Dolly Peel Statue

Dolly Peel (more correctly Dorothy Peel, (1782–1857)) was a famous local heroine in South Shields (Tyne and Wear, UK). She was a fishwife who was known locally as a smuggler of almost anything which attracted excise duty and as someone who could be relied upon to protect men from the Royal Naval press gangs of the day. She is said to have hidden men and boys under her ample petticoats.

The most famous story is that she single-handedly kept the press gang out of her house when in pursuit of her husband Cuthbert, allowing him to escape via a rear window to hide on the roof and temporarily escape. When the press gang eventually rounded up both Cuthbert and her son she had herself smuggled onto their ship before it sailed. Discovered when the vessel was at sea, she was put to work on the orlop deck, assisting the surgeon. During battle she also acted as a powder monkey and was said to be fearless. She was allowed to stay on board during the entire voyage and in gratitude for her services was pardoned for her misdemeanour and both her husband and son were released from naval service. She was also an accomplished poet and songwriter with her most famous works being about the loss of the barque Dove on the Herd Sand and a poem congratulating South Shields' first MP on his election in 1832 following the Great Reform Act.

Her statue was by Bill Goften and was unveiled in 1987 on a green open space just off River Drive where she is seen looking out over what used to be the busy South Shields dry dock area. The statue was commissioned by the efforts of her great great grandson, Reg Peel, a local councillor. The embankment is is on the side of an artificial hill known as a Ballast Hill, constructed of waste ballast transferred from unladen vessels arriving at the port largely to pick up coal. In Tyne and Wear hundreds of such hills were created but except for this one they have all been flattened and built over to the extent that they can no longer be identified as a hill. In this case the ballast hill seems to have been left partially intact and used as a convenient embankment to allow the River Drive road to be elevated high enough to pass over a railway (now the Metro line) into the South Shields terminus of the line (just beyond South Shields Station). When the original railway was constructed, a cutting was made through the ballast hill and a bridge was built over it. Where the rail terminus now is, there used to be a turntable. The impressive concrete bridge which actually carries the road has a very similar form to the famous iron bridge over the Tyne in Newcastle and it has been said that, during WW2, German aircrews would mistakenly think they were over Newcastle when, in fact, they were over South Shields.