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New Northumbria
9
The New Northumbrians
ROBERT COLLS
âCorrect your maps: Newcastle is Peruâ
(Tony Harrison, after John Cleveland)
Is the North East English?
In the North East of England in the second half of the 19th century a cultural movement appeared that sought to identify the region as an historic nation. The seventh- and eighth-century Anglian kingdom of Northumbria was its underlying inspiration, though medieval and early modern histories were woven in as well, and the counties of Northumberland and Durham were its homeland, though the city of Newcastle upon Tyne was its centre of operations. I have called the men and women of this movement âNew Northumbriansâ and it is the aim of this chapter to sketch their feelings and ideas. For the most part they were local notables rather than full-time men of letters or politicians, and there was no headquarters, though the Newcastle Literary and Philosophic Society might be said to have served as a forum. Above all, even though most New Northumbrians were clear-cut modernists, they were historicists too, and the historic significance of the region was never far from their thinking. Their mission was to affirm the modern world by re-charging it with historic meaning. Being a New Northumbrian, therefore, was about living in a rapidly changing present but at the same time drawing oneâs being from a rich and meaningful past. In other words, the New Northumbrians promulgated a doctrine of enchantment that gave them enchantment. In this period many English regions defined themselves in terms of how English they were but in certain key ways the New Northumbrians defined themselves in terms of how English they were not â of a European kingdom that had existed before âEnglandâ began; of a history that had stayed at the edge; of a modern, northern, civilisation that was a democratic alternative to what was being promulgated in the south. If in 1914 we were to have stopped a New Northumbrian in Grey Street and asked him âIs the North East English?â, his answer would have been âyesâ, but he would have surely qualified it with remarks about the irony of being northern and being English at the same time. At the very least, he would have asked us to remember our history.
33 Sir James Radcliffe, 3rd Earl of Derwentwater (1689-1716) by George Vertue after Sir Godfrey Kneller. A Jacobite executed for treason, his estates were sequestrated and conferred upon Greenwich Hospital.
New Northumbrians found a way to vent their frustration with English history. Because United Kingdom Unionism made it difficult for them to express their northern-ness politically,1 like the Scots and the Welsh and most of the Irish, they had no alternative but to express themselves in the guise of an alternative but cultured, and historic, people. Up to 1914, this gave them a much lower profile than, say, Irish republicans who had crossed the line from Unionism to Nationalism, but put them on a par with Welsh, or Scottish, or Irish home rulers who did not cross that line. As a cultural movement, the New Northumbrians were much looser and more inclusive than they would have been had they been a political organisation, but, like their Welsh and Scottish counterparts, what politics they did have tended to be Liberal edging into Radical. As to the beginnings of the movement, if one really insisted on a time and place, I would suggest the mural paintings at Wallington Hall commissioned by Sir Walter Trevelyan of William Bell Scott in 1856.2 As to membership, of three things we can be sure. First, there was no âmembershipâ as such; this was a network of influence, not a club. Second, though we can speculate about New Northumbrian beginnings from the mid-1850s, as a modern intelligentsia with regional interests those beginnings go back to Enlightenment traditions covered elsewhere in this volume.3 Finally, it has to be said that all kinds of northerners could be New Northumbrians except nearly all of them. Women were a minority and, of the men, they had to have the time, the money, the education, and the contacts.4
Consider for a moment the officers of Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society in 1874.5 All were drawn to a popular northern ideology but, equally, all saw themselves as âgentlemenâ with time for scholarship. President was Sir William George Armstrong, Newcastleâs leading industrialist. Armstrong had been a member since 1836, had given his first lecture in 1844 and would give his last in 1895. The Societyâs magnificent library and lecture room were his gift.6 Along with the vice presidents Edward Charlton (doctor and local historian) and John Clayton (town clerk and antiquarian), and committee men Thomas Hodgkin (banker and historian) and John Wigham Richardson (shipbuilder and collector), Armstrong was a wealthy man whose commitment to the region went way beyond owning large portions of it. He was a grand patron and, among the grandees, we can include Algernon, 4th Duke of Northumberland (archaeologist), Sir Walter Trevelyan of Wallington Hall (archaeologist and naturalist), Joseph Cowen of Stella (politician and newspaper proprietor), the bankers Howard Pease and Robert Spence, and the landowners and developers Ralph Carr Ellison and John Hodgson Hinde.7 The Society wanted to popularise its ideas (it extended its membership in 1856 and 1889) but that did not mean relinquishing its power of patronage. Men such as these were used to lording it but even when lordship was not to their taste, as with the Cowens, whose patronage over such vital civic bodies as the Tyne Improvement Commission, or the Free Library, gave them enormous power to make their views known, and heeded.
34 Thomas Hodgkin (1831-1913). New Northumbrian, Quaker banker and scholar. Tenant of Bamburgh Castle 1894-99, and Barmoor Castle 1899-1913.
Secretary to the Lit & Phil in 1874 was Robert Spence Watson, of Gateshead, solicitor, company director, and the countryâs leading lay Liberal. No man in the Society knew as much, cared more, or lectured as long. As chairman of the Newcastle Public Library book committee, he had a lot of say in what the region read. In his famous 1898 Lit & Phil lectures Watson described himself as âa devoted Northumbrian with an intense ⌠belief in the Northumbria of old and the Northumberland of todayâ.8 Vice president John Collingwood Bruce (schoolmaster and scholar), and committee man James Clephan (newspaper editor) we might put in Watsonâs camp as second-order New Northumbrians â not immensely rich, or landed, but hard-working activists who were knowledgeable, and known for it. W.E. Adams, Cowenâs editor at the Chronicle for many years, was hugely influential, and lawyers and company secretaries were prominent in this rank too, including Richard Welford (Steamship Ownersâ Association), and William Weaver Tomlinson (North Eastern Railway). Richard Oliver Heslop, steel merchant, led the revival of interest in dialect speech, and Thomas Wilson, another company secretary though of an earlier generation, was regarded as an authority.9
35 Robert Spence Watson (1837-1911). New Northumbrian, solicitor. His many civic roles included honorary secretary of Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society 1862-92 and president of the National Liberal Federation 1890-1902.
Finally, among the officers of 1874 there was committee member T.P. Barkas, bookseller and gallery owner â representative of a third group of New Northumbrians who had an interest in selling things to do with northern identity. A market in regional products was emerging.10 Increasingly we have to account for New Northumbrians who werenât born there, or who didnât live there, but who still made money by their enthusiasm for the place.11 Out of an early 19th-century local tradition that included the bookselling and publishing Bells, Eneas MacKenzie, and Emerson Charnley, this third group included men such as David Dippie Dixon, Robert White, and the Allan brothers who, towards the end of the century, along with Spence Watson and Cowen, successfully marketed the music hall entertainer Joe Wilson (1841-75) as a true Northumbrian balladeer. Wilson had sold his copyright to the Allans and they, in turn, turned his songs and drolleries into commodities.12 In this category, painters and engravers, along with architects, deserve a section to themselves, and the great Newcastle engraver Thomas Bewick mu...
