Rutter's School, Benton

On the very edge of the official city boundary of Newcastle, where the ‘border’ with North Tyneside runs down the middle of Benton’s Front Street, can be found a car dealer’s by the name of David James. It sits opposite The Ship pub and was, historically, known as Pearson’s Garage; but situated on this spot before that was an institution known as Rutter’s School.

The only known surviving image of Rutter’s School (centre), by R.P.Leitch, with Front Street running left to right behind the open gate. The ‘old’ Ship Inn can be seen across the road in the background.

The institution was the official parish school, and was run by one Thomas Rutter, parish clerk of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. It offered a fairly basic level of education, if reports are to be believed; yet the school was popular among the aspiring middle classes – and helped two very prominent individuals on their way to undisputed greatness.

Thomas Addison was born in 1793 in a house adjoining The Black Bull Inn – a stone’s throw or two away on the opposite side of the road from the school. The property doubled as the workplace of his parents, Joseph and Sarah, who were grocers and flour dealers. Despite a scanty education at Rutter’s, Addison went on to study at Newcastle’s Royal Grammar School, before moving on to Edinburgh University’s Medical School. After moving to London, he worked at the famous Lock Hospital (venereal diseases), and eventually found himself working as a physician at Guy’s Hospital where he rose through the ranks, gaining an increasingly brilliant reputation in the field of skin diseases. You probably know where this is going by now, so, yes, he was the man who first described the condition which later came to be known as Addison’s Disease in 1855. He was a regular sufferer of depression, and committed suicide in 1860; after which he was, somewhat curiously, buried in the churchyard of Lanercost Priory in Cumberland.

Rutter’s School’s other famous pupil was Robert Stephenson, son of George. Robert had been born in Willington Quay in 1803, and was living with his widowed father in Dial Cottage, West Moor, when he was in attendance at Rutter’s (to which he would commute on a donkey). He was later to say, whilst pointing to the humble red-tiled house by the roadside at Benton: “You see that house – that was Rutter’s, where I learned my A B C, and made a beginning of my school learning.” His father, George, scrimped and scraped to further his son’s learning, next sending him to the famous John Bruce Academy on Percy Street, Newcastle. And, as we know, it all paid off rather nicely.

[this article is taken from my book Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Tales from the Suburbs - see left-hand column for further details]