This shop at the bottom of Pilgrim Street was photographed in 1890. Just two years later, it would become the scene of a shocking tragedy when a mother cut her young son’s throat. The colour photo shows the same location today for comparison.
The woman in front of the doorway can be identified from local records as a 69-year-old widow called Mary Forster, who had been proprietor of the grocery store for nearly a decade. In February 1892, a friend called Sarah Ambrose and her two young children spent a night at Mary’s after she’d separated from her husband.
The following day Mary heard the children screaming and found Sarah holding her 3-year-old son Thomas, who was bleeding heavily. Mary took a bloodstained knife off her and sent for a doctor. Thomas was found to have a deep wound across his throat and was taken to the Fleming Memorial Hospital for Sick Children, where thankfully he survived.
Sarah was also examined by a doctor who stated she appeared to be mentally unstable, though sober and able to speak sensibly. She appeared before the Northumberland Assizes the following month and pleaded guilty to wounding with intent to kill, and was sentenced to twelve months in Newcastle Gaol. But the court stipulated there should be no hard labour, and she was to be treated as a patient rather than a prisoner.
The black and white picture was taken by the famous Victorian photographer Lyddell Sawyer, who had a studio on Northumberland Street. Entitled ‘A Quaint Corner of Newcastle. It was shown in London at the annual exhibition of the Photographic Society of Great Britain in September 1890, and became a popular picture postcard.
It is also one of the last surviving photos of the shop. The area around lower Pilgrim Street was full of squalid lodging houses, mostly inhabited by single men. They were demolished along with the shop in a slum clearance programme and replaced by Rowton House on Dog Bank, which opened opposite the steps in 1906 to provide better accommodation for the men.
Rowton House is also now long gone and the steps have been claimed by nature. But we still have Lyddell Sawyer’s iconic photograph to remind us of the people who lived here, and the dramatic human stories that once unfolded.