Grey Horse Inn, 1828
The Grey Horse Inn was a famous hostelry that once sat in a prominent location facing out onto Newcastle Quayside, where roughly now stand the footings of the Tyne Bridge. It fell victim to the Great Fire of 1854.
However, during one of its many renovations, in June 1815, its cellar was cleared of many decades’-worth of accumulated rubbish and dumped in a brick-yard near Shieldfield. Almost immediately local children pounced on their new playground attraction and began ferreting around to see what they could find. And they started picking up guineas, here, there and everywhere. As word spread, more and more folk arrived to join the scramble, and the money just kept turning up.
The cartman who had dumped the rubbish, hearing of the good fortune of so many, recollected that he had taken some of the material to another brick-yard near New Bridge Street. So off he snuck, and was soon richly rewarded. But then this site, too, became overrun with people, young and old. One girl was said to have found 22 of the gold coins – but they all dated from the 1750s to the 1770s. So how exactly did they get there, among the years’-old debris in the cellar of the Grey Horse Inn?
Some of the older folk half-remembered a story from the 1770s that a traveller was robbed in the Grey Horse, and that the thief, a servant, had hid the plunder in the cellar and not been able to ever retrieve it. Others reported that a landlord of the pub had said on his death-bed that he was worth a considerable fortune – but which afterwards could not be found….
[Source: Richardson’s Local Historian’s Table Book, vol.3, 1843]
Article taken from Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Fragments of the Past, vol.3.
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