A Brief History
St Mary’s Church is a familiar landmark, standing high above the Tyne. We have no evidence telling us when it was first built but there are some clues that suggest this is a building whose history stretches back many centuries. For example, a local historian, John Hodgson, who was once a curate at St Mary’s, has speculated that as some of the oldest stones in the church are shaped or hewed after the Roman style, they could have been taken from an old Roman building. While this remains guesswork, there are certainly historical records of monastic life in ’Getehed’ dating from 653 AD. St. Mary’s is reputedly built on the site of Gateshead monastery, although there is nothing to show its exact location.
The Murder of a Bishop
Also on record, giving us a clue to the age of the church, is a famous medieval murder: on May 14th 1080, Walcher, Bishop of Durham was murdered in ’St Mary’s’, though the church mentioned may have been situated slightly to the north of the present building.
Being on the south side of the river, St Mary’s and the surrounding land has always been part of the Bishopric of Durham. After the Norman Conquest, the bishops installed by the new king found the North of England difficult to control. The border with Scotland had not yet been defined and Saxon nobles used the area as a sanctuary to strike at the invading Normans. The Saxons o! the North East were persecuted by the Normans as a warning to other unruly persons.
However, there was one exception: Liulph, an ancestor of the Lumley family of Lumley Castle, near Chester-le-Street, was on good terms with Walcher, the then Bishop of Durham, to the great annoyance of the bishop’s Norman advisers. This jealousy resulted in the murder of Liulph.
Unlike some bishops, Walcher was a timid cleric, and realising the possible results of this, took refuge in Durham Castle. He sent out messengers proclaiming his innocence and offered to meet and explain to Liulph’s relatives. The place chosen was Gateshead, near to St Mary’s which stood slightly to the north of the present church.
Walcher came with a large group of followers, obviously a bodyguard; amongst them were the murderers. A mob gathered, and, urged on by Liulph’s family and friends, attacked the Normans. The bishop and his followers took refuge in the church; those remaining outside were killed. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle gives the figure of one hundred dead. St Mary’s was put to the torch and one by one the Normans were forced to leave and were killed.
Walcher’s pleas were of little avail and with shouts of ’Short rede, good rede, slay ye the bishop’ the crowd hacked him to death. (Rede is an Anglo-Saxon word meaning plan or solution, advice or counsel.) His badly mutilated body was eventually recovered by monks from Jarrow and taken to Durham.
This small success encouraged a general uprising, including a brief siege of Durham Castle, but it was short lived and an army under William the Conqueror’s half-brother laid waste the area. Gateshead probably suffered badly as it was the scene of the crime.
The Church and its Parish
Records from the thirteenth century list a succession of Norman rectors, the first being Robert de Plessis in 1242. The church was beautified with four chantries in the middle ages. These probably lasted until the sixteenth century, when most such institutions disappeared. Beautiful stained glass windows from this era were however part of the church’s treasures which survived into the new Protestant regime.
In 1340, permission was given by the Bishop of Durham to build a sealed cell beside the church to house an anchoress (a female hermit who would probably have had teaching duties). In this building, which became know as the Anchorage, a school was eventually established. Through gifts and endowments, this school provided what was probably the only local access to education for Gateshead’s people. It finally closed its doors in 1870, by which time a new ’national’ school, also called St Mary’s, had been built close by.
St Mary’s also provided a site to care for the poor of the parish. Using funds raised from the local parish levy, a poor house was built and was in use in the seventeenth century in St Mary’s churchyard.
From the 16th century, St Mary’s was the base for the growth of a local type of administration--the select vestry of St Mary’s Parish Church, known as the four-and-twenty. As its name suggests, this select vestry comprised twenty- four of the leading inhabitants of Gateshead. They were self-co-opting; not elected by the parishioners and they effectively controlled those aspects of local government - for example the care of the poor and the maintenance of the highways - which government legislation had made a parish responsibility. The minute books of the four-and-twenty survive from 1626, when the body was already well established.
The four-and-twenty met at St Mary’s Church each Easter and appointed the various parish officers - churchwardens, overseers of the poor, overseers of the highways, and four parish constables. By 1658 the power of the four-and- twenty was so great within the town that it was necessary to obtain an Order in Council from Oliver Cromwell himself to have them removed from office when they disagreed with the Puritan minister at St Mary’s, Thomas Weld.
When new local councils were established in the 19th century, St. Mary’s again played its part. On 1 January 1836, George Hawks was elected Gateshead’s first Mayor. Early meetings of the new Borough Council were held in the Anchorage at St Mary’s Church, until a house in Oakwellgate was rented.
Until 1825 all marriages and burials in the borough had to be performed in St Mary’s. In the church grounds, the headstones show how varied the trades and professions in the town were in the 18th and 19th centuries: an inn keeper, a rope maker and a glass cutter lie close to the grave stone of William Hawks. Hawks was an important figure in the development of Gateshead’s industrial prosperity and one of several notable residents buried here.
Inside the church are some fascinating memorials, including one to Barbara Coulson who ’kept this church clean for 50 years’ and another to James Renforth, a local hero in Victorian times. Renforth, who was Champion Oarsman of England, died tragically young competing in a race in Canada.
The Church touched by War
St Mary’s and Gateshead itself came to national attention during the English Civil War. In August 1644 that the Battle of Windmill Hills took place nearby. After Marston Moor, a Royalist defeat, the Scots had time to try and take Newcastle, something they had been unable to accomplish earlier in the year.
Approaching from the south, the Earl of Callender sent a party of men to clear the way to Newcastle but they met strong resistance on the Windmill Hills where the Royalists made a stand. The advance party waited for the main army to arrive and they easily overran the defenders,’ chasing them down through Gateshead and over the bridge to Newcastle.
Cannon were set up on the south bank of the Tyne to bombard Newcastle, but these cannon in turn were shot at by the defenders of Newcastle, so Gateshead was probably damaged by both sides. Five batteries of cannon were set up on the Windmill Hills, an ideal site from which to destroy the defences and the defenders of Newcastle. The occupying forces destroyed the rectory, left St Mary’s in a deplorable state, stole cattle and generally disturbed the way of life of the area. A severe plague added to these troubles. The Battle of Windmill Hills was really a minor affair when compared with others in the Civil War, but it still wreaked havoc in Gateshead.
Fire! Fire!
More tragic, in terms of the terrible damage caused, was the Great Fire of Gateshead of 1854, which severely affected the church and its surroundings.
It began in the early morning of Friday 6 October, in a textile factory in Hillgate producing ’worsted’, below St. Mary’s. The alarm was raised by a policeman in Newcastle at about 12.30 a.m., and such fire fighting equipment as was available was brought into use. Despite this the fire raged virtually unchecked. There was a large, seven-storey warehouse very close to the fire used for storing sulphur, nitrate of soda and other combustible chemicals. The sulphur began to melt and although this warehouse had been designed to withstand fires, this conflagration proved too great and soon the warehouse and nearby buildings were blazing. Soldiers and volunteers from the gathering crowds were now helping the firemen.
There were two small explosions but people were preoccupied with the fire. Then at 3.10 a.m. a terrific explosion blew up the warehouse, sending flaming sulphur and timber over the river to Newcastle. It is recorded that some wood and stones had been blown over half a mile away. The noise was heard from as far away as Hartlepool, Hexham and Alnwick, gas lamps were blown out at Jarrow and the flames could be seen from Northallerton. The High Level and Tyne Bridges shook, no doubt to the great alarm of the crowds. St. Mary’s itself came under a rain of burning timbers and huge stones, piercing the church roof.
The fire now spread to Newcastle and help was sent for from Berwick, Sunderland and even Carlisle. Horse drawn fire engines were brought from all over the North East. The fire continued to spread in Gateshead, threatening the badly damaged St Mary’s Church. It was only brought under control by army sappers and miners blowing up buildings in its path. Spectators came to look at the damage, special trains ran on the following Sunday bringing 20,000 people into Newcastle and Gateshead.
Some time later in the year, Queen Victoria asked for her train to be stopped on the High Level Bridge so that she and her family could take a look themselves. More than fifty people were killed and 200 families were made homeless, many of them from the poorer classes who lived in the slums near the river. There were several stories concerning narrow escapes during the disaster. People were said to have sat up in bed at the sound of the explosion and seconds later a stone came through the roof landing amongst the pillows.
A fireman and his son were standing together at the scene of the disaster. The fireman was killed during the explosion but the son survived. The estimated damage was put at more than £500,000 but only one quarter of this was paid out in insurance cover.
St Mary’s was shattered and its graveyard badly damaged. There were proposals to demolish what was left and build an entirely new church. The congregation was so committed, however, that within a year the church was re-opened, having been almost entirely rebuilt at a cost of £1 ,610 12s. 4d.
Changes to the Church
We have little evidence of what the church must have been like in the middle ages, but a surviving 12th century arch in the porch shows that from earliest times its stonework was beautifully carved. St Mary’s has had a tower for centuries, but the present tower is relatively recent, built in 1738-40. Although damage caused by the Great Fire of Gateshead of 1854 meant that the twelfth-century chancel and stained glass windows were beyond repair, extensive restoration ensured the church boasted a beautiful interior again. New stained glass windows included one by William Wailes, a local artist with a national reputation.
The churchyard had ceased to be a burial ground around the time of the Great Fire, as new municipal burial grounds became available. After being badly disturbed by the fire, the grounds were further disturbed by the construction of the Tyne Bridge from 1925-28, which not only required the far corner of the churchyard to be demolished. Demolition also took place in the surrounding streets so that a new approach road could be built.
It was not only demolition of housing, with the resultant loss of local residents, that affected St. Mary’s. As the general demographics of Gateshead changed over the 20th century, the population in the area around St. Mary’s dwindled naturally as well, although it continued to be a favourite place of worship for local weddings, christenings and funerals.
A new life for an ancient building
St Mary’s still remained as the ’Mother Church’ of the town until a terrible fire in October 1979 finally heralded its end as a working parish church and the congregation moved to St Edmund’s Chapel on Gateshead High Street (another historic building that is well worth visiting). The fire destroyed most of the church’s beautiful carved furniture and stained glass, although much of the stonework was left intact. For a number of years the damaged building lay unused while various plans to convert it were suggested and rejected by the Diocese of Durham. In 1985 the building was handed over to the Civic Trust, who restored its fabric with the help of Gateshead Council and the former Tyne and Wear County Council.
It came back into use as a working building in November 1990 when Phillips Fine Art Auctioneers bought it and converted it into an auction house. The building was used by Gateshead Council from 2000 as a visitor centre.
St Mary’s is now the home of Gateshead Council’s first heritage centre - Gateshead Heritage @ St Mary’s. It is open Tues- Sun from 10.00am - 4.00pm. For further information contact heritage@gateshead.gov.uk or telephone 0191 433 4699
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