Marat in Newcastle

The French revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat lived in Newcastle between 1770 and 1775, practising medicine (on humans and animals) on the basis of several false or imagined qualifications, and hanging around political clubs and bookshops. In 1774 he published 'The Chains of Slavery' (there's a copy in the Lit and Phil) in which he argued that "the dark projects , crafty proceedings, secret plots, fatal policy and deceitful arts of royal despots" had corrupted English politics, and that Parliament had become " a band of disguised traitors who . . . traffic away the national interests and the rights of a free-born people". He said he only slept a couple of hours a night, and lived on black coffee, while writing it, then slept for a fortnight on its completion.

During the French Revolution he became a radical journalist and orator, often attacking the more hesitant 'Girondist' faction' - one of whose sypathisers, Charlotte Corday, murdered him in his bath on 13 July 1793. He was treated as a martyr by the radicals and immortalized in the painting The Death of Marat by Jacques-Louis David. The bath (and the knife) are today in the Musée Grévin (waxworks) in Paris.

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).