Published at 15:09, Thursday, 20 November 2008

WHITELEY Shield, just south of Allendale, is the old stamping ground of Dawsons, Hetheringtons, and Bells.

Royal connections: Whitley Shield Farm House was once owned by the Bell family who claimed to be descended from a royal Stewart prince.

These families, with their huge quiverfuls of hopeful offspring, married back and forth across the West Allen Valley during most of the 18th and 19th centuries – when they weren’t escaping Tynedale for the New World!

Whiteley (or Whitley) Shield Farmhouse – now for sale – has parts probably dating back to King Charles II, but almost every generation to live there has added its mite to the whole, and by Victoria’s time a complex of buildings was on the site.

One of the earliest structures was a sign of troubled times. The crumbled walls of Whiteley Shield Bastlehouse can still be seen – built and extended over several decades when it was a sensible insurance policy to have walls four feet thick and a trapdoor in the ceiling for when rival Reivers came to call with their “lang spears” akimbo.

Of the families recorded at Whiteley Shield, both the Bells and the Hetheringtons had possible Reiver grandads. The Bells were one of the most powerful graynes in the Borders, who threw their weight about something awful amongst the Armstrongs, the Musgraves, the Irvines, and especially the Grahams.

But the Bells tolled their last when their chief, William “Redcloak” Bell, died in 1628. No-one could replace old Redcloak, and the ferocious clan fizzled out, many resettling in the Tyne Valley and reinventing themselves as farmers and miners.

The Hetheringtons were Reivers in a small but impressive way, allegedly involved in a plot to murder the Bishop of Carlisle in 1596. And though they were few in number, they were particularly successful at the old protection racket or “blackmail”, so profitable in 1600s Tynedale.

The Dawsons are not on the main lists of Border Reiver clans, but if they were quiet in the 17th century they certainly developed a sense of adventure by the 19th century, many of them taking the plunge and emigrating to the other side of the world.

Allendale-born Hugh Dawson was one of the earliest of his clan to be recorded at “Whiteley Shield Farmstead” or “White Shields” according to Armstrong’s map of 1769.

Born in 1750, Hugh Dawson married first Elizabeth Waugh, and then Hannah Oliver, and handed the farm on to his son, Hugh, by the 1790s.

This Hugh worked as a lead ore washer, and his nephew or grandson Joseph Dawson – born in 1816 – took up the family Marigolds in his turn while living at Whiteley Shield.

In the main farmhouse lived Thomas Dawson, who farmed its 78 acres and paid tithe-rent of £4 a year according to the 1839 records. The Thomas Dawsons were upwardly mobile enough to afford a maid – Ellen Moffat.

It was Joseph who forged a family link with the Ninebanks Hetheringtons, marrying their daughter Elizabeth in 1840. One Thomas “Hethrington” of Whiteley Shield – possibly related to Elizabeth – was paying for five children, aged from five to 14, to attend the nearest school at Carrshield in 1861.

By the 1870s, Thomas Dawson lived at Whiteley Shield farmstead, surrounded by his extended family. He worked as a quarryman, and married a lady known to posterity only as Annie of Allendale.

Thomas Dawson became the first of the Dawsons to emigrate – heading for Ontario, Canada in 1881. Thomas was soon followed by his brother, Abraham Dawson, and much later by his widowed sister, Annie Bell.

Elizabeth Dawson, married to an Armstrong in Whiteley Shield’s little Ranters’ Chapel in 1869, also bravely headed for Canuck-land as a widow in 1907.

By 1910, Whitley/Whiteley Shield was marked as Bell property on the tithe valuation map.

The Bells had come into the Whiteley Shield picture with the Reverend Luke Bell.

From a long line of farm hands living near Lee Hall at Wark, Luke bettered himself by becoming a Methodist preacher and learning to play the church organ.

Young Annie Dawson was wooed by Luke’s spirited preaching and tinkling of the ivories at the Whiteley Shield Chapel, and the match was made.

The Rev. Luke had no truck with the emigrating bug which had struck his wife’s family, but after he died, Annie headed West across the Pond, following two of her daughters, Frances and Jean Bell.

The Bells of Whiteley Shield had a curious claim to fame. They reckoned they could trace their ancestry back to the illegitimate child of a royal Stuart prince. Frances Bell claimed to possess an old family tree where the regal connection was set out in faded sepia ink, but sadly for today’s genealogists, her children put mother’s royal witterings down to senility, and after Frances died her treasured family tree was lost.

Many people have claimed a royal forbear. Indeed, London’s Mayor Boris Johnson recently discovered, as part of a TV programme, that he is a wrong-side-of-the-blanket descendent of George II.

There is just a squeak of possibility that the Bell claim is also justified. Frances Bell’s grandmother was Frances Stobbard. The surname “Stobbard” is an English version of the Scots Gaelic surname “Stiubhaird”, which is Gaelic for..... “Stuart!”.

But it might be stretching it more than a few centuries to connect these Tynedale farmers and preachers to a Gaelic-speaking King of Scotland.

l Whiteley Shield farmhouse is for sale via Northumbria and Cumbria of Fore Street, Hexham.

Published by http://www.hexhamcourant.co.uk