Better Damp than Dead

A photograph and a few words ...

"The up-and-coming district of Ouseburn in Newcastle’s East End has dozens of great pubs, breweries and music venues, as well as a 19th-century wagonway beneath the surface that was originally used to transport coal to the River Tyne.

‘The Times’

The joining instructions I received for my tour of Newcastle's Ouseburn Victoria tunnel recommended that as the temperature in the tunnel is a steady 12C, I should bring a jacket. And a washable one, as the tunnel's walls are grubby. I should also wear 'sensible shoes'. I noted the tour company's supply of a hard hat and torch.

Those instructions took me back to my visit to Nero's Golden House - the Domus Aurea - in Rome a few years ago. Again, the tour company supplied hard hats, and the advice on a jacket and shoes was identical. Receiving such instruction may deter some people from visiting what was once Nero's grand palace. Although I recommend that you do it if you venture to Rome.

The Golden House was an opulent dwelling in ancient Rome's heart. Nero intended to show his wealth and power after the Great Fire of Rome by building a massive palace and then adorning it with lavish decorations, intricate frescoes, gold leaf, and precious gems. The building featured a grand entrance hall, a large banquet hall, countless rooms and many courtyards and gardens. The centrepiece was the octagonal room with a domed ceiling adorned with frescoes of the constellations. While outside the house, saw the construction of a large lake.

Yet today, that once grand palace is not evident to the passing public. Even though it sits only some hundred metres northeast of the Colosseum, the fact the Golden House isn't conspicuous would have pleased the emperors who came after Nero as they saw his Golden House as an embarrassingly decadent symbol. 

Within ten years of Nero's death, successive Emperors stripped the house of all the fine marble, jewels and gold leaf. Although some parts of the building continued as a dwelling, Emperor Vespasian ordered filling most of the more than two-and-a-half square kilometre villa with earth and rubble. Then built over the top were the Baths of Titus, and Vespasian also built the Coliseum on the site of the lake that sat outside the Golden House. All external evidence of Nero's once massive palace was gone within forty years of its first building.

Rediscovery of the Golden House came by accident some fourteen hundred years later when a young Roman out for a stroll accidentally fell through an unseen aperture and found himself in what he took to be a cave. Yet a cave with walls covered with painted figures. Word of these frescos soon came to the attention of Rome's young artists, who, keen to see them had themselves lowered into the 'cave' on boards knotted to ropes. Sadly, those frescoes are now severely faded, but they inspired those painters at the dawn of the Renaissance. Of whom two were Raphael and Michelangelo—it is said those frescoes influenced the former in his work in the Vatican. 

Over the centuries, more and more of the house has been excavated. As that happened, it began to attract more visitors. Casanova and the Marquis de Sade left their mark via graffito signatures, and they were not alone. However, thankfully, today's visitors respect the archaeological underground site and simply marvel at what they see.

The need for a jacket becomes clear as no matter how hot Rome might be above ground, underneath within the palace, it's always cool and damp. The hard hat is a safety precaution, the ceilings are high, but a mosaic tile could fall from above. 

As your guide walks you through the corridors, you come upon walls and ceilings still covered in vibrant-coloured frescoes of mythological scenes, birds and flowers. In one large room believed to be the banquet hall, there is a magnificent marble floor and, in its centre, a pool still filled with water. As you continue, you come to a series of garden fountains where once exotic plants and flowers grew. What you can see today is the outline of the ponds and fountains. Sitting in one giant room, you go on a VR 'tour' of how the Golden House once was. That experience was fantastic as you 'walked' through the lavish gardens and looked over the lake. Finally, you get to see the areas where excavation continues and the archaeologists at work.

But let's fast forward through the centuries from the glories of ancient Rome to the remarkable feat of Victorian engineering that is the Ouseburn Tunnel, a significant part of Newcastle's history yet, like Nero's Golden House, not an obvious one. 

The tunnel is not to the massive scale of Nero's Palace, but at two miles long, it was, for a brief period, the world's longest manmade tunnel. When opened in 1835, it measured just over two metres high and a few centimetres less than two metres wide. More than enough to transport coal from the Leazes Main Colliery (close to what is now NUFC's ground, St Jame's Park) to the River Tyne. Within the tunnel, coal wagons ran on a railway of the universal gauge of the time - four feet and eight inches. Supposedly the width of two horses harnessed together. But no horse ever entered this tunnel to move the coal as the tunnel's slope of sixty-eight metres from the colliery entrance to the exit at the Tyne was put to beneficial effect. More on that in a moment.

The Tunnel runs through what was once a band of clay, and its building used the 'cut and cover' technique entirely by hand or, should I say, foot by using 'clay-kicking'. This work involved one miner, 'the kicker', lying on his back on a board sloped at 45 degrees who used his feet to pierce the clay with a sharp spade called a 'grafting spade'. Another miner, the 'bagger', would bag up the clay cut and pass it to the third miner,' the trammer', who would transfer the clay back to the tunnel's entrance via a trolley. The men would rotate their roles during their shifts because of the physical demands of the work. The dug-out clay was then recycled to make the bricks forming the tunnel's roof arches supported by cast-iron columns. And the recycling didn't stop there. The large stones at the base of each side of the tunnel on which the bricks stand were offcuts from the beautiful sandstone used to build the Georgian splendour of Newcastle's Grey Street. Best of all, and unusually for a Victorian engineering enterprise, no one died during tunnel construction. Nor in its twenty years of operation. 

And let's return to that operation and the moving of coal from pit to river. It was by gravity. A simple push from the pit end would send the wagons full of coal down the tunnel's gentle slope. A brakeman (also responsible for supplying the wagons that first push) standing at the back of the last wagon would moderate the descent speed. On the front rode a 'spotter' who could call out if he saw a problem ahead. Otherwise, the wagons descended under their own momentum. The last wagon also had attached a length of rope as long as the tunnel—the other end of the rope fastened to a winding engine in the pit. But the rope played no part in sending the wagons down through the tunnel. It came into use only after emptying the coal wagons at the riverside. Once done, a thin tight wire that ran the length of the tunnel was 'jiggled' by hand, and the vibrations through the wire rang a bell at the pit end. That signal told a steam engine operator to start their winding engine, and the rope was then used to pull the empty coal wagons back up the slope. It was a straightforward operation that cut the costs of transporting the coal above ground by 80%. It saved Newcastle from a lot of horse manure too!

While there was no loss of life through the tunnel's building and operation, tragedy struck at the end of its working life. 

The pit was losing money, and the owner looked to sell. Two possible buyers, Ralph and Benjamin Arkless, requested access to the tunnel to "measure the length of it and take account of the sheaves and other stock that was in it". Accompanying them was 'Staithman' William Coulson, whose role it was to ensure no one entered the tunnel from the river end when it was in use. And when not in use, make sure no malcontents enter it. As there were no passing places in the tunnel, William sent a message to the pit on the morning of the Arkless' visit to send no wagons. For reasons unknown, that message did not reach the pit in time. 

As the Arkless brothers and William Coulson were walking up through the tunnel Thomas Nattrass and Peter Downie were finishing the clearing of rubbish from the pit site. They had filled a single wagon with that rubbish to send through the tunnel for disposal in the river. Downie climbed on the front of the wagon while Nattrass was to function as the brakeman. Unfortunately, as he pushed the wagon, he tripped and fell, and the wagon's gathering speed meant it was then beyond his reach. Downie, at the front of the wagon, was now powerless. He could not reach the brakes nor jump off because of the narrowness of the tunnel, with barely a few inches of clearance on either side and above the wagon.

About halfway through the Tunnel, the inspection party heard the rushing rumble of the oncoming wagon. Ralph Arkless flung himself between the rails and survived unhurt as the wagon thundered over him. His brother tried desperately to flatten himself against the tunnel wall. But alas, the side of that heavily laden wagon caught him with a vicious glancing blow. While he survived, it was with grievous injuries. William Coulson made the poorest choice of the three and tried to outrun the now-hurtling wagon. His effort was futile and fatal as, within a few paces, the heavy wagon ran him down and under its wheels. Downie survived despite his terrifying journey clinging desperately to the front of the speeding wagon. 

After the permanent closure of the pit, the Tunnel was unused for the next seventy years until an enterprising businessman bought it to grow mushrooms. While his business didn't survive a year, others accepted the idea, and the growing of mushrooms in the Tunnel continued for another twenty years. But it was not just mushrooms for which the Tunnel offered a home. It also became a refuge against Adolf Hitler's bombs.

While the Second World War did not begin until 1939, the forward-thinking (or you might say pessimistic or possibly realistic) Newcastle Council fearing the worst, began in 1936 to consider using the tunnel as an air raid shelter. While Anderson Shelters were given to (or bought by, depending upon income) sole property owners, communal shelter use was for those living in densely occupied multistorey properties. The tunnel was ideal as a shelter, with proper conversion, offering a safe sanctuary to up to eight thousand people. It wasn't comfortable, though, being gloomy and damp (remember they were still growing mushrooms). Work on conversion began, and by 1940 the tunnel was used as a shelter.

In 1941 a visiting inspector (I'm guessing from the south) reported that the attitude of the people sheltering in the tunnel was "better damp than dead". He was concerned about conditions but concluded, "As this is a mining district, the persons who will shelter in this tunnel are possibly better fitted constitutionally to resist underground and damp conditions than those in the south". I say no more …...

And just to meander back to Anderson Shelters for a moment. Depending upon your age (and country of origin), you may have little knowledge of them. The shelters came as six curved sheets of corrugated iron. These were bolted together at the top of the curve and with steel plates at either end. Once built, the shelter measured some two metres by nearly one and a half metres. They supposedly accommodated four adults and two children (with that many people inside, things must have been 'cosy'). The shelters were half buried in your garden, and the earth heaped on top. My father paid £7 for his, although they were free to those below a certain income level.

Unlike the people in the Victoria Tunnel, my mother, despite being a miner's daughter (and thus, in the inspector's mind, more suited to life underground), spent only one night in an Anderson Shelter before deciding she'd rather risk Hitler's bombs. Then again, being a teenager, I suspect she had that folly of youth that makes you feel immortal. Given that she also worked in a munitions factory, I suppose her risk assessment of life expectancy also pushed her toward a warm bed. By the time I came along in the mid-1950s, my parent's shelter had long gone, but our next-door neighbour had repurposed his and used it as a potting shed.

But back to the Victoria tunnel. The film 'Oppenheimer' has not long opened. If his worse fears had happened on nuclear conflict, then the plan was to use the tunnel as a shelter in that regard too. I leave to your imagination what might confront people when, or if, they emerged.

It is no longer possible to travel from one end of the tunnel to the other as, more recently, part of the Tunnel was repurposed as a more meaningful contribution to the people of Newcastle in its incorporation into the underground sewerage system.

So, the tour I enjoyed does not travel the length of that marvellous piece of Victorian Engineering, and I accept that those reading this might be saying to themselves, what interest can there be in a dark, damp, cramped tunnel? 

There's more than you might think, as our enlightening and entertaining guides pointed out the historical traces of life in the tunnel. The Victorian 'pingalong' wire used to tell the pit to haul the wagons back up. The yellow squares of gas-sensitive paint designed to change colour if a Second World War gas attack. Nineteen-thirties electric lighting that begged the question of why some of the fittings were on the walls, not the roof (you'd need to go on the tour for an answer). Reconstructed seating and bunks give you a feel of wartime conditions. Oh, and there's an original Second World War Elsan Chemical toilet. And we are talking basic. Extremely basic, with only a canvas sheet offering 'privacy' between one person and another. There were 'separate' sections for women and men, but all that brought to my mind were the days when there were smoking and non-smoking seats in an aeroplane. One way or another, you would 'enjoy' someone else's smoke. 

It isn't only what you see but also what you imagine as you walk through the tunnel. Since its first building, the tunnel's floor is higher, and through geological shift, the walls have moved closer in places. Anyone over 5 feet 9 inches must duck in places (hence the hard hats for those who don't do so in time). And last but by no means least are the small, spiralled stalactites in some places and the 'dragon spit' (again, you'd need to go on the tour to know what that is).

And it's not just guided tours that the tunnel hosts. Over recent years, the tunnel has boasted music concerts, dance and lighting performances, a street art exhibition, wine tasting ("Tipples in the Tunnel"), and many recreations of Second World wartime experiences. They called to mind my attendance of Macbeth in the Redcliffe Caves under Bristol. The setting added wonderfully to the dark atmosphere of the play as we moved from cave to cave.

Newcastle's Victorian Tunnel may not have offered the splendour of Nero's Golden House. However, in its own way, it still supplies both a treasured history and a contemporary offering.