This drug store on Northumberland Street is where people in Newcastle bought cocaine a hundred years ago. It was advertised with a sign in the window.
Inman’s Cash Chemists was opened in 1887 by James Inman, a couple of doors up from Fenwick’s department store, opposite the entrance to Saville Row. You can see the words “Inman’s Coca Wine” in the window to the right of the door—a product aimed at those who found that wine alone wasn’t sufficiently stimulating.
Coca wine was invented in 1863 by a chemist in Paris who extracted cocaine from several kilos of Peruvian coca leaves and blended it with Bordeaux wine. It was marketed as ‘Vin Mariani’ and endorsed by two Popes and a couple of American presidents; Pope Leo XIII loved it so much he allowed them to use his image in their advertising, and it kept him going until the age of 93.
British chemists manufactured their own versions of coca wine, and Dr. Williams’ ‘Great Peruvian Restorative’ was the first to arrive on Tyneside in the late 1880s. He claimed that footballers were especially fond of it. James Inman was relatively late to the party with his own concoction, produced just a decade or so before cocaine became illegal when the Dangerous Drugs Act was passed by Parliament in 1920.
The photo isn’t dated, but we can narrow it down quite precisely by the ‘Ozonia’ signs in the window. This was a quack remedy Inman sold for rheumatism, which sufferers added to their bathwater to relieve tender feet, soft bones, and muscular strain. It was manufactured in Dublin and imported by English chemists for a short period from 1906 to 1907.
Inman built up a chain of drug stores. At the time the photo was taken, there were three in Newcastle and others in Byker, Blyth, and Whitley Bay, with several more in Scotland. They were bought by Boots the Chemists in 1910, who merged the shop in the photo with its next-door neighbour and created one of Northumberland Street’s landmark buildings, with statues of local worthies Thomas Bewick, Roger Thornton, Sir Henry Percy, and Sir John Marley on its frontage.