Staithes is usually considered the south-eastern limit of the 'North-East of England' - well, at least it is by me. And I found myself calling in there the other day, being the final stop on the Cleveland leg of my coastal adventures. I hadn't been there for years, but the limitations of daylight at this time of year precluded a lengthy visit - after all, I had to get back to Skinningrove before 4pm! However, my wife and I had a snack there (as well as the obligatory ice cream - yes, in November), and we indulged ourselves with a quick scout around its charming streets before we turned on our heels.
Everywhere I go I am always on the lookout for connections with my hometown of Newcastle. I wasn't really expecting to find any at Staithes, to be honest, but as luck would have it I just happened to fall upon a couple of strong links in the days following my visit. And two very different ones at that.
The first concerns Newcastle-born (in 1851) artist Isa Jobling (nee Thompson), who, after a comfortable upbringing on the west side of the town (her father was a successful ships' chandler), ended up in Paris studying art. After her father's death in 1875 she returned to the region and set up home in Cullercoats among its famous artists' community, where she flourished. Like most of the other painters around her, Isa specialised in romanticised images of the working folk of the village, and exhibited twice in the 1880s.
In 1889, she moved to Elswick and also set up a city centre studio, but began making regular trips to ... yes, you've guessed it ... Staithes. Here she further indulged her passion for painting working class men and women, which led to her exhibiting widely up until the mid-1890s. Her marriage to fellow artist Robert Jobling in 1893 (and a move back to Cullercoats) led to a falling-off of her output, but the pair visited Staithes regularly over the following years, with their resultant paintings featuring prominently in their many exhibitions. Isa Jobling's most famous work is probably Fisher Folk, featuring two fisher-women from Staithes. After a long and successful double-career, Robert died in 1923 and Isa in 1926.
The other link between Newcastle and Staithes concerns the alum industry. Now, alum was important in the textile industry as a fixing agent for dyes. Traditionally, this had been imported from Italy, but from the 1600s the industry took off here in England thanks to the discovery of alum-rich shale on the North Yorkshire coast. Loftus and Boulby, immediately to the west of Staithes, were two of the biggest quarries in this regard. And the scars of this long-gone industry can still be clearly seen in the landscape thereabouts.
Thing is, the whole process of quarrying and processing the raw materials (before one arrived at the finished product) was a very long-winded operation indeed. To cut a long story short (and there are plenty of websites out there to consult if you're interested) this involved importing rather a lot of coal for the various stages of burning and firing, and an inordinate amount of stale urine, too, for its ammonium content. As you have probably by now guessed, most of the coal - as well as a good deal of the urine - was shipped in from Newcastle/Tyneside. The 'liquid gold' was specially collected in large tubs on street corners, and ships (perhaps somewhat embarrassingly) 'took the piss' to its Yorkshire destination. Many other major towns and villages along the east coast similarly partook in this curious exchange. And, obviously, the finished alum needed to be shipped out of Staithes and the other various Yorkshire seaside villages to the major textile centres - and this included Newcastle, of course. So it really was quite a substantial two-way concern for a good couple of hundred years or so.
However, with the development of synthetic dyes in the 1850s the whole messy set-up ground to a halt, and Staithes returned to its age-old fishy ways.
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