NINETEEN

End of an Era

NEWCASTLE’S PRE-EMINENCE as a coal town dated back hundreds of years, for the exposed seams of the combustible rock that were found along the River Tyne could be extracted and shipped with far greater ease than deposits deeper inland. The local abundance of coal in turn caused manufactories, foundries, breweries and refineries to proliferate along the lower reaches of the river. The works of the Tyne Iron Company was situated on its north bank, four miles upstream from Newcastle; Nathaniel Clayton and George Atkinson had between them purchased nine of the company’s twenty shares in 1803, following a bank failure that ruined its founding proprietors, and they had since ploughed much capital into developing the ‘very extensive’ eleven-acre site.[1] But George soon bemoaned his investment, blaming Nathaniel for some alarmingly large outgoings. ‘The very heavy Debt of Obligation which I must ever owe to Mr. Clayton, will I trust plead my Apology for engaging therein at his Suggestion and Request,’ he told Sir Francis Baring in February 1805.[2]

To the company’s broad quays at Lemington, the ebb and flow of each tide brought fresh supplies of ironstone, arriving by sloop from nearby coastal beds, and carried away the ‘ships anchors, chains, spades, shovels, nails, steel, edge tools, files, and all kinds of domestic utensils’ produced at the ironworks.[3] The coal came by waggon from Wylam Colliery, five miles away, dragged by horses along iron rails – but these four-legged beasts would soon be usurped by locomotives, for ‘Puffing Billy’, the world’s first commercial steam engine to move along ‘simply by its friction against the rail road’, would be built in 1813 specifically for the purpose of hauling coal from Wylam to the docks at Lemington.[4]

Coal is loaded into ships on the banks of the Tyne.

The Tyne Iron Company’s two blast furnaces, blown by vast bellows coupled to Boulton & Watt Double Power 32 Horse steam engines, disgorged around sixty tons of red-hot pig iron each week, ready for moulding and beating into shape. The buildings at the works also included a casting house; a forge with seven puddling furnaces and a relentless engine-driven hammer and anvil; a rolling mill for making plate iron, bars and rods; a boring and turning mill for the manufacture of cannon and cylinders; joiners’ and smiths’ shops; twenty-eight ovens for baking coke; eleven kilns for roasting ironstone; a manager’s residence and forty-three workers’ dwellings. The ironworks presented an infernal sight at night, when the ‘curling flames’ that darted upwards from the ‘numerous furnaces’ were said to give the ‘appearance of a city on fire’.[5]

Matt Atkinson had returned from the West Indies with insufficient wealth to slip into the leisured mode of existence that would no doubt have suited him best; and so it was decided (primarily by his brother George and brother-in-law Nathaniel) that he would run the head office of the Tyne Iron Company on Newcastle’s Quayside. Thus Matt and Ann settled down to their new life in the town, lodging with the Claytons for the time being. ‘It is a great Satisfaction to me, if I have any way contributed to your Son Matthew’s Happiness,’ Nathaniel would tell Bridget on 6 January 1807. ‘I derive also much Satisfaction from the strong hope I entertain that he has married a sensible, well informed & well disposed woman.’[6] Later that spring, Matt agreed to buy three of his brothers’ shares in the company for £18,000, a bargain which, while consuming nearly his entire capital, put his holding on an equal footing to theirs. So sincere were Matt’s feelings of gratitude towards both men that when Ann gave birth to a first child at Westgate Street, in April 1808, they named him George Clayton Atkinson.

SOON AFTER HIS public humiliation in the law courts at the hands of his brother-in-law, Michael Atkinson had taken the lease on 67 Portland Place, an imposing townhouse in Marylebone. Michael was also looking to buy a fine country residence; a newspaper advertisement for the Mount Mascal estate near Bexley, thirteen miles south-east of London, caught his eye in April 1808. The property comprised a ‘capital’ Jacobean mansion ‘suitable for a family of the first distinction’, positioned on a ‘bold but gentle ascent’ within a landscaped park of fifty acres, surrounded by nearly five hundred acres of woods, meadow, pasture and arable.[7] With fifteen bedrooms, the house was perhaps slightly larger than necessary – any smaller, however, and it might not have been able to accommodate Michael’s bruised dignity.

Various members of the family had reason to gravitate towards London during the spring of 1809. Nathaniel, who was called there on legal business – ‘a ship cause of considerable Importance’ – went down with Dorothy, who renewed old friendships and fulfilled shopping commissions while he attended court.[8] Jane’s trip to the capital was precipitated by a love affair – not one of her own, it should be said, but involving her nineteen-year-old niece Sophia, Michael’s daughter, who had passed much of the previous winter at Temple Sowerby. Sophia was a beautiful, nervous young woman, and viewed by her close relatives with a good deal of pity. (‘The tempers of both her Parents were so remarkably bad & Mrs. A never by any accident a day sober,’ Jane later recalled, ‘that any human being would have felt for a Girl so situated.’)[9] The details are obscure, but it seems that while she was up north, Sophia formed an intense attachment to an unidentified suitor. Her father, however, flatly prohibited the match. Jane came south with Sophia in March, hoping to promote her niece’s cause. Three months later she returned to Temple Sowerby, her hopes frustrated; Michael remained as ‘bitterly averse’ to his daughter’s marriage as ever.[10]

George continued to make frequent visits to London, where the Mures and their creditors still held the Atkinson estate under siege; as one of his late uncle’s executors, he was often needed at the Inns of Court. The Lords of the Treasury, meanwhile, having belatedly discovered the degree to which the merchant house of Atkinson, Mure & Bogle had enriched itself through the occupation of Haiti in the 1790s, were intent on clawing back the ‘double Commission’ which had arisen from the army’s expenses first passing through George Bogle’s books in Port-au-Prince, then George Atkinson’s in Kingston, before being settled with Sir Francis Baring in London.[11] When the West India Commissioners investigated, they found insufficient grounds to support the Treasury’s case, but their Lordships would not let the matter rest.

Baring was by now an old man, and very deaf, but his mind remained perfectly agile. He had officially retired from business in 1803, leaving the great merchant house which he had built from scratch in the hands of his sons Thomas, Alexander and Henry. Baring’s favourite recreation during his dotage was making improvements to Stratton, the Hampshire estate he had purchased from the Duke of Bedford in 1801, and filling the mansion with old master paintings. His standards were high and his pockets deep; only the works of Rembrandt, Rubens and Van Dyck tempted him, he would tell his son-in-law, ‘and the first must not be too dark, nor the second indecent’.[12] He rarely passed up the opportunity to acquire local landed property. As one wit remarked: ‘Sir Francis Baring is extending his purchases so largely in Hampshire, that he soon expects to be able to inclose the county within his own park paling.’[13]

When business brought him to town, Baring lived at the Manor House at Lee, near Lewisham, and it was here that he died, in September 1810, aged seventy. ‘Few men understood the real interests of trade better,’ wrote his obituarist in the Gentleman’s Magazine. ‘He was unquestionably the first merchant in Europe; first in knowledge and talents, and first in character and opulence.’[14] Sir Thomas Baring, who inherited the Lee residence, rented it out following his father’s death. George and Susan Atkinson, who had been searching for a house close to the capital, were the first tenants; their ninth child, Harriet, was born there in February 1811.

AFTER TWO YEARS living at Westgate Street, Matt and Ann finally bought a home of their own in 1809. Carr Hill House, built in the 1760s, had originally operated as an asylum ‘for the reception of lunaticks, in easy, genteel or opulent circumstances’; it was located two miles south of Newcastle, on the edge of Gateshead Fell, a dark, wild moor pockmarked with pits and quarries, and notorious for its highwaymen, cutpurses and ruffians.[15] Carr Hill village, on a breezy summit nearly five hundred feet above sea level, commanded views in all directions. The area was studded with windmills, including one in Matt and Ann’s fifteen-acre grounds. They shared a love of the outdoors, and their large garden would prove a ‘great source of amusement to them both’.[16]

This was an unpretentious district; the Atkinsons’ new neighbours included corn millers, nurserymen, quarrymen, earthenware manufacturers, a flint glass maker and a fire brick maker. Matt would forge an especially close friendship with John Hodgson, the vicar of the next village, who was primarily a writer – indeed, some years earlier he had turned down a job at the Tyne Iron Company since he wished ‘to pursue a literary, rather than a mercantile life’.[17] On 29 April 1811, shortly after the publisher of the popular ‘Beauties of England and Wales’ series commissioned Hodgson to compile the volume devoted to the county of Westmorland, he and Matt set out from Carr Hill on a brisk, sodden tramp across the Pennines for the purposes of researching the book. Two days later, groping at times through ‘thick dark mist’, they reached the top of Dun Fell, where they rewarded themselves with their first glimpse of Westmorland and a late breakfast. ‘In a miner’s shop we had our beef and bread and some excellent rum and water – rum made in Jamaica by Mr. A. nine years since,’ wrote Hodgson.[18]

That afternoon they strode into Temple Sowerby, where they found spring several weeks ahead of the east side of the Pennines, and Bridget’s garden in a flourishing state: ‘Mrs. Atkinson has apricots against a common stone wall as large as pigeon eggs, and the foliage of the trees is nearly in perfection, except on the oaks and ashes.’ Hodgson greatly admired Bridget’s library, her collections of Roman and Saxon coins, and her shells gathered from around the globe. He was equally impressed by her continuing stamina. ‘Mrs. Atkinson, although 78 years old, is up every morning at six o’clock, a practice that she and her children have always pursued, as recommended as the very best preservative of health,’ he told his wife. ‘Never, she says, let any person, on any consideration whatever, take a second sleep.’[19]

Now that she was in her late seventies, Bridget might have put her feet up and passed the day-to-day running of the house over to Jane, but she remained cheerfully hands-on. The book of ‘receipts’ which she had started compiling for Dorothy in January 1806 suggests that her knowledge of cookery was based upon a lifetime of practical experience; it also demonstrates her attachment to her eldest daughter, and the love of good food they shared. Bridget and Dorothy often exchanged parcels of provisions – in February 1809, for example, a crate of honey and rose water from Temple Sowerby made the return journey filled with oranges purchased in Newcastle – but neither mother nor daughter was ever quite as diligent a correspondent as the other wished her to be. Dorothy, in particular, expressed displeasure at her mother’s shortcomings in this area. ‘My Dear Dorothy,’ Bridget wrote on 28 June 1812, ‘I find by your writing to Jane that you were quite angry and thought I ought to have wrote to you at the time I wrote to Bridget’ – this was Bridget’s middle daughter, Bridget Tulip – ‘but realy I was so busy with the Stairs Carpet I could not affoard time for any one else so do not impute it to slight or neglesence for it was neighter and when I am done you will see what a punctual correspondent I will be. I Long to see you here and then you will Judge what I have been doing but I am afraid you will give Jane all the credit.’[20]

While not engaged in carpet-cleaning or other domestic chores, much of Bridget’s time must have been absorbed by her antiquarian hobbies. Here in front of me, on my desk, is Bridget’s handwritten copy of the annals of the Clifford family, contained within two leatherbound volumes. They consist of an account of the sea voyages of the Earl of Cumberland, an Elizabethan courtier, and the diaries of his daughter Lady Anne Clifford, who spent forty years in litigation before winning the right to inherit her father’s estates, which included Pendragon, Brough, Appleby and Brougham castles in Westmorland. It seems most likely that Bridget took her copy from a version held at Dalemain – the mansion had once been owned by Sir Edward Hasell, Lady Anne Clifford’s steward. The cyclical appearance of Bridget’s handwriting – each session starting neatly, deteriorating as she tires – hints at how long it must have taken her to transcribe this work.

Bridget’s collections were well known in the neighbourhood, and her coins, shells and books a draw for passing enthusiasts. They had certainly made a strong impression on Matt’s friend, John Hodgson, who was now working with the Newcastle bookseller John Bell towards the launch of an organization dedicated to the history of the northern counties – the first provincial counterpart to the Society of Antiquaries of London. The inaugural meeting of the Antiquarian Society of Newcastle upon Tyne took place on 6 February 1813, at Loftus’s Long Room on Newgate Street, with the election of twenty-nine founder members, including Matt Atkinson and Nathaniel Clayton. The Duke of Northumberland graciously accepted the ‘honourable Situation of Patron’ – but the most striking mark of distinction to be conferred that day was the first honorary membership, upon ‘Mrs. Atkinson’ of Temple Sowerby.[21]

Bridget in old age, an engraving taken from a miniature now lost.

Among the original artefacts to enter the society’s collection were a ‘Celtic Hammer of very hard granular stone, found near Kirkoswald Castle, in Cumberland; a silver Penny of Henry the Second, found with a great quantity of the same kind of coin, at Cutherston, near Bowes, in Yorkshire, about the year 1782; a Silver Penny of Edward the First, coined at London; a Silver Penny of Edward the Second, coined at Canterbury’ and a ‘Swedish Copper Dollar, of Charles the Twelfth, dated 1716’ – all donated by Bridget.[22] She, in turn, received a diploma, printed on parchment, enclosed in a neat wooden box. In coming years, great men would have honorary membership of the society bestowed upon them – Sir Joseph Banks, Sir Humphry Davy, Sir Walter Scott – but no other woman would be permitted to join its ranks until the 1870s.

GEORGE ATKINSON had been bracing himself for the forfeiture of much of his fortune, but finally, after pondering the subject for five years, the Treasury Board gave way on the matter of the ‘double Commission’. On 26 February 1813, the Law Officers declared that while George had not, strictly speaking, been entitled as Agent General of Jamaica to charge an additional 5 per cent on the bills drawn upon him by his partner in Port-au-Prince, he would have been permitted to apply the same charge – which they acknowledged as the ‘proper and usual Commission’ – had he been acting in his capacity as a private merchant.[23]

The decision must have been a tremendous relief for George, coming at a time when he was weighed down by ill health and an excessive workload; too much of his energy was still being absorbed by the lawsuits which were gradually devouring his late uncle’s estate, and he felt increasingly aggrieved that his siblings expected him to shoulder the burden. As he complained to brother Matt: ‘Altogether my Executorship has been a ruinous Concern as well as attended with incalculable Vexation, and has been an obstruction instead of an aid in my commercial Pursuits.’[24] It was about time, he resolved, that the wider family carried some responsibility – most pressingly, in making a decision about the Bogue estate.

Back in 1791, when Nathaniel Clayton and Sir Francis Baring bought out Paul Benfield’s interest in the Bogue, they had declared by deed of trust that any profits from the estate’s future sale would be ‘divided Share & Share alike’ among Bridget’s children.[25] George had acquired Nathaniel’s (but not Baring’s) interest in the property eight years later, following his return from Jamaica. Two decades of under-investment had since taken their toll on the Bogue, and recently the crop had fallen badly short. In 1812 the plantation had consigned a mere forty hogsheads of sugar to Barings in London, which was scarcely enough to pay the overseer’s salary, let alone the interest on huge debts of more than £40,000.

Nathaniel laid out the problem in a lengthy memorandum, dated 28 June 1813, which he circulated around the family (to everyone, that is, apart from Michael, with whom he could ‘hold no correspondence’). While expressing hope that they would all profit from the future sale of their late uncle’s property, Nathaniel pointed out that they might also lose money on it – and here lay the crux of the matter. Surely it was unfair that any of this risk should fall upon the estate of Sir Francis Baring, who had ‘acted merely for the Benefit of Mr. Atkinson’s Family’? Which invited the next question – if not Baring’s heirs, who would be prepared to assume the risk? On this point Nathaniel asked each family member to ‘judge for themselves’; they could either buy further into ‘this Adventure’, or opt out from it entirely.[26] The eventual gains, or losses, would be shared out accordingly.

Matt, indecisive as ever, declared himself ‘perplexed’ by the question. He told Nathaniel:

You both know perfectly well how I am situated as to income. At the same time you will recollect I owe you nearly £500, and my Mill will run me in debt £200 more which must take me some time to Liquidate, and if you deem this undertaking hazardous, I really think I ought in prudence to relinquish all hopes of advantage rather than run much risk of involving myself further – but however I shall in this be entirely governed by whatever you & my Brother George agree I should do.[27]

NATHANIEL AND DOROTHY would be blessed with eleven children, with just sixteen years separating them, every one of whom reached adulthood. As they grew up and left home to fulfil their various callings, each Clayton family gathering became an increasingly rare and precious moment. ‘The Children are all well & happy & I was a proud Man indeed, when I saw them all assembled at the Table on the first Day of this year,’ Nathaniel had written to Bridget on one such occasion. ‘God only knows whether this joyful Circumstance will again happen to us.’[28] The boys, of course, needed careers, and their father earmarked Nat, John and Michael for the legal profession; Nat would practise at Lincoln’s Inn in London, while John and Michael were articled to the family firm in Newcastle. George Clayton came second in the brotherly pecking order, between Nat and John, but was insufficiently studious to pursue a legal career. In December 1813, after graduating from Oriel College, Oxford with a third-class degree, he sailed for Jamaica to join his uncle’s merchant house – the first of the next generation of the family to do so.

Another of Bridget’s grandsons, James Atkinson – John’s orphan son – turned fourteen in 1813. Since his arrival at Temple Sowerby from Jamaica, eight years earlier, his grandmother and Aunt Jane had discreetly raised the boy – so discreetly, in fact, that family letters contain scant clues about his upbringing. Bridget’s household accounts, however, reveal that several bills were paid to a ‘Mr. Robinson’ between 1807 and 1811. This John Robinson, not to be confused with the late Secretary to the Treasury, was headmaster of the grammar school at Ravenstonedale, about twenty miles south of Temple Sowerby; the fees for 1808 came to just over £30.[29] More evidence of James’s education can be found on the shelf beside me; within a copy of Corderius’s Colloquies, a textbook ‘designed for the Use of Beginners in the Latin Tongue’, can be found both his neat signature and the date, 24 February 1808, inscribed on its front endpaper.

I had hoped to learn so much more about James’s life; but the trail seemed to peter out after 1811, and I started worrying that I would never find out what happened to him. One day, however, while leafing through John Hodgson’s papers at the Northumberland Archives, and trying not to be too diverted by his fascinating, but for my purposes entirely tangential correspondence with Sir Humphry Davy about ways of ‘preventing explosions from fire damp’ – ninety-two men and boys having perished in a blast at Felling Colliery, a mile down the road from Carr Hill, in May 1812 – I was surprised to come across a document in a familiar hand.[30] This was one of Bridget’s chatty letters, addressed to Matt at the Tyne Iron Company; and it enclosed the formula for a ‘Thorn-Apple Burn Ointment which is by far the best I ever saw’.[31] It also offered an ending, of sorts, to the story of James Atkinson.

Bridget was writing to Matt on 25 October 1813, the day after James had sailed for … she does not give his final destination, but I would guess it to be Jamaica. The week before, Jane and James had apparently hurried to Whitehaven in the post-chaise, not stopping ‘on the road to eat or drink’, but they discovered when they arrived that the ship for which they were rushing had already left. They then headed without delay to Liverpool in hopes of catching a vessel to take James to Cork, where the West India merchant fleet was gathering in readiness for a naval convoy. At Liverpool, Jane had called on Thomas Littledale – Ann’s brother, a cotton broker – who had offered ‘every assistance and got James every thing he wanted as a Mattrass Blanket Blue woolling trousers &c’, and had also helped find him a passage to Cork. ‘Never one could behave better than James did – but I will tell you all when you come over and you shall shoot me a Little game for Mr. Littledale.’[32] I will tell you all when you come over – rarely have the confines of the written word been more teasingly articulated. Beyond this point, I have no idea how James’s life panned out – for his name never crops up again in a family letter.

BRIDGET HAD LONG SUFFERED from rheumatism and poor circulation, and she spent part of the autumn of 1813 at the resort of Allonby, on the Solway coast, where she derived a ‘great deal of Bennifitt’ from warm indoor baths. (‘I thought I had lost the use of my Fingers in writing,’ she told Matt, ‘but I hope I shall recover all again.’)[33] The following winter would prove exceptionally harsh. In January 1814, blizzards swept the land, depositing a blanket of snow several feet deep. In the capital, for a few dreamlike days in February, the ice between Blackfriars and London bridges was thick enough to support crowds of revellers, roasting oxen and even an elephant – this would be the last Frost Fair ever to be held on the River Thames. Up north, the Tyne and Solway Firth both froze hard.

By the beginning of March, Bridget was dangerously ill. Dorothy went over to Temple Sowerby to help Jane nurse their mother, while Nathaniel consulted the family physician, William Ingham, about her condition. ‘He thinks it probable that there may be some Disease about the Vessels of the Heart, but that all the Symptoms detailed to him might proceed from Debility alone,’ reported Nathaniel on 13 March. ‘The only Remedy is sustaining the Patient and recruiting her Strength. To this End all your united Endeavours should be directed, and he thinks that as the Strength is recruited, the Quantity of Laudanum administered may be abated.’[34] While Bridget lay in bed, the family was filled with foreboding; they would not have long to wait, though, for she died on 28 March.

Bridget left her house, land and money to her youngest daughter Jane – all her property apart from Skygarth, the tiny farm acquired through the enclosures forty years earlier, which she left to Michael. Ten years earlier, at the height of the family row, Bridget had rewritten her will with the express purpose of disinheriting him: ‘I declare it to be my intention totally to Exclude my eldest son Michael Atkinson from any share or interest in any of my Estates or effects real or personal.’[35] It is not clear what caused her change of heart, but in April 1811 she had written him back into her will. However, Bridget’s bequest came with a condition; if he caused Jane, her executrix, ‘any trouble molestation or disturbance’ by demanding more than had been left to him, then the property would be forfeit.[36] Michael was apoplectic when he discovered this stipulation, perceiving it to be Nathaniel Clayton’s work. ‘I am sure there is something in the business which will not bear the light,’ he fulminated, ‘and to that something I ascribe the Disgusting Clause in my Mother’s Will.’[37]

Six weeks after Bridget’s death, on 11 May, George died suddenly at Lee, aged forty-nine, leaving behind a widow and nine children. It was a great shock to the entire family; although they knew that George’s years in Jamaica had ‘decayed’ his constitution, they had not suspected him to be in mortal danger.[38] Michael attended the reading of his brother’s will. ‘I am as much in the Dark as possible as to what he possessed of property, for he specified nothing,’ he told cousin Matthew Atkinson. ‘The Will appeared to me a Complete Attorney’s Puzzle.’ George’s executors were named as the Nathaniel Claytons, father and son; ‘Matt the Blacksmith’ (Michael’s jeering name for his brother at Carr Hill); and nineteen-year-old George Atkinson, who had inherited his father’s share of the merchant house in Kingston.[39]

Matt told Lord Balcarres that he believed his brother’s family would ‘be reasonably well provided for’, once his partnerships had been wound up.[40] This would prove an understatement. George’s estate was valued for probate at £140,000, which placed him among the ten richest men to die in Great Britain that year.[41]