Neville Street is pictured here in the late 1920s, and almost a century later in 2025 for comparison. There’s no precise date for the older photo, but there are some clues that help narrow it down.
The tram in the foreground is displaying an advert for ‘Numol’, which was a tonic for sickly and undernourished children. It was invented by a local chemist called Sydney Dunstan, and manufactured in a factory on Elswick Road.
The product was originally prescribed to hospital patients as an aid to recovery, but an advertising campaign began in 1927 to alert the general public to its invigorating qualities. It put a spring in the step of many a Geordie, young and old – and some even fed it to their whippets prior to a race. The photo must have been taken during or shortly after 1927.
The tram belonged to the Gateshead & District Tramways Company, and was built at their works on Sunderland Road the same year. Its single-deck design was a solution to a tricky problem: it had to pass beneath a low bridge next to Gateshead railway station before crossing the river to Newcastle.
It had an extra-long chassis to compensate for the absence of an upper deck, allowing it to accommodate forty seated passengers with another seventy standing. The saloon had separate smokers’ and non-smokers’ compartments with a centre partition, quite innovative for its day. Passengers boarded the tram at the rear and exited at the front, as per the sign in the photo next to the driver’s cab, which was also quite unusual for that era.
The tram company operated double-deckers as well, but the model in the picture was so efficient that they were still being used when the Gateshead tram system ceased operation in 1951. Working examples of the model still exist in transport museums.
The car in the bottom right of the first photo offers another clue. It appears to be a Morris Cowley ‘Flatnose’, which is of a similar vintage to the tram, manufactured between 1926 and 1931. It had a pre-1932 numberplate which has been cropped off the picture, so a date of 1929 would be a reasonable estimate for the first photograph.