The people in this picture were standing on the corner of Grainger Street and Newgate Street, and had almost certainly gathered there for criminal purposes.
It was taken in 1898 by a photographer from Mathew Auty’s studio in Tynemouth, but not by Matthew himself, who died three years previously. His company was the first in the North East of England to produce picture postcards and were in business until the 1950s, this image has been cropped from one of these.
Huge crowds used to gather on Newgate Street every Saturday to bet on horses, which was illegal back then, except on a racetrack. The bets were placed on the street and the young lads in the photo would have played a part in this, ferrying the betting slips to the bookies who operated in the neighborhood’s pubs.
Some of the pubs were owned by bookies, such as the Duke of Wellington on High Bridge, which made the national newspapers when it was raided by the police in 1883. The landlord was Robert Robinson, a well-known sporting man who owned a racehorse and several greyhounds. He was standing at the bar protesting his innocence to a Chief Superintendent, when the interrogation was interrupted by a telegram boy.
He presented Robinson with a message from a punter in Morpeth, it said: “put me two pounds on Kingardine to win the Stanley Stakes”. With this irrefutable proof of his guilt, the landlord was arrested. Gambling had provided a large part of his pub’s income, he was declared bankrupt shortly afterwards and fled the country rather than settling his debts.
The crowd on Newgate Street was sometimes moved on by the police after complaints from the public, but the gamblers simply convened at the bottom of the Bigg Market instead, where the problem persisted until the police moved them back to Newgate Street. They drifted between the two locations in dwindling numbers until 1960, when an Act of Parliament made it legal to place a bet with a licensed bookmaker, rather than with some spiv in a pub.