Loftus and Lecture Rooms

ART AND ARTEFACTS | Sculptures, portraits,
paintings and other items of interest at The Lit & Phil

Lecture and Loftus Rooms

4: Loftus Room and Lecture Room

The Society’s third Lecture Room designed by John Dobson 1860, dismantled 1966


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The south (back) end of the ground floor was always designated as
accommodation for the Lit & Phil’s public lecture programme.
Between 1860 and 1966 the Loftus room and the adjoining lecture
room formed a single large and deeply raked Victorian lecture room
designed by the Newcastle architect John Dobson, to seat an audience
of around 800. Owing to falling audience numbers after the second
world war, it was decided to make more relevant use of the space. In
the 1960s the lecture room was dismantled (but the ceiling remains!), a
slightly raised floor was built to accommodate a much needed
basement book store, and the resulting ground floor was provided
with two lecture/recital spaces, kitchen and toilets.

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LOFTUS ROOM

Back (south) wall of building

Joseph Cowen (1829-1900)

politician and journalist
Photograph of an oil portrait, artist unidentified.

Joseph Cowen the younger was the son of a wealthy Blaydon brick
manufacturer who became Liberal MP for Newcastle in 1865. The
younger Joseph was politically radical, having revolutionary
sympathies abroad and identifying at home with the mining class. He
came to have a dominant presence in Newcastle’s public life, both as
proprietor of two newspapers (the Northern Tribune and the
Newcastle Chronicle), and from 1874-1886 as his father’s successor to
Newcastle’s Liberal parliamentary seat. He energetically promoted
initiatives to improve the working man’s lot, and used his newspapers
to gain support for the founding of the College of Physical Science. He
played a leading role in the founding of the Tyne (now New Tyne)
Theatre in 1867 and of Newcastle’s first Public Library in 1880. He was
a long-term member of the Lit & Phil and a friend of Spence Watson.
In 1874 the latter acted as his election agent, but political differences
were to divide them.

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William Kennett Loftus (1820-1858)

Carbon print copy made in 1865 of signed
photographic portrait, the original presented

in 1859 by James Radford, a relative. The
carbon printing process, invented and

patented by Swan, produced a photograph
which did not fade.

Loftus owes his honours in Lit & Phil history
to circumstances that led to his indirectly, and
posthumously, financing the 1966 alterations
on this floor.

Born in Kent, when his mother died he was
raised by his grandfather in Newcastle, who
educated his grandson at the Royal Grammar
School and bequeathed much of his estate to
him. Loftus studied geology at Cambridge
and in 1850 joined the British Government’s
Turco-Persian Boundary Commission as a
geologist. However, while visiting ancient Middle Eastern sites he
became interested in archaeology. In 1853 he was engaged by the
Assyrian Excavation Fund and was involved in several major
archaeological discoveries. In Nineveh he excavated five marble
tablets which he presented to the Lit and Phil, on condition that the
Society paid the cost of carriage from Basrah. For over a hundred
years they were displayed on the main staircase of this building. But
in 1961 they were sold to a Los Angeles Museum, and the proceeds of
£40,000 paid for the current ground floor conversion.

The Tyne, looking west from the
north bank

Watercolour, early-mid 19th Century,
artist unknown. Received by the Lit
and Phil as a legacy from R L Nesbit

in 1977.

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Far (west) wall

The Rev. William Turner (1761-1859)

Portrait in oils, artist unknown. Close resemblance to Morton’s 1830
portrait on the main stairs indicates that the respectable practice of

copying was involved here.
A record shows that in 1843 a portrait of Turner was commissioned

for £10 from Stephen Humble (1812-58), for the Hanover Square
Congregation. But in 1841, aged 80, Turner had retired to
Manchester and would not be readily available for sittings.

Conceivably this portrait is the result of Humble’s commission.

When this building opened in 1825, the 64-year-old Turner was still
acting as the Society’s principal lecturer. Until 1830 he gave annual
courses, each numbering around twenty scientific lectures, in the
original lecture room occupying this space. His benign presence
fittingly continues to preside here!

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North wall

Lord Brougham (1778-1868)

Copy by Andrew Morton (1802-45) of his original portrait of
Brougham, now in the possession of the Scottish National Portrait
Gallery. Received by the Society in 1838, the copy was cleaned and

restored in 1993 as the gift of members of Brougham’s family.

Henry Brougham came from an old Cumberland family, but his own
life was spent largely in Edinburgh and London, and his connection to
the north east consisted largely in an acquaintance with the
Cumbrian James Losh, with whom he shared several interests. With
a lawyer’s background and reforming sympathies he entered politics
and in 1830 became Lord Chancellor in Earl Grey’s government. He
made his greatest mark through his involvement in Earl Grey’s
Reform Act of 1832 and the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, and his
support for Mechanics Institutes. In July 1833 Morton wrote to Losh,
the Society’s Vice President, deferentially asking if Losh would be
willing to approach Brougham in the Society’s name, requesting him
to sit for a portrait to be presented to the Society.
The five-year delay between this letter and the Society’s reception of a
copy of the intended portrait warrants speculation. It was not in the
Lit & Phil’s tradition to exhibit political portraits, and the years
following the Reform Act saw significant political fluctuations. One
can surmise that during those years, committee opinion on the
desirability of the portrait was not entirely unanimous.

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Sir John E Swinburne, 6th baronet of Capheaton
(1762-1860)

Portrait by Thomas Philips (1770-1845), eminent portrait painter of
aristocratic subjects and of ‘the men of genius of his time’.

Traditionally the Swinburne family had been Roman Catholics
sympathetic to the Jacobite cause. But at twenty-five the sixth
baronet, an associate of Charles Grey, went into politics as a
Protestant Whig. He intended to stand for Northumberland, but in
1788 when the Cornish seat of Launceston fell vacant, he became its
MP for a year. He did not continue a career in Parliament, but
remained politically engaged in Northumberland, of which in 1799 he
became High Sheriff. A patron of the arts and a friend of the moving
spirits of the Lit & Phil, he became its second President.
Swinburne lost his eye through a shooting accident. He was
grandfather to the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne.


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“The Building of the New Castle on the Tyne, 1080”

Painting by William Bell Scott (1811-1890), commissioned by friends in 1864,
received 1865.

The Edinburgh born poet
and artist William Bell
Scott specialised in
landscape and “historical”
paintings. In adult life he
moved to London where he
associated closely with the
Rossettis, but in 1843 he
was appointed the first
Master of Newcastle’s
Government School of
Design, and spent the next
twenty years in Newcastle.
He became a friend of the
Trevelyans of Wallington
Hall and between 1855-60
he decorated their newly enclosed central hall with eight pictures
romantically representing Border history.

With similar romantic licence this painting purports to depict the
construction of the town’s first Norman castle, the “new” castle built in 1080
by William the Conqueror’s son Robert Curthose. In fact, whether or not Bell
Scott knew it, the castle of 1080 was built of earth and timber. The massive
stone keep whose construction is here reimagined by Bell Scott actually
dates from 1172-77. In his painting Bell Scott has combined details
historically separated by a hundred years and more.

A break in the clouds spotlights the vigorous Norman activity which will
shape the region’s future, but leaves a moribund local past in gloom. Most
prominent among the sunlit figures is the group of proud Saxons subjugated
by the Norman invaders to the status of mere labourers. At their backs, his
royal insignia just visible on a white surcoat, stands Robert Curthose with
his hunting crossbow, consulting with the architect and the castle’s military
governor. Behind them a cook calls up to Byzantine masons. Their skills
were sought after in Europe only in the wake of the 12th century Crusades.
The cook stands in the “Norman” doorway (still extant today) whose ornately
carved arch owes much to a very recent Victorian restoration by John
Dobson, following damage sustained during the great fire of 1854. The left
side of the picture foregrounds trees inhabited by rooks, about to become
homeless as the trees on the precipitous Tyne banks fall victim to Norman
domination. The local populace disports itself indifferently lower down the
bank, but Norman fists bar their access to the castle. On the far bank of the
Tyne Gateshead lies in ruins, destroyed in revenge for the murder in 1080 of
the Norman-appointed Bishop of Durham. 


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The Lit & Phil owns this fragile document, which seems to have
accompanied the painting when it was first exhibited. It’s not signed
so we don’t know whether the account of the composition is provided
by Bell Scott himself, or someone Bell Scott had talked to.

Its factual inaccuracies disqualify it as the ultimate authority on
the painting, but in the spirit of the painting it’s strong on romantic
appeal!


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LECTURE ROOM

Outside kitchen hatch, to left.

“View of the
Interior of the

Library”

Painting in oils
2004 by John
Peace (1933-2017),
commissioned by
the Society in
memory of Mrs
Doreen Quinn (d.

2002).

Outside the coffee hatch upstairs hangs a photograph of Doreen Quinn
who served refreshments to members and visitors for thirty-three
years, and is affectionately remembered by many. The bust’s gaze
extends from the shadows of the Society’s august past towards the
luminous centre of this view, the open coffee hatch which recently
framed Doreen.
John Peace was born in Lemington, Newcastle, and after some years
studying in Leeds and at the Slade School returned there, to spend the
rest of his life teaching and painting. His work comprises mainly
watercolours, often shorescapes. Much of it is privately owned, but
some may be seen in galleries in the region.

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Clockwise from kitchen wall.

George Stephenson (1781-1848)

Portrait in oils, a three-quarter sized copy by Charles W. Mitchell
(1854-1903) after the original by J. Lucas.

In 1881 the Society celebrated the centenary of Stephenson’s birth with
several events. One of these was the decision by the Committee to
commission a copy of the portrait of George Stephenson painted in
1847 by the fashionable London portrait painter John Lucas (1807-74).
The landscape is Chat Moss, an unsafe peat bog west of Manchester
across which Stephenson successfully laid tracks for the Liverpool to
Manchester railway, seen in the background. This railway brought
national fame to both George and Robert Stephenson after it opened
in 1830. The locomotive shown is not Robert Stephenson’s famous
Rocket of 1829, but an 1847 state of the art descendant. The Newcastle-
born pre-Raphaelite painter Charles William Mitchell volunteered to
make the copy and donate it to the Lit & Phil.

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Edward Moises (1763-1845)

cleric, scholar, school teacher
Portrait by James Andrews, a local artist. Presented to the Society

in 1844 by Dr T E Headlam in the name of the subscribers.

Townspeople of the 18th century would associate the name of Moises
with the Royal Free Grammar School, which occupied premises very
close to this building in the medieval Hospital of St Mary the Virgin
(demolished mid 19th century). For forty years Edward’s uncle, the
Rev. Hugh Moises, was the gifted and esteemed master of the school
who numbered Lord Collingwood and Lord Eldon among his
successful pupils. When Hugh was succeeded in 1787 by Edward, an
academic who understood books better than boys, the school’s
popularity waned. Edward joined the founding committee of the Lit &
Phil, and brought his love of scholarship to bear in his proposals for a
library for the Society’s members. However, in 1809 he resigned
owing to differences with Rev. Turner over the introduction of public
lectures to the Lit & Phil’s agenda, which he resented as a distraction
from what he saw as the Society’s proper purpose.

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Sir Joseph Wilson Swan FRS (1828-1914)

physicist, chemist, inventor

Framed photographic portrait presented by Swan in 1911. The
Society’s annual report for that year recorded “A special interest
attaches to the gift, in that it is printed in carbon by the process

invented by the donor many years ago”.

The Lit & Phil’s most famous connection with Swan is his
demonstration of the incandescent light bulb which he had been
developing over decades. In 1879 he reported to the Society on his
imminent success, and in 1880 he was able to illuminate John Dobson’s
great lecture room with his light bulbs, by means of a cable which he
ran from his chemist's shop in Mosley St. This lecture gave the Lit &
Phil the glory of claiming the first public room in the world to be lit
entirely by electricity.

As a chemist, in 1864 Swan had also patented his transfer
process for making carbon prints of photographs, and he subsequently
introduced other significant developments to the science of
photography.

After 1879, Swan lectured to the Society fairly regularly on topics
connected with his discoveries. He received the Légion d’Honneur in
1881 when attending an electrically illuminated international
exhibition in Paris; in 1904 he was knighted and became the third
recipient of the Royal Society’s Hughes Medal. He was a member of
the Society from 1851, its Vice President from 1881, and its President
from 1911 until his death. 


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“On ‘Change”

Painting 1823 by Joseph Crawhall I (1793-1853), donated by the
family in 1894.

The first Joseph Crawhall became eminent as the founder of a
successful rope-works which played a continuing part in Newcastle’s
important industrial development. Not a professional painter, he used
his skills as a draughtsman to make this record of the old Corporation
of Newcastle and leading men of the town gathered outside the
Exchange on Sandhill. He drew his subjects “from life in the dress
they wore”.


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Charles A Parsons (1854-1931)

engineer and inventor

Mezzotint from the painting by Sir William Orpen (1878-1931).

Charles Parsons was born in London to
the Irish landowning family of the
Earls of Rosse, and as a boy was
educated by private tutors at his family
home of Birr Castle in Parsonstown
(now renamed Birr), County Offaly. He
read mathematics at Trinity College,
Dublin and St John’s, Cambridge, but
unusually, on graduating in 1877, took
an engineering apprenticeship at Sir
William Armstrong’s Elswick works.
Subsequently a junior partner at
Clarke, Chapman & Co, ship engine
manufacturer in Gateshead, he ran its
electrical department. The first
Parsons turbo-dynamo was developed
in 1884, and by 1888 two hundred were
in use providing ship’s lighting.

His own company, C. A. Parsons & Co. was founded in 1889 with its
works in Heaton, and in 1890 his electric lighting company opened
Forth Banks Power Station, the first power station in the world to
employ a turbo-operating plant. Ship propulsion by steam turbine
followed in 1894, and in 1897 Parsons built the first turbine-driven
steamship, the Turbinia, now in Newcastle’s Discovery Museum. HMS
Dreadnought, built in 1906 with Parsons’ steam turbines, was the
fastest battleship of its time.

Parsons also became known for his optical glass manufacture,
supplying telescopes to the Royal Greenwich Observatory and the
Royal Observatory of Edinburgh.

Parsons transformed known methods of producing power for steam
on both land and sea. For his achievements he received many
honours, including a knighthood in 1911. He was President of the Lit
& Phil from 1916 until his death.


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William Shield (1748-1829)

violinist and composer

Mezzotint published in 1788 by H W
Billington, engraved by Robert

Dunkarton after a painting by John Opie
exhibited in the Royal Academy in 1787.

Shield was born in Swalwell. He was
educated by his father, but on his father’s
death he was apprenticed to a boatbuilder
in North Shields. At the same time he
continued his musical studies with
Charles Avison for whose subscription
concerts he was regularly principal
violinist. He was persuaded to become a
professional musician and was well
known in theatres around the north east. But in 1773 he accepted an
offer to play for the King’s Theatre, Haymarket in London, and never
returned. Also a composer and arranger of music, his output included
over 30 operas, many of which were for the Covent Garden opera
house. The Lit & Phil holds a selection of songs from his stage works.

Robert Stephenson (1803-1859)

mechanical and structural engineer

Engraving 1860 by Francis Holl, after George
Richmond, 1849.

By 1849 Robert Stephenson had achieved
national renown as a railway engineer and
was a fit subject for the London portrait
painter George Richmond, known for his
particularly good likenesses. Holl’s engraving
after that portrait dates from the year after
Stephenson’s premature death, and became a
well-known image.

1849 heralded a decade of major railway bridge projects which would
carry Stephenson’s fame round the world. The High Level Bridge
bringing the railway across the Tyne gorge, and the Royal Border
Bridge at Berwick both date from that year.

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Rev. William Turner (1761-1859)

Mezzotint after Thomas Heathfield Carrick’s miniature, engraved by
William Ward in 1837.

A Cumbrian, Carrick (1802-74) became a chemist in Carlisle but
simultaneously developed a reputation for painting miniatures. He
moved to Newcastle in 1836 but in 1839 settled in London as a
respected professional miniaturist. In 1868, when his profession had
been superseded by photography, he returned to Newcastle.
The date of this portrait is not known, but it appears to show a
younger Turner than the 75-year-old whom Carrick would have
known on moving to Newcastle. It is our only image of Turner in
mid-life.
A second copy of this engraving is displayed in the Librarian’s room.

!

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John Buddle (1773-1843)
mining engineer

Portrait by James Ramsay (1786-1854)

Buddle was born near Lanchester, Co. Durham, into the family of a
mathematician who became a mining engineer. He gained most of his
“schooling” from visiting mines with his father. In 1793 he became
one of the Lit & Phil’s founder members.
Becoming a successful mining engineer in his own right, one of his
most famous engineering projects was to plan and construct a
harbour at Seaham, in order to spare his employer Lord Londonderry
the costs of shipping at the port of Sunderland.
The project was completed in 1834, and this painting with its
reference to Seaham in the background was probably done in its
wake. In 1880 the portrait was in the possession of the land agent
William Berry Wilson, who loaned it to the Exhibition of the Arts
Association of Newcastle that year.
The current imperfect condition of the work is relatively stable,
thanks to interim repairs made possible by a donation from a member
of the Society. Upwards of £10,000 would cover the complete repair!

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