Published at 09:42, Friday, 12 March 2010

FOR a fairly impressive country mansion with a pedigree stretching back to the days of Elizabeth I, Eltringham House is actually a Humble abode...

Joseph Humble Esq. was living at prestigious Eltringham House throughout the 1880s, and maybe it was the same Joseph Humble still living there in 1914?

Records show that the family of Humble were any thing but “humble” in the village of Eltringham – north of Mickley and across the Tyne from Ovingham.

Eltringham House, which certainly had a long connection with the Humbles, was built around a 16th century bastle – fortified farmhouse – with walls more than four feet thick.

In about 1719 it was extended, and a new modern frontage was added in about 1790. It was most likely Joseph Humble who redesigned the interior of Eltringham House in the late 1800s.

When Jane Charlton married Riddle Robson Bell and moved to Eltringham House some time in the last century, they changed their name to Mr and Mrs Humble, so apparently inseparable was the name from the property.

Back in 1825, when E. Mackenzie was writing a sort of tourist-cum-traders’ guide to Northumberland, the whole of Eltringham was in the pocket of Thomas Humble of “Eltringham Hall”. Was this the name for the great house on Eltringham Farm estate? Last year – as luck would have it – an ancient metal milk churn marked with the name “T. Humble. Eltringham Farm” was offered for sale on eBay.

Thos. Humble of Eltringham was famed for hunting as well as farming. This late Georgian gentleman was for decades the master of a “trencher-fed” pack of hounds – which meant that he would have roped almost every household in the village into sharing the care of the Eltringham Pack.

As local squires, the Humbles ticked off fishing as well as hunting (and presumably shooting). For more than a century the family owned the nearby stretch of the Tyne. It was only sold in 2007 after a period of being leased to the Newcastle Angling Club.

The salmon-fishing potential of the Tyne was a source of lucrative work in Eltringham in 1855, when a fishery offered plenty of jobs to those not employed in Anthony and Thomas Humble’s brick manufactury, or the Humble coalmine.

The first pit of what became Mickley Colliery was sunk in 1840 by the firm of Clark, Anderson and that man Humble, a mile or so south of Eltringham House.

Eltringham Colliery to the east was opened in 1884 and a flourishing fireclay works sprang up in support of the mine. The Eltringham Sanitary Pipe and Brick-Works operated for nearly a century, churning out salt-glazed pottery, pipes and vessels from its pairs of circular kilns on the edge of Coldkettle Dene.

All these local jobs meant Eltringham was a much more bustling community in the 19th century than it is today. It’s not too dramatic to say the village was seized by a housing boom. So many new cottages were being built for miners, brickworkers and potters that New Eltringham was created alongside Old Eltringham.

And the daily influx of workers needed efficient commuter links. Step forward Thomas Cook – not the famous travel agent but Eltringham’s ferryman and landlord.

Bulmer’s Trade Directory for 1886 has a Boat House Inn at Eltringham run by ferryman and victualler Thomas Cook, while Noble Crisp was overman at Eltringham Colliery, the team of Young, Bainbridge, Dance and Gilchrist ran Eltringham Coal Co. and Will Harriman was boss at the Eltringham Brickworks.

It’s not clear whether the Boat House Inn was the same place as the Hare and Hounds Inn, which is marked on the riverside between Eltringham House and the ferry from at least 1856, when it was managed by Jane and John Vickers.

The Vickers might have known Matthew Johnson, a local celebrity who died in Eltringham in 1835. Matthew reached the ripe age of 91 but he was almost cut off in his prime in 1771, when his whole family was swept away in the Great Tyne Flood.

Matthew, his brother John the Ovingham boatman, and eight other members of their household were trapped in the boathouse that rainy November day when the mighty Tyne reached its most furious level ever, ripping away all Tynedale’s bridges but one, pulverising houses, mills, boats, livestock and people.

Of all the Johnsons, only Matthew and John survived when the torrent threw them up into a tree, and Matthew at least had more than 60 years of dining out on the tale of their escape.

The Tyne in tranquillity was recorded by another local son whose fame lasted much longer than river-riding Johnson. Engraver Thomas Bewick was born at Cherryburn, not far from Eltringham House, in 1753.

As well as his illustrations for A General History of Quadrupeds and History of British Birds Bewick made an engraving of the Eltringham ferry which ran so close to his home.

He gave his beautiful birthplace the credit for inspiring his artistic career, saying that as a child the only paintings he knew were the pub signs of the Black Bull at Ovingham, the White Horse, the Salmon, and his local the Hare and Hounds at Eltringham.

Mickley Pit closed in 1934 and Eltringham Pit followed soon after the Second World War. The ferry stopped running and the inn was demolished nearly 50 years ago. “Humble” days indeed for Eltringham, which had a population of more than 450 busy workers in its 1880s heyday, and is now a sleepy handful of houses.

l Eltringham House, Mickley, is for sale through Sanderson Young, of Gosforth.

Published by http://www.hexhamcourant.co.uk