This newspaper lad was standing at the top of Pudding Chare in 1898, with the Groat Market on the left and the Bigg Market on the right. We also get a glimpse of a building behind him on Pudding Chare that burned down two years later.
The early months of 1900 were a terrible time for fires in Newcastle. Huge blazes gutted the Central Exchange and the Theatre Royal, and many of the town’s oldest buildings were lost at the top of the Side when a paper merchant’s warehouse burned down. But the fire at Harrison’s lodging house on Pudding Chare was the only one to claim any lives.
The lodging house was a three-storey building near the top of Pudding Chare, you can see its white sign in the photo to the right of the lad. It had 54 beds, most of which were occupied by men, women and children on the night of February 4th, 1900.
The alarm was raised shortly before 11pm and the residents immediately began to flee the building, some of them jumping almost naked through the windows of the upper floors. It took a while for the fire brigade to arrive, during which time there were heroic efforts from members of the public to rescue those still trapped inside.
Among these was a young man named Stott who carried two children out and went back into the burning building and fetched another two. An Irishman named John Riles jumped from a window thinking he would drop into the street, but fell on the staircase and broke his leg. Stott entered the inferno once again and brought him out.
A thorough search was conducted after the flames had died down and four bodies were found, including that of John Harrison, owner of the lodging house. Three of them had died as a result of the fire and it was established that the fourth man had died in his bed several days earlier, but nobody had noticed him.
Back to the photo, the building to the left of the newspaper lad was occupied by the flour merchant Robert Hope and was demolished in the 1920s. To his right, on the corner of the Bigg Market and Pudding Chare, is the premises of the wine and spirit merchants Graham & Bradley, which would become a pub called the Vine Inn shortly afterwards.
As for the newspaper lad, he’d have worked for the Evening Chronicle, whose printing presses were a little further down Pudding Chare on Rosemary Lane.