I've not found a good local story for a while then this turned up which is definitely quite interesting. It comes from Chris Mitchell from Queensland, Australia who has strong evidence for being an ancestor of John Smith (1787-1853) who was brought up by George and Isabella Smith at what was then called High Close Farm. They had four other children, Margaret, Jane, George and Ann, all baptised at Heddon on the Wall.

At the time, High Close House, now a private residence surrounded by a golf course, was probably the Home Farm of Close House Estate, owned by the Bewicke family.

The family are remembered by a gravestone in St Andrew's Churchyard [14] which reads:

Sacred to the memory of Isabella Smith wife of George Smith of Close House who died the 13th of November 1822 aged 71 years. Also to the memory of George Smith husband of the above Isabella Smith who died the 5th of June 1836 aged 82 years. Margaret Smith daughter of the above died at Close House 25th July 1858 aged 75 years.

John Smith married Frances Jackson from Southwell, Nottinghamshire on 21 October 1816 and emigrated with one infant, George, on the vessel, Shipley, bound for Australia on 18 December in the same year. By coincidence this was the same vessel which carried John Gill to Australia in 1821, having been convicted  for the Great Heddon Tea Robbery.

In January 1818 John Smith received a land grant of 500 acres at Bringelly, about 50km west of Sydney. He named it Close House. Owing to the effect of heat on Frances' health, in 1820 they decided to move to Tasmania. John applied for and received a location order for 500 acres at Breadalbane about 7 miles south of Launceston. The property was named Marchington, after property inherited by Frances from her father Magnus Jackson.

Although Chris seems sure of John Smith's connection with High Close House he is not quite so certain of the rest of the tale, a collection of family stories, heirlooms, family likenesses and genetics which suggest that John Smith might actually have been the son of Prince George (later King George IV 1820-30) and Maria Fitzherbert. They were secretly married in 1785 but later annulled.

Could John have been paid off for his silence and encouraged to emigrate as far away as possible? He is only one of several who claim to be children of George. If true, John Smith would have been a cousin of Queen Victoria.

Is there another reason John could have been placed with the Smiths at High Close House? No connection is yet known between Maria Fitzherbert and George and Isabella Smith. However, there are local connections. Maria's cousin, Sir Edward Smythe owned Esh Hall near Durham until his death in 1811, and her uncle, Henry Errington posessed Beaufront Castle near Hexham, only 15km west of Close House estate. Henry's will referred to his nephews (Maria's brothers), Charles and Henry 'Smith'.

Chris has produced a nicely written, well documented and balanced assessment of the evidence which you can read below. Perhaps more will come to light in the future. Read it and make up your own mind.

When VE Day dawns on 8th May 2020 it will be 75 years since the guns fell silent at the end of the war in Europe. Years of carnage and destruction had come to an end and millions of people took to the streets and pubs to celebrate peace, mourn their loved – ones and to hope for the future, but not forgetting those still in conflict until 15th August when it was announced that Japan had surrendered unconditionally to the Allies, effectively ending World War II.

Because of the current Coronavirus emergency and consequent Government guidance, we are advised to cancel or postpone our planned VE Day 75 community celebrations. A possible date (unless longer shut-down becomes necessary) is the weekend of 15th–16th August.

Click on the title above to go to the IWM website and  on Read More below to see a film.

4272932 Fusilier H.G. Watson, The Royal Northumberland Fusiliers 28th October 1940 age 26.
O valiant heart who to your glory came, your name is hallowed in the home you loved.

Commonwealth War Graves Commission states:
Harold George Watson, son of Charles George and Annie Mary Watson, of Newburn.

Pilot Officer J. A. Trotter, Royal Australian Air Force 24th August 1942 age 31.
Greater love hath no man.

Commonwealth War Graves Commission states: James Arthur Trotter, 402454, Pilot Officer with RAAF, died 20/08/1942. Son of Arthur & Lillian Trotter of Sydney, New South Wales; husband of Jean Bainbridge Fullarton Trotter, of Carruthers, Saskatchewan, Canada.

North East War memorials Project quotes  RAF Bomber Command Losses of the Second World War:
P/O J.A. Trotter was a member of the crew of Stirling bomber N6083 OJ-N which took off from Lakenheath (Suffolk) on a mission to Frankfurt. An engine caught fire almost immediately, causing the aircraft to crash just a mile away from the end of the runway. All the crew were killed.

There is a blog article about Pilot Officer James Arthur Trotter here.

English Heritage has recently renewed their interpretation boards for the restored section of hadrian's Wall on the east side of Heddon village. The two boards at each end of our section of the Wall feature reconstruction artworks by Peter Lorimer.

This last couple of years has seen me doing some exploring and more detailed archaeology in Redesdale. It is beautiful, wild Northumberland countryside with a wealth of wildlife, history and tradition. I have had the honour to work alongside local  people and other like-minded folk from Tynedale Archaeology Group as a volunteer on the National Lottery funded Revitalising Redesdale project.

Another computer-based project is now drawing to a conclusion, that of transcribing the Northumberland Ordnance Survey Name Books of the 1860's first survey, a project led by Professor Diana Whalley. The last parish to be transcribed was Elsdon (including Rochester, Otterburn and a few parts of other parishes, before boundary changes) with about 800 interesting and often informative place-names. Involvement with this project has led me to this post.

Given as an authority to the spelling of one of the place-names in the parish was a reference to  'The Lay of the Reedwater Minstrel'. It is a poem by Robert Roxby, and reading it makes you aware that not only was he too facinated by the place-names of the area but also appeared to know them intimately as places, along with a few of the local inhabitants.

This quotation is used on page 13 of the Revitalising Redesdale: Landscape Conservation Action Plan (LCAP-Part 1) published in July 2017.

In 2013 I wrote an article on this blog about the wreck of a wooden-hulled steam drifter (fishing boat) on the bed of the River Tyne close to the Ryton shore.

Together with an archaeologist who had examined the wreck a few years earlier, we had tried to find out more details. The best information we had was that from a correspondent who told us the vessel had been called Reflect. The vessel had been purchased from Clayton & Davis, ship breakers at Dunston, in the early 1950's. It was to have been a house boat at Ryton for the Sea Scouts but sank before it was converted.

In June of this year, completely out of the blue, another correspondent, ex deep-sea fisherman and researcher of fishing boats, Andrew Hall, sent us a full history of the vessel.

She had started life in 1902, launched by S. Richards & Co. Ltd, of Lowestoft for Robert S. Gouldby, Kessingland, Suffolk as 'Kessingland'. Completed in 1908 and registered at Lowestoft as LT 210.

In 1915, the Kessingland was requisitioned as a Net Laying Vessel (Ad No.1056) based at Dover, being returned to her owners in 1919. In 1920 she was in Scarborough, registered as SH 210, with several different owners up to 1926.

In this year she was back in Lowestoft, registered as LT 294 and renamed 'Reflect'.

In the Second World War, Reflect was requisitioned as an Examination Vessel, returned to her owners in 1945. Two years later she was sold as scrap to Clayton & Davies of Dunston on Tyne. Here she was purchased by the 1st Tyne Sea Scouts, sailed to Ryton, but sank before refitting as a houseboat.

Following the excitement with the find of a section of Hadrians Wall on the Town Farm development site we now report on a new archaeology find, close to the eastern entrance.

We must await the full archaeology report but it is clearly a medieval or post-medieval corn-drying kiln, very simillar to that built into the conserved section of Hadrian's Wall, slightly further east, across Towne Gate.

The excavation was undertaken by an archaeologist from Wardell Armstrong, and my photos taken, with careful regard for health & safety, through the wire fence at the east entrance to the building site.

The location of the kiln is likley to lie close to, but just to the north of the line of Hadrian's Wall, which hadn't been visible in this area of the site.

Behind the circular part of the kiln in the foreground is a deep fire-pit bounded by large  masonry on the south side.

Photos below, taken in June 2017, are of the old Town Farm (Tulip's Yard) before demolition of the old buildings.

Photos below of the revealed section of Hadrian's Wall taken by Bill Pointer 8th March 2019.

Those who have followed developments of the former site of Town Farm, later Tulip’s Haulage Yard, on the East side of the village will have seen in the past weeks, the old, derelict buildings of the farmstead demolished, a new section of Hadrian’s Wall briefly found and cleared, and the site prepared for the building of five new bungalows.
 
I don’t know much about the early history of Town Farm but have speculated that it was in place in 1750 requiring the slight adjustment of General Wade’s Military Road from using the line (and foundations) of Hadrian’s Wall, west from Great Hill. This led to the preserved section of the Wall otherwise largely destroyed and covered by the road. This road, the first properly constructed road in Northumberland since Roman times, became the Newcastle to Carlisle Turnpike and later the A69, before it was abandoned and the bypass constructed.
 
Beside the old road, below the retaining wall of the Town Farm site, still stands a milestone recording a distance of 7 miles from Newcastle’s West gate. It is probably one of the original milestones of the turnpike road from around 1780.
 
The original farm may have adjoined the old buildings, incorporating both farmhouse and barn as one long building. The two-storey farmhouse still standing on the north side of the old road, previously Four Winds and now Glanville House, was probably a much later addition.
 
At one time, like much of the village, it was owned by the Clayton family. The farmer in 1901 was William Stephenson who lived in the farmhouse with his wife Sarah and six children. William had been born at Rudchester and was nephew of William Stephenson who founded Throckley Brick Works and whose son, Sir William Haswell Stephenson of the Throckley Coal Company was seven times Lord Mayor of Newcastle.
 
In 1901 a gamekeeper, George Charlton, lived in what is now Keepers Cottage. He died in 1931 and has a gravestone in St Andrew’s churchyard erected by Brigadier General Sir Loftus Bates of Heddon Hall ‘in memory of an old friend’.
 
There was a large fire at Town Farm in 1913 which destroyed buildings and livestock. It was fought by local people until the fire brigade arrived from Newburn, alerted by a youth on a bicycle.
 
In 1918 it was bought for £3000, along with many of the other village properties, by Sir James Knott who had a vision of turning Heddon into a model village. However, after the events of the First War and loss of his two sons, his interest in the village came to an end. Town Farm was Lot 1 in his sale of 1924. Town Farm, on the site of the Roman Wall, including 38 acres of old grass land, was sold to Adam and James Hedley for £2800. They were already faming Bays Leap, bought from the Claytons in 1918. James Knott retained the small field containing the currently preserved section of Hadrian’s Wall which he later instructed to be gifted to the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne.
 
Around 1927, Town Farm was rented from the Hedleys by William Ward Sanderson. He lived in the farmhouse and farmed the fields on the east side of the village, milking cows in a parlour at the farmstead, cutting hay on the site of the Roman Wall and running a local shop selling cigarettes and confectionary. The end of farming came when the land was sold for the building of the Vallum housing estate in the 1950s. The farm buildings became part of Tulip’s Yard, base for a successful haulage company.
 
The wall of the farm next to the old road sported adverts for the local shop and a Heddon on the Wall road-sign on a photo of army cadets resting on the grass below taken around 1950. Part of this photo was used on the album of The Eton Rifles by The Jam in 1979.
 
Demolition of the farm buildings in the past weeks and thorough archaeological excavation of the site has revealed the continuation of Hadrian’s Wall in two runs of large stones marking the lower course of its north face, and rubble core set in clay remaining below the old buildings. Most of the stones had been previously robbed and presumably reused elsewhere, perhaps including the church and even the buildings of Town Farm. Milecastle 12, known by measurement to be in this vicinity, hasn’t yet been found and may have been further west, perhaps under the garden north of Tank House. Similar remains of the Wall are known to exist below the tarmac of General Wade's road something that causes all sorts of problems for utility companies wanting to dig holes.
 
Cadwallader Bates in his History of Heddon published 1886: This mile-castle probably stood to the east of the pond, on the hill-top now covered with ruins of cottages. The Rev. G. Bowlker, vicar of Heddon, has heard that the people who lived in these cottages, in digging a hole in front of them for burying a horse, came on old foundations and what they described as a grave-stone with letters on it. This they promptly broke up.
 
Nothing has been agreed to date but interest has been expressed in the village obtaining at least some of the Hadrian’s Wall stones if they are not wanted elsewhere, perhaps to enhance the area around the Victrix sculpture, letting us put the centurion close to a little part of the fabric of the original Roman Wall.

Map rendering provided by houseprices.io free to use under Creative Commons Attribution Licence CC BY 4.0

LINKS

The Wall at Heddon

Heddon History - Hadrian's Wall

Hadrian's Wall on Tyneside (pdf)

Hexham Courant - 19th March 2019

The Knott Memorial Hall was given to the village of Heddon by Sir T. Garbutt Knott, in memory of his parents, Sir James and Lady Margaret Annie Knott.

Initially the hall was to be a more elaborate construction, the initial plans of 1935 included higher wings at the north east and south west corners to provide a news and games room at one end and a caretakers flat at the other.

In view of the relatively small size of the village, at that time, and the existing news and games room at the Men's Institute, and the availability of other meeting rooms, it was decided to scale down the plans and use the money saved to create an endowment fund to assist with the future upkeep of the hall. This suggestion was agreed to by Sir Garbutt and his legal advisers, and the Hall in its present form was subsequently built in 1936.

The site upon which it was built formed part of the Church Banks, this had been for many years previous an unofficial playground for the village children.

Mr. L.Walton-Taylor of Heddon and Newcastle was the architect and the Hall was built by Messrs. Lowry of Newcastle. The original official opening ceremony was to have taken place on Saturday the 18th July, 1936 at 3pm by Lt.Col. Sir Alexander Leith, Bart, M.C; D.L, and the dedication service by the Venerable Archdeacon of Northumberland, a tea to be provided for all invited guests.

The tragic death of the vicar, The Rev. Harold Nixon, in a motoring accident whilst on holiday in Wales,  brought a sudden cancellation of these plans. It was later officially opened by Mrs. G.E. Wilkinson of Wylam and dedicated by the Lord Bishop Billrough, of Newcastle, on the 24th October, 1936.

Program for original opening ceremony planned for 18th July 1936.