Last updated at 14:39, Monday, 30 November 2009

THERE is no shortage of candidates for possible past residents of The Old Smithy in Hexham’s Eastgate.

Rugged past: The Old Smithy, where horses once queued to be shoed.

The surname ‘Smith’ is still the most common in Britain, reflecting the number of smiths – or blacksmiths – once needed to satisfy our rapacious appetite for fire irons, horseshoes and door hinges.

Like most other communities, Hexham once teemed with smiths and farriers. And Eastgate was home to a fair proportion of them, although they probably knew the road as Skinner’s Burn after the small watercourse running alongside, or as Bone Street.

Today, a house hunter would look at The Old Smithy at number 18 Eastgate and see an attractively rugged, late Georgian, three-storey townhouse, but a century or two ago this property was working hard for its living and its rough-hewn walls were crusted with the grime of honest toil.

In 1826, when Edinburgh surveyor John Wood visited Hexham to make the first detailed map of the town, the mall we know as Fore Street was called Coastley Row. Hexham’s Ropery – which still exists in a sad state behind the bus station – was in its hemp-weaving prime, and Eastgate was called Bone Street.

If Mr Wood had passed along Bone Street in 1826 he might have spotted blacksmiths John Pattison and Matthew Ward hard at work. Both men are known to have run smithies in the street now called Eastgate, and either or both could have lived at The Old Smithy, which is thought to have been built around the turn of the 19th century.

Other businesses based near The Old Smithy, in records from the 1820s, included a glovemaker – so not all the leatherworkers were based across the town in Gilesgate – and William Hammel, Hexham’s much-needed perfumier.

A decade later the clerks from Pigots Directory noted that Matthew Ward was still forging away, his neighbouring fellow craftsman was William Turnbull, and Bone Street had become Skinners Burn – not yet Eastgate.

The Skinners Burn, which now runs fast and clear in a culvert somewhere beneath The Old Smithy on its path to the River Tyne, was among Hexham’s then gruesome watercourses given a total upgrade in the middle of the 19th century. The Local Board of Health had completed the town’s first modern drainage system by 1866.

But posh plumbing was in the distant future for the likes of Ward and Turnbull in 1834. These Skinners Burn smiths had plenty of competition for their horseshoes and hinges, just around the corner. The nearby Cattle Market had its own smithy run by Thomas Stokoe, and there was yet another forge in Priestpopple, run by Thomas Routledge.

By 1890, John Joseph Amos had a forge at the top of Eastgate which was advertised by a large painted sign: “J.J. Amos, Horse Shoer and General Smith” fastened to the rough-rendered walls of his thatched cottage. It’s likely that Amos’s forge was the main rival for The Old Smithy, which was 100 yards south along Eastgate.

Amos was a true entrepreneur in his small way. As well as his Eastgate forge, he had branched out to run a yard in Priestpopple, building small carts and carriages.

A blacksmith called Amos worked the forge at Heddon – in what is now the Swan Inn – well into the second half of the 20th century. Could Heddon’s Amos be a descendant of the Victorian smith in Eastgate? Perhaps the family moved to Heddon when, in 1896, Amos’s Eastgate business was taken over by Joe Beeby?

But the Wards were still welded to their old Eastgate anvil. In fact, when master smith John Ward died around 1896, his wife Jane took over to keep the business in the family, though no doubt like Dorcas Lane, the postmistress in Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford, Widow Ward would have found some local beefcake to wield the hammer at her forge.

When the Great War began in 1914 Eastgate had a blacksmith called Henry Oxley, and it’s possible that he lived at The Old Smithy. Oxley had at least one neighbour with a rare and slightly eccentric occupation. Charles Boyd of Eastgate was a maker of artificial teeth.

It’s many years since The Old Smithy echoed to the clang and hiss of a blacksmith at work, but when the house was massively revamped a few years ago, there were still local people who could remember when it housed two forges at once, and horses queued for shoeing on the road outside, which used to be at a lower level allowing headroom for the nags to walk straight into the smithy.

Blacksmiths have long been the stuff of legend. Maybe the names of Eastgate’s smiths have not rung down the centuries, but a couple of their local guild fellows made more of a dent in history.

In the 1820s when John Pattison and Matthew Ward were at work in Hexham, they would have heard of fellow Northumberland blacksmith William Carr, who had long held the title of England’s Strongest Man.

Carr was born in 1756 near Tynemouth, and when he joined his father in the family forge at 17 he was over 6ft 3ins tall and his party trick was lifting a weight heavier than five or six grown men.

In his prime, Carr worked at the early steam railway yards at Hartley, Plessey and Bedlington, where he regularly heaved coal wagons on to the rails with a ripple of his mighty shoulders.

Once Carr went to the aid of five sailors struggling with a half-tonne anchor. He lifted it alone and carried it to his father’s forge.

But one of Carr’s most mythical feats involved the strength of his head rather than his arms. He was famed for downing 84 glasses of spirits during a business trip to South Shields, and returning to his home at Blyth stone-cold sober. Perhaps it was the sea air?

Another North-East blacksmith with a powerful head – though not for alcohol – was Blythe Hurst of Winlaton, Co. Durham.

After a day toiling over a hot anvil, Hurst’s idea of refreshment was a large portion of Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Arabic, washed down with French and Sanscrit.

Hurst wrote a pamphlet, called Christianity no Priestcraft which came to the attention of the Bishop of Durham. For Hurst, it was like winning a mid-Victorian X Factor. The bishop whisked the frustrated scholar away from his life of grime and into the groves of academia, where Hurst did so well that by 1842 he had swapped blacksmithing to become curate of Garrigill near Alston.

Not that there is anything wrong with being a simple blacksmith, as the long list of The Old Smithy residents would tell you.

l The Old Smithy, Eastgate, is for sale via Foster Maddison of Priestpopple, Hexham.

First published at 09:50, Friday, 16 October 2009
Published by http://www.hexhamcourant.co.uk