May 2005

Parish History Episode 49 The River Wear

The Tyne and the Tees may mark the Northern and Southern borders of County Durham, but the Wear is unquestionably the greatest river within the county, running swiftly South-Eastwards from Wearhead to Bishop Auckland, as if it wished to join the Tees, and then turning abruptly North, through Durham and Chester-le-Street, as if it intended to join the Tyne, but then veering off North-Eastwards, to reach the sea at Sunderland. It bears an ancient name, perhaps pre-Celtic, and is first met in written form in Ptolemy's map (of the Second Century A.D.), as the Vedra, with two towns, Concangis (Chester-le-Street) and Vinovia (Binchester), along its central (Northward-flowing) stretch. While through much of its course the Wear runs down deep valleys, probably scooped out by glaciers during the Ice Ages, it finally runs out to sea through what was once flat, marshy country, with shifting channels, an outflow which made it unattractive to shipping. Unlike the Tinea, the Tyne, the Vedra was of little importance to the Romans.

Roman artefacts have been found in and around Sunderland, the town that grew up on the flat land at the mouth of the river, to the South of the main channel, so there probably was some Roman settlement there, perhaps entirely obliterated by later changes of the river course. But then, in later years, as recorded in earlier articles in this series, an important Anglian monastery was established at Monkwearmouth, on the north bank of the river mouth, in the Seventh Century, while a fishing village, known as Sunderland, grew up on the south bank, sundered by water from Monkwearmouth. Then, in the Twelfth Century, Bishop Puiset granted Sunderland, by then apparently quite a prosperous fishing town, a charter, making it a borough, with some rights of self-government.

The fishing port continued to be known as Sunderland, though the Charter officially described it as Wearmouth. A mile or two inland stood a large agricultural village, Bishopwearmouth (the Bishop of Durham being the patron of the parish church), while another village, Monkwearmouth, still stood, clustered around a monastery and an ancient church, on the opposite bank of the river.

None of these places was of any but local importance, while Durham, some thirty or so miles up a winding river (but the distance by road was only half as much, with the taverns of Houghton-le-Spring conveniently situated half way between Sunderland and Durham) flourished as the ecclesiastical and administrative capital of North-Eastern England. As in Roman times, commerce and industry flourished along the lower Tyne, with Newcastle coming to overtake Durham as the most populous town in the region. Both Durham and Newcastle were walled cities, as also was Hartlepool, a port of some importance, fifteen or so miles South of Sunderland: but no fortifications existed to protect the villages at the mouth of the Wear (though there was a private castle at Hylton, a few miles up-river).

At the start of the Fourteenth Century, Sunderland still seems to have been nothing more than a small fishing town. But in 1346, we learn that a man by the name of John Menville was building boats at a hamlet called Hendon, just to the South of Sunderland. There may then, at that time, have been a branch of the Wear coming out to the sea at Hendon, but the place is well South of the main channel of the river, and it seems more likely that Menville was building his boats on the beach, and launching them directly into the sea. They would almost certainly be small boats: fishing boats, probably, built to serve the local fishing community.

Three years later, the whole area was smitten with the Black Death. We do not know what happened to Menville's business, but probably many of the shipwrights died, and demand would also have fallen off, with many fishermen dead of the Plague, and as many boats moored at the quays as were there before the Plague struck.. However, it is probable that boat-building at Hendon beach eventually recovered. But it would still be a small-scale enterprise, catering primarily for the needs of the neighbouring fishing town, in the same way as local net-makers and sail-makers catered for local demand.

While life by the Wear seemed to flow on placidly as ever, the Tyne, as we have seen, was being transformed in importance during the second half of the Fourteenth Century, with strings of ponies, each pony laden with panniers of coal, trotting down to the waterside, and with drift-mines cut straight into the river banks; with sea-going ships carrying the coal away to the Thames and to foreign lands; and with great slipways on which those ships were built and from which they were launched; and the towns of Newcastle, Gateshead, Wallsend, Hebburn, Jarrow, and North and South Shields would be a network of narrow streets, from which the trades
which supplied equipment for mining and for shipping would be carried out. Those streets were also full of runaway serfs, male and female, who had discovered that, however unhealthy the towns might be, "town air made you free", that employers welcomed labourers willing to work hard, and that, unlike the cities which had risen to prominence in earlier centuries, there were few guilds laying down the conditions on which trade could be carried out.

In contrast to the Tyne, the Wear flowed down to the sea, through a
countryside which had seen relatively little change in recent centuries.

It flowed down from gorse-covered moorlands, past the bishop's castle at Auckland and his cathedral at Durham, past the small town of Chester-le-Street, and then along a gorge, with the parishes of Washington and Houghton-le-Spring on either bank, to emerge into the sea at a point between an ancient monastery and a small, bustling fishing town.

The countryside, once the moors of Weardale were left behind, was largely agricultural, but, as we have seen in recent articles in this series, coal was known to exist in many areas, and small-scale pits and drifts supplied fuel for the bishop's castle and cathedral, for the private castles at Raby, Lumley and Hylton, and for the priories at Durham, Finchale and Monkwearmouth. But there seems, at mid-century and later, to have been no export trade of coal from the mouth of the Wear.

In 1373 and 1374, Bishop Hatfield, perhaps foreseeing the potential of the coalfields along the length of the River Wear, arranged for numbers of male serfs, formerly employed in agriculture, to be compelled to serve in the coal mines, and this perhaps can be seen as the beginnings of industrialisation in this region, but a more important development, a few years later, was the opening, at Sunderland, by the mouth of the river, of a shipyard, a dock where large sea-going ships could be built, with slipways from which they could be launched into the river, by a man called Richard de Heworth.

I know nothing else about this man. His name sounds aristocratic, of Norman-French origin, but his family is unknown to me. He may not have been Norman at all, but he may have come from the village of Heworth, where perhaps his family may have been serfs who had run away to Gateshead, and lost themselves amongst its collieries and shipyards. Richard had obviously prospered, and then, it would seem, he had moved some fifteen or so miles away, to set up in business at Sunderland.

Here, in the 1380's, he began to build ships: not just fishing boats, but colliers to carry coals to London, or wherever they might be required; and not only sea-going colliers, but also shallow-draughted keel-boats which could move up the Wear, at least at high tide, as far as Fatfield Ferry, and perhaps a bit further. Now at last the coal industry began to develop alongside the upper river.

Coal workings began to be exploited on both banks of the Wear, at North Biddick and Fatfield within Washington parish, and at Cox Green and Penshaw within Houghton parish.

At Sunderland the keel-boats transferred their cargoes, through the labour of coal-heavers, and with the help of pulleys, to sea-going colliers which carried them on to their destination. The first contract we know of, pertaining to the export of coal from the Wear, is dated 1396, and is for the supply of Whitby Abbey, on the Yorkshire coast, with coals from Sunderland.

In later centuries, the coalfields developed spectacularly. Waggonways were built, to carry the coal from the pit-head down to the Wear at Fatfield. Later on, steam engines hauled trains of wagons directly to the staithes at the mouth of the river, or to Seaham Harbour.

Finally, the coal was raised to bank at pits sunk close to the docks at Sunderland or Seaham, and most of the transportation took place underground.

The shipyards also developed, equally spectacularly. Collier brigs, built for use on relatively short sea passages, such as that from the Tyne to the Thames, were for centuries the mainstay of the yards. But in the Nineteenth Century ocean-going clippers and schooners, often used on the long passage to Australia and New Zealand, became a speciality.

The most famous of these ships was the "Torrens", built in 1875, which for a while was famous as the fastest ship on the London-Melbourne passage, carrying emigrants outward, and wool homeward: in just over two months, in each direction. The novelist Joseph Conrad served on her as First Mate.

But the building of sailing ships was coming to an end in 1875. The slipways along the Wear were soon to be crowded with the hulls of steamships under construction, ships destined to sail on all the oceans of the world. But the River Wear was not wide enough to take really big ships, and the great Cunarders and other ocean liners were built mostly at Glasgow or Belfast or Birkenhead, while the Tyne tended to specialise in large warships.

Nevertheless, the Wear remained, for a century after 1875, one of Britain's greatest ship-building rivers. From Pallion and Southwick to the sea, both banks of the Wear were lined with shipyards - Thompson's, Crown's, Austin's, Pickersgill's, Short's, Laing's, Doxford's, Bartram's - which built the ships which, through two great wars, kept open, despite heavy losses to enemy submarines, the sea-lanes to North America. The yards were, like the ships, directly targeted by the enemy: the occasional zeppelin raid in the first war, much more intensive bombing during the second war.

In 1977 Britain's shipyards were nationalised by the Callaghan government, the last such act of nationalisation to be carried out by Labour administrations (well, it seems unlikely that the Blair government will return to that policy). The Wear yards proved the most profitable of all those owned by the nation, and when Callaghan's successor, Thatcher, who came to power in 1979, began a policy of denationalisation, selling off the shipyards and much else, it was assumed that the Wear yards would easily find buyers.

But the prospective buyers tended to be foreign ship-owners, and they were attracted more towards yards on the Tyne, the Clyde, the Laggan, or the Mersey, which had built great ships more recently than 1875. In the end, it was realised that the Wear yards were unlikely to find purchasers.

For two long years, throughout 1987 and 1988, political life on Wearside was dominated by plans to "Save the Yards". These plans were doomed to failure, just as the preceding fight, in 1984 and 1985, to save the coal-mines, had also failed. In 1987, I watched the launch of the "Challenger", the last major ship to go down a slipway into the River Wear. M.P's, the City Council, Trade Unions, were all fighting hard to keep alive the shipyards, begun in a different age by Richard de Heworth, but all the plans failed. Towards the end of 1988, after two years of political wrangling, the gates were closed at every shipyard along the Wear.

For six hundred years they flourished.

In six hundred days, they died.

Dick Toy

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