A woman is pictured selling oranges outside Newcastle Central Station, for the refreshment of the passengers on the trains.
Unfortunately the photographer and the year the picture was taken are unknown, so it’s impossible to say for certain who the woman was. There were several women selling oranges from stalls outside the station towards the end of the nineteenth century, the most famous of these was Ann Ratcliffe. Perhaps it was her who the photographer singled out for this portrait.
Ann was from Hexham where she began her career as a street hawker at the age of seven, before coming to Newcastle when she was fourteen. Her pitch was opposite the bottom of Grainger Street West where she’d stood most days of the week since 1837, and she was still there in the 1890s when this photo looks to have been taken.
Oranges were the equivalent of fast food in nineteenth century Newcastle, albeit a little more healthy. They were imported by sea from Portugal and Spain and were a pricey delicacy when they first appeared in Newcastle shops in the 1700s, but by the 1830s there were orange boats arriving at the Quayside every few weeks and the prices plummeted. They were sold all over the town on stalls like Ann’s at a halfpenny each or five for tuppence.
Fast food caused a nuisance back then, as it does today. Local newspapers often reported injuries such as broken arms and legs that were caused by people slipping on discarded orange peel. Newcastle Corporation introduced the town’s first anti-litter laws because of this, with one councillor saying it was exactly the sort of thing our “Peelers” – the nickname for the police, after their founder Robert Peel – should be clamping down on.
The orange sellers themselves were often considered a nuisance. The Georgian Tyne Bridge had a marker on it that denoted the boundary between the counties of Durham and Newcastle, which was two-thirds of the way across the river. This was called the Blue Stone, women used to sit on it selling oranges to passers-by, shouting abuse at anyone not tempted by their wares. They hopped over to the other side of the stone when they were approached by police from one county or the other, so they were outside that constable’s jurisdiction.