General

This guest blog has been written by Professor Annie Tindley from Newcastle University.

‘Messers Atkinson and Marshall the first adventurers in stock farming in the earldom of Sutherland are stock and crop farmers, who reside near the river Aln in Northumberland. They breed and buy lean stock which they feed for Morpeth and the Yorkshire markets; and with the last 10 years they have embarked … not less than £20,000 on putting breeding flocks in the mountains of Sutherland …

I could not keep contemplating with wonder the boldness of that spirit of adventure which had led men, living quietly in that fine county to overleap all (one would think) to the unfathomable mountains and ravines betwixt the Aln and the Shin …

It has established on the great scale cheviot sheep and cheviot shepherds and connected Sutherland in the most intimate manner with the joint stock community, the kingdom …’¹

So wrote Patrick Sellar in around 1820, thirteen years after Stephen Atkinson and Anthony Marshall, two sheep farmers (and brothers-in-law) working in partnership in Northumberland, invested in the pioneer sheep farming county of Sutherland in the far north of Scotland. They had made a further enormous commercial success from what was without doubt a risky venture on their part: Sutherland was still seen as relatively beyond the pale, a highly peripheral region in Britain’s burgeoning industrial and imperial economy. They had established themselves raising the new cheviot sheep breed in Northumberland, principally for wool, which they sold via Yorkshire brokers to the newly expanding textile mills in that county. They had also successfully developed a new workforce of skilled shepherds, well rewarded men who managed flocks of sheep thousands strong.

In 1807, they took up new leases of sheep walks on offer from the Sutherland Estate, one of Britain’s largest landed estates, owned by the earls and dukes of Sutherland. The Sutherland Estate was in the throes of a revolution of its tenancy and economic structure, moving away from the trade in black cattle and subsistence agriculture to a more commercial model based around sheep, which – as the Improving minds of the period had it – could be raised in the harsh environment there.

This revolution is known to us as the Sutherland Clearances, a part of the wider Highland Clearances, which saw the Introduction of wholescale commercial sheep farming across the region. In Sutherland between 1806 and 1821 it led to the removal or eviction of around 15,000 people from the straths and glens to the coasts to make room for the new sheep walks. Atkinson and Marshall were among a new cadre of tenants of these enormous sheep walks, which ran into the tens of thousands of acres. This was part of the attraction for them: to scale-up their already successful enterprises and utilise the skilled workforce they had developed. The downside was that the rents they had to pay were also enormous: their farm at Clebrig for example came at a cost of £1500 per annum._²

What becomes very clear from this unique archival collection is what a high risk, high capital game the early days of commercial sheep farming was: huge sums were required for stocking the new farms and paying the large rents charged. Huge profits were also possible, as Atkinson and Marshall demonstrated. They had to fight for those profits, however, and they were not shy about making significant demands on their new landlords. We can see this in the sometimes acrimonious negotiations between Atkinson and Marshall and the Sutherland Estate management over terms and conditions and the rents themselves: sheep products were part of an unstable global market, subject to rapid spikes and drops. This meant watching every detail down to the smallest loss: in the early years of sheep farming one of the key threats was loss of sheep through natural causes such as the weather, but also against sheep stealing by local populations. Atkinson and Marshall pressed the Estate hard to pay for additional protection of their flock, threatening to take legal action if this was not forthcoming:

‘As I believe the safety of their flocks was one of the first considerations that weighed with the tacksmen [tenants] at taking the Sutherland farms … their protection expressly stipulated for by them in their offer, they certainly think themselves entitled to demand that protection … For unless such protection had been promised the tacksmen would never have embarked in the enterprise at all.’³

Despite being one of the largest and most powerful estates in the country, they had to meet the demands of their new tenants to justify the enormous expense and upheaval already undertaken to introduce sheep farming.

Neither Atkinson or Marshall ever lived in Sutherland on their sheep farms: they ran the operations from afar, mainly through correspondence and their cadre of skilled shepherds. The rewards were great, however; the Atkinsons built Lorbottle Hall near Rothbury from their proceeds and funded the imperial careers of their descendants until well into the twentieth century, becoming part of the gentry class. What is very clear from this collection is the sheer scale of the national and global networks – of people, ideas and goods (wool in this case) – that underpinned and connected the Agricultural Revolution in disparate parts of the country, fuelled by growing global and imperial markets and staffed by hardheaded, effective men pushing forward in the risky business of the new commercial sheep farming.

The author would like to acknowledge with thanks the generous funding of the Strathmartine Trust, which made this work possible.

Images

Lorbottle Hall (Wikipedia commons)

Dunrobin Castle (Wikipedia commons

1 Northumberland Archives, Atkinson and Marshall, Patrick Sellar to James Loch, NRO 04433/1/2/93, n.d. [1820]. Patrick Sellar was the notorious sheep farming tenant and agent for the Sutherland Estate from the early nineteenth century, and James Loch the Commissioner for the Estate, his overseer.

2 Northumberland Archives, Atkinson and Marshall, NRO 04433/1/1/4, James Loch to Messers Atkinson and Marshall, 21 Sept. 1822.

3 Northumberland Archives, Atkinson and Marshall, NRO 04433/1/2/55, Marshall to William Mackenzie [the Sutherland Estate’s lawyer], 4 Sept. 1809.

Visitors to County Hall reception in Morpeth have had the opportunity to view a selection of images from the Paul Hindmarsh photography collection held at Northumberland Archives. Paul Hindmarsh worked as a commercial photographer from the 1960s until he retired in 2010. With his associate Don Riddell, he captured many important industrial developments throughout the region as well as the day-to-day activities of businesses and factories across Northumberland. His archive of over 20,000 negatives taken between 1968 and the mid 1980s was donated to Northumberland Archives in 2023. It features images of large-scale industrial projects such as the construction of the Tyne and Wear metro and the development of Kielder Water, factory construction, housing schemes and publicity photographs for businesses across the northeast.

When fully catalogued the Hindmarsh images will be open for the public to consult, and a selection will be made available on the Archive’s website. The scale of the collection makes it impossible to suggest when this might be but, due to the quality of the images and the likely levels of interest in them, the Archives were keen to share a sample of the collection with the public as soon as possible. Staff have selected a small number of images that give a good representation of the type of work Paul undertook throughout his career.

The exhibition has been well received by the public so far. One of the reasons for this is that, while the images remain within living memory for many, they vividly highlight the dramatic changes that have occurred in a relatively short time. Although on the surface these are practical photographs from the world of industry and commerce, the exhibition showcases a world vastly different from today’s. The photographs capture artists in a graphic design department creating technical drawings by hand with nothing but pen and paper, a ‘computer room’ where the operator is required to wear a lab coat, and even the distinctive hairstyles and trouser cuts of the era—details that feel both familiar and also now, historic.

During our appraisal of the Hindmarsh Collection and the curation of this exhibition, we were struck by the many layers of significance within the images. A core mission of the Archive Service is to preserve historically valuable materials, and the Hindmarsh Collection is certainly a rich source for anyone interested in the industrial and commercial history of the northeast—both now and in the future. Yet beyond their historical and contextual importance, these photographs also stand out for their aesthetic quality. Paul was not just a documentarian but an obviously gifted photographer, with a clear ability to capture striking compositions that hold their own as artistic works. It has been interesting for Archives staff to consider this idea; that the primary reason for the creation of the images was almost always purely practical; whether to document a specific part of a construction process, an updated manufacturing procedure, or for marketing purposes. For this reason, the curation of exhibitions featuring this type of collection is especially satisfying; an image that was perhaps never conceived as anything other than part of a 1969 advertising campaign for a northeast-based glass company can now be celebrated as both an interesting historic document as well as a brilliant photograph.

The County Hall exhibition is not the first Hindmarsh project we have undertaken. During the 1960s and 70s, Paul was employed by Washington Development Corporation to photograph the output of the architect’s department during the development of the town. As 2023 marked the 60th anniversary of the town’s foundation, we worked alongside Washington Heritage Partnership, Wessington U3A and Washington History Society to hold a series of workshops where local history societies and members of the public were invited to view a selection of Paul’s Washington images, share memories and help chose images for a digital exhibition. The finished digital exhibition is available to view on Northumberland Archive’s Youtube channel. The current County Hall exhibition will end in a few weeks, but with such a rich source of historic content covering a period of huge change in the northeast, there will be scope for more exhibitions and projects in the future as more of the material is catalogued.