The life of Thomas Ferens: What can one man’s story tell us about attitudes to homelessness in Victorian Newcastle?

Picture postcard of Thomas Ferens, c. 1890s (image courtesy of www.picturesofgateshead.co.uk)

There were at least 15 newspaper and magazine pieces written about Thomas Ferens during his life. His death in 1907 was reported in newspapers from London to the Scottish Highlands. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries he appeared in poems and paintings, on postcards, and even gave his name to a racing greyhound. Today, Ferens is still mentioned in local history books, articles and websites. Generally portrayed as an almost mythical character, his name has been woven into the rich, folkloric history of the city of Newcastle and Gateshead. Yet, despite all of this, we know little about the life and tragic death of this man.

The elevation of Ferens (or ‘Tommy on the Bridge’ as he was known in the press) to ‘celebrity’ status means he is one of the most visible and recognisable of all the people in the history of this city whose lives were impacted or shaped by homelessness.** The fact that so much has been written about him also offers the chance to learn about attitudes towards homelessness in Victorian Newcastle.

Ferens was born blind (and, by some accounts, partially paralysed) in Newcastle around 1843. Newspaper reports on Ferens at the time of his death suggest that he lost both of his parents at the age of 5. Census records offer an even vaguer picture. In 1851, at the age of 8, he is recorded with Robert Bewick, a coal miner, and his wife Margaret (who is most likely Ferens’ mother, though Robert Bewick was not his biological father) at a lodging house in Harraton, a colliery town in County Durham. Records place the family around the Durham colliery towns of Harraton and Tanfield until Margaret’s death in 1860, shortly after the birth of the Bewicks’ youngest son, William.

Hillgate in the 1930s (image courtesy of www.gateshead-history.com)

Immediately after Margaret’s death, Robert Bewick took Thomas Ferens (now 18 years old) and his four younger children to Gateshead, where the 1861 census finds them at a house in the poverty stricken Hillgate, on the south side of the River Tyne. Running alongside the banks of the Tyne, Hillgate was a filthy and dangerous place. William Fordyce’s History of Durham, written in 1857, three years before Bewick moved to Hillgate, describes the area as a ‘notoriously dirty [place], where people are living huddled together amongst filth without the necessaries of life.’ A decade earlier, Hillgate had been massively affected by an epidemic of typhus caused by the wholly unsanitary living conditions. The street was also home to many factories – it was an explosion at one of the Hillgate factories that caused the great fire of Newcastle and Gateshead in 1854.

Fast forward to 1871 and, at the age of 29, Ferens is still recorded as living on Hillgate as a single boarder in a lodging house just a few doors along from the house he shared with his stepfather. It’s worth noting that common lodging houses in Victorian Britain were the lowliest and most basic form of accommodation available and were often only preferable to the workhouse because they didn’t require a stint of hard labour – although they did require a very modest income to pay for a bed. It’s a safe bet to assume that any lodging house in the poverty stricken Hillgate area of Gateshead would be among the most deprived and unsanitary accommodation in the whole of the North East. Again, William Fordyce describes the lodging houses on Hillgate as ‘little better than hovels’ and ‘a disgrace to civilisation’.

While we can assume that, in the years between 1861 and 1871, either Robert Bewick died or Thomas Ferens was forced to leave the Bewick household and go it alone, this is where the historical evidence runs dry. What we’re left with from then on is a simplified account of the life that Ferens’ poverty, circumstances and disability pushed him into.

We know, from the many newspaper articles, that Ferens depended on begging as his only means of income. And we know that Ferens chose the middle of Newcastle’s Swing Bridge as his pitch. By all accounts he had a severe distrust of the police and his strategy to avoid arrest was to stand on the boundary between Newcastle and Gateshead so that the police of neither jurisdiction could lawfully arrest him. We do know, however, that on more than one occasion Ferens’ strategy failed and he was arrested for using foul language.

The Swing Bridge, 1889 (image courtesy of Newcastle City Libraries)

The newly built Swing Bridge was very busy and Ferens was a highly visible presence to traders and other passers-by travelling between Newcastle and Gateshead. We know that, over the years, Ferens became a recognisable figure who was regarded as a local ‘celebrity’ by the community and the press. The treatment of the poor and destitute as figures of public spectacle was not new to Newcastle. From the late 18th century a number of people in positions of extreme poverty had been assigned the status of ‘worthy’ or ‘eccentric’ – in other terms a local figure whose visibility, appearance and manner brought attention and derision.

The earliest written account of Ferens that we can find appears in the December 1889 Monthly Chronicle of North Country Lore and Legend –  a local publication of anecdotes and oddities. The article describes Ferens as an ‘eccentric character’ who attracts notice by ‘…incessantly swaying his arms and body …dependant for support upon a not too charitable public.’ Local photographers and postcard manufacturers also took advantage of Ferens’ celebrity status, selling picture postcards with his image. We found one card for sale on the website of a Californian antique postcard dealer – it was sent from Gateshead to San Francisco in 1906.

Illustration of Thomas Ferens from the December 1889 Monthly Chronicle of North Country Lore and Legend

From the late 1880s onwards, Ferens’ name appears in various newspapers and magazines around the North East and beyond. A ‘literary’ piece about him even appeared in the London publication Academy and Literature in 1902. All of the articles written about Ferens, whether local humour or longer articles, took a light hearted tone, commenting on his ‘ruddy appearance’, his disability, his foul language, the restricted movement of his arms, and his clothes. Ferens is described in various terms as a vagrant, a mendicant and an eccentric. He is portrayed as nothing more than a stoic and sturdy figure whose presence is as fixed and unchanging as that of the bridge he stands upon.

It does seem that Ferens sometimes played along with his celebrity status. For example, it is reported in an article in the Morpeth Herald and Reporter in August 1896 that Ferens and another homeless man known as ‘The Bishop’ were invited to officially open an area of land called ‘Deckham Park’ south of Gateshead. However, we’ll never know how Ferens felt about the attention he received or whether he was even aware of the reach of his celebrity.

Photograph of Thomas Ferens, c. 1890s (image courtesy of Newcastle City Libraries)

Despite being so well known to the local community, Ferens died a lonely and tragic death on New Year’s day, 1907. While out begging on the Swing Bridge in the winter cold, aged 65, he collapsed. He was found on New Year ’s Eve and taken to Newcastle Workhouse the day after, where he died just a few minutes after admission. His death was reported widely, the Sheffield Daily Telegraph described how Newcastle was ‘mourning the death of a common beggar’ and that the grief was ‘as widespread and sincere as any that could be indulged in by a large community’. All reports of Ferens' death talked only of his manner, his appearance and his disability.