The cream and mauve exterior and decorative mouldings give the impression that this lovely building on the corner of Cross Street and Fenkle Street was baked rather than built. It’s a former pub called the Crystal Fountain, which opened in 1852 and took its name from a popular attraction at the Great Exhibition in London’s Crystal Palace the previous year. It’s also where Mary Ann McDermott threw a bottle of acid in the face of her lover.
Mary was a 21-year old servant in a house on Fenkle Street, she’d been going out with a labourer called Owen Monaghan from Pilgrim Street for around five years. Owen was drinking with friends in the Crystal Fountain one evening in August 1868 when Mary came in and had a few words with him. She returned later and persuaded him to come outside for a chat, where she told him she was pregnant and asked if he intended to marry her.
Owen replied that he didn’t intend to marry her or anyone else, which wasn’t the answer she’d hoped for. As he turned to go back into the pub, Mary produced a glass bottle containing acid and threw the contents in his face. His head and clothes were badly charred and he almost lost the sight in his right eye. When she was arrested in her master’s home, Mary said, “I don’t care whether it burnt the tongue out of his head or not, for what he has done to me, supposing I take seven years for it.”
The jury at Newcastle Assizes was sympathetic and accepted her defence that she was angered by the way Owen had treated her. They also believed she’d only intended to burn his clothes and not his face and found her guilty of a lesser charge, rather than grievous bodily harm. Mary was sentenced to six months in prison for which she thanked the court, saying “that’s not much”.
The Crystal Fountain was about a hundred yards from the Westgate Police Station and within clear sight of it, but this did nothing to temper the behaviour of its clientele over the years. In 1877, Mary Janes Thompson asked for a glass of beer, and a customer shouted, “give a her glass in the face”. He threw two pint pots at her head, badly cutting her, for which he was jailed for six months.
A neighbour wrote to the Newcastle Daily Chronicle in December 1885, complaining about a fight between two prostitutes outside the pub: “Last night one of those tigresses of the human type who walk the streets, attacked a most inoffensive creature of her class. The furious brute fell on the ground to tear and disfigure her who, instead of resisting, lay down like a lamb to the slaughter.”
The pub lost its licence in 1892 when the magistrates were told it was frequented by prostitutes and other disorderly characters. They also heard a complaint from an unusual source, claiming the pub’s name was misleading. Several clergymen and their wives had entered the premises one evening, believing that it dispensed holy water.