Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885

castle-upon-Tyne in the

Sabbath-First Acquain

Mid-Century-In Peril

School-A Plague of

century a faithful and honoured preacher, retiring in 1880 amid the esteem of the whole community on Tyneside. He died in 1887 under the roof of my younger brother Stuart, at Wilmslow, Cheshire, a year which was memorable to me in other than a sorrowful sense, since it was then that I settled in London. It was said of my father at the time of his death, in one of the Newcastle papers, tha

er James, with whom I was most closely associated in boyhood and youth, was always more or less of an invalid, and died at Leeds in 1880-the year in which our mother also passed away. I came next in the family, and my younger brothers are Alexander, now manager of the Dublin and Wexford Railway,

the town on the west. Beyond it was nothing but fields and open country. There was no High Level Bridge in those days, spanning the river and forming a link in the great iron highway between the English and Scotch capitals; nor had so much as the first stone of the famous Elswick Ordnance and Engineering Works been laid. The future Lord Armstrong, whom I met at dinner not long ago, looking hardly older than when I first saw him, was then a solicitor, whose office stood in Westga

I can still recall vividly the two boys-myself and my brother James-who were playing together in the garden in front of the

a general catastrophe; vaguely, too, I remember the firing of the guns from the old castle, which announced the death of Queen Adelaide in 1849; but it was not until 1850 that my real life may be said to have begun. In the spring of that year I went on a long visit to my paternal grandf

eeds grew freely. Antiquity and repose characterised the place as a whole, though in the winter months the stir of young life filled the little city, troops of red-cloaked students passing to and fro between the grey, weather-beaten halls of the University and their lodgings. At the end of South Street stood the ruins of the cathedral with the fine tower, in which the beams of some great vessel of the Spanish Armada, wrecked on the neighbouring Bell Rock, were carefully preserved, and the graceful arches of the sacred building, for the destruction of which John Knox was responsible. Many generatio

purposes St. Andrews had a monopoly of it. [Footnote: Blackheath, of course, had then, as now, its ancient golf club.] We all talked golf, even if we did not all play it. The shop-boys rose betimes of a summer's morning to

was wont to visit; I can recall the whirr and rattle of the loom "ben the house," and picture to myself the grave elderly man who on my entrance would rise from the rickety machine in front of which he was seated, and, after refreshing himself with a pinch of snuff, adjust his horn-rimmed spectacles and stare, with a seriousness which to me was somewhat disquieting, at the little

f hours. But it was not the public services, terrible though these were, that formed the most depressing feature of Sunday in St. Andrews; it was the rigid discipline which pervaded her home-life. My grandfather, I believe, was looked upon as being somewhat lax in his religious views, and he was undoubtedly more liberal-perhaps one might say more advanced-than many of his neighbours. Yet even he had to render homage to the universal law. So when Sunday came round the blinds were closely drawn, lest the rays of the sun should dissipate the gloom befitting the solemn day, whilst no voice in the household was raised above a sepulchral whisper. Lucky for me was it that I was sent to bed early, and that thus the horro

I got the chance. It was not only that the journeyman printer (there were journeymen in those days) was the kindest of men, whose memory I cherish with affection to this hour, and who never failed to welcome me with a smile and a pleasant word when I invaded his domain. The place had a charm of its own for me, mysterious, inexplicable, but absolute

press. How delightful were the hours which I and David, the journeyman aforesaid, spent together when business was slack-and it was often slack! Then it was that together we would compose the most wonderful announcements of the great enterprises to which I was to commit myself in after life. Now it was the prospectus of a "genteel academy" of which I was to be the principal, and agai

wish to utter a word of disparagement of those who were responsible for its management fifty years ago; but to me, a timid boy who, in spite of his Northumbrian burr, was turned to ridicule as a Cockney by the Fifeshire lads and lasses, it wore the aspect of a veritable place of torment. That classic instrument of discipline, the tawse, was in use at every hour of the day, girls as well as boys rec

, tail, and trident, were all clearly seen, and I sprang wildly from side to side of my bed trying to evade the fiend's attempt to capture me, until at last I took refuge, trembling and almost fainting, in my grandfather's arms. My youth and my good constitution carried me safely through an

n. On the maps of those days it bore quite another designation. It was a delightful spot, and when, accompanied by our nursemaid, my brothers and I set off to spend a long summer morning there, we seemed to have reached the height of bliss. The grove was separated from Elswick Lane by sloping fields, where wheat and barley grew luxuriantly, and the narrow path by which we ran, shouting with joy, through these fields to our haven among the trees led past a little fountain at which we always stopped to drink. The grove itself was a small wood of oak and fir trees, covering a piece of rising ground from which the most delightful views of the beautiful Tyne Valley and the coun

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s and I made merry fifty years ago in the shade of the oak trees, or beside the well in the meadow, there is now a vast cemetery, and some of those who played with me there now sleep peacefully almost in the shadow of the Diana's Grove we loved so well. And the prospect from the grove-where is it now? Al

Back Street. There was no great pier casting its mighty arm into the sea across the mouth of the river, and the favourite resort of visitors, the place where we children played and bathed, and our elders lounged and read or flirted, according to their tastes, was the quaint little haven now given up to the pier works. How high

garden, and the delicious scent seemed to me in those happy days, when I first reached the cottage on one of our summer holidays, to be as it were the fragrance of heaven itself. Nobody else seemed to visit Whitley in those first years of our sojourn there; so that we had the noble stretch of sands and the long line of cliffs almost to ourselves during the long summer's day, and my father, lying on the yielding turf above the sands, could study his sermon for the coming Sunday at peace, unmolested and almost unseen by any man. There must still, I suppose, be spots somewhere on the long coastline of this island where one might find combined the peace, the seclusion, and the beauty of that bit of Northumberland as I knew it fifty years ago; and yet, whatever my understanding may say, my heart tells me that I shall never again see anything like the Whitley of my youth. [Footnote: Since these pages were penned, the memory of the blacksmith's c

but the second, under the temptation of an entrancing story in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine which absorbed my thoughts, I entirely forgot. I was devouring this story, as only children do devour stories, when I heard the front door opened. I was sitting in the parlour, at the back of the house, so that I could not see anyone enter the garden. Running to the door, under the belief that my mother had returned, I found myself confronted by two men. They were-or pretended to be-pedlars; and one of them carried a case filled with sham jewellery. Their great desire seemed to be to get me

iscussing the best means of driving the robbers from our house, should they ever enter it. We had both agreed, then, that if we could but induce any ordinary thief to believe that a certain big relative of ours, whose colossal proportions we had often admired, was on the premises, there would be no need to do anything else to make the intruder flee affrighted. My mind was made up. Creeping softly back into the parlour, I seized the tongs. These I hurled suddenly down the kitchen stairs, and when the terrible din thus raised had died out, I cried in my childish treble, "Uncle John! Uncle John! Come downstairs! There are thieves in the house!" There was a cry of rage or alarm from the kitchen, a hurried scuffling of feet on the floor, and then through a window I saw my two fri

them. That meant that they must be sent to the best school in the town-Percy Street Academy. So when my elder brother in 1848 was of school age, he took him to Mr., not then Dr., Bruce, to enter him as a pupil. I have no doubt that he went with some trepidation, knowing full well that the school fees would be a heavy tax upon his small income. I was sitting with my mother in the drawing-room of Summerhill Terrace when my father returned, and I saw that there was an unwonted brightness on his gentle face. He

man usually obtains during pupilage. Percy Street Academy, Newcastle, has long since disappeared, after having counted no inconsiderable proportion of the best-known residents among its pupils. It occupied a series of rambling buildings with an imposing house at the end of the row, in which lived "The Doctor," the assistant masters, and the boarders. But though the school is gone, my old schoolmaster died but recently, enjoying to the

, the Doctor-who was an excellent public speaker-explained that he had called us from our tasks in order that we might listen to the story of a great deed done for England of which every Englishman ought to be proud; and then he read the whole story of the battle as it is told in Russell's graphic narrative, whilst we boys cheered

hoolboy like myself, that the cholera was approaching. A few weeks later it was with us in all its grim reality. Its actual appearance in the town was preceded by an extraordinary phenomenon which may, or may not, have been connected with the epidemic. One hot morning in August, when I left home for school, I was struck by the curious appearance of the atmosphere. No sooner had I stepped out of doors than I found that the strange dimness which pervaded everything was due to swarms of minute flies, which literally darkened the skies and settled in innumerable hosts upon every object animate and inanimate. It was impossible to breathe without inhaling these loathsome insects whenever the

of the plague was terrible indeed, and the month of September, 1853, is never likely to be forgotten by anyone who then lived at Newcastle. It was not merely that the mortality was enormous, the deaths on some days being above a hundred, but that the circumstances attending the plague were of a gruesome and harrowing character. Not a few of the scenes in the streets recalled the story of the Great Plague of London. We had the same incidents of the dead lying unburied because there were none left to carry them to the grave. We had the piles of coffins waiting for interment in the churchyard. We had sad stories of men seen wheeling the corpse of wife or child in a barrow to the place of burial. In the evenings workmen carried burning dis

go? No visitor from Newcastle or any other riverside town could find admittance into any of the lodging-houses on the coast. Happily a port of refuge was open to us in the little blacksmith's cottage at Whitley, and thither, to our great relief, we were transported about the time when the virulence of the epidemic began to abate. My father had himself suffered from an attack of the disease, probabl

It was just a year after the epidemic had passed away that we were visited by another calamity, infinitely less appalling, and yet at the time of its occurrence far more startling. Sound asleep in the middle of a dark October night, I began to dream, and, natu

es away. In response to my cries he awoke, and at my urgent request went to the window, which I was myself at the moment too much unnerved to approach. Directly he drew aside the curtain the room was filled with a glare that rendered every object as plainly visible as in broad daylight. We believed that a large building used as a tannery immediately behind our house must be on fire, but the building stood, and we saw that the glare which lighted up the whole heavens was far away. It was shortly after three o'clock on the morning of October 6th, 1854. Presen

had happened. Whether old Dixon expected my father to act as an amateur fireman, or whether he hoped for services of a more spiritual kind, I do not know; but he resolutely refused to

ning at every moment to attack the old parish church, which stood like a rock strangely illumined in the glare; to our left, in the crowded streets and alleys of the lower part of Newcastle, I counted no fewer than seven fires burning fiercely in different places, whilst on the river there were three ships in flames. It was wonderful to look up and see burning sparks and fragments hurtling through air, resembling nothing so much (I thought at the time) as a snowstorm every flake of which was a point of fire; it was wonderful, too, to see the shipping in the river, the broad stream itself, and the long lines of houses on either side glowing in the dancing flames. We could hear the rush of the fire hea

oining the vinegar manufactory. By this time it had acquired such proportions that it had been found necessary to summon the military from the Newcastle Barracks to assist in the effort to extinguish it, whilst vast crowds of people assembled, not only in the neighbourhood of the fire itself, but on the bridges and Newcastle quay, from which an excellent view was to be obtained. The fire at last reached a warehouse owned by a gentleman named Bertram, and here

on as serious in its character as that which was raging in Gateshead, but inflicted terrible injury both to life and property. The persons in the neighbourhood of the burning building, including soldiers, firemen, police, and Mr. Bertram, the owner of the warehouse, were instantly killed; and in many cases not a trace of their remains could afterwards be found. On the bridges and on Newcastle quay the great

lying on the pavement who had been killed by the force of the explosion. As I passed, they were lifting the body into a cart, and the sight of the head, hanging helplessly like that of a dead bird, was one I never forgot. All that day the fires burned

who, like myself, had been early on the ground having much to tell to eager listeners. It was only when we had trooped excitedly into our class-rooms, and found ourselves face to face with our masters, that we began to realise the actual solemnity of a catastrophe the like of which had never before be

Bruce entered, pale and agitated. "Boys," he said, "a dreadful thing has happened to our good old town. God knows how far the mischief may extend, and what ruin may be wrought; but we know already that more than one old pupil here have lost their lives, and that some of you boys have lost those near and dear to you. There can be no school to-day. It would not be decent--" And then the Do