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A Little Bit of History

 

The Ware Rooms got its name following extensive research into the history of Carliol Square. Whilst here spare a thought for Newcastle’s own Bill Sykes – a man called Henry Cunningham who is historically documented as being one of the city’s most infamous rogues. Want to know more?

The description in the Newcastle Courant of January 10, 1782 seems a familiar one. The ringleader of a gang of prolific thieves had just become an inmate of the Newcastle House of Correction, paying the price for his ill-gotten gains.

“He appears to be about 30 years of age, 5 feet 9 inches high, of a dark swarthy complexion, thin faced, has black dull eyes, long black rough hair, a small scar of a slight wound under his left eye, lately healed, a scar on his right jaw, and wants the first joints of the thumb and two first fingers of his right hand.

“His present dress is an old coarse slouched hat, a black silk neckcloth, a coarse blue half-wide coat, a fine light blue coat and waistcoat, and dirty buck or doe skin breeches.”

Like something straight from the pages of Charles Dickens’ ‘Oliver!’ the detail of this shady underworld figure is vivid - it could almost be a description of Bill Sykes himself.

But instead, this is a man named Henry Cunningham, whose reputation for leading a gang of eighteenth-century pickpockets and petty criminals in the North East pervades even to this day.

The Ware Rooms is proud to help keep the legend of Henry Cunningham alive. Its building, in Carliol Square, occupies part of the site of the House of Correction – Cunningham’s former home, for a time at least – which was to be the last of the city’s prisons, before it closed in 1925.

Read the full story here