Charlotte Bailey

Part 1 – Charlotte's Earsdon

Picture standing at the foot of the hill in Earsdon, looking up towards St Alban’s church. This is the beginning of our family story — the very ground where it all started for us.

Close your eyes for a moment and picture 1798. A baby girl named Charlotte Bailey draws her first breath right here in Earsdon on the 18th of March. This village is small and beautiful — just two neat rows of low stone cottages hugging a little green in the middle, a handful of farms at the western end, and wide open fields rolling gently down towards the sea. Life here moves to the slow, steady rhythm of the seasons and the church bells ringing out from the hill.

The church has watched over this village for centuries. Long before the Victorian building that stands today, an earlier church occupied exactly this spot, built and cared for by the monks from Tynemouth Priory just a few miles away. People had been christened, married, and laid to rest on this same piece of holy ground since at least the 1100s. In 1818, when Charlotte was twenty, the church she knew wasn’t the one standing there now, but the ground is the same ground her feet touched on her wedding day. Hundreds of years of North East families had already said their vows here before her.

By the time Charlotte is a young woman, the quiet village is starting to hum with change. Just over the fields, coal pits are opening up — the Duke and Duchess Pit at Earsdon Colliery will soon be winding men and boys down into the earth every morning. Down the hill in North Shields the little port is busy loading coal, salt, and barrels of fish onto ships heading south down the Tyne. On a still day you could smell woodsmoke from the cottages, fresh-turned earth after rain, and every now and then the faint salty tang of the salt pans working along the river.

It’s the very end of the long wars with Napoleon. Soldiers are finally coming home, but food is still expensive, bread is dear, and everyone feels the pinch. Young people like Charlotte and her friends are hearing stories of better wages in the new mines and works. The whole North East is waking up — coal, glass, ships, iron — and this little village on the hill is right on the edge of it all.

Charlotte’s own childhood wasn’t easy. Her father Charles died when she was only five years old, so her mother Jane raised her here among the same families who had lived in these fields and cottages for generations. Charlotte would have helped with the chickens, fetched water from the well, walked the same lanes, and gone to church every Sunday on this hill. She grew up knowing every face in the village and every footpath across the fields.

Then comes the day that changes everything for the family line.

On the 25th of July 1818, twenty-year-old Charlotte walks up this exact path — probably arm-in-arm with her mother Jane or a couple of her closest friends, wearing her best dress, heart beating fast. She steps into the church and marries David Barclay.

David wasn’t born here. He came from Scotland, like so many skilled, hard-working men did in those years. Scots were moving south in good numbers into the booming North East because there was work — good work — in the glass houses and the pits. David was a bottle finisher, a proper respected craftsman. In the hot, noisy glassworks, teams of men worked the molten glass by hand: one gathered the glowing blob on a long pipe, another blew it into shape, and then David took over with his special tools, shaping and smoothing the neck and the lip perfectly while the glass was still red-hot and glowing. It took steady hands, years of experience, and real pride in the craft.

Picture standing at the church gates. Stop for a moment. Stand exactly where they stood. Close your eyes if you wish. Picture the little fiddler playing a tune just outside, the smell of candle wax and summer flowers inside the church, the murmur of family and friends, and two young people — Charlotte, a local lass from the village, and David, the skilled Scottish lad who had made this place his home — promising their whole future to each other on this hill.

That single marriage, on this ordinary summer day in 1818, in the little church standing here… that is the root from which the family line has grown.

Take your time here. Look around. Breathe it in. This is where it began.

Part 2 – North East Scottish Roots

The couple did not pack up and head off to Scotland. They stayed right here in the North East, exactly where their story began. After the wedding they only moved as far as the new industrial villages a few miles south — Jarrow on the Tyne, Gateshead, Heworth, and Bill Quay. That was where the glassworks were exploding into life. Every brewery in Britain, every chemist, every medicine maker needed thousands upon thousands of bottles, and the North East had the coal to fire the furnaces and the skilled hands to blow the glass.

David kept working as a bottle finisher. Picture the scene: a long, hot workshop filled with the roar of furnaces, the clink of metal tools, and the glow of molten glass. Teams of men worked together — one gathering the fiery blob on a pipe, one blowing the body into shape, and David, the finisher, stepping in at just the right second to shape and smooth the neck and lip with wooden paddles and tongs so the cork would seal perfectly. It was hot, dangerous, skilful work, but it paid better than farm labour, and David was respected for it.

Charlotte raised their six children right in the middle of all that smoke and clatter. She would have carried babies on her hip while hanging washing, cooked meals over an open fire, and walked the same muddy lanes between the works and the rows of workers’ cottages. Life was tough. They lost little Alexander when he was only one year old, Charles at five, Jane before she turned eighteen, and others in their twenties and thirties. Those losses were heartbreakingly common in those days, but every time they picked themselves up and carried on. That quiet strength runs through the family line.

Their daughter Catherine Elizabeth Barclay was born in 1832 in Jarrow. She grew up breathing the same industrial air, playing among the brick rows and the river, watching her father come home with glass dust in his hair. In 1851, at the age of nineteen, she married Matthew Thompson in South Shields. Matthew wasn’t from far away — he was a local Sunderland lad, another skilled bottle glass finisher whose family had deep roots right here in the North East. Again, they stayed close, raising their own big family around Gateshead and Sunderland. The line from Charlotte never wandered far from these rivers and these hills. And here’s the beautiful pattern that repeats through our story: the Scottish connection keeps coming in through the husbands, never by our family leaving the North East. Scots had the skills the booming North East desperately needed — glass blowers who knew the old ways, miners who weren’t afraid of the dark, shipwrights who could swing a hammer. So they came south in waves, married local girls, and made this place their home. That’s exactly what happened again one generation later. Charlotte Thompson, born in 1857 right here in the North East, not in Scotland, marries John Thomson. John himself was born in Glasgow, but like his grandfather David Barclay before him, he chose to come south for work. He started as a cartman hauling heavy loads around the busy docks, then became an engine driver, moving goods and people along the growing railway lines. So the blood mixes in the best way possible — deep, solid North East roots from Charlotte’s side, mixed with proud Scottish names, stories, and hard-earned skills coming in through marriage. The family stayed close to the Tyne and the Wear, raising children in Bishopwearmouth, Monkwearmouth, Deptford, Southwick. As one walks slowly around the churchyard, it is worth taking a proper look at the old stones. Many of the surnames one will see are exactly the kind of families the ancestors lived alongside — miners with blackened hands, glass workers with burns on their arms, labourers who built the North East that helped power the whole country. Charlotte and David made a choice in 1818 to build their life here, and because of that decision the family has stayed within a few miles of this very church for more than two hundred years. That is not just history. That is belonging.

Part 3 – From Church to You

The story keeps rolling forward, and it never leaves the North East. Charlotte Thompson and John Thomson raised their big family right here in Sunderland, in the streets around the Wear that are still familiar today. Their son William Thomson was born in 1879 in Monkwearmouth. By the time he was a young man he was working as a labourer and then a plater’s helper in the great shipyards that lined the river.

Imagine the noise: the clang of thousands of rivets being hammered home, the hiss of steam cranes, the smell of hot metal and paint and the river itself. William would have been right there on the hull plates, helping shape the iron and steel into some of the greatest ships the world has ever seen — cargo vessels, colliers, even warships that helped change history. It was back-breaking, dangerous, freezing in winter and scorching in summer, but it was honest work and it fed the family.

William’s son David Boyle Thomson, born in 1915, followed straight into the same hard trade. He too became a plater’s helper in those same shipyards, swinging hammers and crawling across scaffolding high above the water, helping build the next generation of vessels that kept the North East famous for ships the world over.

Then comes the leap. The next David Boyle Thomson, born in Sunderland in 1937, takes the family story into a completely new chapter. After achieving well in his 11+ exams, he attended St. Aidan's grammar school in Sunderland. After finishing school he trained as an engineer and went to work on the Blue Streak rocket project in the late 1950s and 1960s. He was helping design and test Britain’s own powerful liquid-fuelled missile and early space launcher — massive steel and alloy structures that stood taller than houses, engines roaring with thousands of pounds of thrust, test firings that shook the ground and pointed toward the stars. From hand-finishing glass bottles by fire in the 1820s to engineering rockets that could reach space in the 1960s… that is the journey the family made in just six generations, all while staying rooted right here on these same North East hills.

From Charlotte Bailey standing nervously in Earsdon church in 1818, through the roar of glass furnaces, the hammer-blows of the shipyards, the coal dust in the air, and finally to rockets gleaming on the test stands — every single step has stayed within sight of these same fields, the same rivers, and the same sea you can see from the top of this hill today.
The Scottish thread is woven beautifully through it all, but never by us leaving. It comes in through the husbands — David Barclay walking south from Scotland, John Thomson making the same journey a century later — bringing their skills and their names, then marrying local North East girls like Charlotte and her daughters and granddaughters. Strong Northumberland and Durham roots mixed with proud Scottish blood and craftsmanship. That mixture made us tougher, more adaptable, and still completely at home here.

That is exactly why standing in front of St Alban’s matters. One is only a few short miles and a couple of centuries away from the moment Charlotte said “I do.” The same wind that lifted her veil on her wedding day still moves across these hills. The same churchyard soil that holds the graves of people who knew her, or knew people who knew her, lies underfoot.

The family never scattered across the world. It stayed rooted in this corner of England, welcoming good Scottish blood and skills that made it stronger, and two hundred years later it is still here.

Take your time here. Walk every path in the churchyard. Run your hand along the old stone wall. Say a quiet hello to Charlotte and David. Their line is still proud of Earsdon, still proud of the North East, and still going strong — working hard, loving fiercely, and never forgetting where it came from.

Full circle. From that wedding day in 1818 to the present day… the family made it. And it is still right where it belongs.