This blog was written by Emily Rowe, a PHD student engaged on the ‘Northern Bridge – Carr-Ellison Project’. The aim of the project is to explore the records and histories of international trade and maritime transnational links between north-east England and the wider world through the records of Cotesworth, Carr and Ellison families held at Northumberland Archives and Tyne & Wear Archives.

“…a Merchant has the most anxious time which can never be lessened while he thinks it worth following…[I] often had the Mortification of seeing the very best concerted plans Overturned by a Variety of Untoward Accidents”

– Ralph Carr

Ralph Carr (1711-1806) was a successful businessman in eighteenth-century Newcastle-upon-Tyne. He was a merchant adventurer, exporting local resources such as corn and coal, and dealing with commodities from iron and timber to wine and whale-oil. He had contacts all over Northern Europe, with his mercantile activities stretching from Amsterdam to St Petersburg. Around 1750, Ralph Carr extended his reach even further as he began to trade with New York and Boston.

Carr’s Atlantic dealings likely started off as a favour. He had merchant friends in Amsterdam looking for a convenient route through British customs. Cargo from Europe to America needed to stop in Britain and pay taxes. Ralph Carr facilitated this for his Dutch friends and filled the boats with ballast – heavy cargo such as grindstones and coal that provided stability for the ship to make its long journey east. Carr’s profit from this agreement was small…so he began to try to sell goods of his own to the American merchants.

In a 1750 letter to a Boston merchant, a copy of which is at Northumberland Archives, Carr tries to convince the merchant to purchase goods from the north-east:

‘‘We have many articles than answer well with you, & yearly ship great quantities for my friends in Boston and all parts of America as they are cheaper here than in any part of England…Lead, Shott, sheet Lead, Grindstones…& every sort of Glassware & Earthenwares…Cloth, Blanketts, Rugs, & all kings of Woolen Goods, we have also bought.”

Carr sent many letters of this sort to his contacts in America. He stressed the variety of goods the North of England had to offer and promised that they came cheaper than anywhere else in England and Europe. But the response was disappointing. American merchants were not interested in most of the goods Carr offered them – they only wanted cheap ballast and sometimes earthenware. One Boston merchant did put in some orders for glassware, lead, and linens, but never paid Carr and the dispute went on for years. Carr wrote to the merchant in 1752:

“I am really quite tired out with writing to you year after year upon this same disagreeable subject and am sorry for your repeated promises which only pass for words of course, however, I shall wait until the Fall for their accomplishment and no longer.”

Despite his many successes as a merchant, Carr was never able to crack the American market. Lack of interest in his wares and caution on Carr’s side over selling to Americans on credit rather than cash meant that despite his connections, Carr’s dealings with American trade were frustrating and had very modest profits. In a 1756 letter, Carr wrote to two New York merchants, “I absolutely refused to be concern’d with any ships [to New York] save such as Enter’d every pennyworth of their goods fairly and above board”. By 1765, however, the Newcastle-America trade came to a grinding halt when the British government demanded bonds of £2000 from all merchants trading with America and the Newcastle merchants refused to comply. British-imposed taxes on shipped goods to and from America were a source of growing resentment on both sides and the escalation of these frustrations, just twenty years after Carr attempted to trade with Boston, led to the Boston Tea Party and the American War of Independence.

Sources

Digital copy of portrait of Ralph Carr, Northumberland Archives, ref: ZCE/F/4/1/2/9.

Copy letter from Ralph Carr, Newcastle upon Tyne, to Benjamin Tenouil Esq. [at Boston, America] (1750), Northumberland Archives, ref: ZCE/E/3/5/1/14/1033.

Note by Ralph Carr, Newcastle upon Tyne, to William Fletcher [at Boston, America] (1752), Northumberland Archives, ref: ZCE/E/3/5/1/14/1133.

Copy letter from Ralph Carr & Co., Newcastle upon Tyne, to Messrs Philip and John Livingston and David Provost [at New York, America] (1756), ZCE/E/3/5/1/14/1214.

A. W. Purdue, Merchants and Gentry in North-East England 1650-1830: The Carrs and the Ellisons (University of Sunderland Press, 1999), pp. 141-86.

William I. Roberts, III, ‘Ralph Carr: A Newcastle Merchant and the American Colonial Trade’, The Business History Review, Vol. 42, No. 3 (Autumn, 1968), pp. 271-287

This blog was written by Fiona Ellis, a local freelance writer. Fiona was commissioned by Northumberland Archives and November Club, a local award-winning performance arts charity, to write a script for a short film featuring the character of Hannah Glasse, an 18th century cook with Northumberland connections. The film was inspired by the content of one of Hannah Glasse’s letters found amongst the Allgood MSS (ref: ZAL) held by Northumberland Archives. The film will be launched on our website in April 2021. Fiona’s blog tells of Hannah’s eventful life. 

If you were asked to name the most successful cookery writer of all time, the chances are you might mention Jamie Oliver or Nigella Lawson. Perhaps the more historically minded would say Escoffier or Brillat Savarin or even Apicius. But you would all be wrong. The answer lies much closer to home.  

Among the treasures in the Northumberland Archives are a few precious letters and documents gifted by the Allgood family. They contain much of the story of the real ‘most successful cookery writer of all time’. That they are not better known is an illustration of how easy it is for extraordinary figures to disappear – especially if they are women.  

The story begins with Isaac Allgood (1683-1725), a Northumbrian landowner with an estate near Hexham. He improved on an already comfortable fortune by marrying the daughter of a London wine merchant. We know little about her but she must have been a very tolerant wife for, not long after her marriage, she took into her household Isaac’s infant daughter by his long-term mistress Hannah Reynolds. This child, also called Hannah, was to become our lost Northumbrian heroine. 

Young Hannah was born in London in 1708 but brought up and educated near Hexham at the Allgood family estate. She appears to have been raised as a full member of the family and had close relationships with her half-brother Lancelot Allgood and various Allgood aunts and uncles. She certainly saw herself as an Allgood to the extent that she repudiated her natural mother, dismissed in an Archive document as a ‘wicked wretch’. 

At sixteen Hannah was back in London in the care of her grandmother. Apparently, the grandmother was quite strict and Hannah rather spirited. However, despite firm supervision, Hannah managed to meet and then secretly marry John Glasse, a subaltern not then in service, a widower and older than Hannah by some margin. Furious Allgood letter writers paint him as an aged fortune hunter. But Hannah is clearly bedazzled by him, protesting in her letters that although he has but little fortune he has talents that will secure him a good living in time. John too wrote to the family contesting their views about him. His letters demonstrate his own high opinion of himself.  

Although it took some years for the family to forgive Hannah for her secret and, in their eyes, rash marriage, eventually the correspondence shows a rapprochement. They did, however, retain a wariness about John. 

Hannah’s continued attachment to her Northumbrian family is clear from her letters from Essex and then London where she and John lived. She often sent gifts or procured goods at their request. She writes of nuts and quilts and all manner of items to be sent by cart. The family in turn provided a small annuity though they were careful to dedicate it to her use and not to allow John Glasse to have a claim on it.  

Thus far there is nothing special or heroic about this headstrong young woman with her unsatisfactory husband and, soon enough, a large brood of children. What distinguishes Hannah is what she did to make up for John’s frequently inventive but always disastrous business ventures. 

Hannah applied energy and imagination to a series of undertakings with admittedly mixed success. The foremost of these, and the enterprise for which she should be remembered, was her cookbook: ‘The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, Which far exceeds any Thing of the Kind ever yet Printed’. The first edition was published in 1747 under the sobriquet ‘A Lady’ and was an immediate success. 

Let us for the moment gloss over the sadder parts of Hannah’s entrepreneurial history, the highly successful (until it was not) habit-making shop patronised by the Prince of Wales et al., the attempt at promoting Daffy’s Elixir as a panacea, the spells of bankruptcy and incarceration in debtors’ prison. Her business acumen definitely had holes in it. However, in creating her cookbook she showed true flair. 

The Allgood letters help us reconstruct the story. Hannah writes to her Northumberland relatives announcing her intentions of making a book, asking for recipes, and soliciting subscriptions. A first publication like hers needed subscribers – a sort of crowd funding of its time – to succeed. Her family supported her as did others often from quite distinguished households. 

In the foreword to her book she explains how she spotted a gap in the cookbook market for something quite basic – a proto-Delia’s How to Cook perhaps. Her keen eye saw the floundering new middle classes unable to instruct their servants, and those servants unable to understand fancy French cookbooks and methods. Hannah’s offer was simplicity. She factored in the limited education, equipment and indeed funds available to these households. She adapted fashionable French recipes explaining in detail how to prepare and anglicise them. She promoted seasonality and use of local produce; the wars and tensions that impeded imports from Europe were, even then, a feature of her letters.  

She had considerable marketing ability – she sold her book in the premises of high-class suppliers of tableware establishing it as a necessity for the affluent household. It became the most used and referenced cookbook of its time not only in England but in the Americas and throughout the English-speaking world. 

Alas, her story does not end well. Whether through her own financial failings or John’s posthumous debts, she was forced to sell the copyright of her book less than ten years after its first publication. She watched as future editions – thirty or more of them – made money for others. To add to her misery these later editions carried her name where their predecessors had been anonymous.  

Hannah died in 1770 in Newcastle. A notice in the London Gazette merely notes the death of Sir Laurence Allgood’s sister.  

Hannah’s fan club includes historic figures like George Washington and Benjamin Franklin as well as Clarissa Dickson Wright, who called her ‘the first domestic goddess’. But where is her memorial? Where indeed! 

 www.novemberclub.org.uk