These men had gathered on Newgate Street in 1911 to commit crimes, something they did every week. They were placing bets on horse races, which was illegal except on a racetrack, until the Betting and Gaming Act was introduced half a century later.
Newgate Street has a long association with horses, they’d been bought and sold there since as early as 1281 when ‘Horse Market Gate’ is mentioned in a property deed. Weekly markets were held on the street until the end of the 19th century, but the highlights of the horse traders’ year were the March Fair in the spring and the Stones Fair in the autumn. Hundreds of them came from across Northumberland and Durham and spent a week drinking heavily and galloping around town scaring the locals.
There were never any race horses there, the stock on sale was mostly for agricultural use, as well as a smattering of clapped-out cart horses and knackered pit ponies. But the people who frequented the area reckoned they knew a thing or two about bloodstock, and there were others who’d tell them to put their money where their mouth was and would take a bet off them.
These bookmakers mostly owned pubs on Newgate Street or operated in them, although the network extended further than that. Bets were fetched from the punters milling around on the street by ‘runners’, and the bookies received the results of races from nearby telegraph offices. The police made occasional showcase raids on pubs, but convictions were rare unless hard evidence of gambling was found.
Irrefutable proof came out of the blue on one such raid at the Duke of Wellington on High Bridge in 1883. The landlord, Robert Robinson, was standing at the bar protesting his innocence to a police Superintendent, when the interrogation was interrupted by a telegram boy. He presented Robinson with a message from a punter in Morpeth, it said: “put me two pounds on Kingardine to win the Stanley Stakes”. Handcuffs were duly clapped on the landlord’s wrists.
The crowd on Newgate Street was sometimes moved on by the police when obliged to by complaints from the public, but the gamblers convened at the bottom of the Bigg Market instead where the problem persisted until they were moved back to Newgate Street.
They drifted between the two locations in dwindling numbers until 1960, when an Act of Parliament made it legal and preferable to place a bet with a licensed bookmaker, rather than with some spiv in a pub.