Sunderland Echo reporter Tony Gillan and some special guests take us on a journey to the peculiar corners of Sunderland's past and present.
Taking in fact, fiction - and the in-betweeny bits! - we look at a mythic giant worms, a Victorian murderess, a TikTok sensation's coastline discoveries, ghost stories, Daleks, a haunted Greggs and more.
Taking in fact, fiction - and the in-betweeny bits! - we look at a mythic giant worms, a Victorian murderess, a TikTok sensation's coastline discoveries, ghost stories, Daleks, a haunted Greggs and more.
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FunTranscript
00:00:00 Hello I'm Sutherland Echo reporter Tony Gillan.
00:00:03 Wayside has more than its fair share of myths, legends and historical facts.
00:00:09 Plenty of zhuzhing it up over one or two ghost stories we've heard over the years too.
00:00:14 Everyone loves a local ghost story so here are some curious facts and some curious possibly
00:00:19 fiction from over the centuries.
00:00:22 We have one or two curiosities from the present day too.
00:00:25 [Music]
00:00:37 As everyone knows the lantern worm definitely existed.
00:00:40 There is no shortage of historical, scientific and empirical data to back this up.
00:00:45 Only the conspiracy theorists, Santa Deniers, spoilers of childhoods and all round rotters
00:00:49 would claim anything to the contrary.
00:00:51 The only issue is the exact location of the creatures operations.
00:00:54 This terrifyingly authentic reconstruction from 1978 which enlisted all of the leading
00:00:59 naturalists and evolutionary biologists of the day offers conclusive proof.
00:01:03 We can't know exactly when every relevant event took place but we can narrow it down
00:01:07 to what professional historians refer to as the olden days.
00:01:11 The hero of the tale, John Lambden, reputedly fought in one of the crusades so we're going
00:01:15 back a bit.
00:01:16 Anyway, as a young scallywag John skipped church one Sunday to go fishing in the River
00:01:21 Weir.
00:01:22 But all he caught was a small worm.
00:01:24 He would have looked a bit of a chump taking that home for his mother to plate up with
00:01:27 chips so he disposed of the little fella down a well.
00:01:30 Worm in this instance is an archaic name for a legless dragon derived from the old English
00:01:35 Wyrm.
00:01:36 The etymology was confirmed when the creature grew to be a gigantic serpent dining on sheep
00:01:42 and the occasional human being when he got the munchies.
00:01:45 No one managed to slay the beast until Lambden returned from Jerusalem.
00:01:49 As he was to blame for the creature being there in the first place he felt obliged to
00:01:52 sort it out and he went shopping for some special armour with razor blades stuck to
00:01:56 it.
00:01:57 He allowed the creature to envelop itself around him thereby slicing itself up like
00:02:00 a Morrison's cucumber.
00:02:02 The nutcase Lambden Wyrm was no more.
00:02:05 Prior to that the animal wrapped itself around a hill.
00:02:08 But which one?
00:02:16 According to the famous song, The Lambden Wyrm, composed by the Sutherland-born songwriter
00:02:20 Jack Luman in 1867, away he went and lapped his tail ten times round Penshire Hill.
00:02:30 Some versions say seven times but either way the Lambden Wyrm was clearly a big lad.
00:02:35 But was it Penshire Hill?
00:02:37 Songwriters don't necessarily tell a literal truth.
00:02:39 For example John Lennon never really believed he was a walrus.
00:02:43 On the north bank of the River Weir, about a mile from Penshire Hill as the crow flies,
00:02:48 lies the 52 feet high Wyrm Hill.
00:02:50 It's in Fatfield and it's more modest but pointedly named.
00:02:54 The historian William Hutchinson wrote in 1785, and I quote, "Fatfield's stathes.
00:03:00 Near this place is an eminence called the Wyrm Hill which tradition says was once possessed
00:03:05 by an enormous serpent that wound its horrid body round the base, that it destroyed much
00:03:10 provision and used to infest the Lambden estate, till some hero in that family engaged it,
00:03:15 encased in armour set with razors, and when it would have crushed the competent by enfolding
00:03:21 him, sustaining a thousand wounds, fell at last by his falchion."
00:03:25 Which is a type of sword.
00:03:26 As this is the earliest known written account of the legend it would appear to be 1 nil
00:03:30 to Fatfield.
00:03:31 Furthermore, an oral tradition had it that the beast would lazily wrap itself around
00:03:35 Wyrm Hill for a postprandial kip after a large helping of sheep and children.
00:03:40 So it's Wyrm Hill versus Penshire Hill for the bragging rights.
00:03:43 They'll just have to argue about it for a few more hundred years.
00:03:46 We'll hold the quotes.
00:03:49 Or the armour.
00:03:50 So I'm Catherine and I'm the face of North East Nostalgic, a TikTok and Instagram account.
00:03:56 So today I'm going to show you my favourite discoveries around the Fulwell, Roker and
00:04:00 Seaburn area of Sunderland.
00:04:02 Did you know that there's a Sunderland branch of Greggs that's actually haunted?
00:04:06 So if you fancy a poltergeist with your pasty, or a spirit with your sausage roll, then this
00:04:10 is the branch to go to.
00:04:12 It's believed to be a friendly ghost of an old lady that lived in the flat above the
00:04:16 shop.
00:04:17 There's a lavender whiff often around before and after the spirit visits, and there's often
00:04:22 a lot of banging when the shop radio is too loud.
00:04:25 The ghostly goings on were actually reported in 2004 as reported in the Sunderland Echo,
00:04:31 and I find it really interesting that Sea Roads is the place of the haunted Greggs.
00:04:40 So we're here at Roker Park, and this is where Spotty the Bandit, the notorious Mac and Pirate,
00:04:46 is thought to have lived in one of the caves behind us.
00:04:49 Before Holy Rock was demolished, Spotty's cave would have been a little bit further towards
00:04:53 the coast, sort of where we are standing now.
00:04:55 So Spotty's thought to have lived in this cave behind us, and he was named so because
00:05:00 of his spotted shirt.
00:05:02 And he was quite a notorious pirate for scaring people.
00:05:05 He would like to scare the fishermen's wives, who would travel from Whitburn to get their
00:05:10 fish, so they would often walk all the way around to not disturb him.
00:05:15 He would also light fires on the cliff tops, which would then bring the ships in, and then
00:05:20 would crash, and then he would loot their ships.
00:05:23 It's thought on a stormy night that Spotty the Bandit's ghost can be seen.
00:05:27 There is a myth that through this cave leads to Hilton Castle.
00:05:31 It's thought to have been used by smugglers, but actually now it's got a moat for down
00:05:35 to earth use, as it's used by the council to store their bins.
00:05:40 Did you know that there's a sign pointing to Germany and Sunderland?
00:05:43 This sign at Roke next to the Bungalow Cafe has been a fixture on the North East Coast
00:05:47 since the 1920s.
00:05:48 We're not really sure where it came from, but it's been a fixture ever since.
00:05:54 Some locals say that it was kept there to keep an eye on the enemies.
00:05:58 So who knows?
00:05:59 At least it's thought that it points to the Rhineland.
00:06:03 So behind the Marine Centre at Roke is this petrified well.
00:06:09 The North Dock Tea Fet was discovered in 1992 behind some huts, and it's the formation of
00:06:15 layers of calcium carbonate over the years.
00:06:18 It's thought that the origin of the water comes from around Harbour Road, and it continuously
00:06:24 has layers, and it's continuously grown year on year.
00:06:27 I started doing my channel through being interested in family history and the history of the North
00:06:33 East of England, finding all of the weird and wonderful parts of the region.
00:06:37 I began my TikTok and Instagram channel in August 2021.
00:06:42 My TikTok and Instagram channel, North East Nostalgic, it took about six months of continual
00:06:50 posting before videos started to really blow up, especially about the weird and wonderful
00:06:55 parts of Sunderland.
00:07:02 In common with all right-thinking people, I love cemeteries.
00:07:05 I'm not saying it's the best, but it's certainly Sunderland's biggest.
00:07:09 80 acres.
00:07:10 Bishop Weymouth Cemetery, been here since 1856.
00:07:15 Some people don't like cemeteries.
00:07:17 I don't know why.
00:07:18 The inmates could not possibly do you any harm.
00:07:21 Martini McCormore, the Lion Tamer, we know a little about his origins.
00:07:25 We don't know why he was probably the first black lion tamer.
00:07:30 He was purportedly from some exotic part of Western Africa, but he may also have been
00:07:36 from the West Indies.
00:07:37 And another school of thought says he was actually called Arthur Williams and was from
00:07:41 Liverpool.
00:07:42 So this rather exotic West Indian, West African scouter lies here.
00:07:47 The age on his grave is little more than a guess.
00:07:51 He famously tangled with Wallace the Lion, who now stands next to that Nissan Bluebird
00:07:55 in the Sunderland Museum, and he survived that.
00:07:58 He actually died in Sunderland, nothing to do with lions, in the Palatine Hotel, which
00:08:02 is now the apartments, Mowbray Apartments.
00:08:05 The abiding mystery of McCormore is the fact that he lies here in the Commonwealth War
00:08:08 Grave in perfect symmetry with all of the others.
00:08:11 He died in 1871.
00:08:13 The soldier next to him died in 1940, a World War II victim.
00:08:17 So why McCormore is here with all of the servicemen, we have absolutely no idea.
00:08:24 McCormore died of an illness, and the headstone says 32, but we don't really know.
00:08:30 Mr Manders must have been an absolutely charming gentleman.
00:08:34 McCormore was replaced within days by an Irishman, who also had already been mauled by lions,
00:08:40 and actually donated his left hand to one of them.
00:08:44 He was killed by lions a little more than a year later.
00:08:46 The bottom half of the headstone is frankly a disgrace.
00:08:50 It is little more than an advert for Mr Manders' circus.
00:08:53 After a vote in the year 2000, Sunderland Football Club decided that its official nickname
00:08:57 would be 'The Black Cats'.
00:09:00 The name has never really caught on to be honest.
00:09:02 They could quite conceivably have called themselves 'The Teachers', because of, largely of this
00:09:07 man, James Allen.
00:09:09 His name looms larger over that of the city itself really.
00:09:13 He founded Sunderland Football Club in 1879 in Norfolk Street with a lot of other teachers.
00:09:18 He played himself.
00:09:20 He once scored 12 goals in a 23-0 win for Sunderland over the mighty Castletown.
00:09:26 He was Scottish by birth.
00:09:28 He was born in 1857 in Tarbolton, a small village just south of Kilmarnock.
00:09:33 He came to Sunderland to teach.
00:09:35 He taught at Hilton Road School among other places.
00:09:38 Sunderland AFC in the late 19th century were the powerhouse of English football, if you
00:09:42 can imagine such a thing.
00:09:44 So he must have been chuffed.
00:09:45 But he wasn't.
00:09:46 By that stage he'd fallen out with the club, to the point where he went and formed another
00:09:50 club, Sunderland Albion.
00:09:51 It was short-lived.
00:09:52 The rivalry was intense, albeit Albion only lasted four years.
00:10:00 The games that they had were quite violent.
00:10:02 Sunderland AFC did the dirty on Albion.
00:10:05 They drew each other in the FA Cup, a point which Sunderland AFC simply withdrew.
00:10:09 This was a financial disaster for Albion, who never really recovered.
00:10:13 James Allen died in Elmwood Street, certainly in Ashbrook anyway, in 1911.
00:10:21 This is the family grave.
00:10:23 He's buried next to his wife Priscilla.
00:10:25 The main name on the grave is Stevenson, which was another branch of the family.
00:10:28 But there lies James Allen, founder of Sunderland AFC.
00:10:33 One of the money-spinning ways that James Allen and his friends thought of in the early
00:10:38 days of the football club was to hold a raffle in which the top prize was a canary which
00:10:43 had been owned by one of the members of the committee.
00:10:47 History does not record the name of the committee member or, indeed, the canary.
00:10:51 The graveyard here beside Holy Trinity's Church in Sunderland's East End, it's now called
00:10:55 1719, is deceptively tranquil.
00:11:00 It's a very empty place.
00:11:01 It's peace and quiet itself.
00:11:03 There are only three visible headstones in here, however, an estimated 100,000 people
00:11:09 lie in there.
00:11:10 So how did 100,000 bodies come to be here?
00:11:14 The churchyard covers roughly the same area as two football pitches.
00:11:17 A nearby notice claims it was the country's largest.
00:11:20 Nevertheless, 100,000 is a huge number, even for two football pitches.
00:11:26 How did they manage to bury all those folk?
00:11:28 How come so many died?
00:11:30 Firstly, the graveyard was used for 135 years.
00:11:34 It opened for business, as it were, alongside the church in 1719.
00:11:39 The last burial was in 1854.
00:11:41 By then legislation had forced Sunderland into creating purpose-built cemeteries, Bishop
00:11:45 William House and Mayor Norris.
00:11:47 Still, that averages annually at 740, a great many for the population of Sunderland at the
00:11:53 time, considerably less than it is now.
00:11:56 One reason for this high mortality rate was cholera.
00:11:59 Very popular.
00:12:00 Sweeping regularly throughout the population until 1860.
00:12:04 The logistics of packing 100,000 people into here are very interesting, or to put it another
00:12:09 way, gruesome.
00:12:11 Many of the 100,000 aren't in coffins.
00:12:13 They would make their final journey here in one, but were placed inside the grave and
00:12:19 then the coffins reused.
00:12:21 This sadly was the fate of many inhabitants of a nearby workhouse.
00:12:24 19th century coffin maker, the delightful Jackie Hewitt, had a one-size-fits-all approach.
00:12:31 Every coffin this charming artisan produced was designed for a 5ft 8in body.
00:12:37 The deceased who had carelessly grown beyond that height had their ankles broken and their
00:12:41 feet tucked in.
00:12:42 Lovely.
00:12:43 Eventually, it was conceded that the graves should have been damaged.
00:12:48 The first diggers were not thinking 135 years ahead.
00:12:51 A partial solution was to move the bodies upright.
00:12:55 It is standing room only.
00:12:57 Previously many headstones could be seen.
00:13:01 Virtually all of them have been removed, in fact there are only three, helping to create
00:13:05 the illusion that very little ever happened here.
00:13:08 This obelisk stands in honour of John Dixon, pharmacist and bigwig.
00:13:12 The monument doesn't exactly bombard the reader with information, stating that Dixon
00:13:16 died aged 32 in 1852 and was "followed to the grave by a large number of friends and
00:13:22 inhabitants".
00:13:23 Quite what they mean by inhabitants.
00:13:26 We wouldn't like to say.
00:13:27 The second visible grave is this one.
00:13:29 It's that of the Reverend Robert Grey, 1787 to 1838, and he was venerated for his tireless
00:13:35 care for the many cholera victims.
00:13:38 He lies here with his four children.
00:13:40 As we said the graveyard is actually officially Grey Memorial Gardens and Grey Road in Hendon
00:13:45 it's in that direction, not very far, is named after him too.
00:13:49 But there's no doubt who gets top billing in this graveyard.
00:13:52 This is the headstone of the Sunderland swashbuckler Jack Crawford.
00:13:56 Well Jack Crawford was born in Sunderland in the sort of the harbour, the dock area
00:14:02 in 1775 and he would have been one of those people whose names would have vanished because
00:14:09 he was born into a very poor environment, but he is someone who has a statue to him
00:14:15 in Sunderland so you might think well why?
00:14:18 Why is this very impoverished beginning to a life now celebrated in the statue?
00:14:26 And what is he doing on the statue?
00:14:28 He is nailing a flag to a mast.
00:14:30 So why do we have to remember what he was doing, where he came from and what he did?
00:14:37 That's basically why Jack Crawford is an important person in Sunderland because he
00:14:41 is someone who was very poor and yet we have a statue to him.
00:14:45 The one thing that we can say that is still in our culture that is to do with Jack Crawford
00:14:52 apart from the statue in Newebright Park is the phrase 'nailing your collar to the mast'
00:14:58 and we have this idiomatic phrase in English, particularly British English, where it means
00:15:04 showing your true feelings or showing your true desires.
00:15:08 He was a celebrated sailor around the beginning of the 19th century because of the actions
00:15:17 in the Battle of Camperdown.
00:15:18 Well what he actually did in the Battle of Camperdown was he was on a ship which was
00:15:23 the commanding officer in that part of the naval action and that ship's mast was blown
00:15:32 down by cannon from one of the French ships and in naval code if your central mast with
00:15:40 your flag is not visible then that means you've surrendered your ship.
00:15:46 So Jack Crawford climbed up the shattered mast and nailed the ship's flag back to the
00:15:52 mast to show that the ship was still in action and hadn't been surrendered.
00:15:57 This is taken at the time to be one of the saving acts which led to the British Navy
00:16:03 winning the Battle of Camperdown.
00:16:05 That's how he comes to be initially well known.
00:16:09 He was given a medal by the people of Sunderland and he was given a pension by the king so
00:16:17 he was actually celebrated nationally at the time not just locally.
00:16:22 Unfortunately the pension was not very much, there was no social welfare at the time and
00:16:29 he fell on hard times as he got older and he was very well known for sitting in the
00:16:38 corner of a pub telling his story about the Battle of Camperdown to anyone who would buy
00:16:43 him a pint.
00:16:44 He spent most of his pension money on alcohol and he pawned his medal that the city or the
00:16:52 town had given him for more money to buy alcohol so this was the thing that was quite common
00:16:58 at the time.
00:16:59 If you were very poor you would seek consolation and comfort in alcohol.
00:17:04 And he was actually recorded in Dr Clanny's notebooks as the second person to die of cholera
00:17:09 in 1831.
00:17:10 So the biggest outbreak of cholera, the first recorded mass outbreak of cholera in the UK
00:17:18 is in Sunderland in 1831 and Jack Crawford is the second person to die.
00:17:24 If you look at the pattern of people who died of cholera at that time, early on they were
00:17:29 the very poorest people, they were the people in the very impoverished households down by
00:17:34 the docks.
00:17:35 So he was obviously living in a very impoverished household and that's 1831.
00:17:41 And basically he gets forgotten about.
00:17:44 It isn't until another 50 years later you have a resurgence of interest in British imperialism
00:17:54 and one of the things that they do is they look back to British naval battles during
00:17:58 the Napoleonic Wars and see, oh we've got someone who is quite well known at that time,
00:18:03 Jack Crawford.
00:18:04 And that's when you start to have a resurgence of interest in Jack Crawford.
00:18:08 And it was only when there came to be a greater interest in Jack Crawford, this heightened
00:18:14 sense of British imperialism that we have towards the end of the 19th century, that
00:18:19 there started to be a lot of interest in British naval history in particular and Jack Crawford's
00:18:26 name cropped up as a local lad and they constructed, or they put a plaque to him on his birthplace
00:18:35 which was in the east end of Sunderland, although most of the plaque was taken up with the details
00:18:41 of the person who had funded the plaque, the councillor, Councillor Anderson.
00:18:45 And they also paid for a very, not so much expensive, but a very high spec memorial stone
00:18:58 to him which was in the grounds of Holy Trinity which is now called 1719.
00:19:04 And he's not actually buried there, but that's just where the memorial to him is.
00:19:09 And then later on, because there was such a lot of interest in him, they put the statue
00:19:14 up in Mowbray Park.
00:19:16 There is a very famous poem which appears in children's school books in the 19th century
00:19:24 and that is about Jack Crawford and the battle, the hero of the Battle of Camperdown.
00:19:29 So it is not only a Sunderland thing, but it becomes quite well known nationally as
00:19:34 well.
00:19:35 You nail your colours to the mast.
00:19:36 And that actually is a phrase that comes from the poem written about Jack Crawford.
00:19:41 So there is this legacy that perhaps no one could ever have envisaged where there is a
00:19:47 phrase in our language which has a direct link to Jack Crawford in the Battle of Camperdown.
00:19:53 The graveyard has an association, albeit almost certainly apocryphal, with the infamous grave
00:19:59 robbers Burke and Hare.
00:20:01 I'll give you a little bit about them.
00:20:03 William Burke and William Hare, two Williams, were Irishmen born in the 1790s.
00:20:07 They moved separately to Edinburgh in the 1820s.
00:20:10 They met and began to sell human corpses to an anatomist for experiments.
00:20:15 After selling the first body, a man who had died of natural causes, they realised that
00:20:19 demand outstripped supply.
00:20:20 Their simple but highly questionable solution to this age-old economic quandary was to murder
00:20:26 at least 15 people.
00:20:28 And sell them to remarkably incurious members of the medical profession.
00:20:31 There's a sign on Sunderland's nearby town moor which says William Burke and William
00:20:36 Hare were thought to practice their trade in Sunderland.
00:20:39 There is no evidence that Burke and Hare ever committed murders in Sunderland, but it's
00:20:42 still got a story.
00:20:44 But there is at least one authenticated instance of body snatching at this site.
00:20:49 On December 24th 1823, on one of his less merry Christmases, a Captain Headley buried
00:20:54 his 10 year old daughter Elizabeth Hare.
00:20:57 Five days later, for uncertain reasons, he wanted to move her to another part of the
00:21:00 churchyard.
00:21:01 But Elizabeth's coffin was found empty, along with the body of a two year old it had been
00:21:05 removed.
00:21:07 Suspicion fell upon two strangers, observed for a month, hanging around at funerals and
00:21:11 notches for the buffet.
00:21:13 They were John Thompson of Dundee and John Weatherley of Renfrew.
00:21:18 Elizabeth's body was found at the pair's lodging, covered with straw, wrapped and addressed
00:21:23 to Mr Jameson of Link Street, Edinburgh.
00:21:26 There is little to be said for Thompson and Weatherley, other than their touching faith
00:21:30 in the efficacy of the Royal meal.
00:21:32 Human teeth and some receipts were also found.
00:21:34 The body of a Mrs Corner was also realised to be missing from the yard.
00:21:38 They were therefore presumed to bear responsibility for that too.
00:21:41 Public anger at perceived leniency towards criminals is nothing new.
00:21:45 The pair were tried at Durham Sessions, sentenced to three months imprisonment and fined sixpence
00:21:49 each.
00:21:50 Time travelling telly legend, Doctor Who, has been part of our culture for six decades
00:21:55 at the time of recording this, and counting, and Sunderland has crossed paths with the
00:21:59 Time Lord in some small but significant ways.
00:22:02 Not least of which, the old public police call boxes, whose appearance the Doctor's
00:22:06 TARDIS nicked as an ineffectual but iconic disguise, were trialled here on Wearside in
00:22:11 the 1920s before they were installed throughout London.
00:22:14 Granted, as you can see from the one that stood on the corner of Chester Road and Kale
00:22:18 Road, their look was a little more garden shed like than the well... boxier design that
00:22:23 the BBC swiped and was later able to copyright.
00:22:26 A Sunderland born actor, William Russell, was among the Time Lord's very first coterie
00:22:31 of travelling companions when the series debuted in 1963.
00:22:34 Indeed, he gave the show a bit of star presence, having previously played the lead in The Adventures
00:22:39 of Salancelot, on the only rival channel there was back then.
00:22:44 Even I am related to one of the Doctor's loyal assistants.
00:22:46 I forget which one.
00:22:48 A resident of Sunderland has played a key role in bringing some of the Doctor's long
00:22:52 lost adventures back to life, all from his Wearside home.
00:22:56 We'll let him explain that one.
00:22:57 There's a lot of programmes that have missing episodes, mainly from the 50s, 60s, some 70s
00:23:06 I think.
00:23:07 Doctor Who is a programme that's been really really fortunate in the way that every episode
00:23:11 exists as an audio recording and that wasn't down to the BBC, that was purely down to fans
00:23:18 of the show at the time and you would have basically fans who did want to relive the
00:23:25 episode and that would be through either holding a microphone up to a television and just recording
00:23:32 the episode as it went out live.
00:23:34 On those instances though you would always hear family members in the background, dogs
00:23:37 barking but you would have some fans who were really clever and would take apart a TV set
00:23:45 and hard wire cables from an audio recorder into the speaker output of the TV.
00:23:50 So we've got these fantastic audio recordings of a programme that sadly the visuals don't
00:23:55 exist but the soundtrack does.
00:23:57 So I helped with about 7 animations for the BBC on reconstructing missing Doctor Who.
00:24:05 Obviously I've been a big Gaelic fan as you can guess but that's how I ended up getting
00:24:12 the job on the animation range just from doing animated Gaelic tests and putting them on
00:24:18 YouTube and a producer at the time saw them and said "well I like this style, can you
00:24:24 do it for an actual BBC production?"
00:24:27 Rob also worked on the similar reconstruction of a missing episode of another classic British
00:24:32 show, Dad's Army.
00:24:34 Doctor Who and Dad's Army are a bit fortunate in that there's not many other TV shows that
00:24:38 get this much love and attention and you certainly don't see old programmes like Zed Cars getting
00:24:45 an animation reconstruction or anything like that.
00:24:48 So Doctor Who's got the fan base and the fans who do want to see these missing stories brought
00:24:54 to life.
00:24:55 So my Dalek, I started building during lockdown, just did little bits and I always wanted that
00:25:06 specific style of Dalek because I've always loved the style of the original 60s Daleks
00:25:12 and why I went for that one with mine is a bit more sentimental.
00:25:16 I've really enjoyed working on the two missing Patrick Troughton Dalek stories so I basically
00:25:24 built that Dalek to the specification of the ones from those animations.
00:25:29 You know what, I always get asked how I would feel if an original episode turned up after
00:25:35 we've done one but I would be absolutely okay with that and you know what, I would be fascinated
00:25:42 to kind of put the two side by side and see how close we were with some things or how
00:25:46 miles off we might have been with other things.
00:25:50 And obviously people could still watch both but it would be really important if the originals
00:25:56 did ever show up again.
00:25:59 If an original episode turned up and I would be going through watching both side by side
00:26:05 and seeing if we were better for anything or...
00:26:09 I do think that there's one story in particular which was called the Macro Terror which was
00:26:13 about giant alien crabs and I could tell you now that we did the crabs better than how
00:26:20 they did them in the 60s but it would still be amazing to see an original episode recovered.
00:26:33 We now go onto an historic Sunderland mystery so bizarre it would have taken Doctor Who
00:26:37 to solve it.
00:26:38 That or a good forensics lab which was scarcely possible at the time.
00:26:59 In the summer of 1949, Mrs. Harriet Clark of 51 Nile Street, Sunderland was plagued
00:27:06 by a bizarre offence taking place at her home.
00:27:10 Harriet explained that she witnessed two men in sand shoes climbing into her house during
00:27:16 the early hours of the morning.
00:27:19 If that isn't menacing enough, she found a note composed of newspaper headlines that
00:27:26 had been stuck to an upstairs window that read "I will get you's all".
00:27:31 "It all began about a month ago" she said.
00:27:35 "At about 1.30am we heard the back door creaking.
00:27:40 One of the family ran out and found the back room light on and the key from the door lying
00:27:45 on the floor.
00:27:46 There was no one there."
00:27:50 Since then, the home had windows broken five times and their daughter had become too scared
00:27:55 to stay the night.
00:27:57 Mrs. Clark became even more terrified after catching a glimpse of the face of a man through
00:28:02 the window behind her bed head.
00:28:06 Marks left on the kitchen window, which appeared to be made by cigarettes, had also been found.
00:28:13 As this menacing campaign of harassment progressed, Harriet Clark found a parcel in the outhouse
00:28:19 near the property.
00:28:21 When the parcel was opened, a blood-soaked shroud was found inside that appeared to be
00:28:27 of an expensive quality.
00:28:29 Harriet put the parcel back where she found it and it vanished before the police arrived.
00:28:36 Harriet's son-in-law, William MacDonald, then began house-sitting in the hope of catching
00:28:41 the perpetrators.
00:28:45 After one of the incidents, William ran out of the house and witnessed a man in sand shoes
00:28:51 climbing out of the window of an empty house next door.
00:28:54 He chased the man and his accomplice down, eventually catching him, but the man, who
00:28:59 was described as being well-spoken, explained that he had been taking lead from the roof.
00:29:05 William was knocked down and the two men escaped into the darkness.
00:29:10 The family continued to be tormented and the culprit's ability to avoid the police led
00:29:16 some to believe they knew when they would be there.
00:29:19 These strange goings-on soon captured the public's imagination and as a reporter I've
00:29:24 drawn hundreds of people to the property, all desperate to have a look at the unexplainable.
00:29:31 Harriet's daughter, Ava Clark, received a letter after the publication of the original
00:29:38 article in the Sun and Echo that read, "People are wondering about the mystery of number
00:29:45 51, but there's no mystery about it.
00:29:49 We've been watching you for some time and we are out to get you."
00:29:58 Eventually the family vacated the house to stay with relatives.
00:30:03 No more seems to have been reported on these events, leaving them unexplained.
00:30:08 Was it malicious thieves?
00:30:10 Was it something paranormal?
00:30:11 Or was it something else entirely?
00:30:25 The brick building you can see behind me is now the University of Sunderland's Centre
00:30:29 for Photography, but it was once upon a time a hospital where Mary Ann Cotton worked as
00:30:34 a nurse.
00:30:35 If you haven't heard of Mary Ann, let's just say that while she worked in the caring
00:30:38 profession she didn't exactly take her work home with her.
00:30:41 Mary was in fact a multiple murderer.
00:30:43 In 1873 she was tried and convicted of killing her seven-year-old stepson.
00:30:48 This was the only murder she was ever actually tried for.
00:30:51 But Mary had been charged with the murders of four people in total and was undoubtedly
00:30:56 involved with many others.
00:30:57 She certainly kept it in the family, poisoning not just three husbands, a sister-in-law and
00:31:03 very likely her own mother, but also most of her children, a figure which in itself
00:31:07 runs into double figures.
00:31:09 Mary was administering arsenic like it was going out of fashion, as indeed it eventually
00:31:13 did.
00:31:14 Let's hear more now from someone who knows their anti-diluvian arsenic wielders backwards
00:31:18 and forwards.
00:31:19 Yes, so I'm joined by Sinead from the very brilliant podcast The Poisoner's Cabinet,
00:31:23 in which you look at historical cases of murderers.
00:31:27 And I was speaking about Wearside's notorious Victorian killer, Mary Ann Cotton.
00:31:33 You being the expert, would you say is Mary Ann Cotton the queen of Victorian poisoners?
00:31:40 It's a really good question.
00:31:41 Mary Ann Cotton's been in the news a lot lately, I think possibly because of recent news of
00:31:48 some terribly sad stories of female serial killers, Lucy Letby being one of them.
00:31:54 But people tend to revisit Mary Ann Cotton when you type into Google 'famous female serial
00:31:59 killer', she comes up.
00:32:01 And she's credited as the first UK serial killer, the first female serial killer in
00:32:06 England, in the UK.
00:32:09 It's a point of contention, is she the first one?
00:32:11 She's certainly worthy of the crown, I think.
00:32:13 I think she's the most famous for Victorian poisoners, but there were a lot of Victorian
00:32:20 poisoners.
00:32:22 Everyone needs to make peace with that.
00:32:24 It was a hell of a time for invention and incredible feats in art and culture.
00:32:29 And poison did really well in the Victorian era, had done for centuries beforehand.
00:32:34 So if there's a queen as a female, I guess that Mary Ann Cotton would be up there for
00:32:39 the sheer number of victims that she tragically had.
00:32:43 There are others who may fight for the crown in the Victorian era, but no one really touched,
00:32:50 I think Mary Ann Cotton for the sheer number.
00:32:53 Looking at the case, would you say she was cunning or careless?
00:32:57 I'd say calculated would be the one, but definitely cunning if you were going to go one side or
00:33:02 the other.
00:33:03 Absolutely cunning, but calculations, sort of cunning almost is too nice a word to give
00:33:09 her.
00:33:10 But careless, no, not really.
00:33:13 This is, if the case is exactly as it's been played out, and as we've looked at all of
00:33:19 the research in it, it seems very evident that she knew exactly what she was doing.
00:33:23 And she embarked on a campaign of murder throughout her life, through her various husbands and
00:33:30 through various children.
00:33:31 She absolutely knew what she was doing.
00:33:35 Her motivations for it, that's the thing to really dive into.
00:33:39 And we'll never know exactly what drove her to kill.
00:33:43 But there are certain circumstances, I think, in her childhood and her background that might
00:33:46 explain her actions, but nothing ever really explains why you would go to such lengths
00:33:51 to certainly kill children or kill your partners, seemingly for money.
00:33:54 Yeah, you get the sense that it wasn't done with sort of relish.
00:33:57 It was almost like it was just a very, almost like in her mind, a practical way of going
00:34:01 about things, don't you?
00:34:03 Absolutely, yes.
00:34:04 She'd had a very difficult childhood.
00:34:08 We can't really discount what happened to Mary Ann Cotton as a child, as the youngest,
00:34:12 the death of her father in an extremely violent way, that her father fell down a mineshaft
00:34:17 and was literally brought home to the cottage that her mother and the children had as he
00:34:23 was a workman in a sack, in a sack and handed to the mother and said, "Also, you're evicted."
00:34:29 So from a very young age, Mary Ann Cotton was confronted with violence and was having
00:34:35 to deal with the horrors of death, of the cold calculatedness of the world, really.
00:34:42 And that's going to have an effect on you, I think.
00:34:44 That's going to have an effect on a person.
00:34:46 Some people argue, is anyone born evil or are you nurtured into that?
00:34:51 And there are some psychotherapists who believe, no, you're born a blank slate and it's what
00:34:55 happens to you.
00:34:56 So she obviously developed a way to survive and to live and really started to look at
00:35:03 people as, maybe she did look at them as a commodity, as husbands and children because
00:35:08 she realized, well, life insurance will keep me going.
00:35:12 I can take life insurance policies out on these people closest to me and they are simply
00:35:15 a means to an end.
00:35:17 They are simply just people and people die.
00:35:21 And being confronted with death at such an early stage, she clearly had developed no
00:35:25 emotion for it, we could argue.
00:35:27 We don't know for certain and doesn't seem to have relished or been cackling along the
00:35:31 way.
00:35:32 If she had shown more relish, she would have been caught sooner.
00:35:35 If she were around today, could she sue for libel over being referred to as a serial killer?
00:35:39 Because obviously that's the way we think about it.
00:35:41 She was convicted of one murder, in fact.
00:35:44 Yes.
00:35:45 I mean, I don't think she'd, if she was around today, it'd be interesting.
00:35:48 No, I don't think she'd have a leg to stand on in a libel court because there was plenty
00:35:54 of evidence.
00:35:55 I think today, you know, you can nitpick at these sort of things.
00:36:00 Today she would have been caught far sooner.
00:36:02 Today the evidence would have been much stronger to convict her for more murders.
00:36:08 Back in the day, and we've seen a lot of Victorian poisoning cases and cases of serial killers
00:36:12 that we've covered on the show many times over the centuries, certainly closer to the
00:36:16 modern day, and this happens now, you get the conviction in terms of the authorities
00:36:21 on the strongest case you have.
00:36:24 Strongest case you have.
00:36:25 And back in Mary Ann Cotton's day, it was the death penalty.
00:36:28 So they just needed one conviction and then she would be hanged, however you feel about
00:36:31 capital punishment.
00:36:33 That was what they were aiming for.
00:36:34 Today, they probably still would have only focused on a couple of the cases and said,
00:36:38 okay, this is the strongest evidence we have.
00:36:40 This is enough to put her away for life or double life sentences or a full life term.
00:36:45 Her suing for libel as a serial killer, I mean, you'd have to sort of be a Ted Bundy
00:36:49 sort of level of arrogant to kind of go, well, technically, while yes, of course I did kill
00:36:54 these people, I didn't kill all these, but you haven't proven it.
00:36:57 It would be an interesting case to follow.
00:37:01 But yeah, I don't think, yeah, I don't think that she would have gotten away with it.
00:37:06 Another question, this is kind of speculative because we can't know obviously, but what
00:37:09 kind of day to day personality would you guess she had based on what we know about her?
00:37:14 Because obviously there's the one grim photo of her, but every photo looks grim then.
00:37:18 So it's not a sign of how she was, I guess.
00:37:21 Oh God, no, you can't judge people on the photos that we have.
00:37:24 I mean, Mary Ann Cotton, because she was so reviled by the public and this case absolutely
00:37:28 shook Victorian society, the idea that a woman would kill anyone, but multiple people, you
00:37:34 know, you still have female killers and poisoners in the Victorian era.
00:37:37 You've got others like Christiana Edmonds, you've got Adelaide Bartlett, which was speculative,
00:37:41 Florence Mabryk again, Amelia Dyer, a baby farmer, you know, these kind of, the idea
00:37:48 that women could commit these crimes becomes so horrific to society that they end up portraying
00:37:54 women in photographs as complete monsters, but then you've got some who are absolutely
00:37:59 guilty of crimes and they look like angels in pictures.
00:38:03 How would you define Mary Ann Cotton?
00:38:04 Again, we sort of spoke to some psychotherapists as well when researching the case and asked
00:38:09 for their opinion.
00:38:10 And these are psychotherapists who deal with personality disorders every day.
00:38:13 And 100% she had a severe personality disorder, behavioral disorder.
00:38:20 We could probably assume I would go with that she is a psychopath rather than a sociopath.
00:38:25 She didn't seem to display any empathy at all and no guilt.
00:38:30 She seemed to know what she was doing, was very formulaic with it, even to the finest
00:38:36 words when she was finally caught about her son when he wasn't taken into the workhouse,
00:38:41 she says, well, don't worry, he'll go the way of the other Cottons.
00:38:44 That seems very sort of calculated, like, oh, well, okay, well, we'll just get rid of
00:38:48 him then rather than relishing in it or experiencing any guilt, but sort of being uncontrollable.
00:38:53 So I think definitely a psychopath with behavioral disorders, someone who really wanted to be
00:39:00 in control of their own life and their own destiny.
00:39:03 And this is a pattern that we see with modern serial killers that have been in the news
00:39:08 of late people whose lives in the past they've experienced some trauma, possibly abuse.
00:39:15 And they take this very bizarre to us, bizarre route of violence as a way of controlling
00:39:22 their lives as a way of going, no, I will absolutely be in control of my own destiny,
00:39:26 my day to day world in a very strange and sort of sick way.
00:39:31 But to them, it's completely normal.
00:39:33 So I think, yeah, psychopath is pretty apt for Marianne.
00:39:36 What is it about these sort of historic cases of murder that we find so appealing to go
00:39:42 back to, especially because if we were talking about something that was within the last 20
00:39:47 years, we'd be talking about it in a very different way than we would talk about Mary
00:39:51 or Florence Maybrick or someone like that, wouldn't we?
00:39:54 Yeah, it's a really good point.
00:39:56 It's one that me and my co-host, Nick, on The Poisoner's Cabinet, we wrestled with when
00:40:00 we started it.
00:40:01 We do historic true crime and we focus on older cases.
00:40:08 Modern cases, there are millions of great podcasts.
00:40:11 I mean, literally millions that deal with modern cases and do it very well.
00:40:16 There is a fascination with true crime.
00:40:17 It's the biggest genre in podcasting.
00:40:19 It's if there's a documentary on, we're all going to sit down and watch it because we
00:40:23 want to maybe escape, which sounds like the weirdest way to describe it, escape into a
00:40:29 world that is completely foreign to us.
00:40:31 The idea of murder, of committing a crime, it's so bizarre and we want to know why.
00:40:39 So that's, I think, why true crime is appealing to us, this macabre sense of wanting to understand
00:40:44 the process of how you could do that.
00:40:47 Some people say it's tapping into a darker side of us.
00:40:49 I don't think that's necessarily true.
00:40:51 I think it is pure escapism.
00:40:53 Historic crimes are even more appealing, I think, because you feel so far removed from
00:40:57 them and you can have an element of very dark humor to it.
00:41:02 Certainly that's what we do on our show.
00:41:04 We never seek to diminish the idea that, oh yeah, murder is funny or anything.
00:41:08 Murder is always awful.
00:41:10 The criminals and things that happened in history, it beggars belief if you look at
00:41:15 it with today's eye, how people got away with these things.
00:41:18 Mary Ann Cotton's case is very dark and very bleak.
00:41:21 It's unbelievable in points where even to her childhood and today, you can go, "How
00:41:27 did that happen?
00:41:29 What is wrong with people for not spotting it?
00:41:32 Come on, come on."
00:41:33 And it's very easy to do that in hindsight.
00:41:35 So it gives you maybe a sense of superiority, not in a nasty way, but you can look back
00:41:39 at these cases and play detective a little bit.
00:41:43 And there are also a lot of other Victorian and even older stories of poisoning and murder,
00:41:50 which are kind of crazy and almost sort of comedic in how ridiculous it was that so many
00:41:55 people were able to get away with poison and murder.
00:41:58 And they really did.
00:41:59 It really did.
00:42:00 It was the centre Victorian era and my God, a lot of people were being killed pretty easily
00:42:06 as well because the tests and the research just was not there to prove anyone.
00:42:12 Like different rules from today, isn't it?
00:42:14 If people had considered committing a crime now, they would instantly think of the ways
00:42:19 that they would be caught and a lot of those ways didn't exist back then.
00:42:22 Yeah, you've got people today and we still see cases and our fans send us through cases
00:42:26 that sometimes we talk about on another platform behind a paywall because it's a little bit
00:42:30 more protected.
00:42:32 We have people sending us these stories where people are still trying to poison their loved
00:42:36 ones.
00:42:37 They're trying to be clever.
00:42:38 And if our show of doing all the episodes we've done has taught us nothing of saying
00:42:42 they didn't really get away with it terribly well in the Victorian era, quite a few slipped
00:42:46 through the net, you're not going to get away with it now.
00:42:49 There are so many tests, so many signs of poison.
00:42:55 You would take an extra level of genius to get away with it and invariably these people
00:43:01 are caught.
00:43:02 So yeah, I think historic true crime is good fun because of the insanity of some of the
00:43:09 circumstances around it and it gives you that sort of separation and escapism.
00:43:13 If anyone is interested in historic true crime and cocktails, because we do like to mix up
00:43:17 a cocktail based on the stories that we tell, please do check out The Poisoner's Cabinet.
00:43:21 It is a comedic true crime podcast with lots of research, lots of stories, lots of chats.
00:43:28 And we put an episode out every single week.
00:43:30 Lots of cases covered and also murders outside of poison and crazy crimes.
00:43:35 So worth dipping your toe into if you're into that sort of thing.
00:43:38 It seems that Sunderland is something of a hub of paranormal activity.
00:43:42 We regularly hear of pubs with resident ghosts.
00:43:45 Some poltergeists are apparently capable of deliberately spilling a pint of lager.
00:43:50 This has chilled the heart of many a waysider who had previously been unconcerned by the
00:43:54 supernatural.
00:43:55 As we all know, every pub in Britain is haunted.
00:43:58 It's actually written into the 2003 Licensing Act, but nobody knows who put it there.
00:44:03 This makes eminent sense if you think about it.
00:44:05 If you were a spirit pondering where to spend your indefinite ethereal existence, you wouldn't
00:44:10 choose to spend the centuries clanking round in Wellington Lane Scrapyard.
00:44:13 Splendid scrapyard though it is.
00:44:15 No, you would pick yourself a nice cosy boozer, or perhaps an opulent stately home.
00:44:21 Or castle.
00:44:22 Which brings us neatly, if not contrivedly, to Sunderland's most celebrated spook.
00:44:27 The Cowled Lad of Hilton Castle.
00:44:28 The story of the Cowled Lad, spelled C-A-U-L-D for the benefit of any tourists who might
00:44:33 be watching, is as follows.
00:44:36 We think.
00:44:37 In the 16th or 17th century, can't be more precise, a stable boy called Robert Skelton
00:44:42 was carrying out one of two possible misdemeanours.
00:44:47 Either he had failed to prepare the horse of his boss, the thoroughly unpleasant baron
00:44:51 Robert Hilton, who needed the mount for a journey, or he had been caught in flagrant
00:44:56 delicto with Hilton's daughter.
00:44:59 The more we discover about the baron, the more we hope it was the latter, or better
00:45:03 still, both of them.
00:45:05 Whatever the transgression, Robert Skelton was going to be punished.
00:45:09 Fortunately for the youngster, his master was in a good mood and he got away with merely
00:45:13 being run through on the spot with a pitchfork, or possibly battered to death with a riding
00:45:18 crop, or decapitated with a sword.
00:45:21 If it was indeed a pitchfork, the implement was then put to more legitimate use.
00:45:26 Hilton temporarily hid the body under some straw before later dumming it in a pond, or
00:45:31 maybe down a well.
00:45:32 It was discovered months later.
00:45:34 The baddie baron was eventually put on trial for murder, but managed to produce an alibi.
00:45:39 A farmhand said Hilton had ordered Skelton to remove the tool from the top shelf in the
00:45:44 barn.
00:45:45 The youngster fell and seriously injured himself.
00:45:47 Hilton claimed he attended to the casualty, but to no avail.
00:45:51 Records supposedly show that, according to a 1609 inquest, Hilton was found to have killed
00:45:57 someone with a scythe, but these were less enlightened times.
00:46:01 In those days, wealthy people tended not to be treated overly harshly by legal processes.
00:46:06 Hilton was granted a free pardon.
00:46:08 The story is filled with so many obvious flaws and contradictions that people 500 years ago
00:46:13 would never know what to believe, so we've got no chance.
00:46:16 But of more interest to self-appointed paranormal experts is what happened next.
00:46:21 According to the early 19th century historian Robert Surtees, there's no shortage of Roberts
00:46:25 in this story, Skelton's ghost appeared in Hilton Castle's Great Hall and would break
00:46:29 dishes in the kitchen.
00:46:31 The ghost can't have had much to do, as he would sometimes play with people's minds
00:46:34 by messing up a tidy kitchen, or tidying up a messy kitchen.
00:46:38 He might take hot ashes from the fires, then lie on them to leave an imprint of the body.
00:46:43 Most horrifyingly of all, he would sometimes empty chamber pots on the floor.
00:46:48 He just wanted to be noticed.
00:46:49 Eventually a cook stayed up all night to see what was going on.
00:46:52 He saw the ghost of Robert Skelton, apparently, who was wailing "I'm cold".
00:46:58 The ghost might well have been a cow as he was also naked, which would account for the
00:47:02 hot ashes.
00:47:03 The cook must have been a good egg, as he and his wife left some warm clothing for the
00:47:07 ghost who was so grateful that he traded them to some wrapping.
00:47:11 The next night they heard "Here's a cloak and here's a hood.
00:47:15 The cow lad of Hilton will do no more good."
00:47:19 The hood was the more essential of the two items, as otherwise it wouldn't have rhymed.
00:47:22 Even more important was that certain ghosts are seemingly exercised if they are given
00:47:26 a gift.
00:47:27 The ghost was never heard of again, or was he?
00:47:30 Various Hilton Castle residents, guests and staff over the centuries have claimed unusual
00:47:34 sightings and hearings.
00:47:36 In more recent times, a security guard at the nearby building site claimed that the
00:47:39 cowed lad turned off his red lights and put out his fire.
00:47:43 So perhaps he's not so cowed these days, now that he has that cloak and hood.
00:47:46 There are other well-known ghosts around Sunderland and they tend to apparently inhabit high profile
00:47:51 buildings.
00:47:53 An inevitable white lady wanders round Washington Old Hall, wailing and wringing her hands.
00:47:58 She may have lost her purse.
00:48:00 Another spook is said to haunt the Stadium of Light, even though it was only built in
00:48:03 1997.
00:48:04 However, Sunderland EFC has a long association with shadowy figures.
00:48:09 Theatres have almost as many ghosts as pubs.
00:48:12 This includes the Sunderland Empire, where the spectral box office must be doing good
00:48:16 trade, as resident phantoms are said to include Sid James and Vesta Tilly.
00:48:19 But the cowed lad of Hilton is the real A-lister.
00:48:23 Sunderland as you may know has a long association with Pyrex glassware, which was manufactured
00:48:28 at the Weir Glassworks from 1922 until the factory closed in 2007.
00:48:34 The factory complex also appears to have been the site of a much lesser known haunting,
00:48:38 or at the very least what was believed to be a haunting by the workers in its printing
00:48:42 department.
00:48:43 This anecdote of a benevolent haunting comes to us from a member of our own staff here
00:48:47 at the Sunderland Echo, or rather from his mother.
00:48:49 So my mom has always had this story of a ghost that I've never seen sort of written down
00:48:53 anywhere.
00:48:54 So she used to work at the Pyrex glass factory in the late 60s and sort of early 70s.
00:48:59 She was in the printing department and apparently whenever they would go through sort of doorways
00:49:04 in the building that the printing department was in, there was this sort of sweet tobacco
00:49:08 smell.
00:49:09 Apparently at some point my mom asked, "Oh, what's that smell?"
00:49:12 And everyone who worked there sort of chorused, "Oh, that's Mr. Greener."
00:49:16 As if this was like something that everyone had believed there for a long time.
00:49:20 So obviously they had the idea that it was a ghost.
00:49:24 And at first you would think Mr. Greener was someone who they had known, but it was actually
00:49:29 Mr. Greener who had owned the Weir Flint glassworks long before it had been sold to James A. Joblin
00:49:38 in the sort of 1880s, I think.
00:49:41 And well before the factory had started producing Pyrex under license for the US.
00:49:45 So I don't know how long this idea actually went on for there that Mr. Greener haunted
00:49:50 the place.
00:49:51 But apparently people also believed that the printing department in particular, which was
00:49:55 where they did the time cards, apparently they believed that that had at one time been
00:49:59 Mr. Greener's actual house that was now part of the factory complex.
00:50:03 I've tried to find out if there's any truth to this, but haven't been able to find out
00:50:08 either way.
00:50:09 But it's the kind of memory that always sort of brings a smile to my mom's face.
00:50:12 And she likes to think that whoever lives in the houses that are now in the place where
00:50:17 that building was might occasionally get a sort of whiff of tobacco and wonder, "Who?
00:50:22 What's that?"
00:50:23 You know, it's a nice idea.
00:50:24 So was Mr. Greener's spirit keeping a harmless eye on the place?
00:50:28 It's hard to imagine that would be the case.
00:50:30 He'd had to sell it to a creditor, James Augustus Joblin, and could hardly be said to have any
00:50:34 investment of his own in the success of Pyrex, which wasn't manufactured on the site until
00:50:39 around 40 years after his death.
00:50:41 Then again, if it really was his old house, and let us admit that it's a big if, perhaps
00:50:45 he was just a bit of a homebody even beyond the grave.
00:50:49 Or perhaps a tradition had simply begun amongst the workers at some unknown point of attributing
00:50:53 all manner of mystery and sense around the building to a pleasantly ghostly presence.
00:50:57 With nothing else apparently documented, though, we can't know for how long a tradition of
00:51:01 believing in Mr. Greener's paternal presence actually lasted.
00:51:05 His home, it would have been around here, is no longer there to haunt, and the memories
00:51:10 of earlier generations are similarly long gone.
00:51:20 The story of the Washington High Women was popularised by headmaster and Washington stalwart
00:51:24 Fred Hill in a book he wrote in the 1940s.
00:51:27 Its authenticity is disputed, but the tale is undiminished.
00:51:31 One evening in 1770, or so the story goes, a posh lady called Margaret Manson was travelling
00:51:37 home in her carriage when her driver was stopped at Pistol Point by a highwayman.
00:51:41 The robber made off with half a giddy, he later relieved a postman of his bags.
00:51:45 Regrettably for our highwayman, he had been spotted holding up Mrs. Manson by a small
00:51:50 boy who recognised the thief's grey mare from Washington Village's blacksmiths.
00:51:54 The little lad grasped him up good and proper.
00:51:57 Law enforcers at the time went to see the blacksmith, Bill Allison, who confirmed that
00:52:01 he tended to a horse of that description every Friday.
00:52:04 The lawman lay in wait the following Friday and the highwayman, Robert Hazlitt, was duly
00:52:08 nicked.
00:52:09 His cries of innocence were undermined a tad when his bags were searched and a pistol and
00:52:13 black mask discovered.
00:52:14 The circumstantial evidence goes that he may as well have written 'swag' on the bag and
00:52:18 had the set.
00:52:19 Hazlitt confessed and told his captors where the loot was, hoping for a bit of compassion
00:52:23 in court, but his luck ran out further when he was tried at Durham Assizes.
00:52:28 The judge, Sir John Fielding, recognised the bloke in the dock as the same scoundrel who
00:52:32 had robbed him a few months earlier.
00:52:34 Robert Hazlitt was hanged and gibbered on Tuesday, September 18th 1770.
00:52:38 Inevitably his ghost has set the lurk around the village.
00:52:46 One of Sunderland's most intriguing little thoroughfares, one which we wish could actually
00:52:51 speak, is one which most way-siders have probably never walked down, although most of them will
00:52:56 have travelled past it at some point.
00:52:59 Bull Lane lies off High Street East, in between the excellent East End Forest and the sadly
00:53:06 recently closed down Clarendon pub, which laid claim strongly to being Sunderland's
00:53:11 oldest boozer.
00:53:13 The Clarendon is a story in itself, it dates back to 1724.
00:53:17 The pub cellar contains somewhere a smugglers cave, so let's hope the pub reopens at some
00:53:22 point.
00:53:23 We can only speculate, perhaps a little romantically, about what has gone on here over the past
00:53:27 few centuries.
00:53:29 A friend of mine has a remarkable anecdote from the 1990s which we couldn't possibly
00:53:34 tell you, although it is very amusing.
00:53:36 However, given its small size, darkness and proximity to the river and the Clarendon,
00:53:41 Bull Lane might well have been a venue for a spot of press-ganging.
00:53:45 Sunderland's greatest naval hero, Jack Crawford for example, was press-ganged in 1796.
00:53:52 Press-ganging incidentally was the practice of forcibly making people join the Royal Navy.
00:53:56 So who knows, Jack could have been bundled down Bull Lane and lobbed aboard a nearby
00:54:00 vessel.
00:54:01 Press-ganging fell into disuse after Napoleon had been sorted out in 1815.
00:54:06 The lane is narrow, only a few metres long and gives pedestrian access between High Street
00:54:10 East and Low Street, where there is a picturesque view of the River Weyher.
00:54:16 Previously there had been a number of similar lanes in the East End.
00:54:18 On the other side of the forest was Nails Passage, that was blocked some years ago.
00:54:23 Bordlewell Lane, after which the apartment block Bordlewell House is named, just up the
00:54:28 road, was another to be demolished.
00:54:30 But why is it called Bull Lane?
00:54:32 Phil Curtis of the Sunderland Antiquarians, whom we thank, says that a 1732 rate book
00:54:38 calls the thoroughfare Headley's Lane after one Thomas Headley who bought 143 High Street
00:54:44 East, which is the Clarendon, in 1724 and that it probably changed its name to Bull
00:54:49 Lane when Mr Headley died.
00:54:50 There has been speculation that cattle were led up here, up to what was then the market
00:54:56 on High Street East.
00:54:58 However, it seems unlikely.
00:55:00 Cattle are notably unenthusiastic about walking uphill, especially when there are steep stairs
00:55:05 involved and the lane is also quite narrow.
00:55:09 They wouldn't be keen.
00:55:10 The most likely and most favoured explanation is that bull-baiting took place here.
00:55:15 The sport, as we shall call it, of bull-baiting was a delightful pastime, very popular in
00:55:21 medieval England.
00:55:22 This serene pastime involved a bull being tied to an iron stake which was bolted into
00:55:27 the ground.
00:55:28 Dogs, eventually known as bulldogs, then set about the bull, aiming to pin it down by grabbing
00:55:33 onto their snouts, the most sensitive part of the bull's anatomy, and wrestling with
00:55:37 the bull until the dogs had turned it on its side.
00:55:41 If this compromised the welfare of the bull somewhat, it didn't do much for the dogs
00:55:44 either, their risk being gored, trampled under hoof or severely bitten.
00:55:48 But in the days before either animal welfare or, more saliently, the telly, audiences were
00:55:53 in thrall.
00:55:54 The cruel treatment of cattle act 1822 didn't quite do what it set out to do.
00:56:00 It gave protection to all cattle except bulls.
00:56:03 There was too much fun to be had.
00:56:06 Bull-baiting was finally outlawed by the Spoilsport Animal Cruelty Act of 1835, by which time
00:56:12 the name of Bull Lane was well established.
00:56:14 Workers digging the ground only a few years back on the buildings behind me, next to the
00:56:18 florist, unearthed some bulls teeth, the more evidence of a less than delightful history.
00:56:23 Now what if I were to tell you that the historic Jackie White's Market in the centre of Sunderland
00:56:28 contained a magical portal where you could be transported back to your childhood?
00:56:32 You'd probably think I was stretching the point a bit, but bear with me.
00:56:36 We spoke to the owner of the collectible stall, The Retro Room, a veritable Aladdin's Cave
00:56:41 of pop culture curios.
00:56:43 On so many occasions people walk past and are like, "Oh my God, I haven't been into
00:56:47 the market in so many years.
00:56:49 How long have you been here?"
00:56:51 We do get a lot of people shocked.
00:56:53 A lot of people still come here expecting to see the old shops here as well, looking
00:56:57 for the plates and dishes, and they're like, "No, we've been here a fair while now."
00:57:02 You do get a fair amount of surprise and like, "Oh wow."
00:57:06 And it's good as well, because it gives people a reason to come in as well.
00:57:10 They're happy that this sort of stuff's here.
00:57:14 Opened in 2022, May, we made a conscious decision to open on May the 4th, so we'd have the Star
00:57:25 Wars day.
00:57:26 We originally opened in the back in a smaller unit, and there was a little bit of success,
00:57:30 so we moved to this unit.
00:57:32 A good base of our customers is returning customers, actually.
00:57:35 We've been pretty lucky.
00:57:37 We've picked up some really good customers, and we've been lucky with the other businesses
00:57:40 in the area as well.
00:57:42 They've been sending us some really great customers, so we do get a lot of repeat customers.
00:57:48 But finding new customers is probably the most difficult part, because a lot of people
00:57:53 just don't venture into the market.
00:57:56 So we have been getting a good sort of turnover of new customers, but returning customers
00:58:01 is... and people who know us through online as well, is another key element of what brings
00:58:07 people in.
00:58:08 Online has become a massive part of what we do.
00:58:13 Initially when we set this up, I set it up with the intention of treating this as a base
00:58:17 and a way of bringing stock into what was an already existing online sort of venture,
00:58:26 so to speak.
00:58:27 We were doing a lot via eBay, a lot via Facebook Marketplace, and I just wanted to have a physical
00:58:33 space.
00:58:34 So a lot of what we've done is focus on just having this as a physical and reliant on the
00:58:41 online, but now it's sort of turning a little bit, where it's actually... we're doing pretty
00:58:45 good in here, and we want to bring it all together into one big thing.
00:58:51 The Retro Room, Sunderland.com.
00:58:54 We also asked Dayton what are the real holy grail items he'd love to have in stock?
00:58:58 How do I get back in here?
00:59:00 For stock for the shop, for me, there's two.
00:59:04 Stock-wise, we really, really want Transformers.
00:59:08 I've struggled since opening to get good quality early 80s Transformers.
00:59:15 I'd really, really like a good boxed original Optimus Prime, a good Megatron.
00:59:21 Megatron's another one that's really tough.
00:59:23 That I would say would be the grail items, but please bring us Transformers.
00:59:27 We need them.
00:59:28 Now we've all heard of the Great Fire of London, 1666, but Sunderland suffered its own more
00:59:33 comparatively recent fire.
00:59:37 Still long enough ago for the photographs to exist only in black and white.
00:59:41 So here's the story then of the town's Great Fire, for it was a town in the year 1898.
00:59:47 The Great Fire of Sunderland left 48 shops and businesses in ruins.
00:59:53 A windy night in Sunderland sparked an inferno.
00:59:57 It started in Havelock House and spread across the corner of Fawcett Street, large parts
01:00:04 of High Street West and the north end of John Street.
01:00:09 There were no fire engines, no fire hydrants, but all the town chipped in.
01:00:15 Every available police officer was out.
01:00:17 Twelve postmen formed a human barrier to stop sightseers.
01:00:22 Panic broke out when the Royalty Theatre had to be evacuated.
01:00:27 Even looters were out in force.
01:00:37 One man was nabbed running down Matlock Street with a stolen lady's dress, a basket and a
01:00:44 bucket on his head.
01:00:46 Despite this disguise, he was identified and hauled before the court.
01:00:55 The Great Fire lasted for hours and only died down early the next day.
01:01:05 By then, 11 premises in Fawcett Street, 22 shops and offices in John Street, 12 business
01:01:12 premises in High Street West and 3 shops in John Street were gutted.
01:01:18 The damage was estimated at £400,000 at a time when the total retailable value of the
01:01:25 town was £500,000.
01:01:27 There can be few way-siders who have failed at some point to notice the enchanting doorway,
01:01:35 a medieval arch surrounding the wooden door set in a cliff-face in deepest Morbray Park.
01:01:42 It certainly has an appropriately Alice's Adventures in Wonderland look to it and generations
01:01:46 of children, having asked their parents the purpose of the doorway, have delighted in
01:01:50 being fobbed off.
01:01:51 There's pure wind about goblins, fairies, elves, pixies, that lot.
01:01:56 Not that adults asking the same question are likely to receive any information that is
01:01:59 any more reliable.
01:02:01 Whenever I've asked, I've always been presented with blind guesses or outright flippancy.
01:02:06 The beautiful lion's head doorknob, notwithstanding, won't take you to Narnia.
01:02:11 It also turns out that the council's parking meter committee doesn't have clandestine meetings
01:02:15 or acid house parties in there after all.
01:02:18 Nor does it contain Nazi gold bullion.
01:02:21 It isn't even part of a secret network of tunnels which merge into a neolithic portal
01:02:24 in the Pennywell Comrades Club.
01:02:27 It isn't a casino.
01:02:28 It isn't... you get the picture.
01:02:30 There is literally an endless list of things that are not behind the door but the truth
01:02:34 of the matter turns out to be... well, say what you think.
01:02:38 Both the door and its knocker were commissioned to artists Craig Knowles and Carl Fisher in
01:02:42 the late 1990s.
01:02:43 However, there is a genuine historic value to the stone archway, which is medieval and
01:02:50 was originally the entrance to the rectory of St Michael and All Angels Church, now Sutherland
01:02:54 Minster.
01:02:56 The rectory was roughly where the Empire Theatre is now.
01:02:59 It was demolished not long before Moorbrake Park was officially opened by John Candlish,
01:03:04 the glass magnate, in 1857.
01:03:07 The arch was preserved and moved to the park.
01:03:09 If it looks a bit on the short side these days, it's because much of it is buried.
01:03:13 Among the notables to have passed through the Grade II listed archway at its previous
01:03:16 location was the Rector of Bishop Williamouth 1827-1848, Gerald Wellesley, younger brother
01:03:23 of the Duke of Wellington, although he only turned up occasionally.
01:03:28 Another Rector between 1796 and his death in 1805 was William Paley.
01:03:32 He is best remembered for his 1802 book, Natural Theology or Evidence of the Existence and
01:03:38 Attributes of the Deity.
01:03:40 Apart from having a title which is the very antithesis of Snappy, the book is notable
01:03:45 as a rebuttal to evolution, even though it was published seven years before Charles Darwin
01:03:50 was born.
01:03:51 Like the legendary Spotty's Cave in Roker Park, there was a cave behind the door.
01:03:56 The mystique of Spotty's is diminished somewhat these days as the council uses it to store
01:04:00 distinctly unmagical items such as wheelie bins and plastic road barriers.
01:04:05 The Moorbrake Park doorway can't even match that for a lure.
01:04:08 According to official information, there is a cave behind the doorway where the park keeper
01:04:13 used to store tools and supplies in years gone by.
01:04:15 This cave has now been blocked up for safety reasons.
01:04:18 So not only is the door unlikely to be opened again any time soon, it would only lead to
01:04:22 a parkies cupboard.
01:04:23 And a disused one at that.
01:04:25 Oh well, it's a lovely ornamental place and there is history behind it.
01:04:30 And if the little ones ask, it's occupied by goblins, fairies, elves, pixies, that lot.
01:04:35 If ever you walk through Sunderland and walk in past Park Lane, Albion Place is a collection
01:04:43 of restaurants and I think a conservative club or something like that is there.
01:04:49 And they are sort of nice old buildings.
01:04:51 But if you look on the very corner of that, there is a rounded corner building which is
01:04:57 now Chilinos.
01:04:59 If you look above that level, you'll see that there's a much older house.
01:05:04 And that is actually the house, Albion Place.
01:05:07 And Albion Place was a private residential house.
01:05:11 And they just happened to extend into the garden, which is where we have the terrace
01:05:14 now.
01:05:15 But Albion Place was rented out by a really interesting character who moved to Sunderland
01:05:21 called Sir Cuthbert Sharp.
01:05:24 And Sir Cuthbert Sharp was born in Hartlepool in the middle of the 18th century.
01:05:31 And he had a career as a diplomat and as a soldier.
01:05:36 And he received quite a lot of attention and that's how he got his knighthood.
01:05:43 He was also a member of something called the Beef Eater Club, which was a London-based
01:05:48 dining club to do with literature and art.
01:05:55 He retired at quite a young age and moved up to Sunderland to take up the role of the
01:06:02 port commissioner, the river commissioner, which was a very easy sort of job.
01:06:08 It was a nice restful job.
01:06:09 You just had to take taxes from the boats that were docking in the port.
01:06:16 And he brought with him this idea of culture.
01:06:19 He brought with him the contacts he had made in the Beef Eater Club and these included
01:06:25 people like Sir Walter Scott.
01:06:27 And Sir Walter Scott was one of the best-known writers of the 19th century.
01:06:32 He was incredibly well-known.
01:06:35 He was one of the most profitable writers.
01:06:40 And he visited Sunderland because of Sir Cuthbert Sharp.
01:06:44 And he stayed at Albion Place with Cuthbert Sharp.
01:06:48 And if you look online, you can see there are letters written between Cuthbert Sharp
01:06:54 and Sir Walter Scott where he talks about his visit to Sunderland in the early part
01:06:58 of the 19th century.
01:07:02 But one of the other interesting things about Sir Cuthbert Sharp is this nice, quiet retirement
01:07:08 he was hoping for happened to coincide with the first outbreak of cholera in Sunderland.
01:07:15 So in 1831, he found himself not only responsible for collecting taxes but managing a massive
01:07:22 outbreak of a very unusual disease that hadn't occurred in Britain before.
01:07:27 So if you imagine the pandemic, we've got that in 1831 happening in Sunderland.
01:07:33 We are ground zero for that.
01:07:37 So he ends up being responsible for all of that.
01:07:40 And that really is the end of him because he then gives up trying to be a river commissioner
01:07:45 and moves to Newcastle where he promptly dies.
01:07:48 So Sir Cuthbert Sharp, if you look at Albion Place, then you'll see his house is still
01:07:54 there and it's one of the very few houses left in Sunderland that goes back into the
01:08:00 18th century.
01:08:01 There really aren't that many.
01:08:02 But this is the house that he lived in.
01:08:05 So he is an interesting character who moved to Sunderland and then quickly moved out again.
01:08:11 And the worst thing was he couldn't even pop into Chileno's.
01:08:14 Now to bring down the curtain on this little variety show of wayside curiosities, we have
01:08:19 another tale from the second volume of Rob Kilburn's book, Tyne and Weird.
01:08:26 The lore of the eccentric has long since been one that fascinates me.
01:08:31 When we see a homeless man or woman in the street carrying a lot of bags, it is sometimes
01:08:36 whispered in hushed tones that the person in question was actually very rich.
01:08:42 Or they had won the lottery and suffered a breakdown leading to their current circumstances.
01:08:48 These things are seldom true, but one interesting case from Sunderland proves that is not always
01:08:54 the case.
01:08:56 Lady Pete was a woman who lived for many years in a house in Villiers Street.
01:09:01 And although she possessed considerable wealth, she was said to live in the cellar kitchen
01:09:06 in a wretched state, sleeping inside a wooden box.
01:09:11 The many other rooms in the property were elaborately furnished, but were not seen to
01:09:17 be occupied, nor the windows ever clean.
01:09:20 As a youth, she had married in pursuit of her desire to have a title, and Sir Robert
01:09:25 Pete, it is said, married her for her money, making it an arrangement that both found pleasing.
01:09:32 Lady Pete received her title, and Sir Robert Pete received £1,000 a year.
01:09:39 Following the wedding ceremony, he returned down London, while she continued to live in
01:09:44 Sunderland.
01:09:47 As if this story was not strange enough, it seems she was also a kleptomaniac, and was
01:09:53 widely known to be so.
01:09:56 The local shopkeepers would pay her no heed, simply making a note of what the eccentric
01:10:02 lady had stolen and sending the bill, which strangely was always paid.
01:10:09 It is noted, on one occasion, she travelled to Harrington to collect a large sum of money
01:10:14 owed by a tenant for rent, and when she was told to return the following week, Lady Pete
01:10:20 took some of the clothes from the washing line and put them in her bag.
01:10:24 Two men who witnessed the event took her back to the house and made her write off the money
01:10:29 owed, as well as pay for the clothes she had stolen.
01:10:33 The bizarre tale from the life of Lady Pete states that at one time, she invited a doctor
01:10:39 and a minister round for tea with her.
01:10:42 On sitting at her table, the servant announced they were out of tea, to which Lady Pete replied,
01:10:48 "There is some cold dumpling.
01:10:50 Just slice it and they will enjoy it, I know."
01:10:54 To which it is said, the men did enjoy it.
01:10:57 When her husband eventually died, it is reported that Lady Pete ran through the streets proclaiming
01:11:03 the glorious news.
01:11:05 Lady Pete herself passed away on the 20th of November 1842, and is now largely forgotten
01:11:13 by the people of the town she once loved to steal from.
01:11:28 Our thanks, not for the first time, go to Phil Curtis of the wonderful Sutherland Antiquarian
01:11:33 Society, a massive help to a number of people who have contributed these features.
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