People
Charlie did not work in isolation. These are the people in his life and in his paintings, the family who sat for him and the friends and collectors who kept his work together.
Ann Rogers
1942 to 2015
Born in Haltwhistle, Northumberland in 1942, Ann Henderson met Charlie at the Mayfair Ballroom in Newcastle in 1972. They married the following year. She had worked as a librarian in Haltwhistle and Hexham before moving to Gateshead, where she later held a post at Gateshead Technical College.
Charlie Rogers Junior
Born 1974
Born in 1974, the year after his parents married, Charlie Junior grew up surrounded by his father's work. The family home held paintings in place of photographs; the walls themselves were the family album.
FatherFrancis "Pop" Rogers
Charlie's father, known always as Pop, was one of his earliest and most repeated subjects. One of Charlie's very first paintings was a portrait of Pop asleep, and the sleeping or reading figure recurs throughout the catalogue.
The person who started it allAunt Violet Gwendoline Woodhead
In 1964, a knee injury sent Charlie limping down Bensham Road to call on his aunt at 262 Bensham Road. Sitting in her front room with a cup of tea, he looked out at the back lane opposite and decided to paint it. The result was Back Cotfield Street, his first finished work.
Friend and fellow painterNorman Cornish MBE
1919 to 2014
Norman Cornish painted the pit villages of County Durham with the same devotion Charlie brought to Tyneside's back lanes. A former miner from Spennymoor, he was already an established figure when the two men met at Charlie's first exhibition in 1965 and found they had more in common than geography.
Compiler of the bookBrian Rankin
Brian Rankin runs Come View My Art Gallery on Sheriffs Highway in Low Fell. On 4 February 2023 he knocked on Charlie Junior's door and spent a morning being guided through a collection he later described as both unexpected and extraordinary. Hundreds of hours of research and interviews followed.
Collector and supporterDennis Donnelly
An insurance broker from Birtley, Dennis Donnelly first sought out Charlie in 1988 after hearing that St Cuthbert's Church on Bensham Bank was to be knocked down. He bought three oils that first evening, returned many times, and over thirty years accumulated around a hundred paintings for himself and placed roughly the same number with others.
PhotographerTrevor Ermel
Trevor Ermel was a local photographer working the same Tyneside streets as Charlie during the years of large-scale demolition. Where Charlie painted, Ermel photographed, both men conscious of documenting what would soon be gone.