Places & People
Armstrong’s abiding legacy is exemplified by the massive crane he built in the Venice Arsenale to load and unload warships.
Armstrong’s places
William Armstrong’s career and achievements had an international reach, as does his legacy, and examples or relics of his work can still be found not only in Britain but also across the globe, from Chile to the USA, and from Venice to Malta to Japan.
Certain places in England remain particularly closely associated with him. Chief among these is Cragside, the house he built on the Northumberland moors, close to the River Coquet, his favourite childhood haunt. Cragside is now a flagship property of the National Trust in the north of England.
In the last decade of his long life, Armstrong bought the ancient castle of Bamburgh on the Northumberland coast and restored it at an estimated cost of £10 million in today’s money. Often hailed as England’s finest coastal castle, Bamburgh is open to the public, with illuminating exhibitions and displays about its history.
Armstrong’s native Newcastle upon Tyne is full of reminders of him but short of tangible memorials. He spent part of his life in Jesmond Dene, now the focus of The Armstrong Project. In 1870 he was the principal founder of the College of Science, which evolved into Newcastle University.
The most spectacular surviving reminders of his engineering feats are two bridges: the Armstrong Bridge in Jesmond Dene and the Swing Bridge across the Tyne.
Perched on a rocky ledge above the Debdon Burn near Rothbury in Northumberland, Cragside began as a simple hunting lodge and grew organically over the years to become ‘a magician’s palace’.
Family and collaborators
Every thing William Armstrong achieved was an act of collaboration – whether with members of his small but powerful family, or with individuals and groups from the worlds of business, science and industry.
In the early days of the Elswick Works, which would become an industrial powerhouse on the Tyne, he was respected as a manager and as a talent-spotter who nurtured his protégés, but with the rise of union power at the end of the 19th century he came to be seen as patriarchal and out of touch, evoking hostility among the workforce during the engineers’ strike of 1871.
The most important personal influence on Armstrong was his wife, Margaret (née Ramshaw), styled Lady Armstrong from 1859, when her husband was knighted and made Engineer of Rifled Ordnance and Superintendent of the Royal Gun Factory at Woolwich.
He was close to his parents, William and Anne Armstrong, who had one other child, a daughter, also Anne, who married William Watson and had a son called John, before dying at the age of 25.
Margaret Armstrong, a talented gardener and plantswoman, helped her husband with his projects and experiments. (National Trust)
Armorer Donkin, Armstrong’s first mentor, supported his early business ventures and later made him his heir. (National Trust)
Throughout his life, Armstrong collaborated with friends, mentors and opinionated advisers to achieve his best work. The early influence of Armorer Donkin was superseded by that of James Meadows Rendel and his sons Stuart and George, and Thomas Sopwith was often nearby to lend insight and encouragement. Among other inspirational colleagues were Andrew Noble, Richard Norman Shaw and Joseph Wilson Swan.