Charles Armstrong, born about 1800 at Heddon on the Wall in Northumberland, worked as a Land Steward on various estates in County Durham. At some time around 1860 he established his family home and a business as a Land Agent in Hawthorn Terrace, Elswick, Newcastle upon Tyne. The house would be the family’s home for about 100 years, but Charles’ tenure was short; in 1868 he died and the business was continued by his two youngest sons, Thomas John Armstrong, then only 18 and Robert Lamb Armstrong, then 16. Later practising under the name of T. & R. Armstrong, they worked for a number of large local land owners as well as taking commissions in County Durham, Cumberland and farther afield. Robert died in 1889 but Thomas continued, perhaps into his seventies.
It seems as if Thomas never threw anything away; as papers became redundant he deposited them in the attic or a disused coach house, the work of 50 to 60 years resulting in a vast accumulation of documents, accounts, maps and plans as well as personal papers. The collection also includes a large quantity of the business papers of Robert Nicholson (1808-1855) and his half-nephew John Furness Tone (1822-1881), Civil Engineers, of Newcastle upon Tyne. Their consulting practice was active from about 1830 to about 1880, specialising mainly in railways but also undertaking various dock, harbour and water works. After Nicholson’s death, the practice was continued by John Tone. For the next 14 or so years he maintained an astonishing workload. His railway works extended to Somerset and Devon but here he became involved in projects with shaky finance and poor management who could or would not pay his fees. In 1869 he was declared bankrupt and, although discharged in a few months, this seems to have heralded a general decline in his activities. In 1879 he was declared bankrupt again and he died in 1881, after a long illness and in reduced circumstances.
How and why these papers were taken over by Thomas Armstrong remains a mystery. No evidence has been found to show that Thomas Armstrong ever worked professionally with John Tone, although he may have done so. The only proven link is that they were both Freemasons.
It appears that after Thomas’ death in 1927, all the papers were left undisturbed, although it is possible that the practice was continued by Thomas’ son Robert. After Thomas’s widow Annie died in 1961, her three children, all unmarried and still living in the Elswick house, offered the collection to Newcastle City and the bulk of it was transferred in 1963 and 1964, after which the family moved to Hexham. In 1966 the collection was offered to and accepted by the Northumberland Archives and was then described as “…rather scattered, about 5 tin trunks (mostly plans) at the Old Town Hall and a large pile of volumes and some more tin trunks at Saville Place”. Later it was described as being “an extremely large collection, in an extremely dirty condition and a very confused state.” These assessments have been confirmed by recent work; time has not been kind to the archive. Some of the documents have been damaged by water, some are too fragile to unwrap or unroll, ‘bookworms” have bored through bound volumes and some boxes contain mouse droppings. Soot or coal dust coats many items.
Some cataloguing was done in the 1970s but some general sorting and listing was carried out in 1981 and a paper catalogue from this era on is available at Northumberland Archives and is on-line at www.discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk Recently all of the Nicholson-Tone papers have been re-catalogued in much more detail and work is now in progress on some large uncatalogued collections of maps and plans which include much Ordnance Survey material as well as Parliamentary Plans for various public works and engineering drawings. In spite of the poor condition of many items, the collection as whole is a valuable archive of the work of two nineteenth century professional practices in Newcastle.
