This photo of a busy scene on Newcastle’s Quayside comes without a date, but there’s a clue which nails it down to the exact day it was taken.
Crowds of men had gathered on nearby Sandhill every Sunday morning throughout the nineteenth century, the area was the social hub of Newcastle in the years before Richard Grainger rebuilt the upper town. Sunday was their one day off work, their wives and children were at church, and there was time to kill before the pubs opened at noon.
The men were entertained by a raucous array of political agitators, quack medicine vendors, teetollers and religious preachers on soap boxes, shouting to be heard above the din created by street musicians. A local newspaper described the scene in 1883: “Barrel and piano organs, German bands, bagpipes and other musical instruments render the air hideous with their sound”. It was like a weekly fair, with stalls selling food and beverages to keep the men refreshed, but it eventually outgrew the confines of Sandhill and moved onto the Quayside.
There are a couple of women in the photo, which tells us that the men-only Sunday morning gatherings were slowly evolving into a market, this began to happen shortly after the end of World War I. Sunday trading laws prevented people selling the sort of household tat associated with the Quayside Market in later years, the crowds in the photo were still mostly gathering there to be entertained.
Racing tipsters drew the biggest audiences, you can see one in action near the bottom of the photo with a circle of men around him. He has a blackboard nearby with some names chalked on it, and this is what tells us when the photo was taken. They are the names of horses, which include More Rain, Clodia and Fording Bridge.
The only time these three horses ran together on the same day was at a meeting at Catterick racecourse on Friday, August 23rd, 1923. The photo would have been taken the preceding Sunday, which was August 18th, 1923.
The men in the crowd would have won a few bob if they’d listened to the tipster; More Rain and Clodia romped home in their respective races.