North Shields Station

North Shields Station (photos by Peter Mackenzie) 

from the now sadly defunct Northumbrian Railways site.

My Old Note Books: Cosmopolitan North Shields

A Shields Weekly News article [unfortunately not dated] spoke of "distinct ethnic areas": (quoting "an old Shields resident") "Germans and Norwegians in Bell Street; Greeks and Spaniards in Clive Street; and Lascars [Indian or Arab sailors] at the Bull Ring". There were many boarding houses for particular nationalities run by their fellow countrymen who had sometimes married local girls.

A 'Coloured National Mutual Association' was formed in 1930 to protect the interests of 'coloured' residents of the town - which suggests there were quite a few of them, especially as the association seems to have split into two groups in 1939. There was a 'coloured' seamen's hostel known as Colonial House at 3 Northumberland Place.

A Jamaican called Ann Preston was living in Preston Village in the 1820s, and an escaped American slave, Mary Ann Macham, was in service in Dockwray Square in the 1830s and later married a North Shields bank porter and survived until at least 1890.

There seem to have been a number of German and Norwegian owned shops in the town from at least the 1880s (and almost certainly much earlier). Norwegian names appear so regularly in the local papers that they elicit no particular comment. As I mentioned earlier the Norwegian community in Shields was substantial enough to open its own church in Borough Road in 1868. It was extended as 'recently' as 1953.

There were two Greek-owned ship chandlers shops in Clive Street until the 1950s, and "the small Greek colony in North Shields" was reported in 1940 as being "very optimistic regarding the Italian attack on their country". A Mr E. Defteros - a cobbler of William Street - said: "Italians are not good fighters but they are good gangsters". An Italian owned business in the town had the distinction of being demolished by a run-away tram in 1919.

There was a Jewish community in North Shields with a burial ground in Hawkey's Lane as early as the first decade of the nineteenth century. The ground was cleared in 1924 and the remains reinterred in a special Jewish section of Preston Cemetery. They bought a house in Linskill Street in 1870 which was consecrated as a synagogue in 1876. By 1880 this had become too small for the 20 or so families attending and needed to be enlarged. More Jewish families settled in the town in the 1930s as a result of Nazi persecution, but by 1965 the majority had moved on and the synagogue was closed.

Gannin shoppin in Shields

T G Allan (nobody bothered about the Blakian ampersand) in North Shields was where I bought my first books, the first of thousands. Eventually I had so many books I had to become a bookseller to clear some space (for more books). Any way this is where it started on the first floor at T G Allan's. Go and see the exhibition.

Newcastle in film: Stormy Monday

Stormy Monday (1988), directed by Michael Figgis, pits crooked American investor and property 'developer' Tommy Lee Jones against Newcastle nightclub owner Sting. Sean Bean warns Sting of Jones's true intentions and becomes involved with Melanie Griffith who has apparently previously been used by Jones in his dodgy doings. There's a subplot involving a Polish jazz band who fly over from Cracow to Woolsington to perform in North Shields. Thanks to Sting and various hoodlums at last there's some Geordie spoken in this one.

A developer's 'vision' for Newcastle. At least the buses were still to be yellow.

Sean Bean heads down to the Quayside

and back again

where he bumps into Melanie Griffith opposite the barber's.

Later he takes a Metro somewhere

and then travels in a convoy

to North Shields

to the bottom of Howard Street. The building on the right is the former Literary and Philosophical Society Library later the offices of the Stag Line Shipping Company.

Bean meets Melanie again at the top of the Library Stairs.

This platform at the end of Howard Street was intended to lead onto a never built bridge across the Tyne to South Shields.

They return to Newcastle passing a newly privatised ex- PTE bus. Busways retained the old Corporation yellow livery, indeed restored a bit of pre-war maroon. Their takeover by Stagecoach put an end to yellow buses in Newcastle.

Sting meets his rival on the Tyne Bridge.

A Parade is heading down to the Quayside past Brian Mills's Newcastle Bookshop

and the Cafe Procope

in a bit of a homage to Get Carter.

It stretches back to the Royal Station Hotel

where the red carpet has been put out for the American villain.

Melanie arrives

and on leaving 'keys' the American's car.

It all ends explosively.

The sundered town beside the sea

Inhabitants of North and South Shields each call their town 'Shields', as do the local newspapers the (South) Shields Gazette and the (North) Shields Weekly News. Growing up in North Shields I thought of South Shields as somewhere distant and strange. It certainly never occurred to me that the two Shields might be parts of a single divided town. In my twenties I was a regular visitor to Berlin and became fascinated with the divided city which, during the Cold War, we thought of as the place 'nearest the realities of the age'. Did my interest have its roots in the unrecognized division of my own childhood home?

In his poem 'The town where I was born' James Kirkup (born in South Shields) describes his '"almost daily journeys" on the Market Place Ferry as "an enchanted voyage . . . loaded with lust and library books". But he also suggests that the division of the town in some way explained and reflected his own sexual ambiguity and sense of alienation.

And now I see it was from that divided town, that Scylla
and Charybdis my lightning-struck divisions came -
the ambiguities of being, thought and action.

It tugged my heart, my loyalties, my dreams, my passions
in opposite directions - made me love and hate
the sundered town beside the sea, beneath colossal skies,

made me cherish and abhor my roots, my origins
my faults, my gifts, and even life itself. I became that ferry
on the great river rising to a sea of doubt and death."

Ferry cross the Tyne

"I boarded the ferryboat, The Northumbria, with its white-painted rails and lifebelts. Passing the old, hot, oily smell that wafted from the engine-room door, I went on the top deck, and, sitting under the funnel, felt happy to smell again the smoke and grease and fish ands tar and paint and a fresh whiff of briny from the harbour. The sunlight played on the dark entrails of smoke uncoiling from the funnel, and on the white superstructures of the great ships towering above us. The gulls, their feathers translucent against a moving sky of broken clouds, were harshly crying, gently lifting and falling round us like a complicated and giant mobile. The bell rang for departure, and the boat started its cumbersome turning before waltzing sedately across the Tyne."

James Kirkup on returning to South Shields in Sorrows, Passions and Arrows (1959).

Z-Car Number Galaxy

An exhibition about Tynemouth Police has just finished at the Central Library in North Shields. The section about the registration number collection pointed out that even the CID 'undercover' vehicle carried the immediately identifiable EFT 1 plate!

Broken shops: The Old Foxhunters

Somewhere underneath the modern frontage is the Old Foxhunters' Inn in Preston Village near North Shields (you could get there by Hunter's bus). In latter years it served as a 'tuck shop' for Tynemouth Technical School (later Preston High School). A lane led from behind the shop to the much older Preston Village school and to Front Street. The field next to it for many years carried a sign saying it was the site for a new United Reformed Church. The current Foxhunters' Inn is further along Preston North Road at Hillheads just on the old Whitley Bay boundary.

Captured in the glass

Remarkable glass negative images of Tynemouth and North Shields currently offered on Ebay. From the top: storm damage to the pier, Northumberland Park, the Low Light, the Gas Company barrow boys, the Fish Quay.

Z-Car Number Galaxy