One Saturday afternoon in the summer of 1815 some children were playing in Burnup’s brickyard to the west of the Ouseburn valley, across the road from where the Tanners Arms stands now. They were rummaging among some rubbish that had recently been dumped and found several gold coins. The news spread quickly and by the evening a large mob of people had descended upon the brickyard, but there were few further finds before darkness put an end to the search.
The crowd returned at first light the following morning and a cobbler from the Quayside found seven gold coins, of sufficient value he said, to buy a good stock of leather. The finds began to dwindle as the day progressed, but then the cart-man who’d dumped the rubbish got wind of the treasure trove and remembered that some of his load had been deposited on land where a school was being built on City Road next to the Keelmens Hospital.
He returned to this spot and found several coins and on Sunday night another person conducted a search by the light of a lantern and filled his pockets with loot. This second location was soon picked clean and then the people of Newcastle turned their attentions to every other rubbish dump, midden and dung hill in the town, in the hope they’d provide a similar bounty.
It was estimated that around two-hundred coins were found in total, one young girl got twenty-two of them. A guinea was worth twenty-one shillings – just over a quid – and in 1815 a labourer could earn between ten and fifteen quid a year. The story of this golden harvest was reported in newspapers across the country and the general feeling was one of delight that most of the money ended up in the hands of poor people.
The identity of the original owner of the horde was never established. The cart-man had removed the rubbish from the Grey Horse Inn, which stood at the west end of Newcastle’s Quayside roughly where the Slug & Lettice pub is now. Most of the coins were dated 1777, so they had lain in the cellar of the Grey Horse for at least four decades.
Some say a traveller had been robbed while staying at the inn forty years previously, a servant was suspected of the theft and it was thought he’d stashed the coins in the cellar and never had an opportunity to return and retrieve them. Others recalled a landlord of the inn saying on his death bed that he was worth a large sum of money, but his fortune had never been found.
Records show that the Grey Horse was owned by Charles Atkinson around the time the coins were dated. He was a merchant and Mayor of Newcastle who was involved in the building of the new Tyne Bridge in 1776, and undoubtedly a wealthy man. But he died in Dunfermline in 1797 when he fell down a pit shaft, which rules him out of ownership of the treasure.
He was succeeded as owner of the inn by Captain George Adams, a rich ship-owner. He was burgled in November 1784, when a quantity of halfpennies to the total of five pounds was reported stolen. He offered a reward of five pounds on top of forty pounds provided by an Act of Parliament for information leading to an arrest, which suggests that more than a few halfpennies went missing. Nobody seems to have been found and convicted, so the story about the thieving servant may be true. The Grey Horse burned down on the night of the Great Fire in October 1854, taking its secrets with it.