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Myers Literary Guide:
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The North-East
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SIR WALTER BESANT (1836 - 1901) Of all his many works, Sir Walter's own favourite was Dorothy Forster (1884) about the Northumberland heroine who rescued her brother, 'general' Tom Forster from Newgate jail in London after the 1715 Jacobite rising, and enabled him to escape to France. Dorothy, disguised as a servant, rode pillion to London behind a village blacksmith and extricated her brother in a daring operation involving duplicate keys. Robert Patten (q.v.) also appears in the novel as 'Creeping Bob'. Blanchland was part of the Forster estates, forfeited after the rebellion, and Dorothy's ghost is said to haunt the Bamburgh Room in the Lord Crewe Arms. Though the novel takes some liberties with the events of Dorothy's life, the early sections are set in Blanchland. Dorothy's aunt and namesake married Nathaniel, Lord Crewe, Bishop of Durham (1674-1721), whose portrait by Kneller hangs in the hotel. It was the Crewe trustees who fashioned the idyllic village we see today.
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