Hinterland by Chris Mullin

Author:Chris Mullin [Mullin, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Profile Books
Published: 2016-09-22T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

Deep North Two

In the summer of 1987, within a month of being elected, I purchased a large, early-Victorian terraced house in St Bede’s Terrace, a short tree-lined street close to the centre of Sunderland. Further south such a house would have been well beyond my means, but in the north-east it was easily affordable. A glance at the Victorian street directory shows that in 1851, when the house was built, St Bede’s Terrace was rather grander than it is today. There were gates at each end and, as late as the 1930s, older residents could recall a night-watchman. Most of the nineteenth-century residents were shipowners, although another MP once lived at number 4. Shipowners usually had shares in several different vessels, rather than owning one outright, in order to avoid losing everything if the vessel went down. The Victorian resident of our house, number 7, was John Doxford, a cousin of Sir William Doxford, one of the town’s biggest shipbuilders and latterly the town’s Member of Parliament. Initially John Doxford was listed as the owner of an upmarket high-street grocery, but by the late 1860s he seems to have had a stake in at least two ships, the John George (named after his only child) and the Mary. By the time he was in his fifties he appears to have been a gentleman of leisure, apart from a bit of Methodist lay preaching. He married twice. Both his wives were called Mary. The first died in 1859; the second outlived him. According to the census returns, they had two servants. John Doxford died in 1899 and Mary the Second in 1912. In due course I found their graves in Monkwearmouth cemetery. Between them, they lived at 7 St Bede’s Terrace for sixty-one years.

Anyone who lived in my house for more than sixty years deserved to have their photograph hanging in the hall, I thought. Finding one, however, proved easier said than done. At first, I reckoned it would simply be a question of tracking down the current generation of Doxfords (they were, after all, a prominent family), and that sooner or later I would come across the family photo album. John and the first Mary had only one child – John George. John George had four daughters, born in the late 1880s and 90s. At which point the trail went cold. Not one of the daughters had married, probably because they all came of age around the time of the First World War and there were not enough men left. One day Douglas Smith, a local antiquarian, mentioned that he had a box of glass plates from the nineteenth-century photographer’s shop in the High Street. He looked through them and found one labelled ‘John Doxford’. I had it developed and out of the darkness into which he had receded in 1899 emerged a stern, bewhiskered figure in a stiff collar. At which point I wrote an article in the Daily Telegraph recounting my search for the Doxfords and illustrating it with the recently acquired photograph.

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