Warkworth History Society 8th April 2024
On Monday 8th April Chris Tipple spoke on the topic of ‘Lord Armstrong of Cragside – Hero or Villain?’
The son of a coal merchant, William was born in 1810 near Carlisle and brought up in Newcastle. He was apprenticed into the legal profession but his main passions remained science and mechanics.
In 1847 he resigned from his position as a solicitor and set up his own manufacturing business at Elswick, where he initially bought five acres of land beside the river Tyne. A serious, hard working man, he sought to live a rigorously moral and respectable life. His hydraulic cranes were much in demand for the building of bridges and heavy lifting and his business expanded. At this point he is seen as a hero who supported British industry and employed hundreds of workers.
In 1854 with the start of the Crimean War Armstrong began to look to the production of munitions. He produced a breech-loading field gun, donating the patents to the British Government, for which he received a knighthood. Artillery production became one of the main outlets for the Elswick works and they were soon exporting their weapons to the American Confederate Army. The Elswick business later merged with their rival Whitworth’s to become the Armstrong-Whitworth Company. Its gunships and weaponry were sold worldwide.
But although he now employed thousands of workers he had little sympathy for their welfare. He held firmly against their strikes, employing foreign workers to replace them, and eventually they had to accept pay cuts. For this reason, as well as his contribution to weaponry production, many people would now regard him as villain, not hero.
Nevertheless he used his wealth for philanthropic purposes, creating a convalescent home at Bamburgh Castle, working in his laboratory at Cragside to reduce the polluting properties of coal and even looking into the possibilities of solar power. He opened a school and reading room in the Mechanics Institute, and in 1887 became Lord Armstrong as the result of a gift of land to the city of Newcastle. He also made major donations to the Royal Victoria Infirmary, the School for the Deaf and to Armstrong College which later became the University of Newcastle.
And so the question remains open. Did Lord Armstrong’s contribution to the wealth of the nation, together with his philanthropic gifts to the people of Newcastle