A Look at the Locals - Outsiders' Views on Novocastrians Through History
- Sue Hope
- 10 minutes ago
- 6 min read
Newcastle has never been short of outside observers willing to pass judgement on its people. From bewildered antiquaries struggling with the dialect to a Russian novelist convinced that Jesmond's Sunday respectability was a kind of tyranny, visitors across four centuries have arrived with opinions and left, more often than not, quietly converted. In this essay, Sue Hope gathers their testimony - Wesley, Dickens, Zamyatin to name a few, to ask what the world has made of Tyneside and what Tyneside has made of the world.
In 1724 a traveller and antiquary who had explored the length of the Roman Wall and marvelled at this ancient feat of engineering, was less enamoured of the natives of Newcastle Upon Tyne. “They speak very broad,” wrote William Stukeley, with the air of some bewildered anthropologist, “so that as one walks the streets, one can scarce understand the common people, but is apt to fancy oneself in a foreign country.”
Elizabeth Montagu, the noted blue stocking and businesswoman, originally from the south, would have agreed with him. In 1758 she commented that she enjoyed the singing of the miners in the pit she owned in Denton but that she found their dialect “dreadful to the auditors’ nerves.”
John Wesley made many visits to Newcastle - around fifty in as many years - and loved the city itself: “I know no place in Great Britain comparable to it for pleasantness,” he rhapsodised and, coming from such a well-travelled man, this was a compliment indeed.
But walking through the city on his first visit in 1742, the Methodist preacher found the ordinary Novocastrians a different matter, and lamented: “So much drunkenness, cursing, and swearing, (even from the mouths of little children) do I never remember to have seen and heard before, in so small a compass of time.”
Soon though, Wesley came to understand and even love the warm-heartedness behind the slightly rough veneer. Crowds of the poor who came to hear him preach “were ready to tread me under foot, out of pure love and kindness,” he wrote rather ruefully, and, like any modern pop star, he often had to take evasive action to escape his adoring fans.
He acknowledged that, compared to other places, “the very mob of Newcastle, in the height of their rudeness, have commonly some humanity left.” For instance, he once gave an impromptu performance of a psalm one Sunday afternoon, to what he considered the Godless crowds promenading on the Sandhill. And even though his “congregation” had not asked for this treat, and continued to be noisy, Wesley noted that: “I scarce observed that they threw anything at all; neither did I receive the least personal hurt.”
Newcastle girls had the reputation of being among some of the most attractive in the country, and in 1705 a visiting lawyer called John Taylor was so beguiled by no less than three of the city’s beauties that he hired musicians to serenade them – with what success we do not know.
Famous literary figures have spent time in Newcastle. Dorothy Wordsworth stayed in Northumberland Place in 1795 with distant relatives, the Misses Griffiths, who she described as “very chearful (sic) pleasant companions and excellent women.”
As a young woman, Mrs Gaskell passed the winters of 1829 and 1830 with the Reverend William Turner and his family in Clavering Place – and enjoyed herself hugely. Her knowledge of the city would resurface in later years in the novels “Ruth” - her “Newcastle novel” - and “Sylvia’s Lovers.” She would write to a friend in 1849 that she had “picked up quantities of charming expressive words in canny New Castle” from its friendly inhabitants.
Charles Dickens made six visits to the city 1852-67 when he gave public readings of his works at The Music Hall in Nelson Street. He called Newcastle folk “an unusually tender and sympathetic audience [for tragedy] while their comic perception is quite up to the high London average…A finer audience there is not in England,” a sentiment echoed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in more recent times, when they declared Newcastle to be their “second home” outside London.
The Portuguese novelist Jose Maria de Eca de Queiros, a century and a half later in 1878, was stunned by the vibrancy of Newcastle street culture at night. “An enormous brutish crowd, rough and noisy, fills the wide streets,” he wrote of one nocturnal expedition, “harshly lit by shining gas lamps and shop windows; the bars, the gin palaces are ablaze with light….drunks stagger about, punching each other.” Not much different to the 21st Century Bigg Market then!
Eneas Mackenzie, a Scottish writer and politician who settled in Newcastle in the early 19th Century, took the trouble to give a more well-rounded picture He noted that the natives possessed much individuality of character, and that though Newcastle men were “rather heavy and dull in appearance,” their intellectual powers were “usually solid and extensive,” and that in public – presumably when not in their cups! – they were “calm and dignified, and scarcely ever express their resentment in acts of riotous violence.”
He reported that Londoners often commented favourably on the number of tall men in Newcastle, and also on “the elegance and chasteness of the ladies’ dresses” – one aspect of life that has definitely changed. But he was shocked by the unique practice, which he called “disgraceful to the town,” of women being engaged as labourers to bricklayers and roof slaters in the early 1800s, and called for an end to the fair sex indecorously “mounting high ladders and crawling over the tops of houses.”
The only negative thing the composer Sir Edward Elgar had to say about the people in Newcastle was that they did not know how to make a decent cup of tea. When he stayed in the city to conduct some concerts of his own music in 1905 he had noticed that: “Really the tea at Newcastle was not good and purveyed by no angel but an evil spirit; there was coal in it and sulphur dioxide…”
One of the most interesting observers of the inhabitants of Newcastle was the Russian author and naval architect Yevgeny Zamyatin who lived in Jesmond for a short period during the First World War, from 1916-17. He was here to supervise the building of icebreakers for the Tsarist government and visited many of the shipyards on Tyneside and Wearside.
He endured Zeppelin raids, attended parties at the Russian Consulate in Old Eldon Square arriving home drunk in the early hours, to the horror of his landlady, and sent censored postcards home to his wife in Russia, complaining of boredom and a host of physical ailments.
An acute but hostile social commentator, he mostly lived at 19 Sanderson Road, Jesmond – a blue plaque marks the spot - and came to despise the Jesmondites as “repressed slaves to a stifling regime” of respectable social conformity. He satirically described the middle-class men there out for a walk on Sundays, “sporting identical canes and identical top-hats,” and passing all the Jesmond doorsteps, scrubbed to “gleaming rows of white, like the Sunday gentlemen’s false teeth.”
In his two short novels “Islanders” and “A Fisher of Men” – described by Martin Amis as “remarkable in every way” – he gives thinly disguised and quite rude descriptions of Jesmond inhabitants, and local pillars of the community like Lady Noble of Jesmond Dene House and the Reverend A. Boot of St. George’s Church.
His later masterpiece “We,” considered to have influenced both Huxley and Orwell, gives a nightmarish future vision of the thirtieth century. And its One State, ruled by Hourly Commandments, watched over by The Guardians, and protected from the “primitive” and chaotic world outside by a glass wall, owes its inspiration to Jesmond.
Or rather Zamyatin’s over-simplified, one dimensional view of it, ignoring the academics and artistic types who rubbed shoulders with the well-to-do there – then, as now.
He also found time to sneer at other parts of Newcastle. He stated, ridiculously, that all the houses in Newcastle looked like “grain barns in (Saint) Petersburg,” and considered the patent medicine man and his colleague who drew teeth for a shilling at the Sunday Quayside Market very “provincial.”
But all his hostility should be taken with a pinch of salt. When he moved to Paris he was fed up there too. And on his eventual return to Russia – which he also criticised for being dull and provincial - he was known as “The Englishman”, for aping the dress and manner of an upper-class British toff.
Indeed he had displayed a deeply provincial attitude to Newcastle himself - struggling with the language, and never becoming involved in the exciting cultural and technological developments taking place there at that time.
Sue Hope is a History graduate with a particular interest in local history and has had articles published in "The Northumbrian" and "Durham Town and Country." She is currently working on a novel about George Cooper Abbes, an eccentric antiquarian from Cleadon Village who was a close friend of Charles Dickens.