Dr Greg Finch is a historian based near Hexham who has written on various early modern North-East of England topics. He is currently preparing a book on the rise of the Blackett family in seventeenth and early eighteenth century Newcastle for publication later this year.

Amongst the papers of the Allgood estate in the Northumberland Archives is a fragile and unexplained listing of over 600 households giving, for each of them, the name of the head of household, the number of men, number of women and number of children under the age of sixteen (ZAL 84/16). Such counts are rare for this period, certainly in Northumberland. When first catalogued in 1960 it was described only as ‘Census? Nunwick [the Allgood country seat at Simonburn on the North Tyne]?’ More recently a typed transcript of the document by Sue Wood, Head of Archives, also filed with the Allgood catalogue, described it as ‘Unidentified census, probably Hexham, n[o] d[ate] c.1740.’ As I live near Hexham I’ve been exploring this further in the hope of confirming its identification and date.

As far as the location is concerned, many of the names given of heads of households are found elsewhere as residents of Hexham. 70 of the 620 heads of households listed also appear as Hexham residents who voted in the 1748 Parliamentary by-election, as shown in The Northumberland Poll Book… 1747-8, 1774, 1826, (1826). Other names appear in the parish registers (NRO EP/184) and these also help to narrow the range of dates within which the census must have been drawn up.

Mary Bearpark, the twelve-year-old daughter of William Bearpark, was buried at Hexham in May 1740. William’s household can be found in the census, but it contained no children under the age of sixteen, so it seems almost certain that the document was drawn up after May 1740.

Only two months later, the burial of ‘Mr. Skurfield, minister of the meeting house’ was entered in the register, which can perhaps be linked to the empty household of ‘Mr Scofield’ given in the census. This might therefore move the earliest date of the document to July 1740. Since the house was shown as unoccupied, his death might have occurred recently.

As far as the latest date is concerned, the family of Thomas Lambert is shown headed by him in the census, but he was buried in December 1741. So the document was probably compiled between the summer of 1740 and the end of 1741, and perhaps nearer the start of that period than its end.

Why was it drawn up? A strong clue lies in the separation of counts of children under the age of sixteen from adult men and women. Sixteen was the usual age of communion in the Church of England at the time. The number of potential and actual communicants was a question commonly asked of parish clerics by their ecclesiastical hierarchy every three years. One such visitation covered the entire Archbishopric of York in 1743, including Hexham, so it is possible that the previous visitation took place in 1740. It therefore seems likely that the census was taken for church purposes, but this does not explain why it should have ended up in the Allgood archives rather than those of the parish.

However, different branches of the Allgood family had often occupied civic offices in Hexham from the seventeenth century, and Thomas Allgood was bailiff of Hexham manor between 1736 and 1741. This was a role closely linked in practice to that of the parish vestry, the ‘Four and Twenty’, which set and collected the town rates and was therefore familiar with drawing up lists of local households. The census might have been taken primarily for church purposes but it may also have been of wider use in support of later rate assessments.

What of its coverage? Until 1764 Hexham parish included rural Hexhamshire to the south of the town, so if the listing was drawn up to support a visitation return the whole parish might have been included. Fortunately we can compare the total number of households (621) with those declared by the parish curate, William Graham, in his reply to Archbishop Herring’s visitation queries of 1743 (775). We know that the latter figure includes rural Hexhamshire. The difference of 154 households is a feasible total for ‘the Shire’ in comparison to the total of 150 given for it in the 1673/4 Hearth Tax assessment and the 164 enumerated in the 1821 census. So the 1740 listing covers Hexham town only.

The census is incomplete, for some of the right hand side of the manuscript has been nibbled by rodents or otherwise lost. [Before it came into the archives! Ed.] This means that while the counts of males and females over the age of sixteen are all still present, the number of children is missing for 44 of the 621 households (7%). The best that can be done here is to estimate the number of missing children based on the ratio of children to adults in the other households. This adds 50-60 children to the total. Hexham’s population was about 2,550 in 1740. 784 adult men were counted, and 1,007 women. While this might seem quite imbalanced, it was actually reasonably common in many early modern English towns.

The largest household was Sir Edward Blackett’s at Hexham Abbey, with 29 in total. Seventeen were family members, Sir Edward and his wife Mary (previously Roberts), her son Nicholas, his wife, and their children, all of whom are listed in a Roberts family tree given in Hinds’ Volume 3 of the History of Northumberland (1896, p.297). The remaining twelve were presumably servants. Other prominent local residents’ households included the seventeen in Lancelot Allgood’s substantial house overlooking the Market Place, ten at the Reverend Andrewes in Hexham House and nine at John Aynsley’s home in Fore Street. At the other end of the scale were 32 houses with only a single occupant, (of the households for which records are complete), 25 of them women. The town’s workhouse apparently contained just five male occupants. On average there were 4.1 people per household, confirming Hexham as a town made up mostly of small nuclear families.

A date of 1740-1 for this census places it just about half way between two other two dates for which Hexham’s population can be estimated – 1673/4, from a Hearth Tax assessment, and the first national census of 1801. A longer article on what this tells us about the town’s growth will appear in the 2021 issue of the Hexham Historian journal due to be published by Hexham Local History Society in the autumn.

The beauty of listening to oral histories is sometimes you don’t get what you are expecting.  I was given the recordings of Mr. William Hall, retired surveyor and engineer for Bedlingtonshire Urban District Council to transcribe.  Given Mr. Hall’s former occupation I was expecting information about local mines, possibly the railways and something about the Council too.  What I did not expect was to learn about the early days of the Scouting movement in the region. 

It was 1908 that he read ‘Scouting for Boys’ by Robert Baden-Powell (founder of the Scouts movement, who Mr. Hall refers to as BP throughout the recordings).  He had bought a copy for a shilling on the way home from school one day.  Within a week, William and his friends had assembled themselves into a troop.  The uniform included blue short-shorts, green jerseys, waistcoats insulated with corrugated card to keep warm even in the winter and scarfs that he made with the help of his grandmother, selling them for tuppence.  They would parade at 8 am and march off towards Hartford at 8.30.  This was before there was any formal organisation, having read the book was sufficient.  Each member read the book that Mr. Hall had bought; extracts were shared amongst troop members. 

The 1^st Bedlington troop had 7 members and they called themselves the ‘wolf patrol’, within a month there was a 2^nd troop which became the ‘peewit patrol’.  A junior patrol, ‘the otters’, was also created for those aged about 10, usually those with an older brother who was already a member.  Other troops started up soon after in Ashington, Nedderton village, Blyth and later Morpeth. 

By 1910, with a growing number of troops a meeting with local citizens was held to discuss the aims of Scouting.  This was the beginnings of a formal movement in the County; a Local Association was formed and Mr. Hall was appointed organising secretary of what was known as the Tynemouth Rural District.  Mr. Hall talks proudly of speaking with BP when he inspected troops on Newcastle’s Town Moor in 1916 and discovering that he had been a scout longer than the Newcastle members.  By the time they met again, whilst Mr. Hall was attending the 1931 international jamboree in Kandersteg, Switzerland, BP recognised him and referred to him as “the old hand”!.  

Amongst the collection of 4,500 printer proofs from William Davison’s Printing Shop in Alnwick , there are four posters each offering a reward for the recovery of the body from the Pegasus shipwreck which happened off the coast of Holy Island on 20th July 1843.

The Pegasus was a large wooden paddle steamer, the first boat of the newly created Hull and Leith Shipping Company, the vessel was to run a weekly passenger and cargo service between the two ports. It was launched from Glasgow and after completing sea trials had its first voyage, Leith to Hull in February 1836, with the return trip being completed days later. Between 1836 and 1841 the Pegasus was involved in a number of incidents hitting rocks at sea and being run ashore, so much so that it began to develop a reputation as a ‘problem ship’. In January 1843 the ship was taken out of service for an overhaul with the potential of being sold. When it did not sell, it was returned to service in the spring of the same year. Its last voyage left Leith on Wednesday 19th July 1843 at 5.40 pm. Aboard were 15 crew, 18 passengers and 23 cabin passengers. At 12.20 am the following morning it hit Goldstone Rock near Holy Island. At 5am Pegasus’ sister ship the Martello came across the scene of unimaginable devastation; a ship wrecked, bodies and little evidence of any survivors. Local fishermen also came out to assist with the rescue, however there were only six survivors, two of whom were passengers.

The four reward posters represent the loss of a loved one in tragic circumstances; three adults and two children. What do we know about the individuals mentioned in these posters? Unfortunately, there are no miraculous happy endings to report.

Miss Sarah Briggs is mentioned in the image attached. Her brother Mr. Briggs, who offered the reward, travelled to Holy Island and stayed at Bamburgh for 8-days. Her workbox, which contained items of a sewing kit was found and identified.

Mrs. C.O. Edington, aged 28 described as being 5 foot 5, a small figure with long thick auburn hair was sought by her husband. He too travelled to Holy Island and stayed for a short time on Bamburgh. He identified and claimed a satin cloak lined with fur as being part of her belongings.

Mr. James Richard Elliott, aged 38 was described as dark complexion, bushy black whiskers, an aquiline nose and a missing tooth. He was a solicitor with the firm Messrs. Elliott and Stott in Rochdale, Lancashire. He had been visiting his brother Captain Elliott in Dundee and was making the return journey with his nephew, the Captain’s eldest child.

It is the missing children that we know the most about. Master Field Flowers, aged 13 with fair hair and projecting upper teeth and his younger sister Miss Fanny Maria Flowers, aged 11 with fair hair, regular white teeth and ‘hands large for a child’. The 1841 census shows them living in Tealby, Market Rasen, Lincolnshire with their parents Mr. Field Flowers, aged 36, a clergyman and Frances Flowers, aged 35, younger sister Mary aged 3 and two female domestic servants. Master Flowers’ body was picked up by the crew of a French boat, ‘Lloyd’s weekly Newspaper’ reported that they “nobly refused to accept the award of £3 offered by his uncle until they were earnestly pressed to do so” explaining that “the master of the French boat stated that he had only performed an act of humanity”. Field Flowers was buried in the churchyard at St Mary the Virgin, Holy Island on 12th August 1843. Others from the shipwreck are buried there too. It would appear that the body of his sister, like the other victims of the tragedy mentioned in the reward posters, was never found. Her French teacher wrote a poem which originally appeared in a French journal and was published in French in the ‘Caledonian Mercury’ on 4th September 1843 lamenting her loss. Belongings of Miss J.M. Flower, a possible travel companion, including a handkerchief, frock and mits were later identified. The 1851 Census shows that their parents went on to have more children, two were named after the elder siblings they never met, William Field born c. 1844 and Elizabeth Fanny Maria born c. 1847.

If you are interested in learning more about the subject why not look at the Exhibitions section of the Northumberland Archives website which has exhibitions relating to both maritime history and Davison’s print shop. A more detailed history of the Pegasus paddle steamer can be found on the website www.islandshirearchives.org.uk. The reward posters referenced are ZMD 167/22/118; ZMD 167/22/119; ZMD 167/22/120; ZMD 167/22/138.