The crowd upon the Quayside and Sandhill was mown down as if by a discharge of artillery, many being rendered insensible by the shock, others temporarily suffocated by the vapour, and many more wounded by flying debris. An appalling wail of distress arose in all directions.
A contemporary report on the ‘Great Fire of Gateshead and Newcastle’ in 1854
The building in the photograph is the Customs House on Newcastle’s quayside. It is the only structure that survived on that stretch of the quayside from the fire mentioned above.
In the early hours of Thursday, the sixth of October 1854, a Police Constable on the Newcastle side of the Tyne saw flames coming from the upper windows of the Worsted Manufactory of Messrs. Wilson and Sons that stood on Gateshead’s quayside about where the iconic Tyne Bridge spans the river today. For those who saw the photograph and the few words I shared in Notes on Friday, Wilson and Sons stood where the bridge column on the far left of the photograph now stands.
The PC hurriedly crossed the river using the old Tyne Bridge and raised the alarm, after which firefighters and soldiers from nearby barracks began to fight the fire. Although, in truth, they put as much effort into salvaging the goods within the warehouse as battling the blaze. This lack of attention meant the flames began to spread to the neighbouring warehouse of Bertram and Spencer, which contained chemicals and other combustible materials.
Despite the early hour, crowds of people had now gathered on both banks of the Tyne to watch the conflagration. Little did they, or those fighting the fire, realise that what they saw pouring out of the windows of Bertram’s was melted sulphur. A couple of hours after the fire was first spotted, several popping sounds were heard by those fighting the now-roaring blaze. Those sounds indicated impending disaster as Bertram’s warehouse blasted apart with volcano-like force moments later.
The people on the opposite side of the river to the fire who minutes before thought themselves safe were then felled by vast blocks of masonry, hurled across the river by the force of the blast to rain down upon those watchers. Falling hot sulphur landing on the roofs of the buildings on the Newcastle quayside started new fires.
The force of the explosion was so fierce that its sound carried over a 14-mile radius of the city. Coalminers working underground in a pit in County Durham heard it and thought it so loud that it signified a collapse in part of their mine.
Firefighters and soldiers battled the flames through the suffocating fumes of burning sulphur late into the morning. The efforts were to no avail and appeals for help went out to North and South Shields, Sunderland, Hexham, Durham, Morpeth and Berwick for fire pumps and firefighters. Eventually, the combined efforts of some three hundred firefighters controlled the fire.
Fifty-three people lost their lives, and countless were injured. What had been Bertram’s warehouse was now a crater over thirty feet deep and fifty feet wide. Some eight hundred homes and two hundred businesses were destroyed to a value today of £200M.
But let’s return to that one building that survived. Those with keen eyes will note that the coat of arms gracing its front is not that of the current British Royal Family but that of the Hanoverians. The Royal line that gave Britain, between 1716 and 1820, four King Georges. The loyalty to whom is believed by some to have given the people of Newcastle the sobriquet ‘Geordies’.
I write 'believed by some' as there are several other theories, but let's start with the one that concerns the link to the coat of arms on the custom house.
I mentioned the Jacobite rebellions of the early eighteenth century in my piece on the town of Hexham. The first of those rebellions happened a year after King George I (a German Protestant) was appointed King of Great Britain despite the strong claims of the Catholic James Stuart (the son of the deposed King James II), known as `The Old Pretender'.
Many calling themselves Jacobites (from the Latin form of James - Jacobus) in Scotland and Northumberland supported James. They raised a large army in his support, seeking the British throne by force. However, Newcastle was the one northeastern city that stayed solidly loyal to George I. Mainly because the city's wealth relied heavily on the King. This steadfast refusal to succumb to the Jacobites caused them to label the people of Newcastle 'Geordies' as an 'insult' based on the shortening of George I's name. It echoed the principle of some fifty years earlier when the Tory and Whig political parties acquired their names as insults. A Tory was a word for "one of a class of Irish robbers noted for outrages and savage cruelty," and a Whig was the word for "a country bumpkin".
However, another school of thought discounts the royal theory in favour of George "Father of Railways" Stephenson, who also happened to invent a miners' safety lamp. His great rival in this endeavour was Humphrey Davy. Indeed, the Davy Lamp is the better known of the two (there were three - the 'Clanny' lamp invented by Wilfred Reid Clanny was the first but much less known). Not surprisingly, calling Stephenson's Lamp a 'Geordie' had a nice ring to it, and thus the lamp and those who used it became known as Geordies.
But the theories don't stop there. It is a fact that the name George was prevalent, as the name of a firstborn son, in the northeast mining community from the late 18th century. A series of monthly magazines published in Newcastle from 1887 to 1891 explored the region's history and heritage. They extensively used the term 'Geordie' but slightly condescendingly to describe pitmen and their naïve ways. Several of the 'Geordies' described were not residents of Tyneside but from the mining districts northeast of Durham City, Sunderland, and the County Durham coast. So, this would seem to support the theory that pitmen were the first 'Geordies'. The authoritative Oxford English Dictionary states that the term describes a 'pitman' from the Northumberland and Durham coal mines. And to back that up, the Northeast writer Scott Dobson (the author of a book with the same title as this piece) wrote in 1973 that his grandmother, who was from Newcastle, also believed that miners were the true 'Geordies'.
Despite Scott Dobsons granny's belief, something that counters the pitmen theory is from the historian William Fordyce writing in 1850, noting that vessels from the Tyne were called 'Geordies' and those from the Wear were called 'Jamies'. It's not a giant leap to think ‘Jamies’ might represent a pro-Jacobite leaning by Sunderland.
Yet another theory offers that the term dates to the Border Reivers, who feuded with each other continuously for two hundred years from the late 13th century. They were famous for having colourful names- - Ill Will Armstrong, Jock Stowlugs Armstrong, Fergie the Crow Bell, Nebless Clem Croser, Jock Halfe Lugs Eliot, and Fingerless Will Nixon. Geordie was also a common name among these raiders, Geordie Kang Irvine, Ill-Drowned Geordie Nixon, Jingling Geordie.
All these theories have some logic, and none has enough evidence. The earliest record found of the use of Geordie dates to 1823 by local comedian Billy Purvis. Purvis had set up a booth at the Newcastle Races on the Town Moor. In an angry tirade against a rival entertainer, who had hired a young pitman called Tom Johnson to dress as a clown, Billy cried out to the clown:
"Ah man, wee but a feul wad hae sold off his furnitor and left his wife. Noo, yor a fair doon reet feul, not an artificial feul like Billy Purvis! Thous a real Geordie! gan man an hide thysel! gan an' get thy picks agyen. Thou may de for the city, but never for the west end o' wor toon."
Which translates to … 'Oh man, who but a fool would have sold off his furniture and left his wife? Now, you're a fair downright fool, not an artificial fool like Billy Purvis! You're a real Geordie! Go on, man, and hide yourself! Go on and get your picks [axes] again. You may do for the city, but never for the west end of our town!'
So, if we can’t be sure where the term Geordie originates, let’s move on to what a Geordie is.
I recall my father telling me some sixty years ago that just as a true cockney must be born within the sound of the bells of Bow Church, the parish church of St Mary and Holy Trinity, Stratford, Bow, true Geordies were those born within the sound of Armstrong's Hooter. The Armstrong in question is William George Armstrong, 1st Baron Armstrong, CB Kt FRS, a Victorian northeast industrialist whose 'works and hooter were a mile or so west of Newcastle city centre (another site that gets a mention in the Geordie anthem ‘Blaydon Races’ - "we flew past Armstrong's factory"). Armstrong's hooter fell silent years ago, so no one over the past two generations can call themselves a Geordie under that definition.
Another slightly more expansive definition of decades ago was a Geordie was one born under the sound of a shipyard whistle. Thus, on either bank of the Tyne. This theory would also end the line of Geordies as Tyne shipyard whistles, like Armstrong's Hooter, were silenced some time ago.
Unsurprisingly, the people of Newcastle would not wish to see the end of such a lineage. Therefore, today a Geordie means someone born in and around Tyneside.
So, if we are unsure where a Geordie is from or why they carry the title, what about the lively, friendly, endearing, sometimes famously incomprehensible dialect of the northeast? Indeed, the actor Alan Rickman once said … "I think every English actor is nervous about a Newcastle accent." And I’ve seen some fine actors strangulate that accent.
For example, for a series set in and around Newcastle, the accents of the cast of 'Vera' are an ‘interesting’ mix. But they are not as bad as the chap acting’ as a Geordie in the USA series 'Castle'. He gets my vote on the worst I've heard. What I found surprising was the success of ‘Auf Wiedersehen, Pet’—given all the regional accents were barely tempered. Especially Oz. When I watched that in the early eighties, it felt like I was 'home' again.
While today it is seen by many as the most popular English regional accent, distinguished by its musical tones and peculiar words and pronunciations, that wasn't always the case. As recorded in 'English Journey', J B Priestley hated it - "I can find nothing pleasant to say about it. To my ears, it sounds a most barbarous, monotonous and irritating twang... The constant 'Ay-ee mon'... of the men's talk and the never-ending 'hinnying' of the woman seems equally objectionable". Indeed, JB was not enamoured with anything he encountered while visiting the northeast in the early 1930s. That said, he was visiting an area of rapidly declining industry with all the hardship and poverty that came with it.
Fast forward some forty years to when I left the northeast in the 1970s, having a Geordie accent indicated to those in the south that you were someone of lower intelligence. Despite this prejudice, I didn't try to hide my accent. Still, to be understood, I had to slow down my speech, drop the use of Geordie words, such as a bullet, stotting and tab (sweet, bouncing (or excellent) and cigarette) and amend my sentence structure, i.e. stop using "to get wrong" and start using "to be told off".
And to settle one point, Geordie is not the generic language of the northeast but the speech of those from Tyneside. Geordie and several other northeast dialects, such as Pitmatic and Mackem, differ significantly. Pitmatic is the dialect of the former mining areas in County Durham and around Ashington to the north of Newcastle upon Tyne. Mackem refers these days to the dialect of the City of Sunderland and the surrounding urban area of Wearside. Although only 1tenmiles apart, there are differences between the accents of Sunderland and Newcastle. One that's easily spotted is the encouragement of their respective football teams. It's "Howay the Lads" in Newcastle and "Ha’way the Lads" in Sunderland. That one letter makes all the difference.
So where do these dialects originate? And from herein, I will use Dialect when writing of the speech of those of the northeast.
When the Romans departed Briton's shores, they left the native Celtic-speaking people of the country near Hadrian's Wall vulnerable to the raids of the Picts. Thus, the Celtic Britons may have had no choice but to seek mercenaries to protect the Tyne Valley and pay for that protection by giving up land.
The ninth-century ‘Historia Brittonum’ records that a fifth Century Celtic-Briton king called Vortigern despatched forty keels (boats) of Angles under Ochta and Ebissa to fight the Picts in return for land 'in the north by the Wall'. If this is true, some of Briton's earliest Angle settlements were near Hadrian's wall in the Tyneside area.
The problem for the Celtic-Britons was the Angles began to increasingly colonise the land, which developed over the next hundred years into what was initially called the Angle Kingdom of 'Bernicia'. Bernicia has Celtic roots so the colonisation may have been a power transfer within the existing Celtic-Briton Kingdom. Bernicia extended from the River Tyne to the Firth of Forth at the time. Later, Angle power extended south towards the Humber, merging with the rival Angle Kingdom of 'Deira' to form the massive Angle Kingdom, Northumbria.
When the Vikings came, they settled south of the River Tees, and therefore, their impact on language was on the dialects in Yorkshire, but not further north. Even after the Norman invasion, the counties of Durham and Northumberland do not feature in the Domesday Book in 1086, as both counties resisted Norman control for some time. Then later, the border skirmishes that broke out sporadically during the Middle Ages meant the River Tweed became a significant northern barrier against the influence of the Scottish language. As a result, the Northeast has always maintained a powerful sense of cultural identity and thus left linguistically isolated from elsewhere in Northumbria.
Despite J B Priestley's view, the Dialect should not be seen as sloppy pronunciations or poor use of language, as the words within it are of great antiquity. Distinctively, the Dialect contains words with more than 80% Angle in origin, compared to standard English, where the figure is less than 30%. Many contemporary Dialect words, such as gan ('go' – modern German gehen) and bairn ('child' - modern Danish barn), can trace their roots back to the Angles. One of northern Anglo-Saxon England's most significant figures was the Venerable Bede. His most famous work, ‘Ecclesiastical History of the English People’, gained him the title ‘The Father of English History’. It is worth noting that Bede's poems in Old English seem to translate more successfully into Dialect than into modern English. Also, many words and phrases commonly used in the works of Chaucer and Shakespeare and no longer used in other parts of Britain have survived as common usage in the Dialect.
One of the Angle words still in the Dialect today is the word 'wife' for a woman, whether she is married or not. While the Angle word 'ald' (old) is like the Dialect word 'aad'. Thus, an Angle saying 'ald wife' meant 'old woman' as it still does today in the northeast. Use of words in the Dialect may appear incorrect. For example, in the Dialect, you may say 'Aaal larn yer' (meaning 'I'll teach you') but it comes from the Angle word 'laeran' that meant 'to teach'. Other Dialect words of Angle origin include 'axe' (ask) from the Angle 'acsian'; 'burn' meaning 'stream' and 'hoppings' meaning 'funfair’. The unique pronunciation of some words in the Dialect is also often Angle. Words like 'deed', 'coo', 'cloot', 'hoos', 'wrang', 'strang' and 'lang' are, in fact, the original Angle pronunciations for 'dead', 'cow', 'clout', 'house', 'wrong', 'strong' and 'long'.
I could go on; I'm sure someone has written a PhD thesis on the Dialect somewhere. As for my accent? Well, I’ve been back as a resident on Tyneside for some six months, and I notice a thickening. Whenever I now speak to my wife Sarah, she notes my preponderance to substitute, in the Dialect way, ‘my’ with ‘me’ as in the opening line of the chorus of ‘Blaydon Races’ - “Ah me lads, ye shudda seen us gannin”. And so, I close this week's 'meander' with the hope you are better prepared for the next time you venture to the northeast of England. But remember to bring your passport!!
Fascinating read, Harry. Two memories spring to mind for this Sussex lass who migrated north. both asking for directions. Firstly the Rising Sun Centre in Wallsend, late for a course & hopelessly lost. I wound down the window and asked an old bloke at the bus stop. I had no idea what his reply was.
Secondly, getting off the bus at the bottom of the hill at Easington Colliery as the shift was finishing at the mine, and asking where the special school was, where I was starting a teaching job. Never had I been so aware or acutely embarrassed by my southern accent. That community, however, took me to their heart and it wasn't long before we were dancing with miners & their families at ceilidhs in the colliery clubs there.
I'm not a Geordie born & bred but I bliddy love living here now.
I’d never really given much thought to where Geordie comes from, fascinating to explore.