Alexander Robinson: A Scotsman on Gateshead Fell

Of all the people I've turned up in this branch of the family, my second great-grandfather Alexander Robinson is the one who keeps me guessing. For most of my life I'd never really been sure there was any Scottish blood in us at all — and it was only when I began this research that he stepped out of the records, and Scotland came with him. He is the nearest Scottish relative I have. As it turns out, he isn't the only one — there are other Scottish connections further back, on both my Mam's and Dad's sides, that I'll come to in future posts — but Alexander is the closest and most recent of them.

Born around 1840, every census I've found agrees on one thing and falls silent on the rest: his birthplace was simply Scotland — no county, no town, no parish. This is of real interest to me, now that I live north of the border myself. What I can trace, at least, is the life he made once he came south.

A stranger on the Fell

When Alexander first appears in the records, in 1861, he is twenty-one and already head of a household at Sheriff Hill, on the high ground of Gateshead Fell, a couple of miles south of Newcastle. The Fell had been open moorland until it was enclosed in 1809, and by his day it had been carved into the colliery districts of Sheriff Hill, Low Fell and Wrekenton — a working community of pitmen, pottery and quarry workers, alongside a steady influx of incomers and itinerant traders.

I grew up right next to this corner of Gateshead until I was ten — within touching distance of the streets where Alexander was raising his family more than a century before. A Scot who'd arrived in a region booming with coal and drawing migrants from across Britain and Ireland, he didn't go down the pit. He made his place among those who got by on trade and ingenuity rather than at the coalface.

Source: Newcastle Libraries

The trades he turned his hand to

His occupation changes at almost every census, and together those entries sketch a varied working life:

• 1861 — Labourer

• 1871 — Pedlar

• 1881 — Picture Framer

• 1891 — Hawker

A pedlar carried his goods on foot and sold them door to door; a hawker did much the same, often with a cart or a barrow. The spell as a picture framer in 1881 shows him in a settled, skilled trade with a workbench — one more string to his bow. He moved where the work was, too, temporarily crossing the river to Byker by 1871 before returning to Gateshead, never straying far from the Fell where he'd started.

Marriage and a growing family

In about November 1860, at Gateshead, Alexander married Mary Ann Dodds, a woman from nearby Heworth who was around ten years his senior. Their eldest daughter, Isabella, had already been born around 1854 — early enough that she may have arrived before Alexander and Mary Ann ever met.

After the wedding the children came steadily: Henry (1861), James Henry (1864), Joseph (1866), John Alex (1869), a first Robert William (1870), Agnes Ann (1873), and a second Robert William (1877). Two of those names carry a quiet sorrow. Little Henry died at just two years old, and the first Robert William did not survive infancy either; when another son arrived in 1877, his parents gave him the same name again. It is that second Robert William, my great-grandfather, who carries the line forward.

A home for generations on Whitefield Road

By 1881 the family had settled at Strong's Buildings on Whitefield Road, Sheriff Hill — and that address became something rare in a much-travelled life: a family home that lasted generations. Alexander was the first to bring the Robinsons there. His son Robert William (born 1877) would make his own home at this address, living there with his wife Ellen, of the Wreford line I've been tracing on another branch of the family. My own grandad — another Robert — grew up under that roof, and lived there during the first years after marrying my grandma. Multiple generations, one address on the Fell: the wandering Scot put down a root that held.

The questions still open

Setting aside the Scottish question for a moment, even the places Alexander lived around the North East hold their own small mysteries. The family's spell in Byker, around 1871, put them at James Place in the crowded East End of Newcastle — a dense knot of terraced housing and Tyneside flats packed in close to the noise and smoke of the riverside industries. I wonder whether it was that very crush of streets that drew them back across the river to Sheriff Hill, to the higher, airier ground of the Fell where Alexander had first set down.

And though I know the family settled at Strong's Buildings on Whitefield Road, I still haven't managed to pin down exactly where the building — or indeed Whitefield Road itself — once stood. The census records place it next to Dixon's Buildings, an address that does appear on older maps, yet its precise location still eludes us; my dad is sure Strong's Buildings sat a few streets from Dixon's. If anyone reading this can help fix it on the map, I'd love to hear from you.

The most stubborn question, though, is the first one: where in Scotland did Alexander begin? Scotland's People hasn't given him up yet, so I'm pinning my hopes on his marriage certificate to Mary Ann — that it might name a father, or better still both parents, and a place: another thread to pull. It's been a little while since I sent for the document and I'm not yet sure it can even be traced, so stay tuned.