A Tyneside Heritage E-Book

Peter S. Chapman

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 594

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Spanning 150 years of South Shields' changing fortunes, A Tyneside Heritage is a pioneering work of interwoven local and family history. After the nineteenth-century boom years of coal exporting and shipbuilding for global markets came the First World War, then the mass unemployment and political turbulence of the 1930s. Luftwaffe bombing in the Second World War was followed by the peacetime challenge of attracting new industrial development. Against this background, four generations of the Chapman family played a leading role in the town and in County Durham as businessmen, soldiers, borough councillors, sportsmen, philanthropists and representatives of royalty.

Leseprobe

A TYNESIDEHERITAGE

PETER S. CHAPMAN

A TYNESIDEHERITAGE

SOUTH SHIELDS, COUNTYDURHAM AND THE CHAPMANFAMILY, 1811–1963

For my family

First published 2021

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Peter S. Chapman, 2021

Front cover: ‘Mouth of the Tyne’, © Christine Westerback

The right of Peter S. Chapman to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7509 9693 8

Typesetting and origination by Typo•glyphix

Printed and bound in Europe by Imak

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

Part 1: South Shields and the Tyne

  1 The Transformation Begins

  2 A North-Eastern Powerhouse

Part 2: Westoe

  3 Full Steam Ahead

  4 Business and Community Leaders

  5 Sporting Lives

Part 3: The First World War

  6 War on all Fronts, 1914–18

Part 4: The Inter-War Years

  7 Post-War Challenges

  8 Mayor and Mayoress of South Shields

  9 Parliament and the ‘Special Areas’

  10Undercliff

Part 5: The Second World War and Beyond

  11 The Second World War, 1939–45

  12 Royalty and Recognition

Notes and References

PREFACE

Memories of my grandparents’ house, Undercliff in Cleadon, where I was born in 1944, have remained vivid throughout my adult life. In the dining room were ancestral portraits, in the drawing room a display cabinet with my grandfather’s medals and decorations, and upstairs in my grandmother’s sewing room a long shelf in the mahogany bookcase full of scrapbooks, recording family events over three decades from the 1930s. Some newspaper articles took the reader back to early nineteenth-century Tyneside. I became fascinated by this historical collection.

Seven years ago I was invited by the South Shields Local History Group to give a lecture on the lives of my grandparents, Sir Robert and Lady Chapman, and the contribution they had made to the local community from the 1920s to the early ’60s. Inspired by this invitation I got to work reading each scrapbook page and sifting through family archives meticulously preserved by my elder brother, Sir David, and his wife, Marika.

By the time the lecture had taken place, the idea for the book was born. I would push back its historical start date to the beginning of the nineteenth century, the family link being my great-great-grandfather Robert Chapman, who had been born in 1811, and the focus would be on the changing fortunes of South Shields, Tyneside and County Durham, brought into sharp relief through the lives of the Chapman family over 150 years, ending with my grandfather’s death in 1963.

The book involved extensive and enjoyable research on topics ranging from shipbuilding and coal exporting to political and economic developments and leisure activities, all affected dramatically by two world wars. Numerous librarians, archivists and museum staff members have given me the benefit of their knowledge and expertise. Catrin Galt, Community Librarian, Family History and Heritage, at South Tyneside Libraries, has answered numerous queries, provided ideas for images from the council’s exceptional historic collection and allowed me to access a wide range of unpublished documents. Anne Sharp, former Local History Librarian, and Caroline Barnsley, former Senior Library and Information Assistant, have both been very supportive.

Assistance from Adam Bell, Assistant Keeper, Social History at the South Shields Museum & Art Gallery, from Ruth Sheret at the Philip Robinson Library of Newcastle University, from Julie Biddlescombe-Brown formerly at Durham University’s Palace Green Library and from Kay Easson and her colleagues at the Lit & Phil Library in Newcastle has all been much appreciated.

Research reports and documents provided by Tyne & Wear Archives in Newcastle have filled in many gaps. Assistance from Durham County Records Office, the National Archives, the National Library of Scotland, Historic Environment Scotland, the Imperial War Museum, Bridgeman Images, RIBA Collections, Stirling Council, the British Red Cross Society, St John Ambulance, the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, D.C. Thomson & Co. Ltd, Clarion Housing Group (successor to the Sutton Dwellings Trust), Hew Stevenson and Owen P. Elton, Head of Mathematics at Marlborough College, is gratefully acknowledged. Staff at the London Library have, as ever, been unfailingly helpful and I give special thanks to Amanda Stebbings, Head of Member Services, for research assistance and permission to photograph images from books and journals in the library’s collection.

Ian Whitehead, former Keeper of Maritime History at the Discovery Museum in Newcastle upon Tyne, has been an invaluable source of information and research on shipping generally, and on Tyne rowing in the nineteenth century. I also happily acknowledge a debt of gratitude to Len Barnett, Alan Johnson, the late Richard E. Keys, Norman L. Middlemiss, Dave Waller and Christine Westerback.

On the First World War I benefited from research and assistance provided by Chris Baker, David Wardrop, Patrick Brennan and Mary Ingham (who also helped with Second World War research). Lt Col Peter Winton, Commanding Officer 101st (Northumbrian) Regiment, Royal Artillery, kindly arranged access to regimental memorabilia at the Napier Armoury in Gateshead through his colleagues Capt. Jim Foster and Lorraine Dent, RAWO.

The education of family members in the nineteenth century was a fruitful topic, and I acknowledge with gratitude help from Oliver Edwards, Archivist of the Royal Grammar School in Newcastle, Mrs Rachel Roberts, College Archivist of Cheltenham Ladies’ College, Jane Claydon, Archivist of St Leonards School in St Andrews, and Mike Todd for information on the South Shields Boys’ High School. Assistance from Graham Allen, Chairman of South Shields and Westoe Rugby Football Club, and from Phil McGowan of the Rugby Football Union was much appreciated.

Throughout the book’s long gestation period I have benefited from the strong support of the South Shields Local History Group and particularly of its Honorary President, Dorothy Fleet. Her exceptional knowledge of South Shields was generously shared with me, and no request was too much trouble. Her SSLHG colleagues Janis Blower (Patron), Alan Newham (Chairman), Jean Stokes (Vice-Chair), Jim Mulholland and Jim Smith have all been enthusiastic and helpful. Information from Pauline Shawyer and Heather Thomas on family members was also much appreciated.

Friends and family have kept me going. Julia Carnwath kindly made available detailed information on the Armstrongs, who were great friends of my family. My own close friend the late Professor Michael Dickson CBE generously left me a legacy to help fund research and development costs. My brother David, sister Elizabeth Levy and cousin Caroline Steane have provided encouragement, information and some splendid images.

Laurie Danaher has typed every draft and redraft, every caption and credit, with good humour and meticulous attention to detail. I know how fortunate I have been to have had her professional help and expertise from the very beginning.

My wife, Joan, has been a star. Unwavering in her support for the project, she has helped me with its structure, given constructive criticism on early drafts, taken camera shots of family portraits and documents, set up digital files for nearly 200 images, and somehow found the energy to spur me on if I seemed to be flagging. Our children Christopher, Vicky, Katherine and Rachel have been loyal supporters from the start, wisely taking the long view on a publication timescale.

In the event, once the manuscript and images were with The History Press, Nicola Guy (Commissioning Editor, Local History) and Juanita Zoe Hall (Managing Editor) facilitated a smooth passage to publication, despite Covid-19 obstacles. I am very grateful to them and to my indexer, Joanna Luke, for their professional help and encouragement.

INTRODUCTION

Migration in England was not always from north to south. The Chapman family had lived for four generations in Upleatham in the Yorkshire parish of Guisborough, before William Chapman (‘Yeoman otherwise butcher’), born in 1747, moved to Elwick in the parish of Hart in what was still called the County Palatine of Durham, reflecting the jurisdictive powers formerly exercised by its bishops. His son, Robert Chapman, born in 1782 at Hart, moved further north to South Shields at the mouth of the River Tyne and became a mariner and shipwright, marrying Elizabeth Cleugh of Westoe.

This account of 150 years of the Chapman family in South Shields and County Durham begins with the life of his son, Robert Chapman, JP, who was born in 1811 and died in 1894. It continues with his son, Henry Chapman, JP, FCA (1850–1936), and ends with his grandson, Col Sir Robert Chapman, Bt (1880–1963).

South Shields was transformed out of all recognition during Robert Chapman’s nineteenth-century life, as the coal trade, industry and shipbuilding boomed. This heady expansion, and later severe contraction, of the economy formed the backcloth to the business and public service endeavours of the Chapman family for a century and a half.

PART 1

SOUTH SHIELDSAND THE TYNE

Perchance a person South of York

May, whilst having varied talk,

(But not of fair Elysian fields)

Have heard of such a place as Shields.

Matthew Stainton, 18681

1

THE TRANSFORMATIONBEGINS

Robert Chapman’s life spanned most of the nineteenth century. Born in 1811 during the Napoleonic Wars, he would see profound social and economic changes before his death in 1894. At the time of his birth in South Shields on the south bank of the River Tyne where it meets the North Sea – then called the German Ocean – the town’s population had started to increase dramatically. From small beginnings of 11,000 at the time of the first national census in 1801, there was a 40 per cent increase by 1811, and by the end of the century the population had risen to 100,000.

In the early years of the nineteenth century, South Shields was largely concentrated along the river, with small communities to the south in the nearby agricultural villages of Westoe and Harton. Its architectural pride and joy was the eighteenth-century Town Hall. Affectionately known as the ‘Pepper Box’, it was situated prominently in the middle of the Market Place, which was ‘chiefly occupied by private houses and the residences and offices of professional men’.1

They were fortunate enough to be comparatively well housed. However, for the vast majority of the population, living conditions ranged from the fairly primitive to the absolutely appalling. There was no gas or electricity supply and therefore no street lighting, little or no paving, no sewerage or efficient drainage system, and water supply was totally inadequate both in distribution – mostly by water carts – and in quality. This situation was both typical of expanding industrial towns and cities throughout Britain, and also disastrous for public health. To ameliorate conditions would require a strong economy, new municipal powers, and resolute political will.

1855 Ordnance Survey map of South Shields, published in 1862, by which time the population was around 35,000. (National Library of Scotland)

Sketch of the Market Place in the 1850s, showing the Old Town Hall of 1768, St Hilda’s Church (c. 1764), St Hilda’s Colliery (1825) and the chimneys of R. & W. Swinburn & Co.’s plate glass works. The Town Hall was affectionately known as the ‘Pepper Box’. (South Tyneside Libraries)

Shipbuilding, Coal and Industry

South Shields’ economy grew rapidly during Robert’s lifetime. The Napoleonic Wars had been good years for building sailing ships: by 1811 there were some 500 vessels totalling 100,000 tons registered to the town, which had a dozen shipbuilding yards and a larger number of docks.2 Operations were mostly on a modest scale, with the construction of wooden sailing ships requiring little complex equipment and employing relatively small workforces. Nevertheless, in total the industry employed around 1,000 shipwrights, one of whom was Robert’s father.

The Napoleonic Wars had also been productive years for the development of new and more powerful vessels. A year before Waterloo, in 1814, the Tyne celebrated its own first steamboat called, appropriately enough, the Tyne Steam Packet, which carried passengers between Newcastle, South Shields and North Shields. This new mode of transport would in due course make a significant contribution to the development of the river, especially since road communications between Newcastle and the coast were – and remained for another half century – exceptionally poor. The town clerk of South Shields, Thomas Salmon, recognised the revolutionary significance of the steamer’s maiden journey on 19 May 1814, recalling that ‘Being Ascension Day, it joined the procession of barges and boats, and was a great novelty. I was one of the multitude of wondering spectators, who witnessed its performances from Newcastle Bridge.’3 As it turned out, the passenger service was not a commercial success, and a new owner, Joseph Price from Gateshead, renamed her Perseverance a few years later and turned her very successfully into the first steam tug on the river.

The French may have been decisively defeated in 1815, but the immediate result was economic depression and distress, exacerbated by a currency panic. The Army reduced its numbers, and the Royal Navy reduced the size of its fleet, discharging seamen for whom there was no alternative employment. As Hodgson put it, ‘an immense body of seamen were thrown idle’,4 resulting in bitter strikes throughout the North East. In what were known as the ‘two Shields’ (North and South, reflecting the towns’ Tyneside locations), there were around 7,000 seamen and their demands were for increased wages and manning levels. Their strike committee was well organised and maintained strict discipline. Pickets prevented nearly all ships from sailing, and seamen who tried to set sail were taken out and paraded through the streets with ‘faces blackened and jackets turned’.5

Perseverance towing the brig Friends’ Adventure up river to Newcastle. Built in 1814, she became the first steam tug on the Tyne. Painting (formally entitled Seascape) by the American mariner and artist Frank Wildes Thompson (1836–1905). (Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne. © Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums/Bridgeman Images)

The ship owners appealed successfully for help from the Navy and the military. Cavalry were sent from Newcastle; a troop of dragoons was stationed on the Bank Top and marines on the sands; 600 special constables were sworn in; and two sloops of war stood by. The odds were stacked very heavily against the seamen, and in the event the strike collapsed in October 1815, just a month after it had started. Some 200 affected ships then put to sea. Nevertheless, three months later in January 1816, between 300 and 400 sailing vessels were still ‘laid up in Shields Harbour and unrigged owing to the badness of trade’.6

Economic conditions gradually improved, the new technology of steam started to spread widely, and expanding shipyards created jobs for unemployed seamen. In South Shields, Thomas Dunn Marshall had successfully developed steam tugs and in 1839 his yard launched the North East’s first iron ship, the Star. He then launched the SS Bedlington, an innovative iron-built, twin-screw train ferry, designed to carry loaded coal trucks in her hold. Although she was a commercial failure, the technological advance was significant, and in 1845 he built two iron-screw steamers (Hengist and Horsa) for owners in Bremen, followed by commissions for Hamburg owners, ‘the Germans thus showing their facility for assimilating new ideas quicker than their British competitors’.7

In 1844 there was another important technical innovation on the Tyne. John Coutts had built at his Walker shipyard, upstream on the north bank, a small sailing vessel of 271 tons, the Q.E.D. She was subsequently fitted with auxiliary engines made by Messrs Hawthorn at their Newcastle engine works. Q.E.D. (an abbreviation of the Latin Quod erat demonstrandum, or ‘what it was necessary to prove’) was not only a pioneering screw-propelled vessel, but, most importantly, she was the first ship to be built with a double bottom, enabling her to take in water to act as a ballast without spoiling the cargo holds. This was revolutionary, since the typical practice at the time was to use chalk as a ballast when empty vessels were returning to their home ports after delivering their cargoes. The banks of the Tyne were disfigured by huge heaps of chalk ballast. South Shields was no exception, with The Bents Ballast Hills alone covering an area of 30 acres.

By 1848 there were thirty-six shipbuilding yards on the Tyne, with steam power poised to replace sail in the decades ahead. Nevertheless, at this mid-century point, over 90 per cent of all vessels were sailing ships, and they continued to be built on a very substantial scale. When Robert Chapman became a ship owner in 1854, it was a sailing ship in which he invested. Its fortunes, and those of the mercantile sailing fleet as a whole, will be explored in the next chapter.

Chalk ballast unloaded from sailing ships at Cookson’s Quay was transported by railway to The Bents, whose unsightly ballast hills covered some 30 acres. In the background can be seen Tynemouth Priory. (South Tyneside Libraries)

The growth of Tyne shipbuilding in the first half of the nineteenth century was despite, rather than because of, the state of the river. South Shields and neighbouring downstream ports suffered from what can best be described as the curse of Newcastle, which through ‘ancient chartered privileges’ controlled the whole river, from its mouth to the west of the city. Newcastle had been an irresponsible conservator, and:

In fact the Tyne was a treacherous and inconvenient port with no defences at the entrance against gales which frequently strewed the Black Midden rocks with wrecks, and with a channel beset by shoals and obstructions. During the first half of the nineteenth century Newcastle took over £1 million in dues from shipping which used the port, but only about a third of that amount was spent in maintaining or improving the harbour.8

The brig Margaret at the mouth of the Tyne painted by the South Shields seafarer-turned-artist John Scott in 1849, when over 90 per cent of all vessels were still sailing ships. (South Shields Museum and Art Gallery. © Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums/Bridgeman Images)

This hugely disadvantageous situation – which had undoubtedly held back development in South Shields – started to be ameliorated in 1848, and was finally resolved in the early 1850s.

It was coal that fuelled the growth of the Tyne’s shipbuilding industry and economy. The increase in coal mining during the first half of the nineteenth century was by far the most important of all the industrial activities on Tyneside. It profited greatly from the existence of a ready market, especially in London, and from the ship-borne route to it. Transportation to ports was facilitated by the use of new waggon ways, while the increased use of steam power for pumping enabled deeper seams to be reached.9 New and deeper pits included the Templetown Pit, named after its owner Simon Temple, at the eastern end of Jarrow Slake in 1810, and the St Hilda’s pit in South Shields itself, owned by J. and R.W. Brandling, in 1822. Output almost doubled between 1831, when annual shipments from the Tyne were 2.2 million tons, to the early 1850s when they were around 4 million tons. Most of the coal continued to go to London, but exports responded to strongly increasing demand and started to be significant from 1831, when dues were reduced. They were abolished in 1845 for British-owned colliers (coal-carrying vessels). This export trade from the Tyne amounted to 161,000 tons in 1831 (7.3 per cent of total shipments), increasing sixfold to over 1 million tons in 1845 (30.6 per cent of all shipments).

Employment conditions and labour relations were woeful. In 1825 a Miners’ Union was formed, its publication, A Voice from the Coal Mine, heavily critical of poor ventilation and of the annual bond system with its low wages and potential for fines (‘a kind of legalised temporary serfdom’).10 A few years later the Union was incorporated into the Association of Colliers on the Rivers Tyne and Wear, which soon had some 4,000 members. In 1831 there was a miners’ strike, one of the key demands being a reduction in the punishingly long hours worked by boys from the age of 6 upwards. The colliery owners finally agreed that in future boys should not work for more than twelve hours a day.

Then, in June 1839, disaster struck. There was a terrible explosion at St Hilda’s Pit, close to the town centre of South Shields, in which fifty men and boys died.11 The town clerk at the time, Thomas Salmon, recalled the tragedy: ‘Never shall I forget … the harrowing spectacle that presented itself at the mouth of Saint Hilda Pit, when on that day, so sad and melancholy in the annals of our borough, one scorched and blackened corpse after another was brought to bank, amidst the wailings and lamentations of surrounding relatives.’12

Thomas Hair’s sketch of coal ‘drops’ at Wallsend on the north bank of the Tyne in the early 1840s, when booming coal exports reached 1 million tons a year. (T.H. Hair and M. Ross, A Series of Views of the Collieries in the Counties of Northumberland and Durham [London, 1844])

St Hilda’s Pit in the centre of South Shields, sketched by Thomas Hair, was the scene of a terrible explosion in 1839 that killed fifty men and boys. (T.H. Hair and M. Ross, A Series of Views of the Collieries in the Counties of Northumberland and Durham [London, 1844])

The town, in a state of shock, was determined to prevent a repeat of this terrible tragedy. A local Committee for the Prevention of Accidents in Mines was formed at a public meeting. Chaired by the Borough’s Member of Parliament, Robert Ingham, its members were leading residents, notably James Mather, a wine and spirits merchant, and an active Radical in politics. The committee’s hard-hitting report of 1842 was produced by Mather himself. It called for sweeping changes in mining operations, including mandatory improved ventilation systems, an end to employing children under 11 years old, and for the appointment of Inspectors of Mines. The report, which became famous in Britain and abroad, was considered by a House of Lords Committee in 1849 (by which time a new Pitman’s Union had been formed and the great miners’ strike of 1844 had taken place), and by a Parliamentary Committee in 1852. Almost all of its recommendations were adopted in the subsequent Mines Act and internationally it became a textbook of best practice. The grateful miners of Northumberland and Durham presented a silver cup to James Mather in recognition of his outstanding achievements.

The increased output from the coalfields facilitated the growth of a wide variety of coal-using industries on Tyneside and in South Shields itself, notably the chemical industry and glass-making, which expanded dramatically after the 1820s. By mid-century, Tyneside’s chemical manufacturers employed 50 per cent (3,067) of the national total of 6,326 in the industry, and consumed nearly 250,000 tons of coal a year. They produced about a third of the national supply of alkali and two-thirds of the national output of crystal soda.13 In South Shields the largest chemical firm was Cookson & Cuthbert, which used the Leblanc process (named after a French chemist) for the manufacture of alkali. Unfortunately this process involved pumping into the atmosphere large quantities of highly noxious hydrochloric acid gas. A number of private prosecutions were brought against the company in the late 1830s and early ’40s, notably by a local farmer who complained – successfully – about damage to his crops. As further prosecutions were launched, the company received support not only from its 700 employees, but also from a large number of local working men in marches and public meetings. A resolution was passed opposing the prosecutors, whose proceedings ‘would sacrifice an enormous extent of valuable property and deprive several thousands of their helpless countrymen of bread’.14 Jobs that caused pollution were better than no jobs at all.

However, the proprietors of Cookson’s had had enough, and, as they had threatened, they closed their plant in 1843. Fortunately for the workers, it was purchased in the following year by James Stevenson of Glasgow, and renamed the Jarrow Chemical Works. His son was James Cochran Stevenson, who would make an exceptionally important contribution to public life in South Shields. He ran the company successfully for several decades and oversaw a major restructuring as competitive pressures intensified in the 1880s. Unfortunately those pressures proved terminal. The company’s interests were transferred in 1891 to the United Alkali Company, which closed down the South Shields works the following year.15 By the end of the century the Tyneside chemical industry was a mere shadow of its former self.

Cookson’s business interests had not been confined to the chemical industry. They had been glass-makers since the eighteenth century, and by the 1830s Cookson & Co.’s Works had become the biggest glass-making enterprise in the country. It remained in pole position after its sale in 1845 to a new company, R.W. Swinburne & Co., which shared with a Birmingham company an enormous order for the rolled plate glass required for the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace in 1850, where the company obtained a prize medal for its innovative craftsmanship. However, the following decades would also see glass-making in South Shields in gradual, and then final, decline.

The Railways Arrive

The glass-making, chemical and coal industries benefited enormously from the transport revolution in the first half of the nineteenth century, the Stockton and Darlington Railway of 1825 being ‘the first clear demonstration of the commercial transformation which could be produced by the construction of a railway’.16 The benefits were two-fold. First, local transportation costs were reduced by as much as two-thirds compared to road transport, and, even more importantly, the new railway lines provided cost-effective access to the lucrative ‘sea-sale’ markets for coal from the mines of inland South Durham. Before the advent of the railways, it cost less to move a ton of coal from Newcastle to London by sea than to move it 19 miles overland from Bishop Auckland in south Durham to Stockton.

For its part, South Shields was an early beneficiary, becoming the terminus for the new Stanhope & Tyne Railway, which opened in 1834. Like other early railways, it drew on experience of the technology of the colliery waggon ways. When it was first completed, ‘it combined every form of motive power then known. Ten and a half miles were worked by horses, nine and a quarter miles by locomotives; there were three miles of self-acting inclined plane and no less than eleven miles which were worked by fixed haulage engines.’17

The development of railways to South Shields and other Tyne ports enabled coal to be loaded directly into colliers’ holds from ‘drops’ or ‘staithes’ (waterside depots equipped with staging and shoots for loading vessels). This gradually and painfully led to the demise of keelmen, who had previously transferred coal from shore to colliers in their small boats or keels. Strikes – sometimes long and bitter – could not halt the technological advance. The Stanhope & Tyne brought another benefit: it gave South Shields the first Tyneside public railway, carrying passengers to Vigo, near Washington, and thence by coach to Durham. More importantly, passengers could, by 1840, travel by rail from South Shields to Gateshead, on the Brandling Junction line. This involved changing trains at Brockley Whins to join the railway company’s main line from Sunderland to Gateshead, but the service was rather spasmodic: ‘loud were the complaints of the long delays involved by waiting at the junction’.18 Facilities for passengers were basic, as was noted in a review fifty years later:

The first-class carriages were not so good by any means as the main line third-class of today; the second-class were uncushioned and comfortless; the third-class simply open waggons. A journey to London (in the early 1840s) was a fearful undertaking. To accomplish it by Parliamentary train you had to leave South Shields about five o’clock in the morning,19

arriving in London twelve hours later. Fortunately, in 1844 the improved rail route from Tyneside to London was completed, the inaugural journey taking just under seven hours from Euston to Gateshead.20

Municipal Developments

While trade, industry and transportation were expanding rapidly, local government was still in an embryonic state. Indeed its forerunner, the Select Vestry (whose responsibilities included the administration of the Poor Law, policing, the provision of medical relief, and the assessment and collection of the rates), could not cope with the scale of the town’s expansion. An important step in extending municipal powers was taken in 1828. A ‘Bill for paving, lighting, watching [policing], cleaning, regulating and improving the town of South Shields, and its neighbourhood’ was approved at a public meeting in the Town Hall and subsequently by Parliament. The resulting Act set up an Improvement Commission for defined areas of the townships of South Shields and Westoe. The Commissioners first met in July 1829 and although their rating powers were limited, they introduced a regular system of ‘scavenging’ (refuse collection), and a programme of repairing roads, which were generally in a ‘filthy condition’, not least because houses were undrained. By arrangement with the Select Vestry, ‘paupers’ (men receiving financial assistance, or ‘relief’, under the Poor Laws) were employed as ‘scavengers’, street sweepers and general labourers.

It is hard to imagine now just how dark, filthy and unhealthy towns like South Shields were in this period. The Commissioners started what was to be the very slow and long process of providing adequate street lighting. Gas lamps were provided for the first time in 1829 – twenty of them. Fifteen years later there were still only 178. As for public health, epidemics were regular life-taking visitors. After the arrival of the terrible and prolonged cholera epidemic of 1831, South Shields formed an ad hoc ‘Board of Health’ to try to prevent its spread. Meanwhile, ‘January 11, 1832 was observed as a fast day. All business was suspended, all shops closed, and services of intercession were held in St Hild’s and the various chapels that the cholera scourge might be stayed.’21

The year 1832 did, however, bring excellent news for the town’s political health. This was the landmark year in which Earl Grey’s famous Reform Bill, despite its earlier rejection by the House of Lords, received the Royal Assent as the Representation of the People Act. It established a new parliamentary Borough for South Shields (including Westoe), for which the town had petitioned Westminster two years earlier. Even though the restrictive electoral qualifications meant that only around 3 per cent of the 1832 population of 19,000 residents were eligible to vote, the fact that the town would have its own representative in London would bring significant benefits over the following two decades. The town’s first MP was Robert Ingham, QC (1793–1875), born in Newcastle upon Tyne. He was a ‘Whig or Moderate Liberal’ lawyer who had become Recorder at Berwick before the 1832 South Shields election, having ‘taken a very active part in promoting the enfranchisement of the town’.22

Robert Ingham, MP, QC, became South Shields’ first Member of Parliament in 1832 following the enactment of the ‘Reform Bill’. A Liberal, he represented the borough at Westminster with distinction for twenty-five years. (South Tyneside Libraries)

Parliamentary activity affecting South Shields continued apace in the 1830s. Following a Royal Commission on the Poor Laws (the national system of parish ‘relief’, or assistance, to the destitute originally introduced in 1601 in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I), the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 reached the statute book. This important Act set up, at national level, the Poor Law Commission, which would become the Poor Law Board in 1847, and eventually the Local Government Board in 1871, as the responsibilities of local government continued to expand. Under the 1834 Act, South Shields, Westoe, Whitburn, Harton, Boldon and the townships of Hedworth, Monkton and Jarrow were combined to form the South Shields Poor Law Union, administered by a Board of Guardians drawn from the participating townships. The South Shields Union had twenty-five guardians (eighteen of whom came from South Shields and Westoe). In addition all county magistrates residing in the Union’s area automatically became members. The first Chairman of the Union was an ex-officio member, the magistrate Richard Shortridge. He was a glass manufacturer, ‘perhaps the wealthiest man in South Shields’, and ‘a commercial man of the richest integrity’.23 He remained chairman until 1854, and died thirty years later, leaving generous legacies to twenty-one charities.

The 1834 Act enshrined the Royal Commission’s recommended principle of ‘less eligibility’, namely that the pauper’s ‘situation on the whole shall not be made really or apparently so eligible as the situation of the independent labourer of the lowest class’. That is to say, financial assistance (‘relief’) to paupers should not exceed the wages of the poorest labourers. In South Shields, two-thirds of those receiving relief were the widows and children of seamen – a mariner’s life was extremely dangerous – and in 1839 the Union considered that as many as ‘one person in ten in the township of South Shields was a pauper’, in other words eligible for ‘relief’.24

The responsibilities of the Poor Law Guardians were extended by a new registration role under the 1836 Births and Deaths Registration Act. To carry out their increased duties, the Board appointed a clerk, a treasurer, an auditor, two relieving officers, three rate collectors, three medical officers, two registrars and a superintendent registrar. The Board also decided to build a new workhouse for the Union, purchasing land on the eastern corner of Ocean Road and Park Terrace from Robert Ingham, MP. It was completed in 1838 and could house 260 inmates.

Meanwhile, the first half of the nineteenth century also saw a spectacular growth in the number of friendly societies and savings banks, a legal framework having been provided by Parliament. These philanthropic or not for profit organisations were supported by the active encouragement and financial assistance of the richer sections of society. South Shields was no exception. One important example of a new friendly society was the South Shields Master Mariners’ Asylum and Annuity Society, established in 1839. The originators of the idea of providing ‘an Asylum and Annuities for aged members, their widows and orphans’ met at the Seamen’s Hall in Fowler Street in January 1839. All sixteen of them were Ship Masters, supported by James Young, a prominent ship owner, and Dr Thomas M. Winterbottom, who had already provided funding for a new Marine School,25 and who would become an exceptionally generous benefactor to numerous other good causes in the town.

Dr Thomas Winterbottom (1776–1859), medical practitioner and exceptionally generous philanthropist who founded South Shields’ Marine School and was the leading benefactor of the Master Mariners’ Asylum and Annuity Society, whose Mariners’ Cottages still stand. (South Tyneside Libraries)

The Lord Bishop of Durham became the patron of the new Society, whose rules and regulations were approved at a general meeting on 15 February, attended by ‘officers or major contributors’, including Robert Chapman. In addition to the proposed distribution of annuities to the beneficiaries – and, with the huge number of sailing ships that sank in storms and rough seas, there was sadly no shortage of widows and orphans – in 1843 the Society commenced the task of building the ‘asylum’ (almshouses) in the form of linked cottages. They became known as Mariners’ Cottages, Dr Winterbottom providing generous funding including for a library, a wash-house and proper drainage. Between 1843 and 1862, when the scheme was completed, thirty-nine cottages were built, one of which would later be occupied by Robert Chapman’s sister-in-law, Ann Isabella Robson. The cottages still stand today.

Even the most generous philanthropists could only fund the reduction of insanitary nuisances such as ‘noxious effluvium from cesspools’ on a very small scale indeed. So, given the enormous increase in the urban population of England and Wales in the first half of the nineteenth century, accompanied by frequent outbreaks of cholera and other epidemic diseases, it is not surprising that health and sanitary conditions became a national issue. In 1843 Sir Robert Peel’s Government appointed a Royal Commission to ‘inquire into the health of large towns and populous districts’. A South Shields committee was formed, and its 1844 report painted a depressing picture, all too typical of towns and cities of the period:

In the older parts of the town the houses were two or three stories high, many of them back to back, and closely built in narrow streets and alleys along the bank of the river. In other parts of the town the houses were chiefly single cottages of two or three rooms. The number of families in each house varied from one to seventeen, the average number of persons to each room being three and three-fourths. The tenement houses were always badly ventilated, almost always destitute of necessary conveniences, and their condition ‘had led to the formation amongst the poorer classes of habits not only disgusting and unwholesome but inconsistent with a high tone of morals’. The supply of water to the poor was inadequate, and the provision of cheap public baths urgently necessary. There were some sewers and drains, but the arrangements for under drainage were very defective, and the house drains, where they existed, were not properly cleansed, and frequently choked with refuse. The nuisances most strongly complained of were the smoke from the glassworks and manufactories, the exhalations from the alkali-works, the overcrowded condition of St. Hild’s Churchyard, and the want of suitable slaughterhouses. The report alleged that the worst-conditioned part of the town was the district including Commercial Road, Johnson’s Hill, Carpenter Street, Nile Street, Dockwray Bank, Cone Street, Academy Hill, Pleasant Place, etc., with a population of 2302, where the death-rate was 37.3 per thousand, or 14.9 above the average.26

An 1894/95 map of South Shields, published in 1898, by which time the population was approaching 100,000. Note that the ‘German Ocean’ had not finally been supplanted by the ‘North Sea’. (National Library of Scotland)

Most of these narrow streets and alleys lay between Commercial Road and the river in the High Shields area.

Effective responses to this damning report would take many decades. As a first step, the borough’s improvement commissioners appointed a special committee in 1845 to investigate water supply and quality. It found that only 180 of the 3,911 inhabited houses in the town had water ‘laid in’ (piped), 977 houses obtaining it regularly from the town’s water company’s two dozen standpipes. As for the other 2,754 houses, they depended mostly on water carts. The water supply itself was most unsatisfactory. For example, the Deans reservoir ‘contained large quantities of impurities from the Deans Burn … (to whose ponds) … the horses, cattle, pigs, geese, ducks, etc. from the farmhouses continually resorted’.27

The committee made several important recommendations, including discontinuing domestic supply from the Deans Well (more than half of the water company’s total supply being consumed by manufacturing companies and by shipping), bringing into productive use existing wells, providing large, open storage tanks and laying pipes in every street, with the commissioners levying a rate for the supply of all dwellings with water. These recommendations were not acted upon, nor did a deputation of residents and manufacturers to the Water Company in 1849 receive a satisfactory outcome despite the fact that in 1848 there had been another serious outbreak of cholera, causing 254 deaths. This was followed by a further ‘awful visitation’ of the disease in 1849 itself, which led to the magistrates recommending a ‘Day of Fasting and Humiliation’ (in the sense of humility) with divine services in fourteen churches and chapels. Despite this deputation and intercession, South Shields residents would have to wait until the 1850s for improvements to their domestic water supply, following decisive action by the borough council.

First Moves to Break Newcastle’s Monopoly of the Tyne

The year 1848 was a revolutionary one in Europe, where events, including the Paris Commune, caused great anxiety to the British Government and to Queen Victoria, who had ascended the throne eleven years earlier. Nearer to home, 1848 was the year in which South Shields (in long-standing alliance with its neighbouring harbour borough, North Shields) came one important step closer to realising its ambition to be freed of the monopolistic shackles of Newcastle, whose total control over the Tyne, including the collection and expenditure of all dues on the river’s shipping trade, had been so detrimental to the development of the two towns.

As Thomas Salmon, town clerk of South Shields, recorded in a lecture he delivered in 1856 in the town’s Central Hall, ‘South Shields, until the 6th of April 1848, formed a portion of the port of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, but on that day South Shields and North Shields, after many former efforts, on the part chiefly of the latter, were constituted a distinct port, by the name of “The Port of Shields”.’28 This decision, that Shields Harbour be constituted an independent customs port, was made by the Lords of the Treasury in London following a detailed petition to them, and after a predictably long fight with Newcastle, which had strongly opposed it.

North Shields immediately obtained an independent custom house, and although South Shields also obtained one, in the rather acid words of Thomas Salmon, ‘it is subservient, perhaps as a punishment for her supineness, to that of the sister borough of Tynemouth’,29 whose port was North Shields. Salmon urged his audience to do everything they could to obtain independent status, and therefore duties from ships, for the South Shields custom house. This would eventually be achieved, but not for another seventeen years. Meanwhile, the early years of the next decade, and 1850 in particular, would be of huge importance for the town, as its growth was all set to continue at an even faster pace than in the first half of the century. It was against this background that Robert Chapman’s career developed as draper, ship owner, councillor, select vestryman and magistrate.

2

A NORTH-EASTERNPOWERHOUSE

Rather than follow in his father’s seafaring and shipbuilding footsteps, Robert decided as an ambitious 25-year-old to set himself up as a draper. He had started trading in 1836 at 83 King Street, almost on the corner of the Market Place, just a stone’s throw from the Town Hall, describing himself as a ‘Linen and Woollen Draper, Silk Mercer, Furrier, Hatter, &c.’. Three years later he was well established, advertising confidently in October 1839 to ‘his Friends and the Inhabitants generally of South and North Shields and Vicinities, that he has again returned from the Markets, with a fashionable and extensive Assortment of Goods suitable for the present and approaching Seasons’. He highlighted his Merinos, ‘Dark printed Saxonies’ (soft compact fabrics made from high grade Merino wool from Saxony), ‘De’Laines’ (very light woollen fabrics) and ‘Lutestrings’ (glossy silk fabrics), not forgetting workaday ‘Pilot Cloths’ (thick blue woollen cloths for seamen’s coats) and ‘Beavers’ (heavy woollen cloths like beaver fur). With three other drapers in King Street itself, and five more in the Market Place, Robert’s advertisement ‘begs to state his Determination to offer his Stock at prices that will meet any competition, and secure to his Customers every advantage that it is possible to obtain’.

If the 1830s had set Robert on his chosen career path, the 1840s would transform his domestic life. In January 1841 he married Elizabeth Robson at St Hilda’s Church. She had six children in fairly quick succession: Robert, Matthew, William, Elizabeth, Jane Ann, and, in 1850, Henry. As with most King Street traders, the whole family lived above the shop.

Robert Chapman’s 1839 drapery advertisement. Then aged 28, he had been trading at No. 83 King Street for three years. (South Tyneside Libraries)

By mid-century Robert’s business was thriving, and King Street was positively buzzing with commercial activities. In February 1849 the North and South Shields Gazette was established as a weekly newspaper. Later in the century its editor ‘imagined’ a walk along the street when the Gazette was founded. He describes the various shops and offices he passed:

… the shop of J. Davidson, one of the principal butchers in the town, slaughtering, as he does, not only for the shipping trade, but the London market, who has been known to have as many carcases of sheep in his shop at one time as there are days in the year. A little further on comes the cabinet works of John Carnaby and draper’s shops of John Fenwick, R. Chapman, and G. Short. Other King Street tradesmen are Stevenson Fletcher, grocer and tallow chandler, Mary Learmount, grocer; H. McColl the printer, famous for literature; Matthew Mackie, tailor; Horner & Joseph Martin, confectioners; John Bell, watchmaker; W. English, saddler; J. Emery Tully, chemist, etc. Here are also the offices of the Marine Insurance Societies and of George Potts and J.W. Lamb & Co., notaries public.1

The Town Becomes an Incorporated Borough

The second half of the nineteenth century saw phenomenal economic growth and development in South Shields and throughout Tyneside. And if there was one year in the whole century that was most significant for the town, it was 1850 itself. On 15 July the Tyne Improvement Act received the Royal Assent, and seven weeks later, on 3 September, South Shields became an incorporated borough. As a direct result, river and town would be totally transformed.

The opportunity to seek incorporated borough status had been provided fifteen years earlier by the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835, following a commission’s detailed report that had found residents had ‘a just dissatisfaction with their municipal institutions, a distrust of the self-elected municipal councils, whose powers are subject to no popular control, and whose acts and proceedings, being secret, are unchecked by the influence of public opinion’. It also found ‘a distrust of the municipal magistracy, tainting with suspicion the local administration of justice, often accompanied with contempt for the persons by whom the law is administered’.2

The 1835 Act would prove to be an important step on the long road to strong local government, providing the framework within which local powers – and central authority – would be increased at a steady pace throughout the remainder of the century. In the new legislation:

… the municipal corporation was defined as the legal personification of the local community, represented by a Council elected by, and acting for, and responsible to the inhabitants of the district. Council meetings were to be open to the public and their accounts were to be audited once a year. Justice was separated from municipal administration and magistrates were to be appointed by the Crown for the municipalities as they were for the counties.3

The powers given to the 178 named municipalities (which did not include South Shields) under the 1835 Act were fairly limited, but did include the control of police through a Watch Committee, licensing, the making of bye-laws and the levying of rates under narrowly defined circumstances. In due course Robert Chapman himself would become active in municipal affairs, as a borough councillor, Mayor’s auditor and a justice of the peace.

First, however, South Shields would need to apply to be granted a Charter of Incorporation by the Queen in Council, overcoming the opposition of significant commercial interests that were concerned about the likely implications for additional taxation. In the event, the success across the river of North Shields and Tynemouth in attaining incorporated status as the Borough of Tynemouth in 1849 caused a rethink in South Shields. At a public meeting in January 1850 to revive an application for incorporated status, a supportive motion moved by John Clay, banker and ship owner, was carried, though not unanimously. In the event 778 of the 1,490 town ratepayers signed the petition to Queen Victoria, ‘praying the grant of a Charter of Incorporation to the area comprised within the parliamentary borough of South Shields’,4 covering some 1,835 acres. The total population was estimated as 27,030.

South Shields’ petition highlighted in Victorian language just how important the town’s economy had become by 1850: shipping amounting to 110,000 tons, exclusive of steam vessels (still comparatively few in number); fourteen staithes (waterside depots for coals brought from the collieries for shipment, furnished with staging and shoots for loading vessels) from which forty-four collieries (one, St Hilda’s, in the centre of South Shields itself) shipped over a million tons of coal annually; four glassworks producing more than 10 per cent of the total national output; four large chemical and ‘soda manufactories’; fifteen ironworks, including a ‘locomotive engine establishment’; three ballast wharves; six timber yards; two public railways; fourteen shipyards; and last but not least, ship repair facilities – graving docks and patent slipways – for twenty-three ships. A graving dock was a dry dock where vessels were ‘graved’, that is had their bottoms cleaned by scraping or burning, and coating with tar.

The petition, known at the time as a ‘memorial’, proposed that there should be a total of twenty-four councillors in three wards (Shields, Westoe and Jarrow), and eight aldermen. There would be a total of 879 eligible voters, applying the proposed qualifying principle that they should occupy premises with an annual rateable value of at least £15. The campaign for incorporation received strong support both from the North and South Shields Gazette, and from individual promoters, one of whom pointed out that:

There is an absence of responsible local government with power to promote improvements and to prevent nuisances … an absence of a medium for the concentration of public opinion in the borough and of a recognised head for communication with the government and other public bodies … there is also the need of proper machinery for the adoption and carrying out of sanitary measures.5

Plaster plaque depicting in high relief the original 1850 coat of arms of the Borough of South Shields. Humanity is represented by a lifeboat manned by South Shields pilots, Courage by a sailor and Commerce by a female figure. (Courtesy of South Shields Museum & Art Gallery, Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums)

An inquiry into the application was held on 6 August 1850 at the Town Hall before a Privy Council Commissioner. A fortnight later came the eagerly awaited announcement that a Charter would indeed be granted, and on 3 September Queen Victoria herself signed it.

The first meeting of the newly formed Town Council was held on 9 November 1850. There had been a noisy poll on 1 November, when the twenty-four new councillors were elected:

Excited apprentices had buckets of water thrown over them by shopkeepers in the Market Place, and, according to the writer of that time, ‘all being fair in love, war and elections, some most amusing and exciting scenes took place’, including a galloping horse throwing its boy rider and a procession of independently minded undertakers’ assistants bearing ‘No coalition’ placards.6

At the meeting, Thomas Salmon was appointed the first town clerk, the banker John Clay was unanimously elected the first Mayor, eight aldermen were elected from the twenty-four new councillors, with further elections held to fill the ensuing vacancies. Robert Ingham, who had been the Liberal Member of Parliament from 1832 to 1841 (and would be re-elected in 1852, serving until 1868), proposed a new motto for the Borough: ‘Always Ready’. This was duly adopted, and would resonate strongly down future decades.

The powers and liabilities of the former Improvement Commission were transferred to the new borough council, which took stock of the pretty dismal situation it had inherited – a totally inadequate water supply, lack of an efficient drainage system, ill-paved and badly cleansed streets, inadequate burial facilities, and unsatisfactory magistracy arrangements. There was no shortage of challenges, and the council moved quickly to address them.

On the public order front, there was only one weekly sitting of the Durham County magistrates in the borough. So the council decided in 1851 to apply for a separate Commission of the Peace, through a petition to the Lord Chancellor, which was approved before the end of the year. As a result, for the first time there were borough, in addition to county, courts, and the borough magistrates agreed to sit four times a week. Robert Chapman would himself become a magistrate in due course.

Water supply and its quality was the next issue to be tackled. It was becoming even more important as the borough’s population continued to grow. It reached 28,974 in 1851, almost doubling in the forty years since Robert Chapman was born in 1811, when the total population was 15,165. Given the dreadful performance and unresponsiveness of the old South Shields Water Company, the new council took decisive action in 1851, inviting the efficient Sunderland Water Company to extend its system to South Shields. Agreement was reached and an enabling Bill introduced into Parliament in 1851. Terms were agreed for buying out the waterworks of the South Shields Water Company, and the Bill was enacted as the Sunderland and South Shields Water Act, 1852. Its area of supply was extended not only to the Borough of South Shields itself, but also to the parish of Jarrow, and the townships of Harton, Cleadon and Whitburn.

The Sunderland and South Shields Water Company moved forward with commendable speed. It sank an additional well at Fulwell in 1852, creating a new steam-powered water pumping station. From it, water was pumped to a reservoir on Fulwell Bank, with distributing mains then laid to South Shields and Jarrow. The new supply was turned on in South Shields early in 1855, a transforming event for quality of life, or as Thomas Salmon put it, ‘the invaluable blessing of a copious and wholesome supply of pure and uncontaminated water’.7 In the same year, the company raised finance for an additional main at Westoe and for the purchase of 4 acres of land for the sinking of a new well and the erection of a new steam-powered pumping station and reservoir on Cleadon Hill. Work started immediately, and the new pumping station, completed in 1862, was an architectural gem. It was designed by Thomas Hawksley in the Italianate style, with its detached chimney disguised as a campanile, and set in pleasantly landscaped grounds. Its prominent position on the western edge of the hill created an important and still enduring landmark. By 1864 the Cleadon well was providing 250,000 gallons per day. Even so, demand was increasing so quickly – especially from Charles Palmer’s expanding Shipbuilding & Iron Company works at Jarrow – that a further well was sunk in the same year, at Ryhope, to ensure that a sufficient supply would be available.

The steam-powered pumping station on Cleadon Hill, built by the Sunderland and South Shields Water Company in 1862. Designed by Thomas Hawksley in the Italianate style, its detached chimney disguised as a campanile became a striking landmark. (South Tyneside Libraries)

The council’s next step was to promote an Improvement Bill in Parliament in 1852. This was a successful initiative, the South Shields Improvement Act reaching the statute book in 1853. The entire borough became an ‘improvement area’ and the council was constituted as the local Board of Health. It also received significant additional powers: to purchase land for street improvements and for a new cemetery; to compulsorily acquire the Town Hall, and the markets, fairs and tolls that belonged to the Dean and Chapter of Durham Cathedral; and to borrow money to carry out the newly authorised activities. The council was also empowered to set up committees to oversee its wide new range of activities and duties. It duly formed a Watch Committee, Town Improvement Committee, Baths and Wash-houses Committee, Health Committee and Sanitary Committee. Progress continued to be made at a brisk pace. In 1854 baths and wash-houses in John Street and Cuthbert Street were erected, with, as the town clerk Thomas Salmon put it, ‘a kind consideration for the comforts of the working classes’.8

Charles Palmer’s rapidly expanding Iron Shipbuilding Co.’s works at Jarrow eventually covered 100 acres with a river frontage of ¾ mile and a labour force of 7,500. (South Tyneside Libraries)

In addition to launching almost a million tons of shipping, Charles Palmer’s company had a graving dock where ships such as Batoum (pictured) were repaired. (South Tyneside Libraries)

The year 1855 was another milestone. The council duly acquired from the Dean and Chapter of Durham Cathedral the Town Hall and its market and related rights after an amicable negotiation. This was an important outcome, particularly since the Dean and Chapter still owned most of the land in South Shields, which they let on 21-year leases, and over whose renewal terms there had been bitter disputes. Indeed, Thomas Salmon described Church Leasehold Tenure as ‘that incubus, which has been such a bar to our advancement!’9 The council proceeded to adapt the small Town Hall for use as a council chamber and limited municipal offices. It would be another fifty years before a new and very splendid Town Hall was built.

In the 1850s, baths and wash-houses were built in Derby Street (pictured) and elsewhere in the town as ‘a kind consideration for the comforts of the working classes’. (South Tyneside Libraries)

In 1855 the borough council acquired the Old Town Hall and its market rights from the Dean and Chapter of Durham Cathedral. Fairground attractions enlivened the scene later in the century. (South Tyneside Libraries)

Also in 1855, the South Shields and Westoe Burial Board, set up a year earlier, acquired 16 acres of Robert Ingham’s leasehold land, midway between Westoe Lane and the sea, as a site for the very badly needed new cemetery:

No time was lost in laying out the site, two chapels in the decorated Gothic style being erected, with a circular plot of ground between them, the latter intended as a sort of local Pantheon for the interment of townsmen who had rendered conspicuous service to their fellow-citizens, the first interment in this reserved plot being, appropriately enough, that of Dr. Winterbottom10 (the much loved benefactor of numerous good causes, who died in 1859).

Robert had been taking a keen interest in these important municipal developments, and in 1855 he became both a councillor for the South Shields Ward and a select vestryman of St Hilda’s (a role whose responsibilities were reducing as those of local government increased). He remained on the council for fifteen years, serving on the Town Improvement and Public Health Committee, Baths and Wash-houses Committee, Watch Committee (responsible for the police force) and Sanitary Committee. He was also appointed Mayor’s auditor, no doubt influencing his son Henry’s later choice of career in accountancy.

In the following year, the borough council embarked on a further major project – the construction of a mains sewerage system. It was first installed in the town centre, and in the remainder of the borough during the early 1860s. The system was improved and further extended in the 1870s to cope with a population that was still increasing rapidly, from 28,974 in 1851 to 45,336 in 1871. Although epidemics were far from over, sanitary conditions were, at last, vastly improved.

The 3rd Durham Artillery Volunteers