Josiah Wheatley

History…..not that of kings and queens and battles and castles, but the every day history of every day Northumbrian folk seems to follow you round when you work in the Archives. I love it! You never feel lonely when you are treading in the shoes of those that have gone before. Last Saturday, Mr Josiah Wheatley of Bath Terrace, Blyth, born 1889 came for a walk with me around Newbiggin-by-the-Sea . We didn’t stop for coffee, all the cafés being closed of course, but we had a little mooch around the Church Point end and he showed me a thing or two.

I have been transcribing an audio recording of Mr Wheatley from 1971. He was born in Cambois, Northumberland and at the time of recording, was a grand old gentleman of 82 years of age. His father had worked the rope ferry at the mouth of the River Wansbeck, connecting Cambois to North Seaton in the days when the nearest bridge was 3 miles up river at Sheepwash. Mr Wheatley spent his entire life on or near the sea, first helping his dad on the rope ferry, then as crew and coxswain on the Cambois and Blyth lifeboats and finally as a ferryman guiding and tying up the ships that came in and out of a busy Blyth Harbour.

His tales of times long gone, of ship sails billowing in the wind, of coal keels leaving the Wansbeck and Blyth and of lifeboat crews rowing out into the fog are a truly delightful glimpse into our county’s relationship with the sea. Mr Wheatley had the sea in his veins and an unfathomable sea-dog accent to go with it. How best to get you close to his accent? Try imagining a good old pirate ‘ouh arrh Jim Lad’ with a heavy Northumbrian rolling brogue. Add in a generous sprinkling of mysterious nautical terms and you’ll start to see why I’ve been stuck transcribing this tape since well before Christmas.

One section that really perplexed me was Mr Wheatley’s timeline of three sailing ships wrecked in Newbiggin Bay around the year 1900. Mr Wheatley says, ‘there was a barque, The Haabet , a schooner, The Freeman’ and a brig, The F??????!!’. ‘Excuse me’ says I…’tricky one that Mr Wheatley’….so I listened again…and again….and again. First time I heard ‘The Ferric’, second time it sounded like ‘The Freak’. With nothing in the online records to helped me place this mysterious ship’s name, I called my son to listen. The ‘Faverham’ says he…’definitely The Faverham”. And then my husband. ‘The Berwick’, equally definite. And then my daughter Molly who confidentially declared the ship to be named ‘The Terry…or maybe The Fallon’. So despite knowing this ship had a German Captain with a big ginger beard, her mumbled name remained unsolved. I was ready to give it up and hope that better ears than mine would one day fill in the blank, but Mr Wheatley wasn’t quite finished with me yet.

Most weekends involve a family walk along the prom at Newbiggin and last weekend, we had to detour slightly around the Lifeboat House due to a cordoned off area on the beach. We wouldn’t normally walk up around that way, but I think Mr Wheatley was nudging me as there on the wall to the side of the old building, where they display the names of ships lost in the Bay, was my mystery!

Wrecked in 1900….’The Frederick’.

And I knew she was Mr Wheatley’s ship straight away. He’d been there at that call out. She was one of the three sailing ships that floundered in Newbiggin Bay in those stormy years at the turn of the last century, remembered by Mr Wheatley as the reason why Cambois got a new life-boat. From Bremenhaven, Germany she went ashore off North Blyth in a gale on the 22nd March 1900 and she was assisted by the Cambois Volunteer Watch.

I can add that story now. One of the men saved that wild and treacherous night had a big ginger beard!