Hartlepool to Whitby Britain's First Photo Album

In the Victorian era, Britain changed as never before.

It was the time of great inventors, great engineers,

but above all, great businessmen and entrepreneurs,

and one of the best examples was the pioneer photographer Francis Frith.

It was in the 1860s

that Francis Frith embarked upon a monumental mission

using the newly-invented photographic camera.

He wanted to document every city, every town

and every village in the land.

I'm tracing the footsteps of this remarkable man

and his team of photographers.

Using their pictures as my guide,

I'll be travelling the length and breadth of the country,

finding out what has altered

and what has stayed the same.

Along the way, I'll be taking my own photos,

to try and capture the mood of the place as it is now.

That's great.

Welcome to Britain's First Photo Album.

Francis Frith founded the first

successful photographic printing business.

He had an eye for a good picture

and for a business opportunity.

A popular target for Frith

and his photographers

were the places people went to on holiday.

Places they might want to remember with a photographic memento.

I'm going to some of these

Victorian resorts today,

tracing the North East coastline

from Hartlepool onto Saltburn,

and finally, down to Whitby.

I'll be seeing how gunpowder

adds a blast from the past...

-Is it very loud?

-Yes.

-You might want to step a little further back.

-OK.

..what miners thought about rats...

So you looked at them, well, in a sort of friendly way.

Yes, they were a man's friend.

..and discover the choice ingredients of Whitby stews.

-Sheep heads?

-Sheep heads, they used to put sheep heads,

and they used to run a mile when she used to say the dinner was ready.

My first stop is at one of the most famous

industrial ports and shipyards

of the North East.

You don't expect to see tourist attractions in Hartlepool,

but look at these splendid restored ships.

They are a reminder that in Victorian times,

this was a major seaside resort. And whenever a town had visitors,

you can be sure the Frith photographers weren't far behind.

And in 1886, when our photograph was taken,

the Frith team headed straight for the shoreline.

They came here for one reason only.

My first photo today

is of a most unusual Hartlepool attraction.

It was known, for obvious reasons,

as the Elephant Rock.

A weird and wonderful formation that drew

the crowds, as well as the early photographers.

I've come to the same shoreline to meet Hartlepool archaeologist

Mark Simmons.

We expect the incessant beating of the waves to change the landscape,

but for modern followers of Frith like me,

there's a major disappointment in store.

Now, you're going to tell me the bad news.

The bad news is, you can't take a photograph of the Elephant Rock

because it was washed away by a storm in 1891.

-So I'm a bit late for that. 1891.

-Just a little bit late.

But we can still go down onto the foreshore

-and have a look at where Frith took the photograph from.

-OK.

Part of the Elephant Rock's mystery

was that it existed for no more than a few decades.

A blink of an eye in geological time.

So, unlike me, Frith's team were lucky enough

to be in the right place at the right time.

But can I solve the mystery of the missing elephant?

Mark is going to show me

how much this coastline has altered in the last couple of centuries.

The original coastline, 150 years ago,

was beyond where the waves are breaking against the shoreline now.

All this area in front of us was originally solid rock,

going out as far as about 100 metres that way.

But interestingly, it wasn't only natural forces that created

and then destroyed the Elephant Rock.

This is a drawing from 1847,

and you can see where quarrying,

to get hold of the limestone for building work in local buildings,

has pushed into the side of the coastline, into the cliff face.

You can see the stacks left here, behind.

Probably this is the Elephant Rock, just in here.

This earlier stack is starting to disappear.

So you can see it's partly because of the quarrying

and partly because of the movement of the waves.

So this is where the elephant would have been.

Yes, and you can see from the background

the shape of the rock behind us.

Just the feet and the very tip of the trunk left behind by the sea.

Why would the Frith photographer have taken this picture?

What's getting him excited?

I think he knew that this would sell

and in the ten years after he took that photograph,

it was turned into numerous postcards.

It was sold here on the promenade

from the ice-cream shop and the bandstand.

So profits on a photograph as a souvenir are almost limitless.

It wasn't only Elephant Rock that vanished from Hartlepool.

As the town became more industrial in the 20th century,

holidaymakers too disappeared,

choosing elsewhere for their seaside fun.

Hartlepool's tourist industry all but died out.

Recently, however,

things have picked up, with the opening of a dockyard attraction.

Here, you can be drawn back

into the town's history,

and experience the seaport

as it might have been when Britain and France

were fighting for control of the high seas.

While the Frith photograph was of

what the Victorian's were flocking to see,

my photo is going to be of what 21st-century folk are keen on.

Although it's a place where you can easily get distracted,

especially by a mock-Georgian gentleman firing his cannon.

What would it have fired?

Cannon were rated by the size of the ball they fired.

So this one was a three-pounder.

That would be a three-pound shell?

Yeah. It also... There's another one called chain shot,

two cannonballs chained together.

If you wanted to take down the rigging on a ship,

you might not want to sink the ship,

especially if you were going to take it as a prize.

I can imagine being all at sea with that.

I need some training.

When you feel there's nothing in the barrel, you know it's safe.

Nowadays, re-enactments are a must

at any attraction worthy of its name.

-The cartridge goes in there.

-Right.

Here in Hartlepool, they go off with a bang.

-Is it very loud?

-Yes.

-You might want to step a little bit further back.

-OK, all right.

We'll go after three. One, two, three.

Oh, terrific.

In modern Britain, elephant-shaped rocks aren't that much of a draw,

but re-enactors Stuart and Nina do pull in the crowds,

so they're going to be the inspiration for my photo.

The first time I've used professional models.

That's great.

Frith's photo was of Hartlepool's top tourist attraction,

and over 120 years later, so too is mine.

What's interesting is that Hartlepool

and this museum gets lots of tourism awards.

So although it looked for a time as if

it would never be a seaside resort any more,

never attract visitors, it now really does.

To find the subject of my next Frith photo,

I'm heading a few miles down the coast to Saltburn-by-the-Sea,

a spot that was transformed during Frith's career.

One of Hartlepool's problems

was the growing popularity of bathing in the sea.

To do that and enjoy it, you need sand

and Hartlepool didn't have any sand.

And there were other resorts on the Cleveland coast

that could do better than that. They did have sand.

Saltburn-by-the-Sea cut the mustard.

It had, and still has, long sandy beaches and dramatic views.

And, of course, that other great Victorian asset - a pier,

but that wasn't all, it even had a water-balanced funicular railway

to take the visitors to and from the beach.

Here, it's perfectly captured by the Frith photographer.

In short, Saltburn was a sure-fire hit

with even the most discerning of Victorian holidaymakers.

I'm arriving over 120 years after the Frith photo was taken,

but it would appear Victorian values haven't entirely disappeared.

This is just the perfect way to get to the beach.

Past, present and future.

The modern surfers are out there with their wet suits,

and the old Victorian tramway is still working.

It is just the perfect way for people to keep up the past

and keep history alive.

But Saltburn didn't simply evolve into a seaside resort.

It was carefully planned, the dream of one family.

I'm heading to the beach to meet industrial historian

Steve Sherlock to find out more.

The vision for Saltburn was from the Pease family of Darlington,

who were Quakers, and had a vision of how the town should grow.

They decided what should be built and what shouldn't be built.

So, for example, as Quakers,

they were teetotal and not wanting any pubs to be in the town.

So they were more interested in reading rooms.

So when was the first new pub built here?

-Well, the first new pub was only built in 1986.

-Good heavens.

That's a Quaker tradition, isn't it, in this town?

Entrepreneur and politician Henry Pease was a visionary,

but first and foremost, he was a businessman

and two ventures occupied him above all others.

Iron mining and railways.

His family had been directors

of the famous Stockton-Darlington railway line,

the world's first passenger railway.

And in 1861, he built an extension around the coast

all the way to Saltburn.

But is he concerned, at that stage,

in getting as many visitors here as possible?

No, in the first instance,

he's thinking about it being an economic thing, a mineral railway.

The visitors are secondary and a spin-off from that.

-What, so he wants the mineral rights?

-Yes, indeed.

On both sides of the railway, or near the railway?

He had spoken with the landowners

and had secured royalties for tramways to bring iron ore,

which is the mineral we are looking at, back to furnaces on Teesside.

So when we get to this and what we're looking at,

it's the great businessman, but also the person who wants

to build a town he can be proud of?

Yes, leaving a legacy, if you wish.

I suppose the biggest legacy here is the funicular railway

which we see in the Frith photograph?

Yes, indeed, that's just ahead of us here.

Why did it matter so much to have this railway,

this splendid construction?

There's no point taking people to the seaside

and leaving them at the top of the cliff.

You've got to get them to the beach to enjoy the facilities you offer.

-That's where this comes into play?

-Yes.

-And it is a wonderful construction, isn't it?

-It is, it's fantastic.

The cliff lift really is incredibly simple.

It relies on little more than gravity.

Both cars have water tanks

and as water is poured into the top car,

it becomes heavier than the other car,

so down the hill it goes, pulling the lighter car up at the same time.

I can't wait to enjoy this special experience.

Why do you think people like this so much? They still do, don't they?

The views are fantastic and it's just a bit of Victoriana, really.

It is, it's also nice that it's run by water, isn't it?

It seems sort of natural.

-Yeah, and not polluting or anything.

-Yeah. So it's modern.

-It's really lazy.

-Yes, it is a lazy way to get up, but it's beautiful.

There you go, folks. Thank you very much.

Well, lazy or not, this is one form of public transport

that is quite rightly cherished.

It's not just a matter of nostalgia.

Everybody likes it, don't they?

Yeah, they seem to, yeah.

It's just one of those things... I've never heard any complaints.

-And how difficult is it to work?

-Typical Victorian, it's very simple.

-Are you going to show me how it works?

-Certainly, yes.

-I press the bell.

-Yeah.

-Reset the brakes.

And then I start to put water in the tram.

-We let the brake off slightly.

-Right.

Then we wait for the car to start to move.

All I do now is control the speed.

-It's wonderfully simple, isn't it?

-It's very simple.

It's coming into land,

it's coming through the speed trap, so I'm slowing it down.

-Right.

-Here we go, we're coming into land now at the top.

-Unfortunately, the brakes are binding a bit.

-That's all right.

-There it is. Into land.

-OK.

We make sure the brake's off, put the main brake on.

-And you open the door?

-And I open the door.

The original 1880s design of the funicular was so good

that aside from modern safety brakes,

remarkably little has changed.

There we go, folks, thank you very much now.

Happy customers.

Happy customers, yes.

For Frith, this cliff railway

was part of the reason for

Saltburn's success as a seaside destination.

Today, it's an historic attraction in its own right

and it will make a perfect addition to my album.

Right, that's really good.

We've got the top of the tramway,

we've got our driver, Bob.

And we've got a couple on the side who look happy.

The thing is, this is the kind of thing that cheers people up,

and why not?

My picture compares with Frith's photo quite well, I think.

His was taken from below, mine is from above.

With a bicycle,

Bob at his station

and a couple enjoying a walk by the sea,

there's just enough of the modern world

to remind us that this isn't the 19th century.

We've also captured the enthusiasm of it. That's what I've tried to do.

These people are enjoying themselves.

Bob admits he's got one of the best jobs in the world.

I'm on a trip to tell the story of Britain's First Photo Album,

tracing the footsteps of Francis Frith and his team,

using the photographs they took

in order to discover how life has changed.

Having moved south from the Port of Hartlepool

to the resort of Saltburn-by-the-Sea,

I don't have far to find my next Frith photo.

In fact, I'm only taking a short walk out of the town

to a place called Cat Nab,

and this is what I'm looking for.

A view that the Frith team captured in 1885.

It shows the clash between the old rural way of life,

represented by this farm which once would have stood here alone,

and the new bustling Saltburn,

with its great Victorian homes dominating the top of the cliff.

The building boom was financed from the fast developing mining industry.

Here, we can see exactly where he took the photograph.

There's the farm, which we can still see here, the farm buildings.

There's the road coming round the corner, there.

What do we see here on the horizon?

We see the new Saltburn, the seaside resort.

What we're seeing along here are the poorer houses,

these are the houses for the workers.

What are the workers doing?

They are going across this bridge to the mine

because the whole of Saltburn's prosperity in the Victorian period

is based upon the mineral rights.

It looks a rather odd picture,

but it's an odd picture with a very interesting story.

The way mining transformed the local landscape

can be fully appreciated here at the Skinningrove iron mine,

one of the main employers in the area.

In Frith's time, the mine was owned by, yes, you've guessed it,

the Pease family.

It's now a museum

and I'm being shown around by retired miner Alan Richardson.

This illustrates our mine in its heyday.

It was one of the largest mines in the area.

We employed about 860 people.

On the picture here, we see the railway.

You know that Pease and partners were big railway people.

They were very moral people, being Quakers.

Safety standards weren't high, but they weren't anywhere in those days.

Their excuse for people dying was that it was probably an act of God,

rather than anything to do with them,

but other than that, they did try to look after the employees.

Despite the dangers in the mid-19th century,

thousands of people came from all over the country

to find work here in Cleveland.

With 82 different mines,

it was one of the global centres of the iron industry.

When Skinningrove mine opened in 1848,

Britain was producing more iron than the rest of the world put together.

Railways, bridges, great iron and glass buildings,

these were being constructed at a staggering rate.

The splendour of the finished product was in sharp contrast

to the grim conditions in the mines.

Conditions in those days weren't very good.

First of all, it was very wet, there was always water drips.

They used to say - if it rains on the surface on a Monday,

it rains underground on a Tuesday.

It took a day for the water to percolate through.

We're walking down the access shaft that leads into the mine,

a long sloping tunnel that runs for hundreds of metres

all the way down to the rock face.

Every tunnel grew by at least a metre a day,

but the Pease family were organised.

They protected the major tunnels with up to three layers of bricks,

and where did the bricks come from?

From one of their own brickworks.

They owned everything, didn't they?

-Absolutely.

-They could be very tough employers, couldn't they?

Oh, yes, very exacting, John.

For instance, in those early days, having large families was common,

but if a miner actually went to work and got killed,

the clerk would go to the house as soon as it was known

and inform the widow that her husband had been killed

and she would get 14 days' notice.

What, to leave the house?

To vacate the house, because there was no longer a miner in there.

-Well, you can't get tougher than that, can you?

-Not really.

-We would regard that as pretty well inhuman, wouldn't we?

-Indeed, yes.

Today, the deeper tunnels at Skinningrove are flooded with water,

but to get a feel of what life was like at the rock face,

the museum has cleverly recreated the original scene.

What do they do?

Both sides are mining, or are they mining from the front?

Using one of these, which is called a jumper drill...

-Right. Oh, it's heavy, isn't it?

-Yeah.

They would punch that at the face.

Chop a hole,

until they had got the thing in about one yard,

and then they would put in gunpowder

and explode it.

You're moving the ironstone?

Yes, it's been moved out.

I notice that we have got here...

The miner's friend, the rat.

Miners were very conscious of having rats.

They were an aid to us because they are extremely sensitive,

especially to foul air and gas.

They seemed as if they had a sixth sense about the instability of rock.

So when you were a miner, how often would you come across a rat?

Every day. All the time.

So you looked at them, well, in a sort of friendly way?

Yes, indeed, they were a miner's friend.

If it had not been for the vast profits of the mining industry,

the grand new houses in our Frith photo would not have been built

and Saltburn would not have emerged from a sleepy rural backwater

into a thriving Victorian seaside resort.

Although it was the Pease family who had the vision,

it was Alan's predecessors down the mine who made it all possible.

That's why, in my photo, I'm giving ex-miner Alan pride of place.

Your life's work as a miner. OK? That's what we must think about.

Frith captured the new world above ground,

I wanted to go below, to tell the story behind the story.

That's my picture, because that's Alan, a real miner,

in what is now just a mining museum.

It does capture that period,

and you think of how splendid Saltburn-by-the-Sea is,

but built on the backs

and the hard work of the miners.

So we come to the last Frith photo for today.

For that, I'm moving further south, but sticking firmly to the coast,

to Whitby.

This beautiful fishing town has enjoyed a long and proud history

dating back to the Middle Ages and beyond.

My mission in Whitby is very specific

and it concerns an intriguing Frith photo.

It's set close to the port

and shows the children of one of Whitby's fishing families.

For once, it's not the location

of the photo that concerns me,

but who's in it and who took it.

That photograph is unusual for a number of reasons.

We don't normally get so many people in the picture,

and this is one of those rare occasions

when we can identify

which of the Frith photographers took the picture.

He is an interesting character in his own right.

Frith's company became so successful that Frith alone

couldn't possibly keep up with the workload.

He soon employed an army of photographers across the country.

Most of them are long forgotten,

but one of his agents, based in Whitby,

was a distinguished photographer - Frank Sutcliffe.

Many of his original photos have survived to this day

and are now in the possession of gallery owner Mike Shaw.

One of his first commissions,

actually, was by Francis Frith,

to take some photographs of the abbeys

-and ruins round Whitby.

-So he got a break with Frith?

-Indeed.

In amongst the photos that Sutcliffe took for Frith

is the picture of the children on the beach

that I find so fascinating.

Why do you know that that's a Sutcliffe photograph?

The style is Sutcliffe's.

It's not the type of photograph

that's normally in the Francis Frith collection.

You normally expect street scenes with the Francis Frith ones.

So that again leads to the fact that it's by Frank Sutcliffe.

Where do you think it was taken?

By the look of the rocks and everything,

I would say pretty much over there. Where those rocks are.

Right, just over there.

Quite a few of Sutcliffe photographs were taken of people on rocks.

It was obviously at low tide.

That's right, yes. This is the Peart family.

Quite a well-known family.

It's a good Whitby name, is Peart.

Your father bought the whole Sutcliffe collection, is that right?

My father bought the collection when I was born.

There are about 1,600 glass negatives which,

in the terms of the Francis Frith collection,

is small, but it is a superb collection.

Mike helped me find out where our photo was taken but there's more -

a direct connection to the family in the picture.

We've managed to track down the descendants of the Peart family

from that Frith photograph.

I wonder if we'll recognise them from the photograph?

I'm going to meet Susan Storr,

who is still very much part of the Whitby fishing community.

It is 120 years after her young grandmother

was photographed on the rocks.

Ginny, my grandmother,

this is her, look.

This is her as well.

-Oh, that's nice, yes.

-She was the youngest girl.

She looks a bit, well, she doesn't look very happy, does she?

She doesn't. Maybe because they had a very hard life,

life was very hard in them days.

Did she talk about the difficulties they had, the hard times they had?

-Yes, they were fisher folk.

-Yeah.

Same as what we are now.

What happened to her in later life?

-She had three daughters and she outlived all her daughters.

-Really?

-This is Ginny celebrating her Diamond wedding.

-Oh, yes.

-How old would she have been then?

-Ginny was about 85 there.

-How old was she when she died?

-92, she lived until she was 92.

So although she looks as though she could do with a square meal,

she survived, she must have been strong.

-She was only about four foot ten, actually.

-Was she?

She was a very hard worker and she worked until she was 76.

-It's maybe all that sheep head soup she used to cook.

-Sheep head soup?

They used to put sheep heads and make a stew out of that.

Do you remember that?

I can't, but my brothers can and they used to run a mile

when she used to say dinner was ready.

Well, something Ginny did certainly worked,

because the Peart family has continued to thrive in Whitby.

With Susan's help, I've been able to assemble a fascinating line-up

for what I hope will be a special addition to our photo album.

Right, thank you very much for coming.

We can't take the photograph exactly where it was

because if we do, we'll be all in the sea, won't we?

We don't want to do that.

So let's meet the current family.

There's Susan's brother, David.

Second cousins Leslie and Robert.

First cousin once-removed Dave.

Grandson Travis. And not forgetting

Sue herself and her daughter Lisa.

All direct descendants from the Pearts of our Frith photo.

That's marvellous, and you're on the rocks where your ancestors were.

Extra happiness, yeah, that looks good.

So there it is, the Pearts of Whitby,

but this time, 21st-century Pearts in a 21st-century Whitby.

It is extraordinary, isn't it?

The rocks are the same,

some of the people look the same,

a sort of family resemblance.

But, of course,

there's more than 100 years separating these two photographs.

But times were hard then, times are pretty hard now.

I can see what the photographer was doing here.

I've tried to replicate it there.

If you want to find out more about Britain's First Photo Album, go to:

Join me next time, when I'll be heading to the Peak District

and the final stretch of my journey.

I'll be paying homage to Frith in the town where he was born.

I'll be visiting one of Britain's most romantic stately homes.

-And I must say...

-It is absolutely stunning, isn't it?

-It's wonderful.

And I'll be having a flutter on the horses.

-Are you a bit worried?

-Not really!

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