Description:The Sutherland Papers contain a wide range of documents relating to the Newcastle local elections of the early 1790s, from printed poll books to reports on the treating of the electorate. However, these documents are not just useful for researching local politics. Printed poll books and documents reporting the ‘Cases of Voters’ for both parties at the elections tell us a great deal about people living in Newcastle in the late eighteenth century.
During his investigation into the Trentham party’s election campaign at the Newcastle Election of 1790, Richard Lowndes produced a document entitled ‘Newcastle Cases of Votes for Gower & Macdonald’. The volume provides details about the people who voted for the Trentham party in the 1790 election, and the people who witnessed that they were eligible to vote. The document tells us about the lives of the voters themselves and their associations with Newcastle in the late eighteenth century. Below are extracts relating to just a few of the people who feature in Lowndes’s report.
James Knight
James served an apprenticeship with James Beech, a blacksmith in the Borough of Newcastle. After completing his apprenticeship, James worked in Stoke-upon-Trent but returned at the weekends to his father’s house in Newcastle.
The documents tell us that James married and lived with his wife at his father’s house in Newcastle where the couple ‘maintained themselves’ without assistance from the Newcastle Corporation. The couple also had a child. However, James’s wife and child sadly died within two years.
After this bereavement, James went to work in Cobridge, and then Norton in Shropshire where he worked with a widow called Sarah Birchall who he later married. Shortly after, the couple returned to Newcastle where they had lived for five years by 1790.
Click on the images on the left to learn more about the lives of Newcastle voters.