Abel Chapman of Houxty (NY856784)

Houxty is a large-ish residence which sits on the west bank of the River North Tyne about a mile upstream from Wark. Its supreme claim to fame is that it was the home of well-known naturalist Abel Chapman for the last 30+ years of his life. Chapman, well-educated and widely travelled, was one of those great conundrums of his age: both a keen game hunter and an enthusiastic protector of the natural world.

Chapman was born in Bishopwearmouth, Sunderland, in 1851, into a fairly well-to-do family with a long and strong interest in the very areas in which Abel was to excel. He spent his early years learning field-craft in the wilds of Northumberland, where he quickly developed a love of the outdoors. He attended Rugby School, then went into his father’s brewery business (Lambton’s) which enabled him to begin his overseas travels. As the years passed, he journeyed ever more widely, to take in hunting trips to, most notably and initially, Scandinavia and Spain. He co-wrote a book entitled Wild Norway concerning the former, and helped create a nature reserve in the latter – as well as (in Spain) discovering Europe's major breeding ground for the flamingo and saving the Spanish Ibex from extinction. Two books on his Spanish adventures followed.

After the family business was sold in 1897, he moved to Houxty in the North Tyne valley where he set about creating his own little nature reserve around his new home. When he moved in in 1898 it was a dilapidated sheep farm, but Chapman loved the spot on account of it being the haunt of blackcock. He rebuilt the house and laid out and managed the gardens, plantations and moorland thereabouts to attract wildlife which he could then study – a set-up which brought many other naturalists to his little estate, as well as a troop of boy scouts who visited him as part of the very first Baden-Powell scouting camp in 1908 who were staying a few miles away (see here).

Chapman later developed an interest in South Africa, his experiences there leading him to help form the early incarnation of their still-existing Kruger National Park. He continued to travel abroad, paradoxically both hunting and preserving wherever he went, wrote many works on his subject matter, and eventually died at Houxty in 1929, aged 77. His last words were “Take care of Dash,” his favourite spaniel.

During his hunting days Chapman amassed many wildlife specimens, which now lie scattered across natural history collections in London, Newcastle and his native Sunderland.

Old Wearmouth Bridge (NZ397575)

  

It is difficult to believe that the River Wear at Sunderland was not bridged until the 1790s. Wearside’s growing wealth was, of course, based upon shipbuilding and the export of coal – and the tall-ships of the day needed lofty access to the river’s lower reaches. Any such bridge would have to arch high above the river, and stone – the commonly-used material of the day for such projects – would surely be too expensive for such an exercise. After all, the river valley was wide (250ft) and fairly deep at this point. But the need was becoming pressing by the end of the eighteenth century and something had to be done.

Sunderland’s current Wearmouth Bridge is familiar to us all nowadays, of course; but its predecessor, the extraordinary ‘Iron Bridge’, had an unlikely link with an internationally famous historical hero. Thomas Paine, author of the seminal The Rights of Man, is the chap in question. Paine’s writings would help shape the post-revolutionary development of both France and the United States in the 1780s and 90s, but he had many other interests, too – among them, inventing. And though it has been the cause of much controversy over the years, it seems that it was a design formed originally by Paine in 1787 for a bridge over the Schuylkill River in Pennsylvania which eventually found physical form over the dear old River Wear.

The story is complex and unclear, but it is now generally accepted that the original ‘Iron Bridge’ at Sunderland, built during 1793-96, was based, at least loosely, on Paine’s original ‘American’ model. For reasons of finance, it seems, the US scheme never came to fruition, the half-finished, British-built bridge, finding itself being shipped north by its Rotherham constructors to form the basis of Sunderland’s brand-new industrial wonder.

Local MPs, Rowland Burdon and Ralph Milbanke, were the driving forces behind the scheme. After much research, both wood and stone were discarded as possible building materials; then, somehow, Paine’s iron-bridge design seems to have risen to the top of the pile. The world’s first-ever such effort, the famous ‘Ironbridge’ at Coalbrookdale, had been completed as recently as 1779 – but this famous gap measured only half of that to be bridged at Sunderland. Nevertheless, Burdon, Milbanke and their team (including, notably, engineer Thomas Wilson) bravely went for it, and gave the Walker Ironworks in Rotherham the go-ahead to start (or, perhaps, continue) the manufacturing process.

In the meantime, huge abutments were raised on the north and south banks of the Wear (completed in 1795), then two enormous wooden scaffolds were erected in the river to take the weight of the iron arches during construction. Six iron ribs were swiftly lifted into place to form the skeleton of the bridge, after which a further year was spent on applying the finishing touches. The new erection, at the time justly considered one of the wonders of the world and built at a cost of some £30-40,000, was finally opened on 9th August 1796. It was the largest single-span iron bridge on the planet, and over 80,000 folk turned up to witness the occasion.

Linking Bishopwearmouth and Monkwearmouth in this way proved to be the making of Sunderland, which flourished thereafter. It was a magnificence piece of engineering and much lauded in its day; but its design was flawed. As early as 1805, repairs were deemed necessary when the heat of the sun caused the cross-tubes which held the ribs together to loosen. And so the remedial work continued, until, in 1857, the famous Robert Stephenson took it upon himself to oversee extensive restructuring. The bridge was stripped back to its bare ribs, new iron-work added, and the abutments were raised to straighten out the lop-sidedness of the structure and to iron out the bridge’s distinctive hump. The result was a neater, simpler affair and bore the inscription, in Latin, “Do not despair, have faith in God.” It was re-opened in March 1859.

The volume of traffic over the fine old structure, however, continued to escalate, until it was decided to replace the bridge completely in the 1920s. But that, as they say, is another story.

Note:

The illustration shows a somewhat stylised engraving of the original Wearmouth Bridge, depicted prior to Robert Stephenson’s alterations. In reality, the bridge was a little lower and more elongated.

 

[ the above article is a slightly abridged version of the article which first appeared in Volume 2 of Aspects of North-East History – see www.lulu.com/historymick ]