of the area after the Romans left Britain in the early 5th century. Chester / Ceaster, being the Old English word derived from the Latin castra, meaning ‘fort’ or ‘camp,’ and reflected in many places in Britain that were once Roman forts. The exact origin of the ‘Monk’ element is uncertain but may refer to a connection with the great monastic centre at Monkwearmouth–Jarrow Abbey. With the Romans gone, their fort gradually fell into ruin, and there is some evidence that an early Christian church may well have stood on or near the site of the fort.

So there’s a solid argument for the first castle, but what about the second? Well, most see that as the 1080 Norman-built wooden motte-and-bailey Novum Castellum (New Castle) built, unsurprisingly, on the site of the Roman fort because it already occupied the best defensive position overlooking the Tyne crossing.

Let’s look at the chap who oversaw the construction of that Norman wooden ‘New Castle’, which would later give the city its name. And that was Robert Curthose.

And let’s first deal with the epithet Curthose. These were the days before surnames served as family identifiers, so people acquired descriptive epithets. Robert’s father was known as William the Bastard before he became the Conqueror. The first term describes his parentage rather than his attitude, although after the devastation he wrought in what has become known as the ‘harrying of the north ’, we in the north would say his original moniker fitted him like a glove.

Roberts’ epithet comes from the Norman French courteheuse, meaning ‘short stockings’, which chroniclers claim referred to his short legs or stocky build, and while it may have begun as a teasing remark, conceivably from his own father, it became the name by which history remembers him.

Whatever the background to his epithet, Robert was one of the most fascinating and tragic figures of the Norman age with a life defined by family feuds, crusading glory, military defeat, and finally nearly three decades of imprisonment.

Born around 1054, Robert was the eldest son of William and Matilda of Flanders, but although William could not prevent Robert being the natural heir to William’s Norman lands, he denied Robert the automatic right to become King of England.

More than that, as William’s eldest son, Robert, as he got older, expected to exercise some independent authority during his father’s lifetime. William was having none of that and kept all power firmly in his own hands. Eventually, in 1077 when Robert was in his early twenties, his frustration at his lack of authority led him to rebel against his father.

Robert gathered several young Norman nobles and attempted a surprise seizure of the ducal castle at Rouen, but the coup failed almost immediately, after which William ordered Robert’s arrest, forcing him and his supporters to flee Normandy.

Robert then sought support from Philip I of France, who was delighted to exploit divisions within William’s family, as William had become one of France’s most powerful nobles, and weakening him suited the French crown perfectly.

Philip granted Robert control of the frontier castle of Gerberoy, on Normandy’s eastern border, and from there Robert launched raids into Norman territory that culminated in the Battle of Gerberoy in early 1079, when William personally led an army to besiege the castle.

According to several chroniclers, during a sortie from the fortress, Robert and his followers attacked the besiegers, and Robert met an armoured knight in combat without recognising him. He struck the knight with his lance, unhorsing him, and it was only after hearing the fallen man’s voice that Robert realised he had just knocked his own father from his horse, injuring William in an encounter that was an extraordinary humiliation for him.

Despite Robert’s ‘success’ at Gerberoy, repeated pleas from Matilda eventually led to the reconciliation of father and son, with Robert returning to court. Though mutual trust never recovered, William was a pragmatic ruler, and while he had not forgotten Robert’s rebellion, he recognised that he had proved himself a capable battlefield commander, so rather than leaving him idle, which had helped spark Robert’s rebellion in the first place, William decided to give him an important responsibility in northern England that remained unstable even years after the Norman Conquest.

And just as an aside, Robert’s rebellion offers a revealing portrait of the man, with contemporary chroniclers consistently describing him as brave, charismatic and an accomplished knight, with his victory over William at Gerberoy testifying to that. Yet the revolt also exposed the weaknesses that would characterise his career: impatience, poor political judgement, and a tendency to let others (in this case Philip I) draw him into conflicts he lacked the determination to finish. These qualities would repeatedly prevent him from fulfilling the promise of his early years, despite being the eldest son of one of medieval Europe’s greatest rulers.

But let’s turn back to Robert’s role in northern England. Only a year earlier, he had been fighting against his father at Gerberoy. Now, William was entrusting him with one of the most sensitive military commands in his kingdom on one of its most dangerous frontiers. I mentioned that William had crushed major rebellions during his ‘Harrying of the North’, a brutal scorched-earth campaign in 1069 to destroy any resources that northern-based rebels and Scottish invaders could use in their attempt to overthrow him.

During that campaign, Norman forces systematically set fire to villages, destroyed food stores, and slaughtered livestock, resulting in devastating famine that led to thousands of deaths. Yet the Anglo-Saxon nobility had not entirely disappeared, and ten years on, Norman control of Northumbria remained fragile, especially as Malcolm III of Scotland frequently supported English exiles and launched raids across the border. In 1080, the situation deteriorated dramatically after the murder of the first Norman Prince-bishop, Walcher, near Gateshead.

As a Norman appointee, Walcher faced resentment from the local Northumbrian nobility, and he became even more unpopular among the Northumbrians when he failed to stop Malcolm III’s invasion in 1079. Walcher was also unable to prevent his officials from plundering the local population, but the final straw was his suspected role in the murder of one of his chief advisers, a Northumbrian nobleman called Ligulf, who had become a vocal critic of Walcher’s administration. The perpetrator was allegedly Gilbert, a relative of Walcher’s while the bishop’s chaplain, Leobwin, was also implicated in the deed.

To address the unrest, Walcher convened a meeting with local leaders at Gateshead, near a church where St. Mary’s Heritage Centre now stands by the Tyne Bridge, likely hoping to restore peace and order. But the meeting quickly became hostile.

An angry crowd assembled and drowned out the bishop’s words with a cry of “good rede short rede slea ye the Bishop” and sallied forth. The bishop took refuge in the church, but the mob set the building alight, causing the bishop to flee, whereupon, on sighting him, the mob set about him with their swords to fatal effect. His murder constituted a major turning point in northeast England’s history. It was the first murder of a Norman bishop in England and a moment that would reverberate strongly through the region for years to come. William needed someone he trusted to restore order.

He thus dispatched Robert, who as the king’s lieutenant exercised royal authority on his father’s behalf, at the head of a substantial army to crush resistance across Northumbria and punish those responsible for Walcher’s death. Once done, he was to rebuild Norman control over the region and strengthen frontier defences against Scotland.

Robert’s campaign proved effective, and unlike the devastating ‘Harrying’ a decade earlier, Robert’s expedition was more focused on eliminating opposition than laying waste to the countryside. He also moved into Scotland against Malcolm, who quickly reached an agreement with Robert rather than risk conflict. But for the purposes of this piece, Robert’s most enduring achievement of his time in the north was the construction of a new wooden motte-and-bailey castle above the River Tyne to guard one of the principal routes to and from Scotland.

After his success, Robert returned to Normandy, and when William died in 1087, he became the Duke of Normandy. But it was William Rufus, William’s second son, who became King of England while Henry, William’s youngest son, received a large sum of money.

Inevitably, this division led to decades of conflict between the brothers, including the northern barons’ rebellion against William Rufus, prompted by the fact that many barons owned estates on both sides of the Channel and, finding it difficult to serve two masters, sought to reunite England and Normandy under Robert. He was to have sailed from Norway with an army in support of the rebels but never arrived, and William Rufus was thus able to quash the rebellion.

Robert then decided his duty was to participate in the First Crusade, but needing money to finance his journey to the ‘Holy Land,’ he mortgaged Normandy to William Rufus for 10,000 marks. A colossal amount that equated to circa 25% of England’s revenue at the time and would probably run to hundreds of millions today.

On crusade, Robert became one of the expedition’s most respected commanders, fighting at Antioch, Jerusalem and Ascalon, and showing decisiveness and bravery in battle. Indeed, several chroniclers regarded him as one of the finest military leaders of the expedition, while some later traditions even claimed the Crusaders offered him the crown of Jerusalem, though this story is uncertain.

It was while Robert was slowly returning from the Holy Land that William Rufus died unexpectedly in 1100 in a highly suspicious hunting ‘accident’ in the New Forest. Robert, as the elder surviving brother, had a strong hereditary claim to the English throne, but while he delayed his return, Henry, his younger brother, acted immediately, seizing the royal treasury, securing the support of the leading nobles, and having himself crowned King of England within days.

When Robert finally invaded England in 1101, many expected civil war, but Robert realised that Henry had the support of the English nobles, so instead the brothers negotiated the Treaty of Alton, in which Robert recognised Henry as King of England in return for an annual payment and certain concessions. It was a peaceful settlement, but in hindsight it was probably Robert’s greatest political mistake, as of course the peace did not last because, as Henry steadily strengthened his position, Robert, as a weak and ineffective ruler, struggled to control Normandy and eventually, on 28 September 1106, the brothers met at the Battle of Tinchebray, in lower Normandy at which Henry won decisively, capturing Robert.

Many historians regard Tinchebray as one of the most consequential battles in medieval English history, as Henry’s victory reunited England and Normandy, creating a powerful Anglo-Norman state that lasted for decades, but it wasn’t so good for Robert, who spent the remaining twenty-eight years of his life in captivity.

Contrary to popular imagination of the times, Robert’s captivity did not involve chains or dungeons. As a high-born prisoner, he was treated respectfully, allowed to retain servants and even to hunt on occasion, though he remained under a watchful guard. He lived in a succession of royal castles in Wareham, Devizes, Bristol and finally Cardiff Castle, where he died in 1134 at around eighty years of age, an exceptional age for someone in the medieval era, especially a warrior.

Robert’s remains now lie in Gloucester Cathedral, where a magnificent carved wooden effigy, one of the oldest royal effigies in England, survives today and is among the cathedral’s greatest treasures.

And what of that motte-and-bailey castle that Robert left overlooking the River Tyne? Well, by the reign of Henry II, some twenty years after Robert’s death, it was obvious that the timber castle was no longer sufficiently strong to function as a defence against the marauding Scots. Therefore, in 1168, Henry ordered the construction of a massive rectangular stone keep under the master mason Maurice, who also worked at Dover Castle and the Tower of London. Rather than simply encasing the wooden keep in stone, the Normans demolished the timber structures and built an entirely new fortress, with stone curtain walls enclosing a triangular bailey. Interestingly, the first motte no longer survives as it does in many Norman castles. At Newcastle, the builders of the stone castle removed the motte, so today there is no visible trace of either the wooden castle or its earth mound.

So there, with something of a tentative link, we have castle number three: the stone castle that, over the centuries, has changed much. For example, in the mid-13th century, Henry III added the castle’s imposing North Gate, now known as the Black Gate. Its name does not derive from some sinister goings-on, but because, after its remodelling in the early 17th century to create accommodation, one of the tenants was Patrick Black, a London merchant who became so closely associated with the building that people began referring to the gate by his name.

For centuries, Newcastle Castle was one of England’s principal frontier fortresses, and during the medieval wars between England and Scotland, Newcastle endured repeated sieges, becoming a city of high thick walls, well-defended gates and lofty observation towers. It was in 1644 that King Charles bestowed the phrase that is now Newcastle’s motto, Fortiter Defendit Triumphans (‘Triumphing by Brave Defence’) as a token of royalist support during a long siege by the Scottish Covenanter Army. There is some irony in that eventually the Scots proved triumphant, and Charles ended up imprisoned by them in Newcastle before being handed over to the English parliamentarians for trial and his subsequent execution.

Over time, however, and as relations between Scotland and England began calming, Newcastle’s castle became less essential as a fortress and gradually fell into disrepair. In the 19th century, the construction of a railway viaduct cut directly across much of the old bailey, destroying large parts of the medieval castle complex. What survives today is chiefly only the magnificent stone keep and the Black Gate.

The evolution of the city’s name from Novum Castellum to Newcastle-upon-Tyne began as early as 1216, as the settlement grew in prominence as a fortified crossing point of the River Tyne with growing trade entirely built around its geographic position alongside the river; King John’s charter for the city and subsequent royal charters formally began using the “upon-Tyne” designation to legally distinguish it from other settlements.

But let’s close with Robert Curthose, who has become one of recorded history’s great ‘might-have-beens,’ eclipsed by his father and brothers. Contemporary chroniclers praised Robert’s courage and generosity but criticised his indecisiveness and poor economic judgement, while modern historians generally agree he was an excellent knight but an ineffective ruler. Robert’s life illustrates a recurring medieval truth: the qualities that make a brilliant knight do not necessarily make a successful King; although to us in northeast England, he’s fondly remembered as the man who founded a castle that gave a city its name.

Grant me paradise in this world; I’m not so sure I’ll reach it in the next.

Jacopo Tintoretto

A handful of miles from where I live is Gateshead’s Shipley Art Gallery, one of northeast England’s most important cultural institutions, combining the atmosphere of a traditional civic art gallery with one of Britain’s finest collections of contemporary craft.

The gallery owes its existence to Joseph Ainsley Davidson Shipley, a wealthy Gateshead solicitor and somewhat elusive figure who was born in Gateshead in 1822 and later trained as a solicitor, becoming a partner in the Newcastle legal firm Hoyle, Shipley and Hoyle. Although successful in business, he appears to have led a relatively private life, never marrying or having direct heirs.

Much of what we know about Joseph comes from his will and the art collection he left behind rather than from personal papers or memoirs. Contemporary accounts suggest a reserved and somewhat eccentric man devoted to collecting paintings, and you need to infer much of his personality from his actions. What emerges is a picture of someone who valued art deeply and believed strongly that it should be available to the wider public rather than locked away in private houses.

Joseph’s lifelong interest in art began at the age of sixteen when he purchased his first painting, ‘Tantallon Castle’ by John Wilson Ewbank, in Newcastle’s Bigg Market. What started as a youthful purchase became a consuming enthusiasm, and over the next seventy years, Joseph worked closely with art dealers, acquiring paintings in enormous numbers.

Collecting art wasn’t merely a hobby for Joseph; it was the defining passion of his life, and by the time of his death, he had amassed around 2,500 paintings, one of the largest private art collections in Britain. And a varied one that included Dutch and Flemish Old Masters, landscapes, seascapes, religious paintings, Victorian works and historical scenes.

From 1884 until his death, Joseph leased Saltwell Towers, which at that time was a grand mansion surrounded by a private estate. Now the building is a visitor centre and the land around it is the public Saltwell Park. The house became both his home and an immense repository for his collection, with visitors describing rooms crowded with paintings stacked from floor to ceiling.

When Joseph died in 1909, he left not only his paintings but also £30,000 (over £4.5 million today) to create a public art gallery, with the intent that anyone in northeast England should be able to enjoy great art without travelling to places such as London.

Joseph’s will specified that Newcastle Corporation had first refusal on his collection provided they built a gallery to house it. This led to one of the region’s most famous cultural controversies, as unlike wealthy aristocrats who sought only acknowledged masterpieces, Joseph collected broadly and passionately with little concern for fashionable opinion and more with acquiring works that interested him. Some experts dismissed parts of the collection during his lifetime, but others have noted that he possessed a genuine eye for Dutch and Flemish painting. However, at the time, art experts advising Newcastle Corporation questioned the quality of parts of the collection, and the Corporation eventually declined the bequest after some debate. Gateshead Council, on the other hand, recognised its value and accepted the gift in 1912.

Because displaying the entire collection was unrealistic, Gateshead Council selected 504 paintings for the new gallery, with the remainder sold to help finance the building's construction.

The Shipley gallery building opened on 29 November 1917, eight years after Joseph’s death, and is now Grade II listed, given its status as one of Gateshead’s architectural landmarks and an impressive example of early twentieth-century civic architecture, featuring a grand classical entrance with Corinthian-style columns and sculptural figures representing the Arts, Industry and Learning. However, unlike many grand earlier galleries, once inside the Shipley, it feels cosy, with visitors able to explore several collections without becoming overwhelmed by ‘grandeur’

The paintings selected from Joseph’s collection largely represented major European schools of art from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries; however, today the collection has grown substantially and while Dutch and Flemish paintings from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries continue to be prominent, alongside these are works of Victorian British artists and those of northeast England artists (such as the Cullercoats Colony).

One of the gallery’s most important paintings is ‘Christ Washing the Disciple’s Feet’, created around 1549 by the Venetian master Jacopo Tintoretto for the Church of San Marcuola in Venice. This commission was a companion piece to Tintoretto’s ‘Last Supper‘, which still hangs in the church today. The two paintings flanked the high altar, allowing worshippers to contemplate Christ’s final acts of humility and sacrifice together. The story of how such a masterpiece came to end up in Gateshead is an interesting one.

Tintoretto designed the composition specifically for its location, with Christ placed unusually far to one side of the canvas rather than in the centre. However, from the correct angle inside the church, the perspective resolves itself, drawing the viewer’s eye naturally to Christ as he washes Saint Peter’s feet. It was a bold and innovative use of perspective that reflected Tintoretto’s fascination with illusion, while his dramatic contrasts of light and shade and strong brushwork brought extraordinary energy to the scene, which has a vivid sense of depth and immediacy.

Rather than arranging the figures in a static, symmetrical composition, Tintoretto's ability to combine spiritual meaning with the commotion of daily life sees Christ occupying a humble position quietly washing Peter’s feet, while the other disciples, who appear as real people rather than distant saints, react with gestures of surprise, conversation and contemplation.

At some point in the seventeenth century, the authentic painting disappeared from San Marcuola, but how or why remains unknown. While a copy was commissioned for the church, the authentic piece vanished from the historical record for more than a century, resurfacing in London in 1814, when a French Art dealer offered it for sale. Henry Baring, an art collector, bought it but interestingly resold it the very next day to Sir Matthew White Ridley of Blagdon Hall in Northumberland.

Rather than keeping the masterpiece for himself, Ridley presented it to what was then the Church of St Nicholas (now Newcastle Cathedral) as a gift intended to enrich the city’s principal church with a work worthy of its growing civic importance.

For more than 160 years, the enormous canvas hung above the altar in the church/cathedral, with the local community appreciating the painting, but no one regarding it as a magnificent work. That changed dramatically in 1976, when the distinguished Venetian art historian Rodolfo Pallucchini carefully examined it and concluded that the painting was not simply another workshop version but was likely the authentic canvas produced for San Marcuola. His attribution transformed the painting’s status almost overnight, making Newcastle Cathedral the holder of one of the most important Venetian Renaissance paintings in Britain.

After conservation in London, Newcastle Cathedral placed the painting on long-term loan to the Shipley in 1980, so that more people might appreciate its scale and artistic importance. Tyne & Wear Museums then purchased the painting from the cathedral on behalf of the Shipley six years later with grants from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the Art Fund, the Pilgrim Trust, the Sir James Knott Trust, and other organisations. This purchase ensured that the culturally important piece remained in northeast England rather than disappearing into a private collection or leaving the region.

Today, people regard ‘Christ Washing the Disciples’ Feet’ as the gallery’s finest painting and one of the most important works of the Italian Renaissance in any regional museum in Britain. It is an unexpected indication that you can find world-class art in good old Gateshead, and not just the likes of London, Florence or Venice.

At the other end of the artistic spectrum is Shipley Gallery’s most beloved work, ‘The Blaydon Races’ by William Irving, which depicts the famous Tyneside race day immortalised in Geordie Ridley’s Tyneside anthem of the same name. If London has Hogarth’s scenes of eighteenth-century life, and Paris has Renoir’s celebrations of popular leisure, then Tyneside has William Irving’s ‘The Blaydon Race ', which, more than a century after it was painted, remains one of the most important visual records of Tyneside culture, capturing a community at play with tenderness, wit and extraordinary attention to detail.

The annual Blaydon Races and Fair was one of the biggest days in the Tyneside calendar during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with thousands travelling to Blaydon for horse racing, gambling, drinking, boxing booths, sideshows and other fairground attractions. However, Irving chose not to paint the main event of horse racing but instead captured the busy fairground atmosphere surrounding it. This decision is important because it shifts the focus from sport to people, celebrating ordinary Tynesiders enjoying themselves. In the far distance, you can see the race track next to the River Tyne, and beyond that, the church in the town of Newburn, which sits north of the Tyne.

The painting owes something to Victorian genre painting, where artists portrayed scenes from everyday life. Yet unlike many Victorian works that focused on middle-class respectability, Irving celebrates working-class culture without condescension. The people are lively, comic, and genuinely human in a deliberately busy composition, with a canvas crowded with activity. There is no single focal point; wherever the eye wanders, another story unfolds, with Irving generating a sense of sweeping the viewer into the crowd itself.

One reason the painting became popular is that Irving populated it with recognisable local characters as a Victorian Tyneside “Who’s Who”, some of whom the song also mentions. One is ‘Coffy Johnny’ (John Oliver), who is perhaps the most famous local character in the painting. A former blacksmith from Winlaton, a nearby town to Blaydon, John was well known for his 6 ft 7 in height (a latter-day Dan Burn) and distinctive white top hat. His nickname was from his love of coffee, and he was a familiar sight at race meetings throughout Tyneside with a dubious reputation for the occasional ‘fixing’ of races. Another character mentioned in the song but not pictured is Jackie Broon (Brown), the bellman (town crier) of Blaydon, one of the best-known local figures of his day. Jackie’s grave is in the cemetery beside which I live, and his bell is still used to start the Blaydon Road Race, which takes place each June 9th and generally follows the route people would have taken to get from Newcastle to Blaydon. Interestingly, when Jackie died in 1901, his son, also Jackie, took over the role and would become the last town crier in England, dying in 1935.

Some portrayed in the painting but not mentioned in the song were well-known local characters at the time, such as Gull Willie, a ‘village innocent’ affectionately remembered in Tyneside folklore. In Irving’s painting, the ‘Swalwell Cat,’ a notorious card sharp, is duping Willie during a card trick. There’s also Cushie Butterfield, the legendary heroine of another famous Tyneside folk song (“she’s a big lass and a bonny lass”), whom Irving includes among the region’s most recognisable folk characters. Another character in the painting is ‘Nanny the Mazer’, whose shenanigans after missing a train are captured in another song. There is some argument over whether one of the people portrayed is George ‘Geordie’ Ridley, the writer of ‘The Blaydon Races’, with many believing the central figure known colloquially as ‘George the Plunger’ is intended to represent Ridley, although others think Irving based the face on his own popular cartoon character, the ‘Geordie Pitman’.

One of the painting’s greatest strengths is that it preserves a world in which public fairs were major social occasions where people gathered for entertainment and companionship. When you look at the painting today, it is almost as if you are opening a time capsule from Edwardian Tyneside, the period and place into which my father was born.

Painted in 1903, The Blaydon Races was not always part of the Shipley’s collection, although it’s unclear how the painting ended up in private ownership for almost the first 100 years of its life. Then, in 2002, the work went under the hammer at Sotheby’s in London, and thanks to support from the Heritage Lottery Fund and numerous public and private donations, the Shipley was able to purchase it. An acquisition widely celebrated in the region, as many felt that such an iconic image of Tyneside life belonged here for everyone to see rather than in a private collection elsewhere in the UK.

But away from iconic paintings, perhaps Shipley’s most remarkable achievement is its evolution into a nationally recognised centre for contemporary craft. Since 1977, the gallery has systematically collected innovative work in Ceramics, Glass, Wood, Metalwork, textiles, and Furniture design. Today, the gallery possesses one of the finest contemporary craft collections outside London, with the gallery’s renowned Henry Rothschild collection including hundreds of examples of studio ceramics by leading British and international makers.

One of the Shipley’s most engaging permanent displays is ‘Designs for Life’, which poses the simple yet profound question: why do humans make beautiful things, even for everyday use?

And it will be no surprise that the Shipley is also a preserver of Gateshead’s manufacturing history with examples of Sowerby pressed glass, Davidson glass, Gateshead Art Pottery and the traditional northeast England crafts such as clootie mat making and quilting.

Overall, the Shipley remains deeply embedded in local life, serving as a welcoming cultural space for residents and visitors from across the region and beyond, and it might be said to occupy a unique position in northeast England’s cultural environment. Newcastle has the grand collections of the Laing Art Gallery, while Gateshead has the contemporary architecture of BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, and the Shipley sits comfortably between the two, both historic yet innovative, with local and national significance.

More than a century after opening, the gallery continues to fulfil Joseph Shipley’s ambition of bringing great art, design and craftsmanship into the everyday lives of people. It remains one of northeast England’s most rewarding and underrated cultural destinations, and it’s all down to a man who, in many ways, belongs to a distinctive tradition of Victorian civic benefactors such as Sir William Armstrong. However, Joseph left behind no great industrial empire. His monument is somewhat quieter: a gallery built from a lifetime spent collecting paintings and a conviction that art should belong to everyone.

Mark Lawrence, King of Thorns

While the title of this piece is Memories, it’s not those from my recent European rail trip, but the ones it evoked from earlier episodes in my life, on visits to some of the places I ventured to this time around.

Having lived in and around London for most of my life, I have many memories of a city I fell in love with the instant I arrived there from northeast England fifty-two years ago, almost to the day. I’ve always thought London is like Marmite. People tend to either hate it or love it. The hustle (my pace always quickens when I’m there), the bustle (you already know I don’t mind crowds), and the clamour can be too much for many but not for me. The only tiresome aspect at times is wandering tourists, especially if I need to be somewhere. However, I hadn’t lived there long before I learnt a sidestep to match Barry John’s, or, for those who follow the NFL, a cut as effective as Barry Sanders’ to get around drifters. Still comes in handy today.

Anyway, I could fill a book with my London memories (there’s an idea), but I will share one from my very first working day there back in July 1974, in what was then a Government Forensic Laboratory in Cornwall House, on the south side of Waterloo Bridge. The building is still there, but it is no longer a laboratory, as it’s now part of King’s College and repurposed as a seat of learning.

London was still unfamiliar to me, so once I arrived at Embankment tube station, I did not take the shorter walk across Hungerford Bridge, through the Festival Hall buildings and Shell Centre to Cornwall House. And just as an aside, in those days, Hungerford Bridge was a narrow Victorian footbridge running alongside the downstream side of the railway bridge, spanning the Thames between the Festival Hall and Charing Cross station. The modern replacement for the Hungerford Bridge now consists of two wide walkways that sandwich the railway lines.

Anyway, after leaving Embankment station, I turned left and walked through Victoria Embankment Gardens, intending to cross the Thames via Waterloo Bridge.

The end of the gardens borders the back of the Savoy Hotel, and it was there that I saw, ahead of me on the grass, three recumbent figures. Once called ‘Gentlemen of the road,’ they lay peacefully asleep in their careworn ‘daywear’ of jackets and trousers. Given the mild weather, there was no need for an extra layer.

As I drew nearer, the sun, sitting just over the OXO tower, caught the morning dew that covered the slumbering figures, turning their clothing into a gossamer blanket bejewelled with golden, pearly light, and although out of context, these lines from Yeats came to mind.

“But I being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”

And softly, I did tread as I passed those gentlemen.

On that first working day, with my mind full of the opportunity ahead, my thoughts turned to what dreams these men once had. Over the years, such thoughts occasionally return to me, especially when I do my annual London Walk for the Big Issue. There but for the grace of God.

Again, Paris is a city I’ve visited many times on business and for pleasure, but I’ll share here a recollection of its Gare de Nord just after the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland.

I was at a business conference in Lisbon at the time and was due to fly home later that day for an evening of cocktail-making in London with Sarah. While eating breakfast in my hotel and watching the initial stages of the eruption on TV, something told me I should move sooner rather than later if that rendezvous was to happen, so I abandoned the conference, made a speedy return to my room to pack, and then checked out.

While waiting at reception, a fellow Director passed by and asked why I was leaving. I told him about my fears, and he asked me to wait a few minutes while he joined me. He, too, was keen to get away, as his 40th birthday celebration was only two days hence. By 8 am, we were in a taxi, headed to the airport.

On arrival, we switched to a 10 am flight to Heathrow, but just after checking in, I heard a rapid clack, clack, clack, clack above me. Looking up at the departures board, I saw in dismay that every UK-bound flight was now ‘delayed.’ In fact, the only plane heading north was Air France to Paris at 10:30 am.

Paris was much closer to home than Lisbon, so with little hesitation, my colleague and I headed to the Air France ticket desk. Moments later, we possessed two tickets for the Paris flight.

It was then to call the office and ask they book two seats on the Eurostar from Paris Gare de Nord. That done, it was time to check in, board, and head on to Paris!

Once airborne, my colleague and I kicked back, enjoyed a lovely meal and a couple of drinks, and relaxed in the knowledge that we should be in the UK around 5 pm.

It was not to be. After a smooth flight, we landed at Charles de Gaulle to unwelcome news. A message from the office said there were no seats available on the Eurostar. It was, therefore, plan B. Train from Paris to Calais via Lille, then cross-channel ferry to Dover, and the London train from there.

First, we had to get to Gare de Nord. The RER train seemed like the best choice, and after taking it, we soon arrived at a chaotic railway station around 1:30 pm. People everywhere, with some waiting in long queues while many milled around, looking lost and confused.

Strangely, no one seemed to be using the automatic ticket machines, so we headed for them. With a push of the Union Flag button, a choice of two one-way tickets to Calais, and the insertion of a credit card, we were soon on our way to Lille. I won’t go on, but despite our flawless navigation at Gare de Nord, other glitches awaited, and the ferry terminal at Calais resembled the stories you hear of the evacuation from Dunkirk, but thankfully without the bombing and strafing. We did eventually arrive back in the UK in the early hours of the next day, so the cocktail-making didn’t happen. At least for me, Sarah had a whale of a time supping cocktails meant for two.

When in Turin, a memory of a visit there with Sarah sprang to mind. I’d not long been appointed as the Commercial and Operations Director of a JV company formed by BAE Systems and the Swedish company IFS, which, I note, is now the shirt sponsor for Chelsea FC. Anyway, a system the JV had delivered to the Italian defence force before I joined the company had experienced some glitches after delivery. However, with all those issues resolved, my task was to close the contract and negotiate the final payment. It meant several trips to Turin to meet with my counterpart, Massimo.

As I found with most businesspeople in Italy, Massimo was astute and knowledgeable; I had to bring my best game whenever I discussed business with him. One visit was around February 14th, so I suggested to Sarah that she join me, and after my meeting with Massimo, we could enjoy dinner somewhere in Turin.

On telling Massimo my plan, he was delighted and suggested that three of us meet for a light lunch, then he and I could have our meeting while Sarah explored Turin, and he even went further and said he would make a booking in a particularly good restaurant for us that evening that wasn’t too far from our hotel.

Sarah and I duly arrived, and during lunch, Massimo was charm personified, even insisting on paying for the meal. Lunch over, Sarah went off to explore, and Massimo and I retired to his office, at which point there was an instantaneous transformation in Massimo from smiling charm to steely-eyed, hard-nosed businessman. I’d never seen a demeanour change so quickly, yet at the end of our meeting with business concluded, back came Massimo’s smiling charm. It took another couple of visits, but at last the full payment was made, and by then Massimo and I were on very friendly terms. Yet, sadly, as with many business interactions, no matter how much time you spend with someone, once the business between you is complete, those people quickly disappear from your life. And for the record, the restaurant Massimo booked for Sarah and me was superb.

As with Paris, so with Rome, of which I have many memories, both from business visits and those for pleasure. One wonderful one is the few celebratory days spent there with Sarah for my 60th birthday, and especially enjoying a glass or two of Sassicaia while overlooking Rome from the Capitoline Hill. However, another memory that will never leave me is from one of my business trips. I was there with a colleague, the sales director, to finalise a contract with a large Italian defence company, and our meeting was to be in their headquarters just outside Rome.

The taxi duly picked up my colleague and me, and we were soon on the 30-minute-or-so journey out of Rome along a dual carriageway. To get to the customer’s office, we had to leave the carriageway and cross over it via a flyover, and it was on that flyover that our cabbie uttered “Ooooh la la,” the French expression of surprise rather than the Italian one. At his exclamation, I turned to look out the driver’s-side window and caught a glimpse of a young woman wearing nothing more than a basque, pants (the British type), stockings, suspenders (also the British type), and high heels. Not a sight you imagine encountering at around 9 in the morning on a roadside, hence the cabbie’s expression of surprise.

Still not quite believing what we had just seen, we pulled into a lay-by outside our customers’ offices moments later because the site’s security meant the cabbie couldn’t enter. It was a long lay-by designed for such drop-offs, I suspected, and I got out of the cab while my colleague paid the driver. It was then that I caught sight of another young woman similarly attired to the one we had passed on the flyover. However, in this case, the woman was leaning into a car, chatting to the driver. I assume an agreement between the two then ensued, as within a moment the woman opened the car door, got in, and the car drove away. An interesting way to start the business day, I thought, though I’d probably stick to coffee…

When it comes to Naples, there are again so many memories, but the one I will share is from Sarah and my time there during part of our honeymoon.

We’d taken the funicular up to Castel Sant’Elmo (see my photo above), which sits high above the city, and we’d decided to rest our legs and have a light lunch and a drink al fresco at a nearby restaurant offering a magnificent view across the bay to Vesuvius.

Our server took our order, and I asked where the toilets were. He pointed across to the restaurant building about 20 yards away, telling me they were just inside the entrance. So, I set off towards the restaurant, and as I did so, I noticed a table some 10 yards away, around which sat some half-dozen older, middle-aged men, casually dressed and boisterously enjoying their food and wine. There seemed to be a fair amount of joshing, so I assumed it was some group of retired friends chilling out over a meal.

It was only when I got nearer that I noticed several younger men standing a couple of yards away from the table, forming a loose circle. As I drew nearer, one of the young men paid me some attention, so I smiled and offered a “buona giornata”. He appeared to relax, offering me a smiling buona giornata in return.

By now, I realised they probably weren’t a bunch of old friends but some ‘businessmen’ of the city. The sort of businessmen who needed a bit of protection, and given my destination, all that came to mind was the scene in ‘The Godfather’ when Michael goes to the toilet to seek a handgun hidden there and, on finding it, comes out shooting. I wondered if the young men might have seen the film.

Well, let’s just say I walked back to Sarah with almost jazz hands to show I offered no threat.

One memory of my various visits to Berlin is from the short break I took with Hannah, our youngest daughter, as part of the celebration of her 18th birthday. While we visited various sites and took photographs of the highly decorated bears that were everywhere, the thing that sticks in my memory from that visit was sitting in the large atrium of the Living Hotel Großer Kurfürst in the company of some 30 or so other guests while we watched the final of the European Champions Cup between Borussia Dortmund and Bayern Munich on a very large TV wheeled in for the occasion.

Some hotel atriums can be striking, and this one especially so, as a large bronze horse and rider representing Frederick William, the Great Elector of Brandenburg, appears to burst dramatically out from one wall of the eight-storey atrium.

The sculpture is a dramatic modern reproduction inspired by the famous equestrian statue of the Great Elector by the sculptor Andreas Schlüter, completed around 1700, which today stands outside Charlottenburg Palace and is considered one of the greatest Baroque equestrian monuments in Europe.

Although neither Hannah nor I had ‘skin in the game’ when it came to supporting either team, the hotel manager insisted that, as guests of both the hotel and the country, we had seats in the front row. The game proved an exciting one, with the rival fans behind and beside us very much wrapped up in the ebb and flow. Dortmund, managed at the time by a certain Jürgen Klopp, played very well but eventually fell to the mightier Bayern Munich 2:1.

However, rather than sport, let’s end this with a bit of romance and one of many memories of Amsterdam, probably the European city I have visited most since my first visit to the Rijksmuseum there some 55 years ago. It was in that city that I asked Sarah to marry me, and thereby hangs a tale.

While we’d only known each other a few months, we had grown very close, and as her birthday approached, I decided on an elegant watch as a gift, so off I went to a jeweller to find something she might like. I duly found something I thought suitable, after which the assistant asked whether there was anything else. “Yes”, I said, much to her surprise, and I confess a little to mine, “an engagement ring.” I’ve always been one where heart rules head at times.

The stunned assistant, after all, there can’t be many people who plan to buy a watch, then, impulsively, an engagement ring, brought out a tray. I duly chose one I thought Sarah would like, but then came the question of when I should make the proposal.

Her birthday fell on a weekend, so I decided to make it even more special by taking her out of the UK to propose. Because of work commitments, we had limited time. It had to be somewhere we could reach easily on a Friday evening and return from by Sunday lunchtime. Given that Sarah’s birthday is in November, somewhere warmish would be nice, but I didn’t want to spend hours on an aeroplane and arrive late at night. So Amsterdam was a good compromise. Quick to get to and the weather didn’t look too unreasonable.

Now, in making these plans, I made two mistakes, and no, neither of which was the decision to ask for Sarah’s hand. The first was not booking a table at an appropriate restaurant for the event. The second was adding the date of our arrival to the inscription in the book I planned to give Sarah after asking her to marry me. The book was an old (sadly not first edition) of Arnold Bennett’s ‘A Man from the North,’ and the inscription read “Given to you on the day I asked you to marry me.”

It meant I was tied to making my proposal on the evening of our arrival, i.e. after a working day and a flight, with no dinner reservation. Hadn’t really thought it through, had I?

And, of course, I couldn’t find anywhere that seemed suitable for my plan. We looked and looked, and, not surprisingly, Sarah was getting a little hangry, so we decided on an Argentinian restaurant nearby. Now I’ve nothing against Argentinian restaurants; I’ve had a decent steak in one or two. But asking for Sarah’s hand in a restaurant with cowhide seat covers wasn’t what I had at first envisaged.

Anyway, our server showed us to our table, and dinner commenced. I remembered that adage that if you are to make a proposal over dinner, then wait until after you’ve ordered dessert, so that, in the case of refusal, you’ve at least enjoyed a good dinner. Dessert time arrived, and as our server walked away with our order, I left my seat and knelt, opening the box holding the ring while uttering those time-honoured words, “Will you marry me?”

My action caused some consternation amongst the other diners who were looking on, and a look of horror from our server, who, for a moment, thought me overcome by some illness and fallen from my chair. Sarah’s answer was succinct: “Get up, you silly bugger.” Words carved on my heart to this day, since I took that as a yes (well, she hadn’t said no, had she?)

As it was, we spent a lovely weekend in Amsterdam, and the following evening we found a wonderful little restaurant serving local food, which would have been more than suitable for my plans. However, to Sarah’s relief, I did not reenact the proposal.

And on that romantic note, I conclude my meanderings around my ‘Searching for Caravaggio’ trip. I hope you’ve found some of them of interest, and next week I’m back on home ground with a meander around a famous northeast England institution….

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio

So, having written of my encounters, and my travels and travails on my ‘Searching for Caravaggio’ trip, it’s time to turn my attention to the paintings I saw along the way, well, some of them anyway.

Born in 1571 as Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, I can’t think of too many painters whose life and art are almost inseparable, and few who have left behind a body of work that might also be read as an autobiography. Caravaggio revolutionised European religious painting through his commanding use of chiaroscuro and tenebrism, his uncompromising realism, and his portrayal of psychological intensity. Yet his paintings are more than masterpieces of technique; they express a turbulent life shaped by violence, exile, and then a search for redemption.

Caravaggio arrived in Rome in the 1590s as an impoverished young artist, and his early works reveal a painter fascinated by ordinary people and earthly pleasures rather than idealised classical beauty. In paintings such as ‘Boy Bitten by a Lizard’, which I looked upon in London’s National Gallery, painted before he became famous for monumental religious scenes, he captures the split second when a youth recoils in surprise and pain after reaching toward some fruit, only to be bitten by a hidden lizard. While the turbulence of his latter life lay ahead, some still see in it a recurring Caravaggesque theme: the sudden intrusion of danger into ordinary existence.

At first glance, the painting appears almost theatrical with the boy twisting backwards, mouth open and eyebrows lifted, his finger abruptly pulled away as the lizard bites. Unlike idealised Renaissance portraits, where figures often appear composed and timeless, Caravaggio freezes an uncontrolled emotional reaction with a realism that became one of his defining contributions to European art and still fascinates modern audiences who recognise in a painting an instinctive bodily reaction of surprise and pain before reason intervenes.

And that realism goes beyond expression to observation, with Caravaggio rendering transparent glass, reflections in water, folds of fabric, and the textures of fruit with notable precision, revealing his close study of the visible world.

Light, of course, also serves a vital role, and although the painting predates Caravaggio’s most dramatic use of light and shade, the illumination directs attention to the boy’s face and hand, increasing the sensation of sudden movement.

Success came rapidly for Caravaggio after his breakthrough religious commissions for the Contarelli Chapel in the church of San Luigi dei Francesi, which I looked upon in Rome. Here, Caravaggio painted three works from the life of St Matthew that transformed religious art forever. They are ‘The Inspiration of Saint Matthew’, ‘The Martyrdom of St Matthew’, and the one I will dwell on a little, ‘The Calling of Saint Matthew’, in which the scene unfolds within what resembles a dimly lit Roman tavern.

Christ stands almost unnoticed to the far right of the painting, his pointed figure (modelled on Adam’s from Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel) directing a shaft of light towards Matthew, who sits at a table amongst a group of men.

But which one is Matthew? Most assume it's the bearded man pointing at himself with an expression of “who? me?” since it's the same model Caravaggio used for the Matthews in his other two works. However, another interpretation proposes that the bearded man is in fact pointing to the chap who hangs his head on the far left and asking, “Who? him?” Caravaggio, being the lad he was, probably meant it to be deliberately ambiguous.

Whoever Mathew is, this work, which demonstrates Caravaggio’s powerful use of tenebrism, also shows his belief that divine grace enters the everyday world and mirrors his own experience as an outsider suddenly elevated by others’ discovery of his talent. And just a moment on tenebrism, which is a more extreme, theatrical version of chiaroscuro, where darkness dominates the canvas and a harsh ‘spotlight’ effect isolates the subject. The use of chiaroscuro, in which strong contrasts between light and dark create volume and depth, was first developed during the Italian Renaissance by artists such as Leonardo da Vinci. However, Caravaggio is widely credited with pioneering and popularising tenebrism and transforming it into a defining hallmark of Baroque art.

Throughout his career, Caravaggio showed a profound sympathy for humanity’s flaws and imperfections. His religious paintings reject the idealised saints and elegant biblical figures common in Renaissance art. Instead, Caravaggio’s subjects are weary and uncertain, with rough hands, weathered skin, expressive faces, and practical clothing. To go back to London’s National Gallery for a moment, where I also saw Caravaggio’s ‘Supper at Emmaus’ of 1601, which stands among the most celebrated of his works and represents the artist at the height of his early success in Rome, full of confidence and ambition. And here we can see how Caravaggio’s mastery of chiaroscuro is fundamental to the work’s impact, with light falling dramatically across faces, hands, and objects, while surrounding darkness deepens the emotional focus.

The painting depicts an episode from the Gospel of Luke after Christ’s crucifixion, when two disciples travel to Emmaus, accompanied by a stranger whom they fail to recognise as the resurrected Jesus. Only when he blesses and breaks bread during supper do they understand who he is.

Caravaggio chooses the precise instant when recognition brings disbelief. The disciples’ reactions dominate the composition, seemingly caught mid-motion: one throws his arms out in astonishment in a cross-like gesture, while the other pushes himself up from his chair, as if unable to contain his surprise. In contrast, Christ appears calm and composed, blessing the meal with subtle authority, as the still centre around which all emotion revolves. The innkeeper is a puzzled bystander to this unusual event, and even Christ differs from traditional imagery, appearing youthful and without the hallmark full beard of the time, thus making his identity less immediately recognisable.

One of the painting’s most famous characteristics is the apparent expansion into the viewer’s space, with one disciple’s elbow jutting outward, while the other’s hand seemingly protrudes beyond the implied boundaries of the canvas, and strikingly, a basket of fruit rests precariously at the edge of the table, seeming almost ready to fall. This illusionistic technique dissolves the separation between painting and observer, with the latter no longer distant from the event but a ‘participant’.

As with ‘Boy Bitten by a Lizard’, the painting’s lasting power lies in the fact that, four centuries later, viewers can still empathise with that emotion of astonishment. The instant when the ordinary turns extraordinary, and when recognition changes everything. Just look at any video clip of a family reunion with someone who has been absent for a long time.

As Caravaggio’s renown increased, seemingly so did his propensity for violence, with court records revealing frequent arrests for carrying weapons, brawling, and insulting rivals. You can see traces of this volatile temperament in paintings such as ‘Judith Beheading Holofernes’, which I viewed at the Gallerie Nazionali Barberini, and that captures the precise moment when the Jewish heroine Judith decapitates the Assyrian general Holofernes, saving her people from destruction. Few artists before Caravaggio had depicted the scene with such physical realism, psychological intensity, and brutal immediacy.

The composition is startlingly simple, with three figures seen under a harsh beam of light. To the left, Holofernes lies stretched out on his bed as if just awakening to the horror of his fate. His eyes are wide with terror, his mouth open in a scream, and his body convulses as blood spurts from the wound in his neck. Caravaggio refuses to idealise the violence; the blood looks real, the struggle appears real, and Holofernes is not a villainous caricature, but a living man confronted with sudden death.

Judith stands apart from Holofernes emotionally as well as physically, extending her arms as she draws the sword across his throat. Her face is perhaps the painting’s greatest mystery. While she appears determined, she also seems visibly repelled by what she is doing. Her brow furrows, her lips tighten, and her body leans slightly away from the violence. Unlike, say, Artemisia, who portrayed Judith as triumphant, Caravaggio presents Judith as a young woman conducting a dreadful necessity.

Behind Judith stands the old maidservant, often identified as Abra, watching intently and clasping a sack that will carry away the severed head. Her lined face and eager concentration stand in marked contrast to Judith’s youthful beauty, forming a striking juxtaposition of youth and age, hesitation and fascination.

The painting’s power comes largely from Caravaggio’s masterful chiaroscuro, which heightens emotional tension, as his brilliant, almost divine illumination slices through the darkness, modelling faces, hands and fabric with extraordinary clarity and revealing both the act of justice and the horror of its accomplishment.

The work also reveals Caravaggio’s fascination with the moment of maximum drama when life and death collide, and maybe foreshadows the violence that would eventually destroy his own life. While earlier artists often showed Judith displaying Holofernes’ severed head after the event, Caravaggio instead chooses the instant of death, forcing the viewer to face the reality of violence rather than its aftermath in a scene both heroic and disturbing.

Even viewing it in the calm of a gallery, ‘Judith Beheading Holofernes’ remains as unsettling as it must have been to its first audience, as not simply an illustration of a biblical story but a study of human psychology under extreme pressure, with Caravaggio asking us to witness necessity, terror and death in a drama that feels genuinely human but offers no easy moral comfort.

And the turning point of violence in Caravaggio’s life came in 1606 with his involvement in the death of Ranuccio Tomassoni, during a street fight in Rome. Condemned to death, Caravaggio fled the city to spend the remainder of his life as an exiled fugitive, and that would see him produce some of his darkest works. His years in Naples, Malta and Sicily deepened the sombre mood of his art with paintings characterised by vast darkness, sparse compositions, and a compelling sense of tragedy. The light that once symbolised revelation now struggled against engulfing shadows with works that seem haunted by the artist’s own circumstances as a hunted man seeking forgiveness.

Going back to the paintings I saw at the National Gallery in London, perhaps no painting better encapsulates Caravaggio’s exile years than ‘Salome with the Head of John the Baptist’, a haunting painting that depicts not the moment of violence itself but the terrible consequences that follow.

Four figures in a remarkably economical composition are arranged in a shallow space, pressed close to the picture plane, emerging from a background of almost complete darkness. They surround the severed head of John the Baptist with light falling across them like a spotlight in a dark theatre, illuminating faces and hands.

On the left stands Salome, who, unlike many earlier portrayals of her as a seductive temptress triumphantly displaying her prize, Caravaggio shows as a young woman who seems uncertain, even troubled, by what she has demanded. Her expression suggests discomfort rather than satisfaction as she averts her gaze to avoid looking directly at John’s head, while her demeanour conveys reluctant acceptance of the head rather than eager possession.

On the right stands the executioner, who physically dominates the composition, yet the shadow across his face gives him the appearance of a man who has performed an unpleasant task without a sense of triumph, rather than a villain relishing his work. His muscular arm extends toward the platter, carefully and deliberately, as he lowers John’s head onto it. The violence has already occurred, and all that remains is a grim duty.

The severed head itself is among the most moving elements of the painting, with John’s closed eyes and relaxed face offering little spectacle. Caravaggio emphasises humanity over horror with John appearing less a victim than a martyr whose suffering has ended.

Behind Salome stands an elderly servant woman who, in many ways, provides the painting’s moral centre, reacting with a mixture of fascination and pity. Her lined face and clasped hands make her a kind of witness for the viewer, expressing emotions that the other figures suppress.

The painting belongs to the sombre final phase of Caravaggio’s career, and compared with the bravura and theatricality of earlier works such as ‘The Calling of Saint Matthew’ or ‘The Supper at Emmaus’, the mood here is quieter, more reflective and tragic with Caravaggio’s use of muted colours and freer brushwork. A painting powerful in its restraint, with no sensational melodrama, which is not about a beheading but the moment when those present must deal with that outcome. And in that moment of regret, pity, and reflection lies the painting’s abiding emotional force.

At the Galleria Borghese in Rome, I saw ‘David with the Head of Goliath’, one of Caravaggio’s most moving and psychologically complex paintings, painted around 1609, near the end of his turbulent life. It is not a triumphant celebration of a biblical hero but a serious meditation on guilt, mercy and redemption with the widespread belief that Goliath’s face is a self-portrait of Caravaggio himself.

At first glance, the subject is familiar: the young David holding the severed head of the giant Goliath, whom he has defeated with a stone and a sword; yet Caravaggio transforms the traditional story. Emerging from a background of almost complete darkness, David, lit by a soft, melancholy light, appears not as a classical hero but as an ordinary youth, subdued and thoughtful, with no sense of victory or exultation; rather, his face expresses something closer to compassion than pride.

He holds Goliath’s head by the hair, allowing it to hang heavily before him with a real sense of weight as the giant’s slack face with open mouth and lifeless eyes pulls viewers into the scene, encouraging them to contemplate the moral and emotional consequences of violence. David appears to mourn the very enemy he has defeated, and this unusual emotional mood transforms the biblical narrative into something genuinely human and meditative. Many scholars interpret the painting as a personal plea for mercy, with Caravaggio casting himself as the defeated giant and David as an agent of forgiveness rather than destruction.

The sword David carries bears a small inscription, commonly interpreted as an abbreviation of the Latin phrase Humilitas occidit superbiam (humility kills pride). If this interpretation is correct, the message is highly personal, with the painting serving as Caravaggio’s acknowledgement of the arrogance, violence, and impulsiveness that had moulded his life.

Although not his final painting, ‘David with the Head of Goliath’ is regarded by many as Caravaggio’s artistic farewell, as within a year or so of completing it, he would be dead. As such, the painting therefore carries an extraordinary emotional charge with the sense of an artist looking back upon a life of genius yet violence, hoping, perhaps, that mercy might prove stronger than censure.

By tradition, the last painting I visit when I’m in Naples is Caravaggio’s ‘Martyrdom of Saint Ursula’ at the Gallerie d’Italia, and, in keeping with that tradition, it was the final painting of the 28 I saw during my rail journey around Europe. Viewing Saint Ursula last seems apt, given it’s believed to be his last.

I confess I entered the gallery with some trepidation, as I had grown accustomed to seeing the painting hanging in isolation, with often only my gaze upon it for as long as I wished to linger.

The new hanging is less a conventional display and more a staged encounter, reflecting the museum’s complete rethink of the approach to the work, with the ‘viewing’ now beginning before you even reach the painting.

First, I climbed some stairs through an installation by the contemporary artist Jacopo Foggini called La Nuvola e l’Ombra, a cascade of translucent red forms encircling the staircase. The red tones intended to reflect those in the painting and create a mood of anticipation. They didn’t...

The stairway led to an empty room with only a small, narrow window through which you could view the painting before entering the room where it hung. I guess this is to whet your appetite further. That didn’t do it for me either, but I guess that’s the old curmudgeon coming out again. I hope my photo gives you some idea of the experience, and I don’t count photographing a window the same as the artwork. I’ve gone for black and white in keeping with Caravaggio’s dark style at the time.

Once you’re in the room with the painting, you find it flanked on one wall by Manzoni’s ‘Judith and Holofernes’ and on the other by Louis Finson’s version of the same scene, while nearby is Artemisia’s ‘Samson and Delilah’. I was happy with that as all were admirers of Caravaggio, and I think their pieces offered something to Ursula.

There is also a new lighting of the painting, which does help, as ‘The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula’ is one of Caravaggio’s darkest paintings from his second period in Naples, after he fled the Knights of Malta for an infraction (he was always fleeing someone) and finished within weeks of his death.

The painting depicts the moment when the Hunnish king, rejected by Ursula after she refuses to renounce her Christian faith, shoots an arrow into her chest. Unlike many earlier artists who portrayed martyrdom as a grand spectacle, Caravaggio compresses the drama into a claustrophobic space with figures crowded together, emerging from darkness into a harsh light that illuminates the fatal wound.

As with his John the Baptist, what is striking is Caravaggio’s emotional self-control, as he abandons the dramatic physical action of earlier works in favour of psychological shock. Ursula does not cry out; instead, she looks down, almost in surprise, at the arrow that has entered her body, with an expression that suggests quiet recognition rather than terror. The king, meanwhile, appears momentarily shocked by his own act, as if violence has produced regret rather than triumph.

But I confess the painting is not among Caravaggio’s best. It lacks the confidence and theatrical sweep of works such as ‘The Calling of Saint Matthew’, with looser brushwork and passages that appear almost unfinished, as if painted under pressure by a man running out of time. Caravaggio’s atmosphere of exhaustion, mortality, and inward reflection feels very different from the swagger of his earlier years, while one of the most moving details is found among the spectators, as to the right of the scene appears a bearded figure widely believed to be his self-portrait emerging from the darkness with an expression of alarm and grief. Is the mute onlooker of death Caravaggio’s premonition of his own?

By the time of its painting, Caravaggio had lived for years in exile, moving from place to place; he may also well have had the early symptoms of the disease that was to kill him, and it’s reported that after a street brawl or act of revenge for a slight in Naples, he may have lost sight in one eye. By 1610, he was desperately seeking a papal pardon that would allow him to return to Rome, and soon after painting Saint Ursula, he embarked upon the journey that he hoped would restore his fortunes. Instead, he died on the Tuscan coast at Porto Ercole of some unknown cause, aged only thirty-eight.

For me, Caravaggio’s continuing fascination lies in this fusion of his life and his art, with paintings that are not simply illustrations of biblical stories; they are meditations on his own experiences. First, the youthful adventurer appears in the swaggering boys of his early works, then the celebrated artist emerges in the confidence of ‘The Calling of Saint Matthew’ before the fugitive haunted by guilt confronts us in ‘David with the Head of Goliath’, and finally, we see the exhausted and unwell artist in St. Ursula.

Caravaggio turned his own turbulent and often destructive life into the universal drama of his paintings, which possess extraordinary emotional truth and continue to speak to us by illuminating both the darkness and the dignity of the human condition. Unlike many Renaissance artists, Caravaggio did not present a vision of humanity perfected by reason or beauty. Instead, he painted humanity as he experienced it: vulnerable, sinful, violent, and yet capable of grace.

Next week, the last in this series - memories…

Dale Maharidge

When I set off seven years ago on my post-retirement Leyton Orient Express rail trip, there was a delay on the first leg, from my then-home in Wiltshire to London, because of cows on the line. Eventually, someone herded them away, and though the train was late, it ran. In contrast, this ‘Searching for Caravaggio’ trip began with a cancelled train from Blaydon to Newcastle, the first three miles of my 3000-mile round trip. Not the most promising start.

Fortunately, I was ready early and caught the train before my planned one, arriving in Newcastle with plenty of time for my connection. Alas, it too suffered delays caused by signal issues, slower-moving trains ahead, and ‘congestion’, but it was of no concern, as I still had plenty of time to drop my case at my hotel and take the tube to Leicester Square to visit the National Gallery to view my first Caravaggios of the trip. Oh, and one bonus was that my train arrived more than 30 minutes late, so I received a 50% refund of my fare for the delay.

I did have one concern when I arrived at the gallery, in that I’d read the room in which the Caravaggios usually hang was closed for redecoration, and there seemed to be some uncertainty in what room they might now hang, if they were on display at all. Disappointingly, the person at the information desk was unable to help, so I decided to start outside the closed room and work my way from there. As it was, I came across them almost immediately in the room next door.

I won’t dwell on the paintings, as next week, I’ll focus on those I saw along my journey, so suffice to say after a long perusal of the works and some conversation with the attendant that I mentioned in last week’s ‘Meander’, it was back in the tube to Euston, a bite to eat and and an early bedtime, as it needed to be a 4 am start the next day. My longest travelling day with Eurostar to Paris Gare de Nord, then a quick shift in Paris to Gare de Lyon, and a train from there to Turin.

Somewhat bleary-eyed, I arrived at St Pancras well in time for check-in and to seek out the biometric recording stations to be used as part of the new EU entry scheme, but saw none either before check-in or after, nor around security or passport control, British or French. I didn't even receive a stamp in my passport, so I felt mildly disappointed, although breakfast and coffee rapidly improved my mood.

Unlike the trains of the day before, the Eurostar left bang on time and arrived in Paris right on schedule. It was then time to negotiate the transfer to Gare de Lyon. For those who travel by train, I thoroughly recommend The Man in Seat 61, who offers wonderful advice and guidance on all things rail travel. I’d consulted his website and discovered he offered various alternatives for travelling between the two stations, but the easiest seemed to be the RER regional train rather than the Paris Metro. It was quicker and the same cost, so I followed that advice, having already bought my ticket online before leaving England, and with it now safely stored in my phone’s wallet.

Gare du Nord was, as usual, busy, but not as chaotic as I’ve seen it at times, so it didn’t take long to cut through the crowd while following the clear signs to the RER. Once there, it was just a case of making sure to board the train heading in the direction of the Gare de Lyon. In all it took less than 30 minutes so given I had allowed two hours I arrived with lots of time to spare.

As with many large train sheds, Gare de Lyon, with its pristine, clean glass roof, felt like an enormous greenhouse on such a sunny day as it was, and since it was so hot, I decided to have a ‘hydration break’ of a beer in a small bar overlooking the concourse while I waited. As I supped, I pondered that, despite the glass roofs in large UK stations, we've solved the heat problem by allowing grime to accumulate on said roofs as if it were a high-factor sunscreen.

Then came the announcement of the platform for my train, and this time I was determined not to repeat my mistake during my Leyton Orient Express adventure, when I boarded the wrong train at this very station. As on that occasion, there were two trains on the platform, but this time I took care to ignore the first, heading for Marseille, and walk farther down the platform to mine, the one to Turin. Once aboard, it wasn’t long before we speedily headed south and east with the five-and-a-half-hour journey passing quickly and without incident, and by early evening, I arrived in Turin Porta Susa, ready to find my accommodation and have dinner.

I decided that since it was a warm evening, I would have an aperitif of a chilled beer before eating, and I found a small bar near my restaurant for the evening, assuming I’d find the bar selling a local regional brew or at worst a Moretti or Peroni, so I was therefore somewhat taken aback to discover the only offering was Tennent’s. Good old Vitamin T, and while very popular in Scotland (and clearly Turin), is brewed in Luton. What came to mind was the 1970s Campari advert with Lorraine Chase, who, when asked if she came from paradise, replied in a no-nonsense Essex accent, “Nah, Luton Airport.” Anyway, my beer was cold and drinkable, even if it had come all the way from Luton.

From Turin, I was destined for Rome, which meant travelling to Turin’s Porta Nuova station. The advice from The Man in Seat 61 was helpful again, in its recommendation to take the short metro ride as the quickest and cheapest option from Port Susa. He was spot on, as the service is frequent and took only about ten minutes. Nothing on the journey to Rome stands out other than the wonderful scenery along the way. Most of which I failed miserably to photograph. We were back to being late, though. In this case, 30 minutes, so I thought I’d do a quick bit of research on delay-repay in Italy. It was disappointing to read that the threshold for repayment to begin is 1 hour. This suggested there were likely frequent, possibly lengthy, delays on Italian trains, and it made me question the wisdom of leaving only 20 minutes to make a connection in Milan on my return journey.

But that was for later; I was now in a stifling hot Rome and wanted to get on with viewing the Caravaggios across the city, so after checking into my small hotel, one of many squirreled away in buildings all over the city and usually got to by a shaky ride in a rickety old lift seen so often in European film noir, it was off for the short metro ride to Flaminio.

It was fortunate that I don’t mind crowds, as the metro station and the metro ride were claustrophobic and chaotic, but once back in the fresh air, I was only a short walk from Santa Maria del Popolo. It wasn’t my first visit, so I easily found it, and found it closed. The published opening time of 2:30 was now 4. Given it was only just past 2:30, I decided I’d catch Caravaggio’s St Peter and Paul the next day and walked into the centre of Rome to San Luigi dei Francesi and three paintings that arguably announced Caravaggio as a revolutionary artist. Anyway, by the time I’d gazed upon those again, it was just after 4, so I took a short stroll to Sant’Agostino that should have been open but wasn’t even for the man of the cloth in my photo. He had to wait as patiently as the rest of us until the nuns who looked after the chapel decided to open it. After viewing the paintings, I decided to head to the nearest metro station, Spagna, which was still a 20-minute walk and involved the joy of climbing the Spanish Steps. By this time, and despite drinking copious amounts of water, I was both very hot and very bothered, so you can imagine my frustration in finding the station temporarily closed for an unknown reason. It meant more walking to the next station, Barberini, which at least was open.

The next day I had hoped for a later start, but alas there was a metro strike starting at 8:30 am (allowing people to get to work) and ending at 5 pm (so working people could get home) it meant I had to be up and out promptly if I wanted to use the metro and I certainly did given the Borghese Gallery is at least a 45 minute walk from where I was staying and that did not appeal in temperatures already touching 30c. So at 8 o’clock, I joined the even greater throng than the day before, standing four or five deep on the platform. Calling on some techniques learned from using very busy tubes in my London days, I stood right at the end of the platform and waited in the middle of the door as passengers got off, not on either side. It worked in London, and it works in Rome as I entered the carriage with the minimum of fuss.

The closest metro station to Villa Borghese (it’s still a 20-minute walk away) is Flaminio, but I still had plenty of time to visit the Santa Maria del Popolo that I had missed out on yesterday and look upon two of Caravaggio’s most physically forceful works. The Cerasi Chapel, where they’ve hung for circa 4 centuries, used to be unlit; you waited patiently for your eyes to adjust as the paintings came to life. Now, for €2 you can switch on a light above them. I know I’m an old curmudgeon, but I prefer it as it was. There are also many signs indicating you must not take photographs, yet some still do, even while standing under those very signs! Guess some people can’t help themselves.

It was then time to stroll to the beautiful Borghese Gallery, taking advantage of the shade of the surrounding parkland. I won’t go through all the Caravaggios in the gallery (and the lots of other great art, including Holbein’s Henry VIII), as I’ve mentioned, I will write about some of them next week. However, I will offer advice for those thinking of a visit to the Borghese. Don’t just turn up on a whim, as you won’t get in. Tickets sell quickly, and if you need a specific time slot (as I did), you should check their website as soon as tickets for the day after become available (usually around a month in advance). London’s National Gallery, the RA and Tate could learn a lot from the Borghese in limiting visitor numbers, as although it’s extremely popular, you never feel jostled and have time to consider each piece. However, don’t linger too long, because as with many restaurants, there is a strict two-hour time limit. The coloured sticker you must wear indicates at a glance whether you have overstayed your welcome, and, goodness forbid, if you remove it.

Also, any bag larger than a clutch purse or a small camera case has to be surrendered to a slick, technology-enabled system. While I was retrieving my bag, the chap handling the process was clearly very happy in his work, whistling tuneful opera arias. He also bore a passing resemblance to a character in an Italian detective series I watch, Le indagini di Lolita Lobosco. That character is a policeman, happy in his work guarding the Questura, who sings opera and other Italian songs while so doing. The series, like many such Italian detective shows, such as Non Uccidere, Inspector Ricciardi, Montelbano, Rocco Schiavone, etc., is more escapism than high drama, but oh, the scenery. During cold northeast England winters, it calls to mind Mediterranean warmth (well, maybe not Schiavone, which is filmed in Aosta)

From the Borghese, it was about a 20-minute walk to Palazzo Barberini, which, despite being the National Gallery of Art, attracts far fewer visitors, so there is no need for time-slotted tickets. There were my Caravaggios and the bonus of an Artemisia, or it might be, probably (and I know I’m not an art expert, although I’ve seen many Artemisia paintings several times), but it didn’t feel like that to me, and even the gallery offered it could’ve been by another painter.

Anyway, despite the heat, crowds, metro strikes, and flexible church opening hours, I achieved my aim of seeing all the Caravaggios I had hoped to see while in Rome, and from there it was a short, uneventful train journey to Naples.

Although Naples also has a metro, I decided I’d had enough of overheated and crowded underground tunnels and preferred to stay above ground. As it is, two of the city’s Caravaggios aren’t far apart, and there’s a shuttle bus to reach the Museo di Capodimonte for the third. So, I strolled slowly through Naples, both because of the heat and the crowded, narrow streets, which made it hard to move at a pace (this isn’t Milan). One interesting thing I noticed while flâneuring was a large banner welcoming people to Naples’ Spanish Quarter. Decades ago, when I first visited Naples, the hotel manager warned me to avoid the Spanish Quarter if possible and certainly not to enter it at night. I suppose things may have changed and become safer, like other gentrifying neighbourhoods around the world, but as it was, I didn’t have time to explore it further on this trip.

My first stop was the Pio Monte della Misericordia, which roughly translates to Pious Mount of Mercy and is one of the most remarkable artistic and charitable institutions in Naples. It was founded in 1601 by seven young Neapolitan noblemen as a confraternity dedicated to helping the sick, poor, imprisoned, and vulnerable in the city, and its church is the setting for one of Caravaggio’s greatest masterpieces.

Soon after he arrived in Naples, after fleeing Rome, he became the city’s most celebrated painter. Unsurprisingly, the confraternity commissioned him to create an altarpiece to represent their charitable ideals, and he produced an extraordinary composition that combines all seven corporal works of mercy in a single, chaotic vision illuminated by flashes of supernatural light.

After seeing it, the confraternity decreed that the work was so wonderful it could never be sold, nor could Caravaggio paint a copy, and they paid the artist the incredible sum of 400 ducats to ensure that. While it’s difficult to estimate the equivalent today, estimates suggest it would be around £200,000. Given that he was on the run, those funds financed his move to Malta, where he sought the Maltese Knighthood that would secure a papal pardon.

Before I move on, I should mention that the institution still offers charitable services, with several rooms of the palace occupied by non-profit associations supported by Pio Monte della Misericordia, which carry out activities to support the most vulnerable.

From the centre of Naples, it was then by shuttle bus to Museo di Capodimonte, an art museum located in the Palace of Capodimonte, a grand Bourbon palazzo overlooking Naples. Once upon a time, I ‘climbed’ to it, but my knees prevail against that these days.

By my tradition, the last painting I visit when I’m in Naples is Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of Saint Ursula at the Gallerie d’Italia. Viewing it last seems apt given it’s believed to be his last. It no longer hangs in splendid isolation but as part of an ‘experience’. Again, I’ll share my thoughts on that in next week’s meander.

After my time in Naples, it was time to begin the return journey home on a deliberately chosen different route from the one I took on the way from England.

First, it was from Naples to Milan, where I would change trains for Zurich, but I doubted that after experiencing delays on each Italian train, I would make my 20-minute connection in Milan. It didn't help that we left Naples a few minutes late, and by the time we passed through Florence, we were running 15 minutes behind schedule. It was time to explore later connections. But then, as if by some magic, we began to make up time, and the progress screen in the carriage became addictive viewing.

Mile on mile, the train sped on, and by the outskirts of Milan, we were back on schedule... my re had never been so laxed. But horror on horror, we suddenly slowed to a crawl, and the delay grew. The train regained its schedule on Milan’s outskirts, but then slowed, and delays returned minute by minute. Eventually, we accelerated, arriving in Milan just two minutes late. I left the train but realised I would need all 18 minutes I had to walk almost the length of the platform I was on (my seat had been in the second-to-last carriage), find my Zurich-bound train departure platform, and get there. I arrived at its gate with about 5 minutes left and discovered to my ‘joy’ that my train was stacked in front of another long one. With Chariots of Fire effort, I set myself to the task as Roger Bannister (and don’t forget he wasn’t carrying a large travel bag) must have done when he broke the four-minute mile. Conjuring up an imaginary Chris Brasher to encourage me, as he had done for Bannister, exhaustedly, I reached my goal (and yes, I know Bannister isn’t in Chariots of Fire, but take a look at a photo of him finishing the four-minute mile, and he’s doing a pretty good impression of Eric Liddell). It may have looked to other passengers that I might soon need medical attention, but I’d made it, and as it turned out, the Milan to Zurich leg proved uneventful, even to the passport inspection when a couple of uniformed Swiss immigration people meandered down the carriage smiling and offering welcomes to Switzerland. My passport never left my pocket.

After a stay in Zurich, came the long journey to Berlin, with another change required this time in Munich. And for this one, I had given myself a generous hour to make the connection, since I knew there would be a bit of a walk between platforms at Munich station. Interestingly, while on the first leg of that journey, I happened to read a British newspaper article about Wi-Fi services on trains across Europe, which reported that the UK had one of the worst.

I wasn’t so sure, given my recent experiences. The Wi-Fi service during my journey with LNER from Newcastle to London was great, as was that on Eurostar to Paris. In Italy, the Wi-Fi on the trains I used was patchy at best, and on the Zurich-to-Berlin train, it was nonexistent. I wondered how they did these surveys: a desktop exercise involving theoretical analysis, or by riding the routes and/or asking passengers. I suspected the former. Anyway, when it came to the connection in Munich, I made my Berlin-bound train without mishap and arrived there on time. And what a station. I had travelled through some impressive stations on my journey, most notably Naples, which is completely transformed from the station I recall from 40 years ago. All the stations now resemble shopping malls with a train shed tacked on, and Berlin especially so, being by far the largest, with trains running on three levels enclosed within a huge shopping centre.

Anyway, to my final train journey and the longest, at touching six hours, so it was another incredibly early start as I wished to reach Amsterdam with plenty of contingency for catching the shuttle bus to take me to the Amsterdam-Newcastle ferry and the last part of my travel home. As it turned out, I was so glad I took that early train because, about an hour from Amsterdam, the announcement came (first in Dutch, then German, and then English) that, somewhere ahead of us, another train was in collision with someone. The announcement went on to say that my train would now return to the station it had just left, where we would disembark for services to Amsterdam via another route. No real issue I thought as even with this delay and the need to catch an alternative service I should still make the shuttle bus in plenty of time.

After a short delay, our train pulled away back towards the last station, and as it did so, another announcement came over the loudspeaker. This one was to say that, rather than everyone disembarking, railway operations had decided to reroute my train into Amsterdam, and our new time of arrival would be some 90 minutes later than scheduled. Still OK time-wise, I thought, and confess some relief that I didn’t have to negotiate changing trains somewhere in the Netherlands as my mind went back some 52 years to a similar train journey from what was then West Germany to the Netherlands with my best friend, Chris, after our visit to my brother, then stationed in West Germany with the British Army, and his wife.

In those days, there was no Amsterdam–Newcastle ferry; the nearest North Sea route to northeast England was the Rotterdam–Hull route. To reach Rotterdam, Chris and I had to change trains at Arnhem, a name that still resonates deeply with many British and all Dutch people.

Having disembarked from our first train from West Germany, Chris and I duly went to the indicated platform in Arnhem for our onward train to Rotterdam, from where we would then catch the ferry to Hull and the train home to northeast England.

We waited on the platform, and waited, and waited. Our scheduled departure time came and went, and we waited. Then a chap in a uniform appeared and asked us something in Dutch. Our blank looks prompted him to switch to English as he asked why we were waiting.

On telling him, he sighed and said there’d been a platform change, an announcement we’d missed or misunderstood, and our train was long gone. At 17, neither Chris nor I were seasoned travellers, but fortunately, our friendly railway chap came with us to another platform from where a train would still get us to Rotterdam in time for the ferry. When that train arrived, he even had a quick word with the guard to make sure there wouldn’t be any problems with our tickets. I’ve never forgotten that small act of kindness, especially when I returned to Arnhem some decades later, on business.

Anyway, back to this trip and as forecast, my train duly arrived in Amsterdam Centraal some 90 minutes later than scheduled but still with more than enough time for me to catch the shuttle bus. Once at the ferry terminal, technology caught up with me. I may have missed the photographing and fingerprinting when leaving the UK, but to get back in (or at least leave the Netherlands), it needed to happen. A very chatty immigration control officer asked how I had entered the EU and about my travels while there, all while my fingerprints were being scanned and a photo was being taken. The whole thing took all of two minutes, and with a friendly “Bon Voyage” from the immigration officer, I walked aboard.

Going back to my overnight North Sea ferry crossing 52 years ago, it was very different from this voyage. Chris and I had little money, so there was no cabin for us, and we tried to grab some sleep in some rows of seats in one part of the ship. There was also a distinct lack of entertainment, with just a couple of bars and a snack-bar-style ‘restaurant’. And the ferries were smaller with less effective stabilisers, so you really felt the rocking and rolling of the North Sea. I saw my dinner twice but felt much better afterwards as I gained my sea legs. In contrast, this crossing was as smooth as can be. I've been on bumpier bus rides. And it might only be some 14 hours and overnight, yet on offer are a two-screen cinema, a cocktail bar, a silver-service restaurant, a nightclub, a pub/bar, and other snack bars and coffee bars. Everyone has a cabin of sorts, although the less you pay, the closer to the engine room you are.

However, given my early starts over the last few days, I did not stay up late to take advantage of the various forms of entertainment. I had dinner in the silver service restaurant, and then it was to bed, rocked to sleep on my journey home by the soft sway of the ferry.

Next week it’s about the paintings themselves…

Michel de Montaigne

This is the first of four meanderings, musing on my ‘Searching for Caravaggio’, as I named it, 3,000-mile round-trip by rail (plus ferry), as an early 70th-birthday gift to myself. My birthday is in mid-July, but to avoid the sweltering summer heat, I decided to travel in May, when I assumed it would be cooler. Then arrived the hottest spring in Europe for many a year! Anyway, this piece is about some of the people I encountered and ended up in conversation with along the way.

My first such was with an attendant at London’s National Gallery while I was looking at its Caravaggios. The attendant was also a fan of his work, and when I mentioned my trip, they said they were jealous and would love to do something similar. We chatted for a while about the paintings and the artist. Like me, the attendant didn’t believe the conspiracy theories about Caravaggio’s death and thought it was probably yellow fever, though, of course, no one really knows. Eventually, they had to get back to work, but I enjoyed our talk, and it made me even more excited for the rest of my journey. It’s easy to forget how much knowledge gallery attendants have of the art that's under their watchful gaze.

Another encounter was over dinner in a small, modern restaurant in Rome. I was already tucking into my first course when a young couple (let’s call them Ashe and Ben), perhaps in their early thirties, entered and were shown to the table next to mine. We traded smiles, and I soon ascertained from their conversation over the menu that they were Canadian, the giveaway being their pronunciation of words such as “about” and “out”.

Our conversation began when I overheard Ashe pondering which wine to order and asking Ben for his opinion. He said he was sticking with beer and admitted he didn’t know much about Italian wine. I apologised for the intrusion and suggested to Ashe that the Cesanese I was drinking was rather good. She decided to try it, and soon the three of us were chatting together.

They told me this was their first holiday since their two children, now five and three, were born. Ashe’s parents were looking after the kids, and while Ashe and Ben had much enjoyed the break, there was still a degree of nervousness about how their children were doing. They FaceTimed, but it hadn’t completely removed the couple’s anxiety. It was the last night of their short break, and while they were excited to see their children again, they had really enjoyed spending time together as a couple. I smiled, remembering when my older, now forty-something, children were young and how special it felt to have time alone with my then-wife, Veronica, away from the daily children-centric domestic routine. Our conversation wasn’t just about children. I learned that Ben sometimes travelled to the UK for work and knew Durham, though he hadn’t yet made the short trip to Newcastle.

As dinner was ending, Ben asked if I knew of any nearby rooftop bars, but I couldn’t help. Luckily, our friendly waiter had a few suggestions, and Ben and Ashe left to enjoy the rest of their evening, while I felt pleased that Ashe liked the wine I’d suggested, and thought maybe I even convinced Ben to visit Newcastle on his next trip to northeast England.

My next memorable encounter was also food-related, on my second night in Rome. I’d found a small trattoria tucked away on a narrow street, and upon entering it felt more like someone's house rather than a restaurant. Intimate and slightly worn, with walls crowded with black-and-white photographs and memorabilia, and a glass cabinet full of knick-knacks.

Only a ‘curtain’ of plastic strips separated the dining room from the kitchen, from which came the clatter of pans, while in the dining room, there was only the hum of conversation and occasional chink of glasses. The place felt lived-in, rooted in its neighbourhood, and connected to a Rome that existed long before guidebooks and social media. Overall, it had a faded charm, but I liked it and liked it more when I saw the Roman classic cacio e pepe on the menu. I ordered it right away.

It wasn’t long before the elderly chef (and I discovered the owner of the place) emerged from the kitchen carrying my order. He introduced himself as Carlo and, with a beaming smile, said it wasn’t often that visitors from outside the city ordered this classic Roman dish. Because he still wished to attract those visitors, he had adapted some menu items to include dishes that locals rarely tried (he confessed that, in his experience, most Italians were parochial when it came to food) or tweaked classic recipes to better suit ‘foreign’ tastes. That’s why he was so delighted to serve me personally rather than leave it to one of the waiting staff.

For those who have not sampled cacio e pepe, the dish is nothing elaborate, with no extravagant ingredients. Just pasta, pecorino Romano, black pepper, and, most importantly of all, the culinary skill, in Carlo’s case, honed over decades, to bring them together with the ingenuity of combining the simplest of ingredients into something wonderful. Probably the definition of all Italian cooking.

As I began to eat, Carlo, leaving the cooking to his two sons, asked if I would like to know how he put the dish together. I didn't hesitate to say I would, and he began by offering how important he felt the choice of pasta was, in his view, homemade tonnarelli. The pepe side of the dish was the black peppercorns he crushed every morning, which took a while as he used at least a teaspoon’s worth per portion. Cooking the dish happens very quickly. With the pasta boiling, he toasts the pepper, adding a little of the pasta water once toasted. And while toasting the pepper, he also mixes the pecorino with some pasta water to make a paste. When the pasta is al dente, he adds it to the toasted pepper, stirring constantly and adding a bit more pasta water if needed. He then adds the cheese paste, stirs quickly, and serves. So from order to plate only a few minutes. After his explanation, Carlo then left me to eat, and I pondered that, given it’s the Italian way, other Roman chefs would probably offer a multitude of tiny variations on Carlo’s technique, but to me, what he produced was excellent.

My plate clean, Carlo reemerged from his kitchen, and when I told him how much I had enjoyed the dish, his smile grew even bigger. I’ve always valued traditions, and that meal reminded me that they last not because they’re grand or trendy, but because people still see their value and choose to keep them alive.

The next day, it was on to Naples to receive a warm welcome from Marco, the owner of my hotel there, hidden among the winding streets of the old city. He was in his late twenties, eager to tell me about the place he had recently bought and renovated, being clearly proud of his work and keen to make sure everything was just as I hoped.

On the outside, the building still retained its historic character; however, Marco had brought the interior to life with thoughtful restoration and modern touches. As he showed me my room, he pointed out tiny details, not in a showy way, but with genuine enthusiasm, making it clear this wasn’t just a business to him but a personal project. He was almost like a proud father, simply wanting to share something he cared about, and I have to say he had created a well-appointed, modern hotel that also retained a Neapolitan charm and personality.

Then, even though I told him this was by far not my first visit to Naples, he gave me quite a list of recommended restaurants, bars, and places to visit (I would probably have had to stay a month to visit them all). Marco was clearly as keen to show off his city as he was to show off his hotel.

Of course, no trip to Naples for me is complete without a visit to my much-loved Oak bar, just off what locals call Spaccanapoli, one of the city’s most famous and striking streets, running straight through the old centre and dividing it into north and south. The name means ‘Naples splitter’ because, from above, the street forms a long axis through the dense historic centre. It’s not a single road but a chain of streets, each named individually, following the ancient Greek-Roman grid of Naples, dating back to the 6th century BCE. Walking along Spaccanapoli today, you’re following a city plan that’s well over 2,000 years old. Yet despite its importance, it’s not a grand boulevard but a compressed heart of Naples, busy with the movement of people.

Oak is a small bar that serves great draught and bottled beers from Italy and abroad, along with wines from Campania and other regions. It’s tucked away on a side street that most tourists would miss, but I enjoy the intimate setting and the lively yet relaxed atmosphere that feels truly Neapolitan. My wife, Sarah, always teases me for finding places like this wherever we go. Oak opened eight years ago, and I first found it while wandering the narrow lanes of the Pendino district in Naples’ historic centre. On that first visit, I ordered a beer in my best Italian, but Harriet (or Harri, as everyone called her), one of the owners (the other is her Neapolitan husband), immediately recognised I was English. We laughed about our similar names and started chatting. Since then, Oak has been a regular stop for me whenever I’m in Naples.

Among Neapolitan beer enthusiasts, Oak has earned a deserved reputation and is also known for promoting the modern natural wine movement. Rather than featuring a conventional wine list, they focus on small producers and low-intervention wines, making it popular with customers interested in contemporary Italian drink culture. For me, Oak offers an interesting contrast to the city’s famous pizzerias, cafés, and historic wine bars. While unmistakably Neapolitan, it represents a newer side of Naples, attracting an eclectic clientele of locals, students, and older beer aficionados like me.

My conversation here was with another Marco, who was working behind the bar. He was born in England, the son of Irish and Italian parents, who had moved to Naples when he was a child. Seeing the large tribute to Diego Maradona on the wall beside him, I asked if he followed Napoli, and interestingly, he told me he wasn’t interested in football as a boy, but after meeting his girlfriend, a Napoli fan, he caught the bug and now goes to games at Stadio Diego Armando Maradona. Maradona isn’t so well-liked in England because of the ‘Hand of God’ incident, but in Naples, he’s a legend, and his portrait and tributes to him are literally everywhere. During his seven years at Napoli, Maradona helped transform the club from a struggling side into one that won the Scudetto for the first time and today remains one of Italy’s top teams. Naturally, Marco and I then talked about football, and I couldn’t help comparing Napoli fans to Newcastle United supporters, both groups having their ups and downs in following their team’s fortunes, but the love of those teams is almost part of our DNA.

It wasn’t just football; we also talked about the contrasting social distinctions between North and South Italy, and how it’s the reverse and more significant than the north/south divide in the UK. While Marco did not speak Napulitano, he mentioned that some words in the language change gender compared with Italian, which means people from Naples are extremely easy to identify outside the area. Pretty much how someone can identify people from northeast England by our pronunciation of certain words.

In the 1970s, when I moved to London, having a northeast accent was a stigma, with listeners suggesting the speaker was not as bright as they might be. That’s changed somewhat, and now call centres and help lines, etc., recruit people from the northeast of England because of our keenness to help, friendly reputation and an accent that conveys a ‘cuddly’ personality. In Italy, that transition hasn’t happened, and upon hearing a Neapolitan accent, many Northern Italians will label the speaker terroni/terrone, which loosely translates to ‘peasant’.

Later in the day, I sought out a place to catch the Champions League final before heading to my restaurant for dinner. Of course, in Naples, with its love of football, some shops had the game on TVs outside, so I joined a bunch of Neapolitans (all supporting PSG - Marco in Oak had told me there was some affinity between Napoli and the French team) to watch it. I confess I felt some concern when a chap, not in a uniform, but with a pistol on his hip, stood next to me. No one else batted an eyelid, so I assume he was a plainclothes police officer, but in Naples, you never know. Those around me soon sussed out that I was English, and one chap asked if I was supporting Arsenal, to which I obviously said no, adding I supported NUFC. On hearing that, a few gave a thumbs-up and commented on how much they liked Sandro Tonali (who plays in midfield for NUFC). Although he is from Milan, they saw him as a good player for the Italian team.

At half-time, I wandered into a small bar for a beer. The owner looked a bit like Luca Brasi, the character from The Godfather, but when I smiled and asked for a beer, he gave me a grin that could soften concrete. We sat together while he smoked and I drank my beer, chatting occasionally in a mix of Italian, Napulitano, and Geordie-influenced English. We didn’t talk about anything deep, just the weather and football, but mostly we watched the world go by. Which in Naples means buzzing scooters, street traders calling out, and conversations shouted across distances, much like in northeast England. Sometimes, heated exchanges sounded like they’d end in a fight, but, again, like Newcastle, Neapolitans just passionately discussed things, such as how wonderful McTominay’s bicycle kick was, which won Napoli another Scudetto during the 24/25 season.

On my return journey stopover in Berlin, I had a brief, but not romantic, encounter with the Oberkellner of an incredibly busy Berlin beer Keller. As I waited in the queue to enter, I was fascinated by how, no matter how big the party was, she marshalled the flow of guests from the waiting area to their tables with minimal fuss and efficiency, while keeping a watchful eye on her large team of servers. When it was my turn, I received a very warm welcome, and when I mentioned I was short on time, she quickly found me a table and called over a server before I had even sat down. I didn’t need to look at the menu; I knew I wanted schweinshaxe with kartoffelknödel and sauerkraut, washed down with ein großes bier, as a reminder of meals I enjoyed during business trips to Munich.

As promised, the meal arrived swiftly, and whenever a chance occurred, the Oberkellner would not only check all was OK but also manage snatched conversations on why I was travelling, explaining why the Keller was so busy on a Tuesday evening (there was a private birthday party taking up some of the building) and whether I had visited Berlin before. Each snippet, no more than a couple of minutes, happened while her keen eye swept the rest of the Keller. It was impressive to watch, and my meal over, I left both full and with a fulsome “vielen dank” from the Oberkellner and my server, along with beaming smiles. In a venue buzzing with locals and visitors alike, the staff's professionalism and attentiveness stood out, and the Oberkellner’s ability to keep everything running smoothly amid the boisterous atmosphere was impressive.

While the organisation of the DFDS ferry between Amsterdam and Newcastle cannot be faulted, there is one aspect, the pickup point for the shuttle bus to take you from close to Amsterdam Centraal to the ship, which seems a bit random, especially as there are no signs and many coaches arrive and leave from the area. Although I’ve used the ferry crossing before, this time the literature sent to me said to wait in a different spot from last time. Being early, it was a case of loitering with intent. The intent being to spot others who might also be taking the shuttle bus.

After 20 minutes or so, a group of four passed me speaking English and carrying luggage. I asked if they were aiming to catch the ferry shuttle, and their voices betrayed their origin. It’s said that wherever you go, you’ll always meet a Geordie. In this case, an exiled Geordie, Linda (now living in Australia), along with her Australian husband, Jack and a couple from Sunderland, Maureen and George (OK, you're bound to meet a mackem too).

Turned out the two couples had bumped into each other a few minutes earlier, when Linda and Jack, on hearing English spoken, asked Maureen and George if they knew where to catch the shuttle bus. They did as they had only hopped across from northeast England for a day in Amsterdam and were told the pickup would be from where the bus dropped them off. Turns out that many people enjoy a night crossing on the ferry with all the entertainment on offer, spend the day in Amsterdam (well, around 5 hours) and then take the ferry back. To me, it seems an expensive way to take a trip, but each to their own.

The five of us chatted all through our 30-minute wait for the bus and then on the 40-minute bus ride, saying our goodbyes as we headed off to our respective cabins, with conversation roaming between the different seasons experienced by NUFC and SAFC (I preferred to move on quickly from that), how travel has changed (i.e., become more administratively tedious) from decades ago. How northeast England has also changed over the past 50 years, and how accents never completely disappear, no matter how long we might live away from the area of our birth, in the case of Linda, even after some 40 years in Oz. And even if we soften them, they come roaring back when we speak to someone from our region or visit again. I recall that when living in the south and having slowed down my speech and lost some colloquialisms (e.g., in the northeast you are not ‘told off’, you ‘get wrong’) when I spoke on the telephone to my mother who still lived in the northeast, some psychological switch in my brain dropped me back into a strong northeastern accent and then falling back to ‘softer’ tones once the call ended. Yet like breathing, I was unconscious of it.

My final encounter was while on the ferry. A couple of years ago, I took it from Newcastle to Amsterdam to visit the Vermeer exhibition at the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum. On the way there, I fell into conversation with my waiter, Intan, and during the meal, he chatted about life on board ship (he’d worked for DFDS for 12 years) and my plans for my visit to Amsterdam, as with the Oberkellner, conducting our conversation in snippets as he served other tables. On the return voyage, by coincidence, he was again my waiter, and this time we managed to chat for a little longer as he described how much he enjoyed his work. It was a long rota: three weeks sailing, then 5 days off, but it kept him fit, given he was on his feet for so long, and he loved meeting passengers of many nationalities, either excitedly looking forward to their pending holiday or excitedly telling him about how their trip had gone. He was a man incredibly happy in his work.

On this trip, I looked for him in the restaurant but couldn’t see him, so I wondered whether he was on his 5-day break or had even left DFDS. Then, towards the end of my meal, I spotted him across the room, waiting at other tables, so after paying, I sought him out and found him outside the restaurant. When he saw me, his face broke into a huge smile. Despite all the faces he must have encountered in the intervening couple of years, he remembered me and, more than that, my name! I thought it incredible, and I’m pleased to report that Intan is still as happy in his work as he has ever been.

I said in one of my notes posted while travelling that for me, the encounters I had along the way made my trip just as much as viewing wonderful paintings. All the encounters above, and that with the young Italian waiter who wanted to know more about Caravaggio and the American chap who had not long retired from the same US company I retired from seven years ago, all added to the enjoyment of my travels. And as in travel as in life, it’s not the journey that’s important, it’s the people you meet along the way.

Next week, more on the journey itself…

Alex, 17, writing as part of the Headliners Young Journalist programme.

Last week, I wrote of the influence that William George Armstrong, later Lord Armstrong of Whitley, had on the creation of Newcastle University. This week, I write about another landmark in Newcastle that also benefited from his philanthropy, Jesmond Dene. It’s a distinctive green space that’s more than a park; for generations of city dwellers, it’s been a quiet retreat from urban life. A place to walk, encounter wildlife, meet friends and family or simply chill. But it's also an area that, before its creation through Victorian philanthropy, was a centre of religion and then home to industry.

The word ‘dene’ is a northern England term for a steep-sided wooded valley through which a burn, or small river, runs. It crops up frequently in northeast England, such as in Castle Eden Dene, Crimdon Dene, and indeed Dean Street in Newcastle, which runs between Grey Street and the area known as Side. Before the street existed, the route was occupied by the dene of the Lort Burn, a stream that flowed through medieval Newcastle down to the River Tyne. As Newcastle expanded, the dene was gradually filled in, and the burn was culverted underground, creating what became known as Dean Street.

One of the clues to this hidden landscape survives in nearby street names, for example, High Bridge recalls a bridge that once crossed the Lort Burn valley, and although the stream is now buried beneath the city, its course still shapes the topography of Newcastle’s historic centre, serving as a reminder of the natural landscape upon which Newcastle was built.

But back to Jesmond Dene, a wooded valley covering some 33 acres formed by the Ouseburn (Jesmond means 'mouth of the Ouseburn’), a small river that flows south toward the Tyne and the lower reaches of which I wrote of in Ouseburn. The dene’s waterfalls, rock formations, bridges, and dense vegetation create a rare environment within a major city, underscoring Jesmond Dene’s ongoing significance as a preserved natural space amid Newcastle’s growth.

During the nineteenth century, Armstrong acquired land in the dene and, in line with Victorian ideas about landscape design, reshaped it into an elaborate private park associated with his nearby residence. The result combined natural scenery with elements crafted for a picturesque effect. Curving paths, ornamental structures, planted woodland, and dramatic viewpoints encouraged visitors to experience the landscape emotionally and visually, reflecting nineteenth-century beliefs that nature promoted well-being.

Armstrong then made the significant decision in 1883 to gift Jesmond Dene to the people of Newcastle, an act of philanthropy that transformed a private ‘playground’ into a public amenity, consistent with a wider Victorian tradition in which wealthy industrialists funded libraries, parks, galleries, and educational institutions for civic benefit. Such gifts reflected the ideas of the time on social responsibility and urban improvement, with the growing view that, in rapidly industrialising cities, access to green space was essential; therefore, nineteenth-century public parks in the UK carried important social significance.

Pollution and overcrowded dwellings plagued industrial Newcastle during its rapid growth in coal mining and shipbuilding, and places like Jesmond Dene offered recreation, exercise, and respite from that. Jesmond Dene also developed a distinctive identity by retaining a more irregular, absorbing atmosphere compared to formal Victorian parks. Even today, the contrast between the park’s busy urban surroundings and the secluded valley heightens its function as a place of escape and reflection within Newcastle.

A notable feature of the park is the Old Mill, an evocative remnant of the Ouseburn Valley’s industrial past. Hidden among trees beside the Ouseburn, the picturesque ruin appears almost like a medieval relic, yet its history tells the story of the valley’s transformation from a rural setting of water-powered industry into the Victorian parkland enjoyed today.

Documented evidence shows that Watermills were in use in the dene since at least the 1300s, and it's known that a watermill stood on the site of the present one from at least 1739, when it was known as Mabel’s Mill, the name later changing to Heaton Mill. At about the time the current mill was built, the Freeman family took ownership, and several generations of that family operated the mill, with their name surviving nearby in Paddy Freeman’s Park and the Freeman Hospital.

As more industry developed along the Ouseburn in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the mill adapted to changing economic needs. After its use as a flour mill, it was used to grind pig meal and later to crush flint destined for the pottery industry further down the valley.

The mill’s purpose changed again when Armstrong purchased the dene in 1862. By then, it was no longer commercially viable and had ceased industrial operations, and was instead used as a domestic dwelling until the 1920s.

The building visible today dates mainly from the mid-to-late nineteenth century, although it’s believed to incorporate earlier structures. Now a romantic ruin, it retains traces of its machinery and mill workings, with rocky walls, a riverside setting, and a nearby waterfall, making it a popular spot in Jesmond Dene.

And so to that waterfall, perhaps the park’s most famous feature. Many visitors assume it is natural, but it is a remarkable piece of Victorian engineering by Armstrong, who redesigned the course of the Ouseburn to dramatic effect, with the waterfall his largest intervention. Explosives were used to blast out a gorge, and the excavated stone was then used to build up the sides of the cascade, with the aim of creating something that looked wild and natural, when in truth all was by careful design.

Nearby, Armstrong also created a grotto from an old quarry, allowing Victorian visitors to explore this artificial cave and experience a sense of mystery before emerging to views of the waterfall and the valley beyond. Such features reflected the nineteenth-century taste for romantic landscapes that combined nature, engineering and theatrical effects.

Hidden among the trees above Jesmond Dene are the atmospheric ruins of St Mary’s Chapel, which, in many ways, is the hidden heart of the dene, as the oldest surviving church building in Newcastle. Although only fragments remain today, the chapel was once one of the most important pilgrimage destinations in medieval northern England.

It’s believed that the chapel dates from the early twelfth century and was founded by the Grenville family, Lords of Jesmond. The oldest surviving feature is a Norman chancel arch dating from this period, while additions were made during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as the chapel’s importance grew.

And that importance stemmed from the belief that it was a place of miracles. Medieval tradition held that the Virgin Mary had appeared in the valley, and a sacred relic associated with her was kept at the chapel. Pilgrims travelled from across England to visit the shrine and the nearby holy well, seeking healing and spiritual aid. By the fifteenth century, people regarded St Mary’s as a significant pilgrimage site, with one contemporary benefactor even ranking it alongside the great shrines of Canterbury and the old St Paul’s in London.

St Mary’s was more than a chapel, as historical records indicate that it formed part of a larger religious complex that included a hospice/hospital where pilgrims could receive care. The chapel frequently appears in medieval legal disputes involving both the Crown and the Papacy, underscoring its wealth and significance, but its fortunes changed dramatically during the Reformation after its dissolution in 1548, and the buildings gradually fell into ruin, with parts of the site reused for agricultural purposes, while other buildings disappeared altogether. By the nineteenth century, what remained had become a romantic relic overlooking the dene.

The ruins survived, in part, thanks to Armstrong's efforts after he acquired Jesmond Dene and today, the chapel is protected under Grade II as both a listed structure and a scheduled monument. More than that, its once importance still influences Newcastle’s geography, as it’s believed that Pilgrim Street takes its name from the route used by travellers journeying to the shrine connecting medieval Newcastle to wider religious networks across England.

Finally, let’s take a look at Armstrong Bridge, one of Newcastle’s most distinctive Victorian landmarks, which spans the wooded valley of the Ouseburn at the southern end of Jesmond Dene. It’s an indication of Newcastle's notable transformation in the late nineteenth century, with the bridge’s elegant appearance complementing the dene’s natural beauty. As the bridge sits on land mined for coal, Armstrong designed it to adjust itself if the ground below moved, making it the first bridge in the world to do so. It took two years to build, cost £30,000 (close to £4m today), and opened in 1878.

There is a story that Lady Armstrong wanted the bridge built to make life easier for the horses that otherwise pulled heavy loads up the sides of the valley. When it first opened, it was for pedestrians and horse-drawn wagons; later, it carried motorised traffic until 1963, when that was discontinued because the bridge could not support the additional weight. Amazingly, there were threats to demolish the bridge in the 1970s (then again, that threat seemed to hang over the whole of Newcastle at the time) due to the high cost of its repair, but fortunately, a strong public campaign involving local residents, historians and conservationists argued that the bridge was not merely a road crossing but an important piece of Newcastle’s heritage.

Following its rescue, substantial restoration work was carried out on the bridge in the 1980s and 90s, with some structural elements replaced or replicated, ensuring that it could continue to stand while preserving its historic appearance. It is now a Grade II listed structure and one of the finest surviving examples of Victorian bridge engineering in Britain.

Today, the Old Mill, together with the waterfall, Armstrong Bridge, and St Mary’s Chapel, helps make Jesmond Dene a place where natural charm and local history blend in a uniquely Newcastle landscape, but the dene also holds environmental importance with its woodland habitats supporting bird, mammal, insect, and plant species that are uncommon in heavily urbanised settings. As awareness of biodiversity loss and environmental protection has grown, municipal green spaces such as Jesmond Dene have taken on greater importance, serving not only as recreational landscapes but also as ecological corridors and refuges for wildlife.

Culturally, Jesmond Dene occupies a powerful place within Newcastle’s identity, appearing frequently in local memory, literature and photography, with the dene’s importance perhaps increasing as Newcastle evolved from industrial powerhouse to post-industrial city. As heavy industry declined, landscapes associated with wellbeing, heritage, and environmental quality gained renewed value, and Jesmond Dene now contributes to perceptions of Newcastle as a liveable, culturally rich city rather than merely a former centre of coal mining and shipbuilding. Unlike iconic monuments associated with tourism, its significance is often intimate and personal. For many local residents, Jesmond Dene is simply part of their daily routines, such as strolling for gentle exercise, walking with their dogs and running, as well as social gatherings like picnicking with friends and family, attending seasonal events, or simply seeking quiet after work.

Such everyday relationships make Jesmond Dene culturally important in ways that are difficult to quantify, but ultimately its significance lies in more than scenery. The same wooded valley has served different purposes over the centuries: as a natural environment, a productive landscape, a private estate, a public park, an ecological habitat, and a community space. Each layer of use adds to its meaning and serves as a physical record of changing relationships between nature and the people of Newcastle. In a city once defined by heavy industry, Jesmond Dene offers something increasingly valuable: an indication that civic identity comes not only from buildings and commerce, but also from landscapes where communities rest, reflect, and connect with the natural world.

From the acceptance speech of Dr Martin Luther King Jr. on receiving his Honorary Doctor of Civil Law from Newcastle University

While I am back from my train travels on the continent, it's going to take me a while to write up a Meander on that, so in the meantime, he’s one more local to home.

One of the things I’ve noticed since moving back to northeast England to live, having spent close to 50 years living and working in the south of England, is how much more of a ‘university town’ the city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne is than the one I left in 1974. Indeed, arguably, few institutions have shaped modern Newcastle as profoundly as the university. Although often discussed primarily as a centre of education and research, the university’s significance extends far beyond academia, with the relationship between the city and its university unusually close, probably because the institution did not develop in isolation from the city, but emerged directly from the needs, ambitions, and industries of northeast England.

And before I go any further, I should add that Newcastle University rejected my student application to read biochemistry there some 52 years ago. A disappointment at the time, but I hold no grudges, as that rejection turned out to be a blessing for me. In truth, I am no academic and would have no doubt ended my time at the university with a poor degree and a severely damaged liver. The rejection encouraged me to spread my wings and move to London, and after a few years in forensic science, I then made my little intellect go a long way as I climbed the slippery corporate ladder in Aerospace and Defence. I may not have achieved everything I might have aspired to in my career, but I achieved everything of which I was capable, and I'm comfortable with that. Anyway, this is not about me but about the university.

It may come as a surprise that the university we see today, with some 28,000 students from 130 countries, came into being as recently as 1963, when King’s, a college of Durham University, separated from that establishment to become Newcastle University, although the story reaches much further back in time and is deeply rooted in Victorian industrial society.

As any regular readers of my pieces will know, northeast England in the nineteenth century was one of Britain’s great industrial regions, with rapid growth driven by coal mining, engineering and shipbuilding. It was the resulting population growth that, in 1834, led to the establishment of the Newcastle School of Medicine and Surgery by a group of local doctors, specifically to meet a pressing need for trained medical professionals to serve local communities and treat frequent workplace injuries.

While the medical school was initially independent, it soon developed links with the University of Durham, established a couple of years earlier, and within 20 years Newcastle’s Medical School had formally become part of that University as the Newcastle-upon-Tyne College of Medicine. Thus began a long relationship in which Newcastle’s College of Medicine served as Durham University’s major scientific and medical campus, while Durham University retained stronger traditions in theology and the humanities.

A crucial turning point in the creation of what would become Newcastle University came with the philanthropy of George Armstrong, one of Victorian Britain’s most important industrial figures, especially in weapons manufacturing, and the founder of vast engineering works on Tyneside. Armstrong believed scientific education should serve society and industry, and in 1871, he funded the creation of the College of Physical Science in Newcastle to provide scientific education for the industries driving the northeast English economy.

That college later became known as Armstrong College, and by the late 19th century, it had become a major part of northeast England’s intellectual infrastructure, supplying engineers, scientists, and architects who helped shape both the region and the wider world. In cultural terms, this created an enduring identity for Newcastle as a city of innovation and practical intelligence rather than merely as an industrial labour city. On graduation, students often went on to work in the region’s coalfields, shipyards, railways and steelworks, while some travelled to undertake engineering projects overseas.

In 1937, the Medical College and Armstrong College merged to form King’s College, Newcastle, although remaining part of Durham University. Over the years, Kings became one of Britain’s strongest centres for medicine, engineering and agriculture, earning an international reputation for major contributions to public health and industrial research.

An example of recent pioneering research through the university’s Centre for Life and links with the NHS created one of Britain’s strongest regional genetics programmes, including work on ageing and mitochondrial diseases ( inherited disorders that affect how cells produce energy), with the university becoming a world leader in translational ageing research through its Institute for Ageing and the NIHR Newcastle Biomedical Research Centre. One of the most significant outcomes was research underpinning the development of ‘three-parent IVF’ (mitochondrial donation treatment), designed to prevent mothers from passing severe mitochondrial disease to children. Newcastle scientists were central to the science that led the UK to become the first country to legalise the technique, identifying genes associated with muscular dystrophy, neurodegenerative disorders, inherited blindness, and rare childhood diseases. Their work in human genetics and genomic medicine helped improve diagnosis rates for rare conditions across the NHS.

Newcastle researchers have also developed new cancer diagnostic tools, including work on skin cancer detection and precision medicine approaches, and have contributed to brain cancer research and experimental therapies.

As you might expect from a university so close to the sea, the university’s marine scientists, working partly from the historic Dove Marine Laboratory at Cullercoats, have contributed major research into ocean circulation, climate change impacts, marine biodiversity and fisheries sustainability.

As well as a growing intellectual presence in science and technology, King’s College’s teaching of arts and social sciences expanded significantly, functioning as a catalyst for artistic and intellectual life in Newcastle, with the Fine Art department, particularly during the 1950s and 1960s, becoming internationally influential through figures such as Richard Hamilton, often regarded as a founder of Pop Art. Hamilton’s teaching helped shape artists and musicians, including Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music, whose sophisticated visual and musical style reflected Newcastle’s surprisingly avant-garde artistic environment.

The 1960s were also a period of major expansion in British higher education, and it’s therefore no surprise that Newcastle emerged from under Durham University’s wing as one of the UK’s major “red brick” civic universities, reflecting the institution’s growing size, academic ambition and distinct identity as part of Newcastle.

Like many British universities, and especially given Newcastle’s radical past, the university became a centre of student activism, political debate, and cultural experimentation in the 1960s and 1970s. An example of this came in 1967, when the university awarded Dr Martin Luther King, the inspirational civil rights campaigner, an Honorary Doctor of Civil Law, the only UK university to do so during his lifetime, an act that remains recognised as an important moment in Newcastle University’s history.

Over the years, I have met many people across the country who once studied at Newcastle University and still speak fondly of their time as students and of the city and its people. Newcastle’s identity as a vibrant cultural city would be far weaker without the intellectual energy generated by the university population, while the city’s thriving theatre scene, galleries, museums, and festivals benefit enormously from the presence of thousands of students and academics, who create audiences for cultural events and contribute to public debate.

What’s also striking about Newcastle University alumni is how often they reflect the university’s blend of science and engineering, creative arts, and civic engagement. I’ve already mentioned Bryan Ferry, and another example is Britain’s most respected war correspondent and broadcaster, Kate Adie, who studied at Newcastle in the 1960s. Then there’s the comic actor Rowan Atkinson, who completed a master’s degree in electrical engineering at Newcastle after studying at Oxford. In literature, there’s Neil Astley, founder of Bloodaxe Books, one of Britain’s most important independent poetry publishers, who is strongly associated with the literary scene in northeast England, helping to publish major contemporary poets. Given the university’s track record in science and medicine, it’s no surprise that Sir Liam Donaldson, former Chief Medical Officer for England, who became one of Britain’s most influential public health figures, was a Newcastle graduate. And before him came John Snow, who was among the first cohort of students to the School of Medicine in 1832 and became famous for his pioneering work linking contaminated water to cholera transmission, which helped found modern epidemiology. His act of removing the handle from a pump in London’s Soho district, from which infected water came, is still commemorated by a duplicate Victorian-style pump (without a handle) located approximately where the original stood. Moving from medicine to Architecture and Design, Terry Farrell, one of Britain’s leading architects and urban planners, reflects the capabilities of Newcastle’s architecture school, which has a long and strong national reputation.

It’s not only in economic terms that a university exerts influence; it can also shape how cities envision themselves. As you walk around campus, you can see how the university has also transformed Newcastle’s architecture, with its buildings forming a major part of the city centre landscape, blending Victorian Gothic, Edwardian civic design, postwar modernism, and contemporary architecture. Structures such as the Armstrong building embody the confidence of the Victorian civic culture, while the university’s libraries, lecture halls and public spaces create an intellectual district within the city, linking education to everyday urban life. Unlike more isolated campuses, Newcastle University stays interwoven with the fabric of the city, encouraging interaction among students, residents, businesses and cultural institutions

Perhaps it’s the practical and civic origins that also distinguish Newcastle University from older English universities associated with aristocratic tradition or ecclesiastical foundations. The university was born from urban modernity and industrial ambition as a practical institution serving an industrial region, and that heritage still shapes its culture today with a focus on practical application rather than purely theoretical science. In its early days as King's College, it provided generations of northeast England-born students from humble backgrounds with higher education and access to professions and opportunities previously unavailable to them, and the college became part of a broader postwar ideal that higher education should serve the public good rather than an elite minority.

It has since evolved into a globally recognised university while retaining a strong civic and regional identity, and has become central to northeast England’s economic and post-industrial transformation. As heavy industry declined, higher education and research emerged as important sources of employment, innovation and regeneration, with the university attracting international students, supporting technological and medical research and making a significant contribution to the city’s economy.

Over the decades, the university also helped shape the city of Newcastle’s reputation as relatively open, socially mixed, and less dominated by inherited privilege than some southern university cities, and there doesn’t seem to be the same ’Town v Gown’ tension you find elsewhere. The close ties between the university and the city, through links to civic institutions such as the Great North Museum: Hancock, remain, reinforcing a deep connection between the university and the cultural life of northeast England, as well as the region’s regeneration. These close collaborations with galleries, archives and theatres strengthen the university’s function as a guardian and interpreter of regional heritage. Archaeological projects connected to Hadrian’s Wall, industrial history and Northumbrian culture help preserve northeast England’s distinctive historical identity while presenting it to international audiences.

Overall, Newcastle University helps Newcastle present itself not simply as a former industrial centre, but as a modern, creative, and globally connected city with a keen sense of civic identity. The university has educated generations of citizens from the region, the rest of the UK, and the world, transformed the city’s urban landscape and nurtured its artistic and scientific culture, mirroring Newcastle’s own transformation from an industrial powerhouse to a contemporary cultural and intellectual centre. Long may it continue so to do.

We are delighted to unite these incredible archaeological finds from across the North for our latest exhibition. From Roman silver discovered along Hadrian’s Wall to 9th-century gold found by a Newcastle University student, this is a rare opportunity to see these scattered treasures displayed alongside one another. We can’t wait for people to experience the thrill of these finds and the fascinating stories they reveal about our shared past.

Malavika Anderson, Museum Manager at the Great North Museum: Hancock

This week’s Meander is of my recent visit to the ‘Treasure: Hidden, Lost, Found’ exhibition that’s running at Newcastle’s Great North Museum: Hancock, but before looking at the exhibition, let’s take a look at what at first glance seems the museum’s strange name.

When I was young, the museum was known simply as the Hancock Museum, named after the Victorian naturalist brothers John and Albany Hancock, who were among the most important scientific figures in 19th-century Newcastle, helping turn Tyneside into a serious centre for natural history, zoology, and scientific collecting.

Most regard John, a naturalist, ornithologist, taxidermist, collector and illustrator as the principal ‘Hancock’, who became famous for transforming taxidermy from stiff specimen display into something far more lifelike and artistic. Before John, the arrangement of stuffed animals was very ‘mechanical’ while he pioneered displays that showed birds and animals in natural poses and within realistic habitats. An ideal central to John’s work was that museums should educate, inspire curiosity, and make science accessible to everyone. Many see those ideals as having a huge influence on Victorian museum design and wildlife presentation, and indeed helped shape how museums work today, with some holding John up as “the father of modern taxidermy.”

Of course, taxidermy today occupies a complicated space, neither universally condemned nor universally accepted, with attitudes depending heavily on how the animals were obtained, why the taxidermy was created, and where it is displayed.

Public reactions to taxidermy vary widely, with some visitors finding it valuable for education, conservation and scientific study, while others view it as eerie and exploitative, prompting strong ethical criticism centred on animal welfare. That tension has become part of modern museum interpretation, with many museums, such as the Great Northern, now actively encouraging visitors to think critically about humanity’s relationship with animals and nature rather than presenting specimens in a neutral manner.

Victorian museums often reflected an attitude towards animals as specimens or curiosities, grounded in the idea that humans had dominion over nature, whereas today many people instead emphasise ecological responsibility and respect for animal life. As a result, rows of mounted animals can feel unsettling or sad to some visitors, rather than educational or inspiring.

However, museums still use historic specimens for zoological research, DNA analysis, extinction studies, and environmental history. A 19th-century bird specimen, for example, can help scientists study species decline, the effects of pollution and climate change, and genetic variation. Also, many museums argue that taxidermy helps visitors connect emotionally with wildlife in ways photographs sometimes cannot. Seeing a life-sized animal up close can inspire interest in conservation and preserve knowledge of extinct or endangered species.

Museums today are usually much more careful about ethical sourcing and conservation messaging, and modern institutions do not kill animals for display; specimens come from animals that died naturally in wildlife parks or conservation programmes.

Overall, the debate around taxidermy highlights a cultural shift from collecting nature to possessing and classifying it, to conserving nature with a focus on biodiversity loss, extinction, and environmental responsibility.

Albany, John’s older brother, was a distinguished scientist in a different, less controversial field, specialising in marine biology, microscopic organisms, molluscs, and other sea creatures. He became internationally respected for detailed scientific studies of nudibranchs (sea slugs) and other marine invertebrates. Where John was more public-facing and artistic, Albany was known for his painstaking observation, scientific illustration and anatomical precision. Together, the brothers represented two sides of Victorian science. Public education and spectacle with rigorous research and classification.

There was a deep tie between the Hancock brothers and Newcastle’s scientific community, especially the Natural History Society of Northumbria and the New Museum of Natural History, as it was first called, which opened in 1884 after John Hancock donated his collections and funds toward a purpose-built museum for the city. The museum soon became a symbol of Victorian civic pride, a major centre for natural history, and an educational institution. It was renamed The Hancock Museum in 1890, following John’s death that same year.

The museum maintained its focus on natural history until the end of the 20th century, but in 2003, a redesign and restoration of the Hancock building began, bringing together the collections of the Hancock Museum, Newcastle’s Museum of Antiquities, and Newcastle University’s Shefton Museum. This transition would turn the Hancock Museum from a natural history collection into one that offered natural history, archaeology, an understanding of ancient civilisations, geology, and, importantly, the regional history of northeast England. In 2009, the Great North Museum: Hancock opened its doors.

So, to the exhibition ‘Treasure: Hidden, Lost, Found,’ one of the museum’s major archaeology exhibitions for 2026, which brings together spectacular objects from across Northern Britain to explore not just what treasure is, but why people value and hide or dispose of objects over time. The exhibition also taps into larger debates in archaeology and museums about how objects are classified as ‘treasure’ under the law. Who has the right to own or display historical finds, and the relationships among detectorists, archaeologists, and museums.

At one level, the exhibition is full of visually striking artefacts such as Bronze Age objects, Roman jewellery, Anglo-Saxon gold and Tudor coin hoards, but goes beyond simply displaying precious items by asking questions such as why bury these things and who did so? What turns an old object into ‘treasure’, and who owns the past once something is rediscovered?

That broader approach makes the exhibition feel less like a conventional ‘treasures room’ and more like an exploration of how archaeology connects emotion, history, and identity. The exhibition is also designed to be immersive and family-friendly rather than purely academic, with interactive displays, themes of discovery and excavation, and family trails and activities.

The strongest aspect of Treasure: Hidden, Lost, Found is that it treats treasure not merely as wealth but as evidence of human fear and survival, including ritual or protective acts and the changing cultural meaning of objects. People often temporarily buried things in the ground to keep them safe (think Samuel Pepys and his cheese during the Great Fire of London), but in some cases, items were deposited in the earth or even in water with no intention of ever retrieving them. Of course, sometimes valuables might just have been lost.

A buried coin hoard might once have represented emergency savings during war, a religious offering after grief or loss, or even stolen booty hidden for later retrieval. A number of Bronze Age swords have been found in watery places, like the River Tyne. Many of these were deliberately thrown into the waters as offerings to the gods, with, at the time, rivers, lakes and boggy ground probably seen as places where you might enter the god’s realm. The Amble Rapier, for example, was found on the beach at Amble in Northumberland after a storm.

One of the exhibition’s standout objects for me is the Tribley Shield, a Bronze Age shield discovered near Chester-le-Street. Its story is almost as fascinating as the object itself and it is a perfect symbol for the exhibition’s central themes. Having survived being buried underground for thousands of years, it was rediscovered in the 18th century and broken into pieces so the bronze could be shared among friends; however, two surviving sections have now been reunited. It reminds us of how ‘discoverers’ perceived the value of what they discovered and how recognition of value, from pure financial to historical, has evolved.

Many treasures have a strong connection to their original owners; for example, the Aemilia Ring and the Ord Cross bear names of individuals, while the finds from a burial at Kirkhaugh, a village in Northumberland, also tell someone’s story. The finds, including a ‘cushion stone’ used to work metals, gold lock rings, and flint tools, are understood to be the personal effects of a craftsperson prospecting for metals in the North Pennines.

Given its proximity to Hadrian’s Wall, it’s also no surprise that the exhibition includes finds from Roman Britain and the frontier world around the wall. These include Roman jewellery hoards, coins, and objects associated with military life in the North. One notable find is the Birnie coin hoard, discovered in Scotland, which helps illuminate relationships between Rome and peoples living north of Hadrian’s Wall.

One particularly compelling inclusion is the West Woodburn Hoard, a set of rare early medieval gold artefacts discovered during an excavation in 2025.

In 2021, metal detectorist Alan Grey discovered two gold objects in Redesdale, Northumberland: a socketed mount (probably the head of a decorative pin) and a brooch. These highly decorative objects dated from the 9th century CE, and this discovery prompted archaeologists from the Northeast Museums and Newcastle University to organise an excavation in the same location.

On the first day, Yara Souza, a Newcastle University archaeology student from Orlando, Florida, uncovered a gold socketed mount, similar to the one already found. Alan, who was supporting the excavators, had used his metal detector to initially identify the location of the object, leaving it to Yara to carefully remove it from the earth, who later offered, “I couldn’t believe I’d found something so quickly in my first ever excavation, it was amazing to discover something that hasn’t been seen for more than a thousand years.”

The site where these objects were found lies near Dere Street, an important Roman road that remained in use long after the Roman Empire’s demise and eventually became part of the modern-day A68. Gold was high-status and used only by the elite. As Dere Street connected two major religious centres at Jedburgh and Hexham, experts think the two objects could have had a religious or ceremonial use.

Another treasure on display illustrates different attitudes towards ownership. Elements of the Capheaton Hoard were melted down so that the precious metals could be reused, while the rest became the property of the antiquarian Richard Payne Knight, who bequeathed it to the British Museum. Similarly, the Corbridge Lanx was part of a larger hoard, most of which was melted down and sold to a local goldsmith. However, it was declared a treasure trove and passed into the hands of the Dukes of Northumberland, who eventually sold it to the British Museum in the 1990s.

Some of the finds are from a later period, such as the Tudor period, ‘Mason’ and ‘Short’ Hoards found by individuals going about their daily lives, which show how treasure can be found by chance.

Richard Mason found a jug while renovating a house on the island of Lindisfarne in 2003, but it was not until 2011, when he was cleaning it, that he realised it contained 17 gold and silver coins, including a rare gold scudo of Pope Clement VII. The latest coin in the hoard is a silver penny of Elizabeth I from 1562, indicating that the hoard was hidden after that time. Coincidentally, in 1963, Alan Short found a hoard of 50 silver coins in almost the same spot on Lindisfarne and these coins also date from the reign of Elizabeth I, a time when Lindisfarne was a garrison on the frontier with Scotland, and both hoards might represent valuables buried for safekeeping by soldiers.

The ‘Birnie’ and ‘Dairsie’ Hoards of Roman silver from Scotland illuminate the complicated politics of Rome’s relationship with people living north of Hadrian’s Wall.

Excavations at Birnie, following an initial discovery in 1996 of some coins by Hamish Stuart, a metal detectorist, revealed two separate hoards buried close together in local pots, each containing 310 and 315 coins, respectively. All the coins are silver denarii, with the latest dated to 196 CE, during the reign of the Emperor Septimius Severus, who was campaigning against the Caledonians at that time. A teenage metal detectorist, David Hall, found the Dairsie Hoard at a detectorists’ rally. The hoard consists of over 300 pieces of hack-silver (cut-up silver used as currency by weight) that date to the end of the 3rd century CE. Both are likely to represent Roman payments to local tribes; part of Roman diplomatic efforts to exert control over communities beyond the Empire’s northern frontier, but the reason for the silver’s burial remains a mystery.

Not all ‘Treasure’ is silver, gold, or precious jewels. The display also includes wooden writing tablets from the Roman fort at Vindolanda, often considered treasures, especially given that wooden objects are prone to rot. The tablets give us an unparalleled insight into the everyday lives of people on Rome’s northern frontier.

There’s also ‘Frank’s Casket’, appreciated today for the evidence it provides about Anglo-Saxon art and the blending of different traditions to create something unique. It would have been a prized object not only because of its fine relief carving but also because the material, whale bone, was comparatively rare. Fine-grained whale bone was easy to carve and became a material associated with the elite and, by Medieval times, with royalty. The elaborate carvings on the casket draw on Christian, Germanic, and Classical traditions, and include inscriptions in runes and Latin, suggesting that the intended recipient was educated and/or highborn, and that the casket was probably made for a king or a leading clergyman.

I will close this not with some high-value trinket, but with the largest find in the exhibition, a sandstone coffin, which shows that some dramatic archaeological discoveries do not always result from deliberate excavation. Sometimes they happen by accident.

In 1903, workmen digging the foundations for a new warehouse in Newcastle came across two sandstone coffins. These were relatively small and likely to be child burials, with one coffin containing human remains and an elaborate Roman pot. Over a hundred years later, in 2008, archaeologists from Durham University, excavating at Clavering Place in Newcastle in advance of building work, discovered two sandstone adult coffins. The presumption is that these were the burials of high-status individuals.

I hope I’ve given you a taste of the Treasure: Hidden, Lost, Found exhibition, and for those with an interest in archaeological and historical sites, and who live in or plan to visit northeast England, a visit to this exhibition and, indeed, a perusal of the Great North Museum: Hancock itself will not disappoint.

There’s now going to be a short gap in these weekly meanderings while I go off on my ‘In search of Caravaggio’ European tour (no, I’m not aiming to find his last remains, but to look at as many of his artworks as possible). There will no doubt be a future write-up (or two) of my adventure. ‘See’ you again in a couple of weeks.

Vincent van Gogh, who painted more than a few portraits in his time.

It was to the ‘Exploring Identity’ exhibition at Newcastle’s Laing Art Gallery a week or two back. It’s a thoughtful, thought-provoking portrait-focused show that runs alongside an exhibition of the 48 shortlisted paintings from last year’s ‘Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award’. Together, the two exhibitions form an interaction between past and present portraiture, with the award-winning paintings showing where portraiture is now and ‘Exploring Identity’ setting a historical context.

As not everyone may be familiar with the ‘Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award’, I’ll start with a few words on that.

Running since 1980 and organised by the British National Portrait Gallery, the award has become one of the most prestigious international competitions for contemporary portrait painting and a major platform for both up-and-coming and established artists working in portraiture. The competition is known for high artistic standards, and the quality of the submitted work is extremely high. In 2025, the competition received 1,314 entries from artists in 61 countries. The judging panel viewed 274 works in person and selected 46 paintings as a ‘shortlist’ for the exhibition, which showcased an engaging range of approaches to portraiture, from classic to contemporary styles. These paintings largely explore relationships, both social and familial, with a focus on the relationship between the artist and the sitter. At the end of the competition, after the selection of the winners, the National Portrait Gallery hosts a major exhibition of the shortlisted works and also allows them to tour. An important aspect of the latter is that it brings world-class contemporary portraiture to regional audiences.

The competition has a major influence on contemporary figurative painting, establishing a benchmark for technical and conceptual excellence while highlighting the ongoing evolution of portraiture. Many past winners and exhibitors have gone on to major careers, making it a kind of barometer for the future of portrait painting. The winner receives £35,000, second place £12,000, and third place £10,000. The young artist (aged 18-30) winner receives £ 9,000.

Now back to the Laing Gallery, where the two exhibitions sit in separate rooms and in the spirit of van Gogh, they certainly convey how portraitists aim to express the essence of a person, not simply as a physical likeness, but to reveal something deeper about their personality and experience.

So let’s enter the first room and ‘Exploring Identity’, a collection of 27 portraits in distinctive styles drawn from the collections in the Laing, Hatton and Shipley galleries.

The paintings on show span several centuries, helping visitors trace the evolution of portrait painting from the 16th century to today and, across that timeline, explore ideas such as emotional and psychological selfhood, culture and heritage, and the relationship between artist and sitter.

Traditionally, prominent individuals (usually men) commissioned portraits to ensure a memory of them would endure. Filled with symbolism, such portraits regularly depicted an idealised version of the sitter in beautiful surroundings, expensive clothing or uniforms, and indeed armour, signifying power and strength. Props such as books and artworks symbolised knowledge and culture, while a coy smile could hint at an untold secret. Together, the artist and sitter created the identity the sitter wished to present to the world, with each painting telling a story without words.

One notable striking example of this is ‘Hazel in Black and Gold‘ by Sir John Lavery, depicting his wife, Hazel. Lavery’s portraits often sit somewhere between realism and refinement with loose brushwork that’s still attentive to gesture and presence, showing how portraiture can act almost like theatre with the sitter collaborating in moulding their appearance. None more so in this, with golden highlights standing out in this otherwise overwhelmingly dark portrait, and the sharp contrast exaggerates Hazel’s elegance, while her military-style hat may be a nod to the ongoing Great War when ‘Hazel in Black and Gold‘ was painted. As a footnote, Hazel apparently attended the private view of the painting, disguised as a highwayman, to gauge people's honest reactions to it.

Another painting that caught my eye was ‘Study for Figure Vl’ by Francis Bacon, part of a series created during Bacon’s tempestuous relationship with his lover Peter Lacy. Bacon’s portraits are often the most immediately striking and disquieting works in any room, and rather than presenting a likeness, in this painting Bacon distorts the human face into something virtually unstable, as if identity itself appeared in flux. Bacon is known for his exploration of the extremes of human passion, and in this, he seems to capture the sitter’s unease in an enclosed space, a frequent motif in Bacon’s work. There has been speculation that Bacon’s use of claustrophobic imagery indicates instances of neglect in Bacon’s childhood. However, Bacon stated that he simply used cage imagery as a device to focus the image, often referring to “trapping an image or moment” inside a painting.

There are plenty of strong women depicted in the three works by Beryl Fowler (née Menzies) in the exhibition. Born in Newcastle in 1881, Beryl excelled at portraying confident and expressive female subjects. None illustrates this better than ‘Annunciate,’ in which the sitter, peering from behind her dark hair, meets the viewer’s gaze with a defiant expression that conveys strength, confidence, and a hint of challenge.

I wrote about northeast artist Norman Cornish, who is known for documenting the industrial landscape and working life of northeast England, a couple of years ago. Norman began working as a coal miner at 14 (as did my maternal grandfather) and retired 33 years later to pursue a full-time career as a professional artist. Although self-taught, many consider Norman the most celebrated of the ‘Pitman Painters.’ There are 29 known self-portraits by Norman, the most recent discovered in 2024 on the reverse of another painting. The one above is an early one, painted when he was around 30, and painting was a pastime for him.

Space does not allow me to share all the others in the exhibition, but suffice it to say that there are many more portraits by household names such as Frank Auerbach, Christina Robertson, Frederic Leighton, Harold Knight, and Arthur Hughes. Also represented are some of the leading, but lesser-known, artists from northeast England, such as Robert Jobling and Harry Thubron.

So, let’s move from the first room, which offered us a historical perspective on the portrait, to the second room, which presents the exhibition of the 46 shortlisted artists of the Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award, offering the portraits of today. Interestingly, the symbolism I mentioned earlier is still used in some contemporary works, indicating that the meanings of such symbols remain relevant to observers today.

There are some sensational paintings in this second room, which can seem a bit overwhelming. Some pieces have a photo-realistic appeal, others have their subjects emerging from a maelstrom of paint, one of which is by the winner of the first prize, Moira Cameron, for her self-portrait, ‘A Life Lived’, of which Moira offers “The lines on my face, the subtle shadows, tell a story of time passing, of laughter and worry, of a life fully experienced”. By all accounts, this portrait grabbed the judges’ attention with its emphatic, non-naturalistic treatment of the figure, combined with the use of vivid colour and pattern. To them, this gives the piece an energy, vitality and humour that contrasts with the subject’s introspective pose and expression, creating a compelling tension that appealed to their eyes and their hearts.

Tim Benson won second prize for ‘Cliff, Outreach Worker,’ whom he first painted in 2019 as part of a series highlighting inspirational London Haringey residents who serve the local community. Some years later, Cliff returned for this portrait, made from sketches and photographs taken in his office, with Tim offering, ‘Cliff has a facial difference, which is as much part of his story as his work in the community. Painting him has afforded me the opportunity to challenge historical notions of beauty in portraiture.” The judges were impressed by Tim’s expressive, sculptural use of paint to build a likeness and felt that the intense focus on Cliff’s face, the dignity bestowed on Cliff, and the celebration of difference created a powerful encounter.

Third prize went to Martyn Harris for his painting ‘Memories’ of Gillian, someone whom Martyn came across when an artist in residence at the Art Yard Gallery. After building a friendship with Gillian, Martyn asked if she would sit for a portrait and though the image touches upon themes of loneliness, sorrow and the burden of time, both Martyn and Gillian found their collaboration uplifting. The sensitivity Martyn brought to painting Gillian, who appears lost in her own world in an instant of contemplation, moved the judges, who also admired Martyn’s exquisite rendering of textures, including Gillian’s woollen jumper and wisps of hair.

The Young Artist Award went to Michelle Liu for ‘Kofi’, who is an occasional life model at Big Turtle Studio in London, where Michelle, who recently relocated to the UK from her native USA, attends weekly drop-in sessions. As a young artist, Michelle says of the communal sittings, “My progress has come on in leaps and bounds since I have had a community of artists around me to share techniques, tips and critiques.” The judges thought this was a beautifully rendered, positive portrayal of Kofi, technically accomplished yet full of feeling and a moving calmness, with details such as a slightly raised eyebrow hinting at Kofi’s interior life.

I’ve just offered a hint here of the ‘Exploring Identity’ exhibition and what stands out for me is its emphasis on portraiture as storytelling rather than mere representation, with works that, together, suggest the multifaceted nature of personal identity and how it evolves over time, while also reflecting social history as much as individual character. It’s an exhibition that lives up to its title well.

Jake Morris-Campbell’s beautiful book is a pilgrimage charting his family’s Northumbrian heritage. ‘Between the Salt and the Ash’ is simultaneously poetic and epic in Morris-Campbell’s sweep of the region’s history, language and landscape. After reading this, you will want nothing more than to take the journey yourself.

Fiona Hill, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and Chancellor of Durham University

It’s difficult to define Jake’s book, ‘Between the Salt and the Ash’, as to me it’s part travelogue, part pilgrimage, part social history, and part philosophy that anchors personal identity within the shifting ground of northeast England’s cultural and industrial past. It’s a book that resists grandstanding; instead, it builds its impact through restraint, precision, and a deep attentiveness to place.

At its core, the book explores the afterlife of a part of England that was once its centre of Christianity, then, centuries later, became an economic powerhouse of coal mining, salt production, shipbuilding, and fishing. Jake explores how this past still lingers in the landscape and memory, even though the region's once-important role is now pretty much a thing of the past. Jake uses a ‘coastal’ walk as a narrative for the book, starting his journey on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne in Northumberland and finishing at Durham Cathedral, exploring the region’s past, present, and future and making powerful use of the engagements he has with those he meets and, in some cases, travels with along the way. As he journeys through Northumberland and County Durham, he searches for the identity of the northeast of England, and the book’s title reflects the region’s close ties to the sea and industry.

As Jake offers, it was his great-grandfather’s miner’s lamp that inspired the journey “I had written a poem about his lamp, and I suppose I imagined the world that he inhabited in the mid-20th century. It was a poem I found connected with audiences at readings I was doing, not just in the North East but everywhere. Obviously, it has particular resonance in coal field communities.”

Jake’s nanna gave him the lamp as an heirloom after saving it from her mother’s house. “She rescued it and then saw that I was interested. It became a good metaphor, a way of framing this journey. Because it’s this old miner’s lamp, you’re thinking about what it used to be as opposed to what it is now, and what it might then become. That’s what guided [the journey] from the outset, and it was a strong metaphor throughout.”

While the northeast of England still faces uncertainty today, the region remains a striking and unique part of England, with a history closely tied to English identity. As Jake walks the ‘Camino of the North,’ he reflects on how personal and regional identities have changed over 1,300 years and challenges the idea that communities in the northeast of England are being ‘left behind’ the rest of England. The journey also makes Jake reflect on his role as a writer and how it connects to the people he meets along the way. Some of his encounters with companions as he walks are planned, while others are accidental meetings.

For part of the journey near the Northumbrian coastal town of Beadnell, one of those fellow travellers was poet Katrina Porteous, and in North Shields, Jake was accompanied by the musician Aaron Duff. In Amble, Katherine Renton, an artist who paints with sea coal and brick around Amble and Alnmouth, joined Jake. Amble sits not far south of Warkworth Castle, much loved by JMW Turner, and Katherine pointed out the contrasts in Northumberland's landscape. That to the south of Warkworth Castle is much rougher and more rugged than that to the north, through Seahouses and Craster, which is much more picturesque and more conventionally beautiful. To some extent, that contrast is also reflected in the occupations of the respective peoples who lived there.

In southeast Northumberland, Jake spent time exploring the now often overlooked, but once vibrant coal-mining towns of Ashington and Cambois, offering that in Cambois, “you can’t avoid the fact that it does feel like a one-horse town. People who need to go to the hospital take a one-and-a-half-hour bus journey to get there.” Yet while there, he met Alex Oates and Esther Huss, who run the Miner’s Hall in the village. Alex is a playwright, and Esther is a dance artist, and together they hold community workshops for writers and dancers, reinforcing that cultural pursuits can and do exist in these smaller places, and they should be supported and championed.

Thematically, the book circles around inheritance: what it means to grow up in a region heavily influenced by early Christianity and, more recently, by industries that have largely disappeared, and how that absence defines identity. Jake doesn’t romanticise the past, but neither does he treat it with detachment. Instead, he acknowledges the complexity of hardship, pride, and loss, but without collapsing into nostalgia, seeking an understanding of and a connection to that past. He brings to light overlooked parts of the region’s culture and history, offering a touching tribute to the region and, as you would expect from a poet, writes in beautiful prose.

‘The Salt and the Ash’ has received much praise for honestly appraising the northeast’s regional identity and for giving voice to people rooted in the area and its history, not in some faded, nostalgic, romantic way, but pragmatically. Jacob avoids treating historical events as grand moments. Instead, he looks at them through place, voice, and what comes after, making history feel lived rather than simply told. His approach is less about retelling events and more about showing how they remain in the landscape and in memory. For example, Jake does not present industrial decline as a single event but rather through abandoned buildings, changing coastlines, and the loss of old trades with history found in traces such as ash, rust, and silence rather than in a full story.

While industry often shows up as loss, the sea offers a different sense of time, with fishing and maritime work linked to traditions and skills passed down through generations. There are also the ongoing dangers from the sea, but even when suggesting disasters, Jake does not see them as single events but as a continuum that repeats rather than ends.

Jake’s main achievement is showing that in northeast England, history is not simply in the past, but something we live with now. In ‘Between the Salt and the Ash’, what matters most is not the events themselves, but how they remain in the land, language, and identity of the people here.

Groom draws out the untold stories of Britain outside the South-East, revealing how regional history shapes both our present and our future. His storytelling is widely praised for making the big national questions vivid by examining them at the local scale, bringing depth and immediacy to issues often seen only through a London-centric lens.

The List

Brian Groom’s previous book, ‘Northerners: A History, from the Ice Age to the Present Day’, became a national bestseller, and he is also the author of ‘Made in Manchester: A People’s History of the City That Shaped the Modern World’. In his latest book, ‘These Isles: A History of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland’, he offers a creative and easy-to-read take on the connected histories of the British Isles. Instead of telling a single, straight ‘British’ story, Brian focuses on the differences, conflicts, and connections among the four nations covering all the lands from the Northern isles to the Channel Islands, and the towns and cities in between, tracing how the movements of people, the Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Normans, and others, reshaped regions and their relationships, telling the story of these isles through their people, cultures, languages, and shared heritage.

Brian’s book examines the roles played by factors such as religion, empire, and war while covering several themes, from popular culture to sport, via music and literature. Stretching from ancient times to the early twenty-first century, the book gives a vivid and varied picture of the common stories of the countries and islands that make up what we call the British Isles, both past and present.

Brian writes as a journalist, not an academic historian, which gives the book a clear and appealing tone. He often uses anecdotes to show bigger trends, making it a great starting point for readers who want an overview without too much detail. His main goal is to challenge the idea that Britain’s history is just England’s story writ large. Instead, he explores how England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland each developed their own identity, and how their coming together was often uneasy, marked by conquest and political manoeuvring. The book shows why tensions between them still matter today, and one of its strengths is that it connects the past to the present, illuminating debates such as Scottish independence, the legacy of colonial attitudes toward Ireland, and questions of identity in the UK, showing that many current issues have deep historical roots.

While the book spans from pre-Roman times to today, it doesn’t read like a scholarly text. Instead, it tells stories, centring on key turning points and important people. Brian draws attention to themes like power, identity, and resistance. He is selective, choosing examples that illustrate his points rather than covering everything within his main topics, including Roman Britain, medieval conflicts, the Acts of Union, Ireland’s complex history, and modern political tensions, such as devolution. The relationships between the nations were rarely equal, and Brian highlights English dominance in political and military terms, as well as resistance from Scotland and Wales. Ireland has a particularly contentious and painful history, and Brian does not shy away from the consequences of conquest, rebellion, and cultural suppression. While Brian maintains a balance, he’s not neutral. He acknowledges historical abuses while refraining from polemics.

Overall, ‘These Isles’ is more of a corrective overview than a final word on history. It reminds readers that the story of Britain and Ireland is not a single tale. It is a patchwork of identities, shared histories, and enduring tensions.

The British writer Gildas, writing in the 6th century, describes Magnus Maximus, a usurper emperor based in Britain, who in 383, with the support of many troops in Britain, travelled to Gaul to defeat the legitimate Western Roman Emperor, Gratian.

A few weeks ago, I wrote in Following the Eagle about Segedunum, the Roman fort at the eastern end of Hadrian’s Wall, close to the River Tyne. In that piece, I mentioned Arbeia, the excavation of which I wrote of in A Striking Sight, an even larger fort about four miles further east on a hilltop at the river’s mouth. Today, its remains sit surrounded by schools and modern domestic dwellings of the town of South Shields.

As I mentioned in ‘Following the Eagle’, the soldiers at Hadrian’s Wall came from all over the Roman Empire, and Arbeia, meaning ‘fort of the Arab troops,’ was named after some of the soldiers once stationed there from what is now Iraq. It’s interesting to think about how they must have felt arriving at a damp, windy hill in northeast England.

Inscriptions on the excavated stones show that the Sixth Legion built the fort around 105 CE, though it’s unlikely they ever stayed there. Building such a large stone fort required specialised engineering skills, which only the Roman legions possessed. The auxiliary units that later garrisoned the fort didn’t have this training. So, it was the legions, especially the Sixth, who managed most of the construction at Arbeia.

Arbeia was an important military base established to defend the mouth of the River Tyne. The first unit stationed there was the Ala Primae Pannoniorum Sabiniana, a cavalry regiment of 500 horsemen from the Pannonian tribes in present-day Hungary. Sometime during the second century, they moved to Onnum (Halton Chester in Northumberland) and were replaced by another cavalry regiment, the Ala I Hispanorum Asturum, from the Astures tribe in present-day north-western Spain.

During the reign of Emperor Septimius Severus, a Gallic infantry unit, Cohors V Gallorum, with about 1,000 soldiers, replaced the Ala I Hispanorum Asturum cavalry unit. The infantry unit may have come from Fort Cramond in what is now Edinburgh on the River Forth, and it’s believed to have been only about half its full strength, possibly because some troops stayed behind at Cramond or spent time guarding supply caravans as they travelled between the forts.

Most people in the UK have heard of Hadrian, but few remember Emperor Septimius Severus, yet he spent the last three years of his life in Britain, arriving in 208 CE with a large army. Some say he came because the Governor of Britain asked for help to stop a rebellion. Others think he was simply tired of his sons, Caracalla and Publius Septimius Geta, arguing, so he brought them to Britain as a distraction. That’s certainly one way to manage family problems. The entire imperial family, including his wife Julia Domna and the court officials, moved to Britain and ruled the Roman Empire from what is now York until the emperor’s death.

After arriving in Britain, Septimius Severus changed Arbeia from a regular fort to a supply base by demolishing most of the old buildings except for a double granary and replacing them with eighteen new stone granaries. Later, this number grew to twenty-four. Altogether, the granaries could hold up to eight hundred tonnes of grain, enough to feed about 25,000 people in the Roman forts and garrisons along Hadrian’s Wall. This expansion also saw the building of four new barrack blocks.

After expanding Arbeia, Septimius Severus began upgrading Hadrian’s Wall, and once that was complete, he led his large army north to try to defeat the Caledonians. This was a huge effort, as fighting in Scotland was difficult because of the rough terrain and skilled opponents who avoided direct combat. In the end, Septimius claimed a kind of victory (a trick employed by modern leaders, too), which allowed him and his sons to take the title ‘Britannicus.’

But my recent visit to Arbeia wasn’t about learning more about Septimius Severus. I went to see a new exhibition called ‘After the Fire,’ which highlights a dramatic but often overlooked event in the fort’s history, at the end of the 3rd or early 4th century, when a major fire destroyed or damaged many key buildings, including some of the large grain stores and living quarters.

It’s believed the fire resulted from an attack by Northern Tribes, possibly the Picts of modern-day Scotland and/or other northern British groups. The Picts were a major threat to the forts along Hadrian’s Wall, often taking advantage of any weakness in Roman defences, especially in the waning years of Roman occupation.

The exhibition explores the fort’s rebuilding and repurposing after the fire, in the context of Rome’s declining power, and shows how the story of Roman occupation of Arbeia shifted after the disaster to adaptation and survival, culminating in the end of their rule in Britain.

Using artefacts found during excavations that provide evidence of rebuilding, the exhibition shows how life went on after the disaster. The exhibition also places the fire within the broader context of late Roman Britain, a period known for instability, and presents it as part of the broader decline of Roman rule.

One of several important items discovered is a ring-mail shirt, now deemed the best-preserved in Britain. The shirt, worn over a padded garment for extra protection, was part of an auxiliary soldier’s kit. And this one belonged to a soldier from the Fifth Cohort of Gauls I mentioned above. Other items found in the remains include a precious gold ring, probably hidden by a soldier in his barracks who, for whatever reason, was then unable to retrieve it. You must remember how cramped the conditions in the barrack blocks were. Each block had five ‘apartments’ consisting of two small rooms, with each room occupied by eight soldiers with small, narrow beds and a fireplace or small hearth to offer warmth and a place to cook. Each soldier would therefore have had minimal personal space, and you can’t help imagining how the air must have had a rich aroma. With so little privacy, it was no wonder that soldiers took diligent care of their valuables, hiding them from prying eyes, only to make their retrieval much more difficult in an emergency.

Evidence shows that after the fire, some of the granaries were rebuilt as barracks, suggesting an increase in the number of troops stationed at the fort. The rebuilding programme also saw the construction of a new principia, the headquarters building, while the original principia became a granary. The increased number of barracks headquarters and a more impressive commanding officer’s house point to a shift in the Roman military’s focus from expanding their territory in the north to simply holding on to what they already controlled. Further expansion of the fort began between 220 and 235 and continued until at least 270.

The rebuilt fort showed off the latest designs from the eastern Roman Empire. The expanded principia was no longer in the centre of the fort but at the end of a grand processional road at the south, while two main roads divided the soldiers’ living quarters into four sections. The praetorium, the home of the fort’s Roman commanding officer, was now a large courtyard house modelled after a Roman townhouse, with rooms facing the open courtyard. It featured painted walls, private suites for the commanding officer and his family, baths, and large dining rooms for summer and winter, all designed to impress guests. The house served as both home and office, and you can now see a partial reconstruction on the site.

The house was in use for over a hundred years, and its original layout remained the same for about thirty years. After that, it must have become ‘tired’ looking and in need of renovation, as a new bath suite was installed. However, simpler designs were later used to cover the original elaborate wall paintings, probably indicating that the house (and thus the fort) was losing its importance. By the late fourth century, all the decorated plaster had disappeared, leaving the walls simply covered in white plaster. The grand summer dining room, once the largest room, had become just an open space with a rough stone floor.

The deterioration of the fort didn’t end there. From the mid-4th century onward, many small alterations occurred as Arbeia’s role as a supply base faded. There is evidence that the Tigris Bargemen were the last of the ‘Roman’ occupants, and at some point in the 4th century, the fort ceased to be used as a military base and became a civilian settlement.

This repurposing of the once Roman commander’s building might well have been to answer what was still a demand in the area for fine furniture and quality jewellery. Artefacts found on the site show that Arbeia had a lively community at the end of the fourth century, with a workshop set up in what had been the commanding officer’s private rooms, where people made wooden furniture such as boxes and chests with antler inlay. There was also evidence of food preparation in the courtyard, while in other parts of the fort, artefacts found reflect that workers made jewellery from jet, probably brought from present-day Whitby and Robin Hood’s Bay, on the coast further south of Arbeia.

But I’ll end with one mystery that remains, and it’s the story behind the killing of two young men in the house’s final days, around the end of the 4th Century, some years after the Romans withdrew from Britain, never to return. The men’s skeletons reflect a violent death, and afterwards their bodies were left exposed to the elements long enough for dogs to gnaw the bones before the burial of what remained in the courtyard of the house. Perhaps the two men were former Roman soldiers who became craftsmen, but for some reason, they fell out of favour with the locals? Or maybe just a dispute between locals. We’ll never know.

Dr Shane McCorristine, of the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at Newcastle University

Late last year, I wrote about Newcastle's Crime and Punishment and Newcastle Gaol/Prison, a relatively short-lived building in the city centre, all traces of which have virtually disappeared. Built in the early 1800s, it replaced the notorious Newgate prison, with its overflowing sewers, poor ventilation, prisoners chained together, and frequent, untreated outbreaks of fever. Newcastle Prison differed from Newgate because each prisoner had their own cell, with a small window and a hammock or a bedboard. At least at first, but by the later Victorian era, an increased prison population led to overcrowding again becoming a problem. However, one significant difference from Newgate was the separate wing for women at Newcastle Prison, and of them I write this week.

The exhibition ‘Women Behind Bars: Life in Newcastle Prison, 1828–1925’ at Newcastle Cathedral shares the stories of incarcerated young girls and women in Newcastle Prison, revealing the realities of crime and punishment and the fortitude of some women in a society marked by inequality. The exhibition blends local history with modern voices, and rather than simply listing crimes, it focuses on the social history of imprisoned women, challenging the usual narrative and bringing attention to often-forgotten voices.

Despite the separate women’s wing offering some privacy at first, conditions were still often criticised, with one prison chaplain saying that overcrowding and poor conditions made it impossible to help young women, especially those jailed for minor crimes alongside hardened offenders. Discipline was strict, and one example of this was locking a girl called Margaret Benson alone in a cell with no light after she refused a cold-water punishment called the ‘shower bath,’ which was used despite concerns about its safety and legality. Another punishment was the ‘muzzle,’ an iron headpiece used to silence women who shouted or disobeyed. An improved women’s wing built in the 1860s had better light and ventilation, but overcrowding and strict rules persisted, making life difficult for the prisoners and limiting opportunities for rehabilitation.

One ‘positive’ thing to note is that while the women’s diet in prison may seem basic with a breakfast of a pint of gruel and six ounces of bread, and dinner of half a pint of soup or a pint of gruel with six ounces of bread, it was probably like or even better than that for many ordinary people. Also, several women in Newcastle Prison were pregnant or arrived with babies. Caring for infants in cramped cells was difficult, but for some women, prison offered a bit more stability and support than life outside. This shows how uncertain their lives were outside of prison.

In the early days, public hangings took place at the prison gate, drawing crowds of thousands. In 1833, Jane Jamieson, an alleged sex worker convicted of killing a client, became the only woman executed at the prison. Her case sparked a major public debate about self-defence and class bias.

Mary Ann Cotton was one of the most notorious women held in Newcastle prison. It is believed that she killed up to 21 people, including husbands, lovers, children, and stepchildren, by poisoning them with arsenic. Held in Newcastle prison during her trial, after conviction came a move to Durham Gaol for her execution in 1873. Some people in the UK may remember her story from the 2016 TV series ‘Dark Angel’, which was based on her life.

Although it might seem like executions were common, there were few in northeast England’s prisons during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Some believe this was because local juries were reluctant to convict on capital charges unless the crime was especially severe. Instead, they often preferred to find people guilty of a lesser charge that would lead to transportation, especially after laws in the 1830s and 1840s reduced the number of capital offences. In the early days of such sentencing, transportation would be to the USA, then later to Australia.

At certain times, women made up a third of the prisoners in Newcastle prison, which was unusually high even for that era (today, women make up only 4% of the UK prison population). A Newcastle prison governor at the time said this was likely due to social and economic problems in northeast England. For example, there were fewer jobs for women in the northeast than in the northwest, where many women found work in the textile industry.

Until 1854, young girls often received prison sentences ranging from a few days to a few months, usually for stealing money, clothes, or other items they could sell easily. For example, Ellen Woodman was only 11 when she was sentenced to seven days of hard labour (i.e. oakum picking, rock breaking, the treadmill (Newcastle Prison had one of the largest in northern England), tailoring, or shoemaking) for stealing iron with her friends. Another example is three other girls: Anne Kelly (16), Sarah Cain (15), and Mary Henry (15), who were imprisoned for stealing towels. Even after serving time, Cain and Henry continued to reoffend, while Kelly became such a repeat offender that she eventually received a sentence of transportation to Tasmania for seven years.

Cases like these raised concerns about locking up children instead of tackling the social issues that caused reoffending. The Youthful Offenders Act tried to reduce this by limiting under-18s to short prison terms before sending them to reformatory schools focused on education and moral reform. In 1891, Jemima Brown, aged 13, spent 10 days in Newcastle Prison for two theft charges, then attended a reformatory school for five years. There is no record of her reoffending. Of course, there are some cases where rehabilitation is not going to come about, such as that of Bridget Creggans, who appeared before magistrates 250 times. Her problem was alcohol, and if a pub landlord refused to serve her, she would smash the pub’s windows.

In October 1909, the Women’s Social and Political Union organised protests during Chancellor David Lloyd George’s visit to the Palace Theatre in Newcastle. Women’s suffrage activists were frustrated by the Liberal government’s refusal to give women the vote, so they adopted the motto “Deeds not Words.” Even though Lloyd George was well protected and the city was full of police, some activists broke windows at the Liberal Club, General Post Office, and Palace Theatre. These events, later called the “Battle of Newcastle,” led to the arrest of 12 women, who served sentences of up to one month.

The treatment of these women in prison often depended on their social status. For example, the sentence received by Lady Constance Lytton, daughter of the first Earl of Lytton, Viceroy of India, was “for disorderly behaviour with intent to disturb peace” by throwing a stone at Lloyd George’s car (Constance said she aimed low to avoid hurting anyone), damaging it to a cost of repair of £4 (about £3,800 today). Because of her status, the court offered her the chance to pay £50 (over £40,000 today) instead of going to jail, but she refused and received a one-month prison sentence.

Constance began a hunger strike right away, but quickly became tired and developed back pain, waking up with her knees pulled up to her chin. As her health got worse, the prison doctor came to see her, but thinking he was about to force-feed her, Constance stood in the corner of her cell “with my arms crossed and my fingers caught in my nostrils and mouth.” To her surprise, the doctor was there to check her heart and found she had heart disease. Seeing she was in a ‘feeble’ state, he recommended her immediate release.

Constance knew she had heart disease, but she believed this early release and the absence of force-feeding were due to her social rank. She continued to campaign, raising awareness about the “partiality and injustice” of force-feeding in prisons. Later, she disguised herself as a working woman and was once again arrested and imprisoned, this time in Walton Gaol in Liverpool, but her earlier gentler treatment stood in contrast to this occasion when, in the belief she was of low social rank, she was force-fed. Constance never fully recovered from her time in prison, suffering a heart attack and stroke that led to her early death in 1923 at age 54.

Unlike Constance, Dorothy Pethick Lawrence received a sentence of 14 days of hard labour for throwing stones at the General Post Office. It was her first time in prison, and she became the spokeswoman for the other 11 women jailed after the protests. For three days, she refused to eat and was then taken to the prison hospital, where three doctors, the matron, and a wardress forced her into a chair and tied her down with a bedsheet. One doctor pushed a tube up her nostril while a wardress covered her mouth. A letter to the Governor noted the ‘feeding’ of three-quarters of a pint of milk and egg through the tube, against which Dorothy struggled violently, striking the officers and even causing one officer’s nose to bleed. Dorothy remembered one doctor saying, “Oh, we have not tested her heart,” and another replying, “Oh, I expect that is all right,” before continuing. This happened twice a day for several days until her nostrils became sore, necessitating the lubrication of the tube with petroleum jelly. Ironically, Dorothy lost weight from vomiting after these feedings, so after a few days, prison staff used a force-feeding cup. Dorothy’s freedom came after serving her fortnight sentence, and friends took her to a nursing home to recover.

Kitty Marion, a well-known music hall performer, was another suffragist activist who came to Newcastle to protest Lloyd George’s visit. Her sentence was one month of hard labour for deliberately breaking a plate-glass window worth £3 17s. 6d (about £3,500 today) at the General Post Office. It was also her first time in prison, and she immediately joined the other women in going on a hunger strike. More than that, as soon as she entered her cell, she barricaded the door with furniture and refused to let anyone in except the Governor, and only then, after the granting of voting rights for women. Kitty continued her hunger strike for another 24 hours, keeping her bed in front of the door. Eventually, frustrated staff forced their way in with a crowbar, removed the door’s hinges and moved her to another cell for closer monitoring.

Later that evening, eight wardresses took Kitty from her cell to see three doctors. She told them she had a throat problem, but they ignored her and force-fed her through a tube in her right nostril. In her memoir, Marion described the “horrible feeling of choking and vomiting. My head felt as if it were bursting, my heart beat furiously. Words cannot describe my sensations.” Reports describe her choking and retching as the tube was pushed down into her stomach and liquid was poured in, most of which she then vomited back up.

Kitty then thought of Harry Houdini, with whom she had once performed, and wondered how he might have escaped. From this, she decided to start a fire, tearing the stuffing from her pillow, pulling out the coconut fibres, and setting them alight from the gaslight jet. However, the resultant smoke soon overcame Marion, who was dragged out of her cell and moved to a padded cell with no furniture.

The next day, Marion returned to a regular prison cell and was closely watched, receiving visits from the governor, the matron, and the doctor. Because she was so weak, she gave up the hunger strike, but ate only tiny amounts of food at her own pace. This was not enough for the doctor, who instructed the use of a force-feeding cup. However, the matron, whom Marion described as “most kind and motherly,” did this gently.

Marion served a month of hard labour, and her release was welcomed enthusiastically. In a statement to ‘Votes for Women’, she said: “I am more than ever convinced of the necessity for militant action.” Recognition of Marion’s courage and determination came with the award of a ‘For Valour’ medal from Sylvia Pankhurst.

The exhibition also connects historical stories to modern experiences of incarceration, making it participatory and reflective rather than just observational, and a part of this is the ‘Story Chair’ installation, which represents the voices and testimonies of women who have current experience within the criminal justice system.

In February 2022, Storm Arwen knocked down one of the 200-year-old oak trees along the ‘Long Walk’ at Gibside. The Story Chair, crafted by Nick James from wood from that tree, was part of a programme supporting women in the criminal justice system, helping them explore their stories and move from their past towards better futures. Nick’s imaginative piece represents the twists and turns of the women’s lives, the need for a solid foundation, and the sense of relief that comes from sharing stories. Nick consulted with the women to shape its design and said, “It’s been a creative challenge and listening to the ideas from the women and the reason behind those ideas has been insightful and enlightening. It’s pushed me to think differently about what I’m doing creatively.”

The programme, a creative partnership between the social justice charity Changing Lives, the School of Design at Northumbria University, and the North East Probation Service, also involved several cultural organisations, including the National Trust and Newcastle Cathedral. The idea for a physical chair came from a group of women after a visit to Newcastle Cathedral and its crypt. Once upon a time, that space allowed people to say goodbye to the dead, and the women liked the idea of having a space to leave behind old stories of their lives that no longer served them. The cathedral welcomed the initiative and hosted the chair as part of its ‘radical welcome’ initiative.

The ‘Story Chair’ programme helped women with experience of the criminal justice system to talk about, accept, and move on from parts of their past, recognising that many women in the justice system are there because of outside factors in their lives, which they often face again after release. These women experienced domestic violence and abuse, leading to them reoffending, yet through the programme, they learned different narrative approaches to express their experiences within a safe space, with time to have difficult conversations that help them out of the cycle of reoffending.

Overall, the ‘Women Behind Bars’ exhibition is not only about history, or a prison or statistics and records, but the personal stories that lie behind them that quietly challenge how we think about crime and punishment both in the past and today.

Life is a theatre set in which there are but few practicable entrances
Victor Hugo

Two recent theatre trips in Newcastle offered contrasting glimpses into tragedy: ‘The Thrill of Love’ at the People’s Theatre and ‘Boiler Room 6’ at the Live Theatre, each exploring how people respond to heartache and adversity.

This was not my first time seeing Amanda Whittington’s ‘The Thrill of Love,’ which explores the later life of Ruth Ellis. I previously watched the play at the St James Theatre (now the Other Palace Theatre) in London in 2013. That production was riveting, and I was curious to see how the People’s Theatre would stage it anew.

Many people in the UK know Ruth’s tragic story as the last woman executed here. Born in Wales in 1927, Ruth’s childhood was marked by instability and hardship, shaping much of her later life. As a young woman in London, she became a nightclub hostess and manager, known for her striking looks and strong personality.

In the early 1950s, Ruth became involved with David Blakely, a wealthy, charismatic racing driver. Their intense but troubled relationship involved heavy drinking, arguments, separations, and physical abuse by Blakely. Despite the violence, Ruth remained emotionally attached, and the relationship was further destabilised when Ruth miscarried as a result of the abuse.

On 10 April 1955, just ten days after her miscarriage and believing Blakely wished to separate permanently from her, Ruth confronted him outside a Hampstead pub and shot him multiple times. He died at the scene, with Ruth making no attempt to flee or deny her actions; her calm admission became central to what followed. However, lurking on the edges of the act was another man, Desmond Cussen, a former RAF pilot and accountant who became closely involved with Ruth in the months leading up to the shooting. Their relationship was complex, part friendship, part dependency, and possibly romantic, though not straightforwardly so.

As Ruth’s relationship with Blakely dissolved, Cussen supported her financially and emotionally but, more chillingly, also provided her with the revolver she used in the shooting and allegedly drove her to the confrontation. At trial, his influence remained largely unexplored, with Ruth insisting on her sole responsibility. Only just before her execution did Ruth reveal the extent of Cussen’s involvement, further complicating the story.

Since then, Cussen’s role has been re-evaluated more critically, challenging the view of the crime as solely an individual act and highlighting how the men around Ruth coerced her and shaped events.

Ruth’s startlingly brief trial at the Old Bailey lasted just over a day. The most notorious moment occurred when Ruth, questioned about her intention, replied, “It is obvious that when I shot him, I intended to kill him.” That admission sealed her fate under a legal system that allowed little nuance regarding domestic abuse, emotional distress, and coercion. Convicted of murder, Ruth, a 28-year-old mother, was sentenced to death and then hanged on 13 July 1955.

Almost immediately, Ruth’s case provoked debate over the fairness of her trial, with many questioning whether her abusive relationship was properly considered and, in the circumstances, whether the death penalty was just. Over time, her story became central to the movement against capital punishment in the UK.

Today, Ruth’s trial would likely be much longer and include expert testimony from psychologists. Questioning of witnesses, such as Cussen, would delve deeper, and Ruth’s statement about ‘intent’ would be discussed in more depth as courts are more aware of trauma and how power imbalances in relationships can affect behaviour and responsibility. UK law also now recognises a defence of ‘loss of control’, from which a person can argue that years of abuse and fear caused them to lose self-control when they committed a violent act. Unlike in Ruth’s time, if the court now accepts this reason, a verdict of manslaughter is more likely in recognition of how such abuse may lead to extreme actions.

Whittington’s portrayal of Ruth in ‘The Thrill of Love’ brings out both sympathy and complexity. Rather than seeking a clear villain, the play focuses on how adversity shaped Ruth’s actions within a world stacked against her, highlighting the pressures of post-war femininity, economic hardship, and coercive relationships.

The play unfolds as a series of flashbacks from Ruth shooting Blakely, with a fictional Inspector Jack Gales lending a gentle, fatherly voice to a case he believes deserves more investigation than the otherwise straightforward confession Ruth gives at the start of the play. Through his questions to Ruth, we understand the poignant sequence of events leading up to the shooting, but it is the scenes between this timeline that tell a more sorrowful story. Neither Blakely nor Cussen is portrayed in the play; instead, it centres on the close relationships between Ruth and other women at the club, who function as a chorus, grounding the play in everyday female experience, with their perspectives on Ruth ranging from sympathetic to sharply critical. One of the play’s greatest strengths is its ability to hold two worlds in tension, contrasting the glamour of nightclub life with the harsh reality beneath it, and how Ruth’s life unravelled with her confessions of her shattered hopes at becoming an actress to her late-night finishes, high on drugs and alcohol and covered in bruises. The play’s simple set design follows Ruth’s downward spiral in equal measure, transforming from a smoky nightclub into a trashy room littered with cigarette packs and bottles of booze.

This is not an investigative thriller, but a drama offering an unvarnished glimpse into a woman’s certainty that she had no alternative but to kill, and as a result, have the State kill her. The play avoids easy judgments, instead presenting a genuinely human, tragic portrait that leaves lingering unease about justice and women who defy categorisation. I found this production at the Little Theatre as engrossing and engaging as the one I saw in 2013, with performances as thoughtful and quietly powerful.

The second play, ‘Boiler Room Six’, also embraced a tragic story, but one better known on the world stage, as it centres on the survival of Frederick Barrett, a crew member aboard the RMS Titanic. The story of the RMS Titanic is a familiar one, yet there will always be a grim fascination with the disaster on the White Star Line vessel’s maiden voyage. While others might tell the story as a tale of romance and doom, of impoverished migrants seeking new lives and the wealthy sailing the seas in splendour, ‘Boiler Room Six’ reframes the horror of that night into the story of the grim, hard-working men who toiled in the soot and sweltering heat of the boiler rooms below decks.

Before I discuss the play, let’s consider the actual Frederick Barrett, who signed on to the RMS Titanic in 1912 as a leading fireman for £6:10s a month (about £950 today). A leading fireman was responsible for managing a team of stokers who fed coal into the furnaces and for controlling the steam pressure from the boilers that powered the ship.

Just after departing Southampton on 10 April 1912, Frederick, who gave testimony at both the American and British Inquiries into the sinking, stated that after the discovery of a fire in the coal bunker in boiler room 6, he received orders to empty it. The work took around ten firemen, until Saturday, 13 April, and afterwards Frederick claimed that the bulkhead was fire-damaged from top to bottom; the lower half was warped aft, and the upper half was warped forward.

At the time of the collision on Sunday, 14 April, Frederick was on duty in the same boiler room, talking with an engineer, when the ship jolted, followed swiftly by a bell ringing and a red light flashing. The jolt was so strong that it knocked men off their feet, and water began coming through the side of the ship. Frederick and the engineer retreated into boiler room 5 just as the watertight doors dropped. There, they noticed that the ship's damage extended into that section.

Despite the incoming water, Frederick and his colleagues kept as many boilers running as they could to maintain power aboard the ship. However, after a while, the bulkhead between boiler rooms 5 and 6 gave way, causing a violent rush of water, and Frederick was ordered ‘up top’ where he reached the promenade deck and was ordered, as ‘crew in charge’ into lifeboat 13, one of the last lifeboats left on the starboard side and crowded with about 70 people, as it was lowered. When the lifeboat hit the water, it was so crowded that Frederick estimated the gunwale was less than six inches above the water. Then the discharge from the ship’s side caused the lifeboat to drift aft directly under another descending lifeboat. Calls from Frederick’s boat to stop lowering the other lifeboat were ignored, and Frederick had to scramble over other occupants to cut the lifeboat’s ropes and push it free from the Titanic, an action that probably saved the lives of those in his lifeboat.

But even after the rescue, there was no time for those who remained of the Titanic’s crew (four out of five perished) to recover from the tragedy (and no money, as surviving Titanic crew members had their wages stopped at the moment the Titanic sank), and Frederick was soon back at work on the Olympic, Titanic’s sister ship. Frederick was still working at sea at the advent of the 1920s, but for how long is not certain, as at some point he left to work as a timber labourer, before contracting pulmonary tuberculosis and dying in early 1931.

‘Boiler Room Six’, superbly crafted by writer and director Tom Foreman, brings Frederick to life in a play that is full of moody, claustrophobic detail yet runs at a good pace as it delves into the physical and psychological realities of life below deck, in the furnace-heart of an industrial age.

We follow Frederick from the beginning of the voyage, hanging out in the crew’s quarters, meeting the other crew members, and getting a sense of normality before the disruption when the ship hits the iceberg. From then on, we are right there as Frederick deals with the sinking of this unsinkable ship, trying to keep the lights on for as long as possible, whilst at the same time trying to do right by his colleagues. Foreman also intelligently instils a tone of optimism with the stokers’ perseverance, offering an infectious hopefulness that all might still come good.

From the outset, the production establishes its environment with bold clarity. The only props are two benches, but the play’s staging is so clever that your mind soon visualises the heat and confusion, and as the water and jeopardy rise, the tension builds as our own knowledge of the disaster’s outcome comes into play. The effect is deeply immersive; you don’t simply watch the action, you feel the pressure-cooker environment of the ship’s boiler rooms with the incessant rhythm of shovelling and machinery, the smothering heat and the claustrophobic press of metal and bodies. While the energetic parts are enlivening, the play offers enough moments of calm for reflection and a glimpse of Frederick’s personal life.

In the later stages of the play, the uncanny calm and sadness of the upper deck, with the sound of serene violins playing amid the unfolding tragedy, contrast with the water-filled boiler rooms from which Fredrick has escaped. Interestingly, he does not seem to feel at home in the upper deck, playing into themes of survivor’s guilt that making it through the disaster would surely instil.

Charlie Sheepshanks, in a tour de force performance, plays Frederick and the play’s other characters with the energy and physicality required for such a dynamic, dramatic story. Sheepshanks jumps fluently between recognisable individuals, with language ranging from the rough, unpolished banter between the crew to more poetic descriptions, such as when ‘Fredrick’ describes the hard work of keeping the fires burning as a “dance”.

What sets ‘Boiler Room Six’ apart from other accounts of the Titanic is that this isn’t a story of woeful sadness or frantic and maddening panic. It’s a moving homage to the working men who kept their heads in the worst of situations, making decisions they know might cost them their lives, just for the slightest chance to save their ship and those on board. It’s a gripping play, tightening the screw for all its worth, yet also a story of regret and survivor’s guilt. Right now, the play is on a UK tour, so if you enjoy good theatre, you’ll enjoy this.