The Sparta Of The North

Michael Caine in the Northumbrian film “Get Carter“

What further helps us understand Northumbrian difference from the rest of Britain is that in defensible terms the North of England had a southern ‘inner bailey’ south of the Tees and an ‘outer bailey’ north of that point guarding the Northern perimeter. For the far northern counties were expected to provide a buffer zone against Scottish invasion (it is noteworthy that whenever the Scots successfully invaded England they would pull up sharply at the river Tees, as they did as late as 1644 when the Earl of Leven’s army occupied Northumberland and Durham). Indeed, it was the centuries of conflict with the Scots that really set the Northumbrians apart from the rest of England, which had long since beaten their swords into ploughshares. As the geographer C. B. Fawcett put it in 1919:

“For several centuries, while the rest of England was a peaceful agricultural country, this border region was its fight frontier, a land of savage guerrilla warfare of mingled heroism and barbarity. In every ancient village there are traditions of the border raids. For long after the cessation of that warfare the then poor region of the north was an unimportant part of the realm, except for the fact that the road from England to Scotland passed through it for a hundred miles. It was too poor and barbarous to attract settlers from the more fertile lands to the south, and hence maintained its distinctive character.”

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The twelfth century author of the Gesta Stephani (the Deeds of King Stephen) concluded that the ‘root and origin of all evil arose in that part of England called Northumbria to produce plunder and arson, strife and war.’Much of what is distinctive in Northumbrian culture derives from the simple fact that living in a warzone made it prudent to huddle together for warmth and safety, and in this bloody land it was inevitable that martial prowess would become much esteemed. From this root grew a whole ethical framework that partly explains why ‘hardness’ is still much-prized in Northumbrian culture. Henry Mess thought this background was important enough to cover at length in his study of social conditions in 1920s Tyneside. 

Tyneside is—we will not say militarist—exceptionally interested and proud with regard to all that concerns armies and navies. It is easily understood when one looks at its history. There is, first of all, the Border tradition; for centuries there was watchfulness against the Scot, and the great leaders of Northumberland were, above all, leaders in war. In the second place, Newcastle and Tynemouth are barracks-towns, and the former is a great recruiting depot; the officers take a prominent place in local society. And in the third place, Tyneside grew and thrived on the race in armaments. Battleships and big guns meant wealth to the captains of industry, work to the rank and file, and dividends to thousands of local investors. Men love what they create, and the Tynesider followed the fortunes of his craftsmanship all over the world. When the Japanese fleet blew the Russian fleet to pieces at Tsushima, it was remembered with pride on Tyneside that most of the victor’s ships came from their river. Scotswood and Jarrow, in particular, lived on materials of war. Naturally, they found it hard to be enthusiastic about disarmament.

The hardness of the people who lived in this forbidding place has been much commented on, and even if it is not possible to corroborate the truth of that descriptor, the very fact that their bloody recreations of the ‘Border Reivers’ who lived there were so often remarked upon is striking and helps us to understand why their military capabilities were in such high demand. The feuding ‘surnames’ that roamed this ill-defined border were notorious and shared in a unified upland culture where raids on livestock and property and disputes over grazing rights could trigger open warfare and feuds that lasted generations. In 1550, Sir Robert Bowes notes that the dwellers of North Tynedale ‘were wild and misdemeanoured people much inclined to disorder and given to theft and must be kept continually in dread of justice under their keepers.’ When the antiquary William Camden visited the ‘wastes’ of Northumberland in 1599 he contended that it was the county’s landscape and situation which had shaped the war-like temperament of the people, being ‘for the most part rough,’ which ‘seemed to harden the inhabitants, whom the Scots their neighbours also made more fierce and hardy, adding that here you may see ‘the ancient nomads, a martiall kinde of men … who ride on horse-back with a fresh turf for saddle and twisted straw for girth.’

The dangers of ambush were an ever-present. On one Sunday in 1483 the Northumbrian heidsman Robert Loraine was ‘bushwhacked’ by a Scottish raiding party on his way home from church to his Pele Tower in Kirkharle, then butchered into pieces and packed into the saddlebags of his own horse. The Rutherford and Hall families were so violent that in 1598 royal officials ordered that no quarter be given to anyone bearing those names, and the Johnston clan became notorious for decorating their houses with the flayed skins of their Maxwell enemies. In 1599 it was even recorded that during a six-a-side football match involving the Armstrongs at Bewcastle, west of Kielder, they were interrupted by a gang of Reivers who cut the throats of two of the players. The martial culture of upland Northumbria expressed itself in the colourful names of the Reivers themselves, so we find ‘Fingerless Will Nixon’ and ‘Nebless Clem Croser’ (body parts presumably lost in border clashes), or Armstrongs called ‘Skinabake’ and ‘Bangtail.’ Names that commemorate violent exploits were also common including ‘Ill-drowned Geordie,’ ‘Archie Fire-the-Braes,’ ‘Out-with-the sword,’ ‘Crack-spear,’ and ‘Cleave-the-crune,’ and it’s noticeable how similar these nicknames are to the famous fighters of the American Plains, such as ‘Alligator-Stands-Up,’ ‘Thunder-Rolling-over-the-Mountain,’ and ‘Crazy Horse,’ And for some of the most interesting evidence of the persistence of the belligerent outlook of the Northumbrians we must look to eighteenth-century America.

These attributes of hardiness and aggression had contributed to their complete cultural hegemony in this region by the time of the American War of Independence, and they would go on to dominate the leadership of the new Continental Army and make names for themselves as formidable politicians. Hackett Fischer notes how the baleful faces of backcountry leaders often bear striking resemblance to the descriptions of the North British borderers who settled the Appalachian highlands. ‘Contemporary observers described these men as tall, lean and sinewy, with hard, angry, weather-beaten features,’ men like John Caldwell Calhoun and Andrew Jackson, who both shared Border ancestry. It is striking how much this physiognomy recalls the description in Linda Colley’s Britons: Forging the Nation of ‘Northumbrians and Lowland Scots [tending] to look alike, with the same raw, high-boned faces and the same thin angular physiques’ (for a good example look to Nathaniel Dance’s portrait of the Northumbrian gardener Lancelot Brown), or even George MacDonald Fraser’s vivid description of that moment in 1969 when the descendants of ‘three notable Anglo-Scottish Border tribes’ gathered for the US Presidential Inauguration in Washington DC, with Lyndon Johnson handing over to Richard Nixon in the presence of Billy Graham. Johnson with his ‘lined, leathery Northern head and rangy, rather loose-jointed frame,’ and Nixon’s ‘blunt, heavy features, the dark complexion, the burly body, and the whole air of dour hardness [which] are as typical of the Anglo-Scottish frontier as the Roman Wall.’

Northumbria in the age of Cuthbert and Bede was the Tibet of the British Isles. In windswept monasteries on rocky headlands, muddy riverbanks and tidal islands, bands of shivering monks would offer up Latin incantations for a good harvest or protection from sea-borne danger. When the Danes invaded in 793 the monks of Lindisfarne departed their island for good, hoisting St Cuthbert’s incorrupt body onto a bier and beginning an epic peregrination through Northumbria in search of a new home. After years of wandering this caravan of monks settled first in Chester-le-Street, but when they again became vulnerable they were guided by providence to Dun Holm (meaning the ‘hill-island’): a steep and wooded rock on a peninsula in the RiverWear. There they planted a church, which would grow into the great cathedral of Durham.

Cuthbert’s asceticism—he only seemed to eat raw onions and the eggs of seabirds, and would stand on the shore for hours knee-deep in prayer and freezing sea-water—seemed to match the landscape of the places he inhabited, in life and in death. That monastic tradition has helped to shape much of what is still a recognisable Northumbrian aesthetic: unfussy, unadorned, even Spartan. This is especially true of the vernacular architecture of North East England, but in public art too. The starkness of Fenwick Lawson’s sculpture in Durham City, ‘The Journey,’ of six hooded monks carrying St Cuthbert’s coffin (which the artist carved out of rough blocks of wood with a chainsaw), is illustrative. It captures a sense of the severity of that world, and the grit of the people who lived in it. The same too could be said of other recent public art in Northumbria, which looks back to a harsh and gruelling past. The Sisyphean ‘Steel Men’ spring to mind here, those stick-like figures at Sunderland bent double pushing great boulders of coal up the banks of the Wear; or the sky-scraping ‘Angel of the North,’ Gateshead’s response in all its uncompromising virility to the priapic giant of the South at Cerne Abbot.

Armstrong was a Newcastle-born solicitor-turned gentleman inventor, descended from the famous clan of Border Reivers (the name reputedly derives from an armour-bearer to a Scottish King who had lifted his sovereign onto a horse using one arm). His life served as a bridge between those older Northumbrian martial traditions and the mechanised industrial warfare of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The growth of his enterprises was extraordinary: initially focused on hydraulic cranes, and then artillery pieces, and then finally warships in staggering array. Between 1868 and 1927 Armstrong’s company was responsible for 42% of all British warship production—from the daintily rigged Victorian ironclads to the all-steel behemoths of the twentieth century. 

He sold armaments to any government who could afford his products: he armed both sides in the American Civil War; Armstrong ships fired on and sunk each other at the Battle of the Yalu River in the Sino-Japanese War in 1894; and the Japanese crews of Armstrong-built cruisers even appeared on the terraces of St James’ Park after annihilating the Russian fleet at Tshushima in 1905. When the Italian Navy took delivery of the Europa, complete with a 100-ton gun in 1876, the local antiquarian John Collingwood Bruce pointed out that;

“In the second century, Rome exhibited on the banks of the Tyne the triumphs of her engineering skill, … In the nineteenth century the chieftains of Tyneside showed Rome how largely Britain had profited by her instruction.”

The Newcastle Chronicle had noted with pride that‘ Tyneside has become one of the world’s greatest centres for the production of weapons of death’ and from the 1880s it was the only place where a battleship could be built and armed from scratch on one site. The local press understood that the town was ‘most prosperous at times of peril.’ Armstrong’s huge enterprise dominated Newcastle, and the pub names in his fiefdom of Scotswood spoke of his influence on the culture of Tyneside: the Rifle, the Gun, the Vulcan, the Blast Furnace, and the Ordnance Arms. Despite dealing in weapons of war, it seems that Armstrong experienced no pangs of conscience, unlike his almost exact contemporary, Alfred Nobel. To be sure, he was a great philanthropist and endowed the city with hospitals, schools, and parks, but during a speech in Newcastle Armstrong shrugged his shoulders at those who questioned the morality of his trade:

“We as a nation have few men to spare for war, and we have need of all the aid that science can give us to secure us against aggression—and to hold in subjection the vast and semi-barbarous population which we have to rule in the east.”

The unusual dominance of the two most lethally dangerous occupations in Britain—coal-mining and seafaring—made working lives precarious in North East England. The response to what many would still see as egregious exploitation was certainly political (as we shall see in the following chapter), but also practical—there was seldom a shortage of volunteers for rescue attempts whenever there was a disaster underground or at sea. The classic ‘self-righting’ lifeboat was invented in South Shields by William Wouldhave in 1789, and the world’s first volunteer Life Brigade was founded in Tynemouth in 1864— but a certain stoicism, even fatalism was just as commonplace. Frank Atkinson, the Yorkshiremen who founded Beamish Museum, observed that one of the most remarkable things about talking to old miners was ‘their lack of bitterness,’ and that ‘one almost becomes more bitter on their behalf than the men themselves, who seem to have developed a special kind of gentleness through their hard experience.’

This expressed itself through a distinctively Northumbrian appetite for sentimentality—one thinks here of Billy Elliot’s macho father weeping at the picket line, Ralph Hedley’s much reproduced painting of a miner and his baby ‘Geordie Ha’ad the Bairn,’ or the touching farewell scene in the midst of grim-visaged Northumberland Fusiliers marching to war in ‘The Response.’ It’s possible that an intensity of emotion stemmed from dangerous, precarious, soldaristic lives, and it’s illustrative that Charles Dickens loved to do readings in Newcastle, whose audiences he thought were ‘individually rough [but] unusually tender and sympathetic … while their comic perception is quite up to the high London average,’ adding that ‘a finer audience there is not in England and I suppose them to be a specially earnest people, for while they can laugh till they shake the roof, they have a very unusual sympathy with what is pathetic or passionate.’ 

Considering the banality of industrial tragedy in the industrial North East, this inclination towards mawkishness is understandable—and could be heightened by horrific events like the crushing to death of 183 children in Sunderland in 1883 at the end of a variety show in the Victoria Hall. It also found expression through the enduring popularity of nostalgic ‘Geordierama’ on the regional stage and the canon of lachrymose Northumbrian songs, whose usual subject matter—Geordie’s been press-ganged/Faither’s drunk again/Dozens were killed at the pit today—milk the tear ducts with both hands. This in turn built on deep traditions of folk song and poetry that were unusual in England, where the men ‘spoke English but had the outlook of Afghan tribesmen’ and ‘prized a poem almost as much as plunder, and produced such an impressive assembly of local narrative songs that some people used to label all our greater folk poems as ‘Border ballads.’’ G.M. Trevelyan noted the predisposition that those who live with great danger have towards emotional expressiveness when he wrote of the Border Reivers that

“like the Homeric Greeks, they were cruel, coarse savages, slaying each other as the beasts of the forest; yet they were also poets who could express in the grand style the inexorable fate of the individual man and woman, and infinite pity for all the cruel things which they none the less perpetually inflicted upon one another.”

-excerpted from “The Northumbrians: North-East England and its People” by Dan Jackson (2019)