William Lisle Blenkinsopp Coulson (1841-1911), after leaving the army in 1892, served on the boards of many charities concerned with human and animal welfare, including the RSPCA and NSPCC, and wrote numerous works protesting animal cruelty.
He was a founding member of the Humanitarian League which opposed corporal and capital punishment as well as campaigning for the banning of vivisection and all hunting for sport, making it a forerunner to the modern animal rights movement.
Blenkinsopp Coulson became a prominent figure in Newcastle upon Tyne, establishing there the Newcastle Dog and Cat shelter at Spital Tongues.
There is a memorial in Newcastle to Coulson commemorating 'his efforts to assist the weak and defenceless among mankind and the animal world', now situated at the junction of Horatio Road and City Road.
Blenkinsopp Coulson also restored and extended Blenkinsopp Castle, one of his family's medieval homes, in 1877 (it was destroyed by fire in the 1950s).

Robyn Bolam (formerly Marion Lomax) was born in 1953 in Newcastle, and grew up in Northumberland. She gained her doctorate from the University of York in 1983, and her study of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama was published by CUP in 1987. She has edited four plays by John Ford (OUP, 1995) and The Rover by Aphra Behn (New Mermaids, 1995), and is now Professor of English at St Mary's University College, Strawberry Hill, where she has taught since 1987. In 1981 she received a Gregory Award from the Society of Authors, and won first prize in the Cheltenham Festival poetry competition. Her libretto for the opera Beyond Men and Dreams (composer Bennett Hogg) was performed by the Royal Opera House Garden Venture in 1991. In 1993 she held a Hawthornden International Fellowship. She has published three books of poems with Bloodaxe, The Peepshow Girl (1989) and Raiding the Borders (1996), both under her former name of Marion Lomax and New Wings: Poems 1977-2007 (2007), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her anthology Eliza's Babes: Four Centuries of Women's Poetry in English was published by Bloodaxe in 2003.