Blue Plaque honour for Gateshead luminary
ONE of Gateshead’s great and good will be commemorated with the unveiling a blue plaque next month.
The Victorian age produced a string of extraordinary individuals, one of whom was Robert Stirling Newall.
Newall was born in 1812 and brought up in Dundee. He became an engineer.
In 1840 he formed a partnership with Charles Liddell and Lewis Gordon.
They opened a factory in the Teams, Gateshead to produce wire rope using a new method patented by Newall.
As well as making cables the company started to lay underwater cables. In September 1851 they successfully laid a cable from Dover to Calais.
In 1877 Newall supplied the wire rope that was used to bring Cleopatra’s Needle to London from Egypt.
He was Mayor of Gateshead in 1867 and 1868.
Newall was also a keen astronomer, and commissioned Thomas Cooke to build a telescope for his private observatory at Ferndene in Low Fell. The 25-inch refracting telescope that resulted was, at the time, the largest in the world and had a tube nearly 30ft in length.
Belgian king King Leopold II visited Ferndene to see the telescope.
In March 1889, the year in which he later died, Newall offered the telescope to the University Observatory in Cambridge where his son Hugh Newall later became the first Chair of Astrophysics.
In 1958 the telescope was donated by Cambridge University to Athens Observatory.
Ferndene was used as a Convent of Our Lady from 1906 to 1911, and was the forerunner of La Sagesse school, before it moved to Newcastle.
The house was demolished in the 1920s and only the lodge remains today.
Now, Newall and his achievements will be commemorated with a Blue Plaque that will be unveiled by Gateshead Local History Society.
The celebration will take place at 11am on Saturday, April 21 at Ferndene Lodge, Saltwell Road, Gateshead.
The plaque will be unveiled by Deputy Mayor, Coun Jill Green. All are welcome to the unveiling. Afterwards there will be a reception at Gateshead’s Little Theatre where places will be limited.