Life dispersed in small things forgotten
Funeral
We buried him in the cemetery at Blyth overlooking the beach in the plot where my mother has lain since 1999. It was a bleak place back then. Twenty five years have seen the trees and hedges mature. The watery sunshine of that August morning and the flowers on neighboring graves made the place something of a garden.
In a casket made of wicker. This had been an easy decision guided by his lifelong appreciation of the qualities of materials (MDF — no way!), and by my experience a couple of years ago of Mike Pearson’s moving funeral in a south Wales valley (returning whence we loved, and conscious of the performed event of parting).
But what was he to wear? Until the 80s they always wore fine tailored suits to go out to “The Duke”, the working men’s social club — no sports casual back then. There were a couple in his wardrobe, hand made by Hardwick of Blyth, a friend of theirs. It didn’t seem right, even for the last of his generation. On my visit at Easter, he had asked me to bring him a new Stanford baseball cap; he had lost the others, like so many other things in his last years. There was a Stanford sweatshirt out in his bedroom alongside his sports pants and trainers. He loved his visits to see us in California. So that was it — he was buried in his Stanford gear.
He had neither time nor sympathy for organized religion, was always suspicious of church and state. So there was no chapel service, no vicar, who had never known him, to repeat something that held no meaning for him. Instead I spoke at the graveside to a few family members, Marlene, Milly, Liz and Phil, Andy, Chris and Alex Quinn, neighbors, and John Davison, a friend he had met in the 50s and with whom he still visited the city twice a week. And yes, to Connie who came over from Denmark to be with me; she had gotten to know him over two Christmas holidays. Gary the Funeral Director from the Cooperative (those local to the North East of England will know what this means) stood by in his top hat and tails.
Andy, my brother-in-law, spoke warmly of family connections. We had placed in the casket some of the vitrified ashes of my sister Jacqui, who had died so young six years ago.
Gary, Funeral Director from the Coop.
I spoke of place. He lived his whole life within three miles of the pit village, the colliery village, Shankhouse, where he had been born. He talked a lot about this, what had changed and what was left of previous times, the industrial landscape, the slag heaps of Amelia pit (closed 1938) in front of his house, all the collieries, the shipyard, gone.
Of his lucky escape from a life down the pit like his father and brothers. Not a coal miner but a ship builder, plater, member of the Boilermakers’ Union (they truly looked after his interests in his old age). A family friend got him the job when his wild dreams, unrealistic he admitted, of being a professional football player ended in a knee injury, and after his national military service (that left him with permanent tinnitus and hearing loss). He spoke with such pride of the shipyard community, with anecdotes of the superb riveting of beautiful ships they built in the 50s, of Geordie Cheetham, pattern maker, Johnny Brooks, “he could make anything”, of Mitchison the yard manager. Gone, and remembered.
With the scandal of the closure of Blyth shipyard in 1967 (callous financial expediency of off-shore owners), they took their skills to the shipyards of the Tyne and then into the lucrative boom in the 1970s and 80s of rig construction for the North Sea oil fields. The money was good. My mother had put herself through college and was a schoolteacher at Malvin’s Close, just up from the old pit owner’s house where I played as a boy. They started regular holidays abroad and bought a house in the new South Beach development of the marshy land in from the harbor (salt pans in the 1500s). Here they lived out their lives.
But his was the last generation of ship builders. Press Offshore, bought up by conglomerate Amec, where he worked at Wallsend, made no investment in future shills, no training, no apprenticeships. Why would they? This was post-industrial Britain. End of industry, once the short-lived extraction of oil stopped delivering easy profit. And again, such pride in what they could make. Above his fireplace he had a pewter tankard commemorating a massive 100,000 ton rig module he had helped build (120 feet of ladder climbed several times a day). He sent me a clipping from the Evening Chronicle of the biggest floating crane in the world, from Rotterdam, lifting it onto a barge. He had our name inscribed on a rare alloy nut-and-bolt used in rig construction — “a different kind of high-tech for your lab!”, he told me.
They were planning a retirement focused on family and their love of art and crafts. But my mother died young of pancreatic cancer (as did my sister). He turned to making model ships. Each would take a couple of years to build: extraordinary, perfect-in-every-detail replicas. The eighteenth century in sail: the high-tech of the day. He had me research rigging for him; he figured out how to make wooden blocks to scale. He read and re-read the twenty one Aubrey-Maturin novels of Patrick O’Brian, loved historical novels.
His making was an epistemology of the hand. His workshop at home was first upstairs, then in later years it was the dining room table. Here his making took him to come to know times and places distant. He was model-making into his late 80s, as sure of hand and eye as ever. It was because he found the intensity of attention too demanding that he had to stop a few months before the end. The planked hull of his last project, Swan-class sloop “The Fly”, a kit this time, was still on the sideboard ready for sanding.
I had helped him choose this ship on one of the short holidays we often took together in his last years after he could no longer take the long-haul flight to California. I would rent us places familiar from family outings back in the 60s and 70s: a grand cottage on Armstrong’s estate at Cragside, a cottage by Lutyens on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, an arts-and-crafts apartment overlooking the cricket pitch in front of the castle at Bamburgh, a Georgian house in Warkworth, where they’d taken me for my first holiday in 1964.
His favorite at Christmas – preparing brussel sprouts, here at Ashleigh, Bridge Street Warkworth in 2023. The last of many visits.
Falling
He fell at home, 7 Alconbury Close, Blyth, on May 9 in the evening. He must have pulled the alarm cord given to him by social services. He was taken to Cramlington hospital in a confused state, and then transferred to Wansbeck Hospital at Ashington. His delerium never abated. He knew me when I went to see him, but something was missing. He talked about escaping. He never returned home.
I moved him to a care home, Crofton Court, in the middle of Blyth and with a view from his window that would be familiar to him, out over what had been the railway yard. They were kind; everyone was kind (even with the welfare-state National Health Service in crisis). He kept falling and was taken back to Wansbeck on June 29. He was moved from Ward 2 to a private room and died at midnight on July 5, not having woken for two days. I arrived at the hospital at 10am the next morning. I was hoping to catch him at the end, but my flight into Newcastle was delayed.
The last time we were together, when he was alive.
Home
The house was tidy. His cleaners had visited, as had the gardener. Jim at number 9 had been keeping an eye on things. Andy had stayed on a visit to see him in hospital, but the place was as he left it on May 9, and as it had been for many years. And I was returning, with a sense of an ending, whence I had left for college in 1977.
It is, was (I’m not actually sure which tense to use), a saturated space. Full of stuff, of things. Habitat. Milieu. His. And so many traces of others too. Me included (meeting one’s doppelgänger). The things collected, assembled, gathered, carefully curated since my parents moved there in 1977, prompt reflection on what they might say, the artifacts, and my parents. They are not some kind of débris of life lived. They hint, suggest at best, invite speculation, and cannot but withhold. There’s no knowing. There’s no story.
So much stuff. What was to be done? There was just one item of monetary value and his only luxury — a watch. I had taken care of it while he was in hospital, hoping, of course, to return it to him after recovery. I have bought a case to put it in. The rest, the things with which he was surrounded — you cannot give such things away. No one wants them or can deal with them. I gathered a few items, asked family and friends to come and take what they might like. I left the rest, the majority, to house clearance and charity. The things might move off, dispersed. Some will live on. People, strangers, will come to live in the emptied house.
Left-overs.
I took photos.
Memories — in counterpoint
1. Wartime bomb
He kept talking of his memories of a wartime childhood in Shankhouse. Albion Terrace, where he lived, was poor industrial housing, thrown up in the nineteenth century. Damp. Cold. No indoor plumbing. The only water was from a tap at the end of the street. A bomb destroyed the water main, probably in 1942. He went looking for shrapnel in the crater. It was somewhere by the bridge at the edge of the village. He wanted to find the spot, and so we went to look with Eve in summer 2023. And yes, with an archaeologist’s eye you can still make out where the bomb landed as you look towards Bog Houses on the old Plessey waggonway.
2. Miners’ Welfare
The Miners’ Welfare, the village community center, was past the rows of houses. They are all demolished and replaced by one of the housing estates of Cramlington New Town. Except that some of the cultivated flowers from the old gardens spread, migrated into the hedgerows. We found a patch of fine turf on leveled ground — what’s left of the bowling green and tennis courts. He remembered how well-kept they had been.
3. Edwin
George William Shanks, his father, was decorated with the Military Medal for bravery in action at Ypres in Flanders in 1918. Edwin, who would have been my dad’s uncle, was killed, aged 18, in the same year. He went with John Davison to see the grave in Flanders. He had photo portraits of them both, and my aunt Marlene tells me that he would set them up by his seat in the dining room on Remembrance Day. On the wall by a photograph of Molly aged about six and with a broken arm he hung a letter from the mayor of Ypres; George William had visited in 1964, 50 years after the outbreak of war, to receive the freedom of the town. He was sickening and died soon after.
4. Entrance ticket
Closure of the shipyard in 1966 brought great hardship to Blyth. He found a job in the shipyard at Haifa in Israel, but lasted only a few months away from home, even though there were a good number of his work mates there. In an old wallet tucked away at the back of a cupboard I found an entrance ticket to the crusader castle at Acre. He loved history.
5. Football pitches
We went down into Rothbury for lunch at the Newcastle Hotel, waiting for power to come back on after one of the storms in winter 2021. Over roast lamb he talked about football in the Northumberland coalfields. His village team, Shankhouse Black Watch, famous in their day, was formed in 1883 by the local Methodist Chapel bible class after the Scottish Highland Black Watch regiment, camped nearby, arranged a match against the local miners. He played for Seaton Delaval Juniors and recalled a match he played at Rothbury in the early 50s, with lunch in the very same pub we were now in. As we drove round the old pit villages he would point out where the football pitches had been, sometimes still were. This was his own very particular psychogeography.
6. Local villages
Shankhouse, Bog Houses, East Hartford, Horton, Cramlington, High Pit, Nelson Village, Klondyke, Annitsford, Hartley, Seghill, Seaton Delaval, Bebside, Newsham.
7. Lightship
Trinity House lightships would come into dry dock for cleaning. Moored permanently out at sea to aid ships’ navigation, they arrived covered in shellfish. All Blyth feasted on mussels, but there were too many. Scraped off the hull into the dock, they rotted quickly. He said the smell was so bad no one wanted to eat them ever again.
8. Pubs and clubs
The Duke of Wellington (in its new premises on Cowpen Road) — up-market working men’s club.
The Kitty Brewster — old coaching inn with a great cellar and run by my aunt and uncle. A long walk though.
The Royal Tavern — a convenient walk away and good for chat, though the Vaux beers were not so good.
The Three Horseshoes — another old inn; he remembered US servicemen drinking there before moving south for D-Day.
Oliver’s — pub at the bottom of Plessey Road for regular visits with John Davison in later years.
9. The Blagdon Ridleys
He remembered being taken to see “the beast”, a bull in the care of his uncle. A farmer who could neither read nor write, he worked on the Blagdon estate for the Ridleys, another one of the well-to-do landowning-elite families of the north. Along with regular business interests they sank the pits, developed the ports, drew rent from their land, and ran the county. The fine houses of pit owners are scattered through the landscape.
His cousin, nicknamed “The Major”, though he never was in the army, was the Ridley’s chauffeur and even accompanied them on vacation with his wife. Their accommodations were, of course, fitted to their servile status.
Going through his papers and preparing his house for sale, I found that he had been paying annual ground rent to the Ridley’s, even though he owned the free-hold since 1977. The old feudal ways where landowners profit from property.
10. Garden
The onions and King Edward potatoes did extraordinarily well in the garden of the new council house at Bolam Avenue, named after the Saxon village past Morpeth. Maybe it was because he had double dug the plot. Tough hard work — there was a lot left of the old colliery yard under the topsoil brought in for the gardens. He remembered how rabbits living in the scrub around the pit head came at night and ate the fresh shoots of his favorite carnations.
11. Peugeot 205 GTi
Working in rig construction on the Tyne was well paid, comparatively, at least. He bought himself a Peugeot 205 GTi for the commute. Several. He liked to take the winding back road through Seaton Sluice along Hartley Lane, his brother’s house to the right overlooking Holywell Dene, past the Beehive pub, dodging the foxes at 5.30 in the morning.
12. Woodwork teacher
He spoke with great affection of the school at Cramlington, the fine facilities, gym, playing fields, workshops. He recalled the woodwork teacher, his impressive skills that had helped build Mosquito aircraft in the war, fast and agile because they had wooden framing. He bought me a plastic model kit of one and showed how to mix the duck-egg blue paint for the underside.
13. Collieries
They were every few hundred yards. Anne, Isabella, Nelson, Hartford, Hartley, New Delaval, Crofton Mill (Betty in the canteen kept chips and peas for me when I went to watch the tubs come up to the pit head), and many many more. Amelia was across the road from where he lived on Albion Terrace. It closed in 1938 but the works were still used for washing coal. He remembered how you had to take care not to sink into the soft spots on its slag heaps that towered over the village. They were dangerous and constantly burning beneath the surface. Flames could erupt; there was red and white scarring across the slate gray barren surface.
14. The Hoggs of Stickley Farm
Backing onto the slag heaps of Hartley Main Amelia Pit at Shankhouse was Stickley farm, owned by the Hogg family. He remembered helping with potato picking. The waste heaps were landscaped in the 70s when the new spine road cut off the lane past the farm. The tree where he climbed as a boy is still there.
15. Burning the 18th century
It must have been in the ‘74 miners’ strike. Not enough coal for the power stations. Not enough coal to heat our house in a cold winter. The power cuts did give us wonderfully dark night skies. He brought his friends round, Harry Thompson was one, so we could look at the rings of Saturn through my telescope. He took me along the old colliery waggonways (Plessey was one of the first in the world) to look for any coal that had fallen from the trucks over the years. We stoked our fire with the eighteenth century.
16. Face cream
He described his father as a hard man. He had joined the army as a regular in 1912 to escape going down the pit. It was in the army that he developed his life-long interest in photography; my dad remembered the photos he had taken of the trenches in the Great War, but they were lost by his elder brother. The village turned out to celebrate when he won the Military Medal, and the vicar gave him a new wallet containing a ten pound note — quite a sum for the time. But he ended up, like most, a miner. One of the few luxuries he enjoyed, my dad told me, was expensive face cream, bought by and for him, and not my grandmother.
17. High Pit Sundays
We took the red United Bus Company number 405 up to High Pit every Sunday afternoon. All the family on my dad’s side turned up. He remembered the simple kitchen with a musty-cupboard smell and the canned cling peaches in syrup and served with evaporated milk. I remember the wartime Anderson shelter in the back garden, converted into a tool shed, and the lines (not beds) of prize standard roses.
His brothers and sister and their spouses have died. He was the last. All of my cousins died young, except for Gary and David, with whom we lost touch. He liked to hear from his niece Ann, an artist in Norwich.
18. Northern Goldsmiths
It’s a fine looking store, even today, on the corner of Blackett Street. He bought his Rolex watches there, trading them in one after another. His only indulgence. He just loved to call in and talk to the sales staff, checking out new models of his GMT Master II, or alternatives. They would offer him a glass of wine — in Newcastle!
19. Medieval banquets
Seaton Delaval Hall. Visible over the fields south along the coast. The name gives away some of the story. The Delavals came over with William of Normandy in the eleventh century and have been landowners since — the right of conquest still valid after a thousand years and more. A new fortune made overseas in the early eighteenth century enabled Admiral George Delaval to have Sir John Vanburgh create this theater-set of a house. Frances Askham makes much of the lifestyle of the “Gay Delavals” in his sycophantic history of the family written in the 50s. They funded the biggest bottle works in England at Seaton Sluice, improved the tiny harbor, and were behind much local industrial development. The house was damaged by fire in 1822 and was never fully occupied again, though John Dobson, local architect to the well-to-do, reroofed the central corps de logis of this Palladian magnificence.
In the 70s and early 80s the old kitchen was used as venue for re-enacted medieval banquets. My parents loved them. I went along once. It was a laugh — local geordie humor (in the wake of “little waster” Bobby Thompson), and Lindisfarne mead.
20. Battleship wharf
In the early 60s Blyth was the biggest colliery port in the world, by tonnage. On the north side of the river Hughes Bolckow broke up and scavenged past-their-time ships at “battleship wharf”. He got a teak door to turn into a side table, brass portlights as mirror and picture frames. Upcycling. My mother found him a ship’s wheel at the flea market at Tynemouth station. He cast a brass ship’s bell with Geordie and Johnny. He left it in his will to Ivan, son of his friends of long-standing, Harry and Thelma.
21. Elgar 1974
He loved classical music. I’d hear symphonies blasting out in the background to counter his deafness when I phoned on a Sunday morning. In the 1970s we held season tickets to the concerts at Newcastle City Hall. Jerzy Semkow conducting the Warsaw Symphony Orchestra in Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro for Strings — I found the program from 1974 in his papers.
22. Stealing apples
Along with the Three Horseshoes pub at Horton, Laverock Hall farmhouse stands as a feature on the road from Shankhouse to Blyth. They sell dog food there now. He remembered stealing apples from orchards of which I can find no trace.
23. Town center
He remembered how the town was full of prosperous small businesses in the 60s. Seghini’s cafe that sold espresso (!), Harper’s the fishmongers, Septimus Mole’s hardware and bicycles, Shy’s the butcher. And a wonderfully rich public library ( that so featured in my intellectual growth). Albert Bell had an electrical store for radios and gramophones; long after the shop closed, he bought Albert’s stamp collection for me at a car boot sale.
The place is now in a sad state. Most buildings need serious repairs, whether they are in use or boarded up. The new covered mall has been closed down. At Easter we witnessed the market, where once we listened to the smart banter of market traders selling great deals to crowds, now a lonely line of tables on which people had set out for sale cans of food they had received from the food banks, desperately seeking some liquid cash.
24. Cypria Maris
They went year after year for two weeks of full board stay at the Cypria Maris, the first five star hotel in Paphos, Cyprus. They took one of the cottages in the garden. Everything laid on. He had placed a towel they had brought home, maybe in the late 80s, on the chair by the dining table where he sat everyday until the end.
I was surprised to find this rose in his back garden. It is all that is left of a prolific climber they transplanted from their previous house at Bolam Avenue which had in turn been propagated from a series of cuttings taken from a rose originally planted in the 1930s by my grandparents.
John Davison and family after the burial.
Methodological notes on an archaeological sensibility
In a future post I will take up some of the thoughts and concepts that have animated this portrait. I have been particularly inspired by Laurent Olivier, Bjørnar Olsen, and Christine Finn.
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At the Duke of Wellington in Newcastle for a lunchtime pint. We drank there in the same corner, on and off, for 45 years.
