One newspaper headline called it “The Tragedy at Byker”, a revenge killing that shocked the working-class area of Victorian Newcastle, but for the renowned historian and broadcaster David Olusoga it is a story that went on to shape one side of his family.
Speaking for the first time about a murder for which his great-great-grandfather was convicted, Olusoga has revealed the lasting impact on his relatives, long after the violent death in 1896 on the streets of Byker.
“The overwhelming sentiment is sadness,” said the historian, best known for his BBC Two documentaries A House Through Time and Union, as he described the feeling of “bad blood” that was passed down the generations; an inherited sense of guilt that prevented his own grandfather ever taking a drink.
“It shaped his life. I never saw him lose his temper. His level of control was striking,” said Olusoga.
“This event in the 1890s, this reverberated through my family,” Olusoga is to explain in a new podcast that will re-examine historical crimes. “It shaped my grandfather’s life. He was told by his mother that her father had been the murderer and that in this Victorian way that there was this idea of sins of the father, that bad blood could be passed between generations.”
The fatal incident at the core of this legacy of guilt took place on the corner of Shields Road and Dalton Street in Byker one afternoon as the victim, a younger man called Daniel Gray, stood talking to friends while on his way back to his work as a painter and decorator.
Olusoga’s great-great-grandfather George Ewart crossed the road and drew a revolver. His target, Gray, called for help, crying out: “Murder! I’ve been shot,” according to witnesses, and ran into a shop, begging the owners to lock the door as bullets came in through the window. Gray died of internal bleeding from a wound to his side as he lay on the shop’s floor, in spite of the efforts of two doctors called to the scene.
“I have been to stand on that street corner,” said Olusoga this weekend. “It was a powerful experience. All the key landmarks are still there.”
In an account given for the first episode of Was Justice Served?, made in collaboration with the Find My Past genealogy site, Olusoga and the criminologist David Wilson acknowledge the way the public records surrounding a crime are often the only mark left on history by the working classes.
“If you want to understand the lives of ordinary people, then often the only trace left is in the records of criminality,” Wilson said.
Olusoga says in the podcast: “It’s pretty ironic that the most vivid of our ancestors, the most vocal of our ancestors, if we are of working-class backgrounds, are those who committed crimes or were the victims of crimes.”
The 54-year-old academic has a Nigerian father and is related to Ewart, who was of Scottish descent, through his mother. “I don’t believe in pride or shame in association with ancestors or previous generations of my nations – but you can look at people from the past and, perhaps especially if you’re related to them, just feel the tragedy of what they went through and the challenges of the times,” he said.
The seemingly senseless crime was in fact the result of a fight between the two men 10 years earlier. In 1886, Gray had called on Ewart’s son, Richard, and did not believe that he was away from home in London. In a doorstep tussle outside the Ewart family home, Gray inflicted serious damage to Ewart’s eye. His eyesight was already impaired and the new injury changed his life. Gray was sentenced to two months in prison for assault.
After the killing a decade later, Ewart, a painter and cabinet maker who was still living in Byker with his wife and children, went peaceably to the cells, saying of his victim: “Yes, he blinded me. I have been waiting a long time but finally got him.”
Speaking from Colorado, Jen Baldwin, the genealogist who co-presents the podcast, said she had been moved by Olusoga’s response. “He already knew something of this crime and understood how it had affected his family,” she said. “The point of the podcast series is to look for what we can learn about history through looking at a criminal case.”
“This is a story that has shaped the culture within my family,” Olusoga reflects. “It shaped attitudes that were passed on between generations; ideas about control, very Victorian and Edwardian ideas that actions or predilections could be passed down between generations, and a sense among some generations in my family that they had to control themselves because something terrible had been done by a member of our family with whom we shared kinship. This idea of bad blood.”
Ewart pleaded insanity and his daughter, Sylvia, gave evidence that her father had been abusive to her mother and testified to his depressive behaviour. The jury found him guilty, with a strong recommendation for mercy, but he was sentenced to death by hanging.
“For me the most emotive evidence of mental illness comes from George’s daughter, Sylvia, who is a teenager, and she goes to court and she has to testify about the erratic and violent behaviour of her father in public,” said Olusoga.
“They said the witness gave her evidence in a quiet, ladylike and pathetic way, and there seemed to be deep sympathy with her within the court. Now my mother remembered Sylvia. She knew her as an old woman.”
A local petition against the planned execution was signed by thousands and delivered to the home secretary, who sent doctors to Newcastle. They judged Ewart to be criminally insane. He was sent to what was then the Broadmoor criminal lunatic asylum.
Olusoga said: “I did not know about the petition. It shows there was a strong sense that an injustice had been done.”
