Newcastle in Film: The Likely Lads

Prior's Haven

Tynemouth pier

Coast Road flats Wallsend

The lads' caravan crosses the Tyne

Rothbury

Visit to the Roman Wall

The Bee Hive Inn, Earsdon

Corbridge

Whitley Bay sea front

The Dome of the Spanish City

Newcastle Quayside

South Shields ferry landing

Tyneside Cars: Atkinson and Phillipson

Atkinson and Phillipson, who had built coaches in Newcastle from 1774, and built the first railway carriages in 1825, advertised a steam-powered 'horseless carriage' in 1896 - although it is not clear how many were actually produced. Other local fin-de-siecle local cars were the Martyn of Hebburn (1898), the Tyne of Gateshead (1901), the Elswick of Walkergate (1907-c1910), the Toward steam van of Byker, and the semi-mythical Redhead Rover of South Shields. Two foreign types were made under licence: the famous American Stanley Steamer (called a Gentleman's speedy roadster") was built in Gateshead around 1912-1914 (illustrated), and the French DFP (Doriot, Flandrin, Parnat) (which sported an aluminium body and mahogany interior) in Darlington. Back in Newcastle the locomotive engineers Hawthorn Leslie built heavy steam waggons.

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).

James Kirkup 1918 - 2009

Kirkup is here pictured in 1936 around the time that Laurence was joining the grammar school and Kirkup leaving South Shields High for Durham University. His shirt collar is also pointed, but there the resemblances cease. Kirkup's appearance is dandified. His coat lapels are peaked - always correct for a double-breasted jacket, but a 'fashion-statement' on a single-breasted one; his tie is patterned like those of the young men of 1974; his pocket square is flamboyantly puffed. In later life he took to wearing a kimono.

James Kirkup

James Kirkup

James Kirkup died on 10 May 2009 aged 91. He wasn't a grammar school boy - he went to South Shields High School - but he was well-known to Novocastrian poets. On 3 September 1971 several of us went to hear him read at Hancock's Museum and enjoyed the sherry afterwards. Kirkup achieved some notoriety for his poem 'The Love that Dares to Speak its Name' which was published in Gay News and led to the private prosecution of that paper for blasphemy by Mary Whitehouse. He was as the Times obituary says a 'flamboyant' character and might have become a Tyneside Quentin Crisp had it not been for his academic and literary achievements. In his memory I post here the covers (by Stephen Ross [Russ?]) of two of Kirkup's (many) autobiographical reflections. Both books were purchased from Brian Mills at the Newcastle Bookshop on the Quayside.