Newcastle’s Suburbs, Pt.1

It doesn’t take a genius to work out how Newcastle-upon-Tyne got its name. But what about its many suburbs? These were all originally settlements in their own right but have long-since been swallowed up by the sprawling city.

Benton/Longbenton – Old English (OE) beonet- or bean-tun, hence ‘course/bent grass farm’ or ‘bean-farm’ (we’re not sure which). In time, two settlements grew – ‘Long-’ and ‘Little-’;

Benwell – OE bionnan walle, meaning ‘place inside the (Roman) wall’. Not a well in sight;

Blakelaw – Old Norse = ‘black hill’;

Byker – Again, probably Old Norse by-kiarr, which means ‘the village marsh’;

Denton – From the OE den-tun, which translates as ‘valley farmstead’;

Elswick – OE ‘Aelfsige’s (diary) farm’;

Fawdon – Again OE, from fag-dun, meaning ‘multicoloured hill’;

Fenham – A slightly tricky one. Certainly OE, but could mean ‘place at the fens’ or ‘(water-) meadow by the fen’;

Gosforth – OE meaning, literally, ‘goose-ford’, i.e. the ford where there are geese;

Heaton – OE for ‘high farm/settlement’;

Jesmond – An interesting one, this. Seems to mean ‘Ouse mouth’ – the Ouse being the river that runs through the area and whose confluence with the Tyne is a little to the south. Both elements (‘Ouse’ and ‘mouth’) have been corrupted to ‘Jes’ and ‘mond’ under French/Norman influence. Or so the academics tell us.

Part 2 next week…

Jesmond Real Tennis Club (NZ253673)

(from Wikipedia)

Real tennis, the ancient forerunner of our more familiar racket sports, has been around since at least as long ago as the sixteenth century. It is now very much a niche, or specialist, sport, as is evidenced by the distinct lack of courts worldwide. Globally, there are less than fifty, with the UK being home to more than half of these.

One of the more noteworthy venues is that at Jesmond, to the north of Newcastle. It was built in 1894 as a private court for Sir Andrew Noble, who owned nearby Jesmond Dene House. Noble, a Scot, was a leading light at the famous Armstrong munitions works – and was a handy player himself (despite suffering occasionally from gout!). The architect responsible was local chap F.W.Rich.

The suitably-named Jesmond Dene Real Tennis Club now occupies and runs the curious set-up, though it enjoyed a chequered twentieth century existence. During World War I airships were said to have been constructed there; and, following a brief reversion to ‘family’ use after hostilities, the building moved out of private ownership and into the care of Newcastle Council in 1931. The formation of a tennis club on the site the following year helped maintain the historic links, but Badminton ran the roost at the venue for many years following WWII. Happily, though, the building eventually reverted to its proper ‘real tennis’ use in 1981.

It is now, quite rightly, a listed building.

More extensive historical info here.

Wittgenstein-upon-Tyne* (NZ251656, NZ245650 & NZ225645)

Ludwig Wittgenstein is universally regarded as one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century. Years ahead of his time, he worked primarily in the fields of the philosophy of the mind, mathematics and language. Born into one of the richest families in Europe in 1889, he began life in Vienna, moved around a fair bit, and died in Cambridge in 1951.

Wittgenstein was an odd sort. He gave away his inheritance when in his twenties and suffered the suicide of all three of his brothers at an early age. For the most part he made his own way in life – eventually finding himself studying under Bertrand Russell at Cambridge a little before WWI. During the war he served as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army, and thereafter lived for several years in Austria.

He returned to Cambridge in 1929, where he spent most of the next decade or so, and, bizarrely, served as a semi-anonymous porter in Guy’s Hospital, London, during WWII. It was whilst working there that he fell in with Doctors Reeve and Grant who were interested in philosophy and the effect of shock on air-raid casualities. When, in November 1942, the two doctors moved their studies to Newcastle’s Royal Victoria Infirmary, Wittgenstein was offered a job as their lab assistant at £4 per week – a post he eventually took up in April 1943. He became a lodger at Mrs Moffat’s house at 28 Brandling Park, Jesmond, where Reeve and Grant also lived. After several months living here it seems that the landlady’s ill-health forced a move, with Wittgenstein transferring to Conyers House in Western Avenue, Benwell, where he lived alone.

By all accounts, Wittgenstein didn’t really fit in very well with his friends and colleagues. He was often chatty at the wrong times and unsociable at others – though he did like watching films, especially westerns. He was mechanically minded and proved to be a good technician in his lab at the RVI – though he only worked there for ten months until February 1944. He did no philosophical work of note during this period, though he did gatecrash a philosophical lecture being given by Dorothy Emmett in Newcastle in his typically difficult fashion!

Upon leaving the North-East he soon found himself back in Cambridge where he picked up his philosophical work. Plaques have recently been erected at both 28 Brandling Park and the RVI to commemorate the great man’s brief stay in the city.

Note: Incidentally, Wittgenstein visited Tyneside briefly in 1932 at the behest of his friend Maurice Drury, during which time he called in at Newcastle and Jarrow.

* My clever title has been stolen from the excellent article by Bill Schardt. More information can also be found here. Images of plaques here and here.

Catherine Cookson, 1906-1998 (NZ355653)

[The following article originally appeared as an obituary in the now defunct North-Easterner Magazine in 1998]

An Obituary of Dame Catherine Cookson

Loved and respected by thousands of admirers the world over, Dame Catherine Cookson, author extraordinaire, died peacefully in her sleep on 11th June 1998 – a few days short of her 92nd birthday. She was arguably the greatest and perhaps the most famous living North-Easterner until her recent passing, selling more than 100 million copies of her 100 or so novels worldwide in 18 different languages. Though she didn’t begin writing until she was 44 years of age, for the last decade of her life she headed the list of the most-borrowed library books in the UK. She was awarded an OBE in 1985, and became a Dame in 1993.

Catherine was born on 27th June 1906, at 5 Leam Lane, Tyne Dock, on the south bank of the Tyne, the illegitimate daughter of a tragic, broken alcoholic, Kate McMullen. For the first seven years of her life she was led to believe that Kate was actually her elder sister, and was brought up by her grandmother Rose McMullen and ‘step-grandfather’ John McMullen – whom she believed to be her real parents. Her biological father was one Alexander Davies (her birth was actually registered under the name of Davies), a well-to-do regular at the pub where Kate worked. However, Alexander had left the scene by the time of her birth - never to be seen again.

Catherine endured a childhood of abject poverty – very much the norm amidst the docklands of Tyneside. Shortly after learning the truth about her parentage, she was molested by an Irish lodger who lived next door – at the time her mother’s boyfriend. Furthermore, she suffered regular beatings at the hands of the uncaring Kate, and endured a life of general drudgery. The family soon moved onto Jarrow in 1912, a house which was permanently filled with lodgers thus putting yet further strain upon the young Catherine. Five years later, in 1917, her grandmother, Rose, died – and Catherine herself, in fact, almost died soon afterwards as the wear and tear on her young body took its toll. But, pulling through, she determined to make good, and pushed herself through a series of self-improvement projects in her teens, despite her low social standing.

Shunned by her boyfriend on her 21st birthday she decided to break her ties with the North and fled south – firstly to Essex, and then to Hastings where she found a fairly well-paid job as a workhouse laundry manageress. She scrimped and saved her money, only to learn that, to her horror, her mother, Kate, had decided to move south to live nearby. Catherine, however, was eventually able to take out a mortgage on a large house in 1933, and took in guests – keeping her mother at arm’s length in her old house in the centre of Hastings. One of Catherine’s lodgers, Tom Cookson, was to eventually become her husband – tying the knot, as they did, on 1st June 1940. Her mother returned in disgust to Tyneside.

Suffering three miscarriages and a nervous breakdown, Catherine’s problems continued, however. She even spent some time in a psychiatric hospital near Hereford during the war, eventually returning to her Hastings home where she spent many a lonely night without husband Tom who was away on RAF duty. Suffering a fourth miscarriage, she eventually found solace in writing. Struggling for themes and a style, she began to make use of her own life experiences which finally found form in her first published novel, Kate Hannigan, in 1950. It earned her £100 – a huge amount of money in those days; but, more importantly, was to launch her on a career which was to bring her worldwide fame, and a fortune beyond her wildest dreams.

The publication of Kate Hannigan was only the first step on the long road to fame for Catherine Cookson – who was, by then, already 44 years of age. Her life until then had been a one of perpetual heartache, it had seemed; and even throughout the early years of her new career her health remained a constant problem. She suffered a hereditary blood disorder all her life, and was in constant need of medical attention – and regular blood transfusions. Against the odds, though, she lived on, and on, and continued to write, and write. The money began to pour in as the years rolled by; and when authors began to be paid a fee each time their books were borrowed from libraries it was the making of her – though she donated her first year’s income from this scheme to less fortunate writers than herself. Indeed she was to donate millions of pounds to all sorts of charities and causes over the years.

In 1961, writer’s cramp forced Catherine to start dictating her work. In 1968, she won the Winifred Holtby Prize for the Best Regional Novel for The Round Tower; and the following year one of her best-loved novels, Our Kate, was published. She was made a Freeman of South Shields in 1973, and was granted the Freedom of the Borough in 1974. In 1975, she and husband, Tom, decided to establish a base in the North-East and bought a house in Jesmond – but made the move north permanent in 1976 by buying a house in Morpeth. They later bought houses in Corbridge and Langley, Northumberland. Catherine was elected Variety Club Woman of the Year in 1982 (an honour later gained on two further occasions), and was named as Britain’s top creative writer by Woman’s Own magazine the same year. In 1983, she was awarded an honorary Master of Arts degree by Newcastle University.

She achieved true national acclaim in 1985 when she was awarded an OBE. It was at about this time, too, that many of her novels started being dramatised for TV in a big way – The Fifteen Streets being perhaps the most famous, appearing on our screens in 1989 – and winning the Best Network Programme on TV Award. But in 1990 Catherine suffered two heart attacks – though she recovered, and enjoyed another honour in the shape of an honorary doctorate from Sunderland Polytechnic in 1991. The very same year she and Tom moved into a bungalow in Jesmond.

On January 1st 1993, Catherine was made a Dame in the New Year’s Honours list – the ultimate accolade. By then she was a novelist of international repute. And in her native North-East there were permanent tributes to be enjoyed by all in the shape of, most notably, the ‘Catherine Cookson Country’ tourist trail (which effectively doubled the number of tourists to South Tyneside, Catherine’s ‘home patch’ of her childhood) and the permanent ‘Catherine Cookson Display’ at South Shields Museum & Art Gallery. Both attractions still bring in thousands upon thousands of Cookson fans to the region every year.

But perhaps Dame Catherine Cookson’s greatest legacy is her immense charity donations. £1million to Newcastle University for research into blood disorders; £100,000 to Jarrow’s ‘Bede’s World’; £224,000 to help Durham Cathedral display its ‘Treasures of St.Cuthbert’; £187,000 to safeguard the future of Newcastle's Hatton Gallery; Children’s Literacy in Newcastle received £163,000; South Shields Volunteer Life Brigade were handed £163,000, too - as was the Library Campaign; and she celebrated her 80th birthday in 1986 by donating £160,000 to various causes. And that was just the tip of the iceberg.

Yes, Dame Catherine Cookson was, indeed, one of the world’s best-loved story-tellers. But she was much more than that. When she died peacefully of heart failure in her sleep on 11th June 1998, the people of the North-East had lost a living legend whose generosity knew no bounds. Her husband of almost 60 years, Tom, followed her to the grave less than three weeks later, on 29th June 1998, aged 86.