Whitley Bay (In Memory of My Mother)

Vintage poster from the 1920s encouraging holidaymakers 

to take the train to Whitley Bay [1]

 

 

I. 

 

Although, in a very real sense, Soho is my spiritual home and the place in which I feel happiest, dig deeper, as Heidegger would say, and you will find me standing on golden sands ... [2] 

 

 

II.

 

Whitley Bay is a seaside town in the North Tyneside borough of Tyne and Wear, England [3] - about ten miles east of Newcastle. It's perhaps most famous for its grey-black rocks that my mother used to love climbing on as a little girl and St. Mary's Lighthouse [4].

 

The town has a long history stretching back to at least 1100 when it is first mentioned in historical documents. But it wasn't until the late 19th-century that it emerged as a popular seaside holiday resort - rather than a coal mining town [5] - after it, along with several other small coastal towns, was connected by rail to Newcastle. 

 

At this time, the town was still known as Whitley and was often confused with the far more famous (and upmarket) town of Whitby, in North Yorkshire. Fed up with the problems this caused, including misdirected mail, in 1901 local residents were asked to suggest a new name and Whitley Bay came out on top (the town officially adopted this new name the following year).    

 

 

III. 

 

If it doesn't have the most illustrious roll call of famous names associated with it, Whitley Bay is nevertheless where comedy writer Ian La Frenais was born, in 1937, and he went on to co-create with Dick Clement one of the 1970s British TV shows most celebrated on Torpedo the Ark [6]. 

 

And it is also where my mother was born, 100 years ago today ... Whitley Bay remaining the place she loved best, despite her living in Essex for over 75 years and rarely returning to the North East after leaving to start a newly married life at the end of the 1940s.  

 

A print of the picture above, by John Littlejohns, still hangs in her bedroom even now, three years after her death [7].  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The original art deco style poster was designed by John Littlejohns in 1929. It was commissioned by the London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) to promote services to Whitley Bay and displayed at local stations as well as larger stations on the East Coast Main Line including London. The work is held in the collection of the National Railway Museum in York, which is part of the Science Museum Group. 

      The poster features Table Rocks Pool, situated just south of Whitley Bay and north of Cullercoats, showing people in fashionable bathing gear. This small natural tidal pool was developed and made safe for swimmers in the 1890s following a number of fatalities. It was later significantly expanded in size (to 70ft) and steps were added along with a hut to provide changing facilities, although, unfortunately, this blew down in strong gales four years after its erection in 1912. 

      Sadly, by the 1970s - as more and more English people deserted the British seaside and flew off to the Spanish Costas - the pool had fallen into disuse. However, it still remains visible at low tide even today.  

 

[2] I'm paraphrasing a line that Heidegger is reputed to have liked saying: 'Dig deeper and you will find yourself standing on Catholic ground.' See the essay by John D. Caputo, 'Heidegger and Theology', in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles Guignan (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 270.

 

[3] Whitley Bay has been part of Tyne and Wear since 1974. Prior to that it was governed as part of Northumberland. 

 

[4] St. Mary's Lighthouse (1898) is on the tiny St. Mary's Island (aka Bait Island), just north of Whitley Bay on the coast of NE England. The small rocky island is linked to the mainland by a short concrete causeway which is submerged at high tide. 

      Sadly, it was decommissioned in 1984, just two years after its conversion to automatic operation. It is now a tourist attraction run by the North Tyneside Council. In addition to the lighthouse itself there is a small museum, a visitor's centre, and a café. In 2012, St. Mary's Lighthouse attained grade II listed status. Plans for further renovation have so far come to nothing due to financial issues and environmental concerns.   

 

[5] Exposed coal seams can still be seen in the cliffs north of St. Mary's Island and it's possible to pick up shiny black pieces of coal from the beach at low tide. 

      For younger readers who may not know, coal is a combustible sedimentary rock formed from fossilised plant matter subjected to intense heat and pressure over millions of years. While sparkling diamonds may be a girl's best friend, for me, it's coal that has a more magical allure with its lustrous sheen; and for D. H. Lawrence, the son of a miner, coal was a powerful symbol of the earth's hidden forces, carbon providing the elemental clue to human nature. 

      I mention Lawrence here not only for a literary connection to coal, but because, like him, I am also the son of a miner (loosely speaking); my father left school in Newcastle at fourteen in the year my mother was born and the General Strike took place (1926) and spent a very brief spell down the pits. Hating the experience, he took a job working in a paint factory instead. 

 

[6] I'm referring of course to Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? (BBC One, 1973-74). 

      Certain scenes in The Likely Lads (dir. Michael Tuchner, 1976) - the feature-length spin-off of the TV show - were filmed in Whitley Bay. Written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, the movie starred Rodney Bewes and James Bolam, reprising their roles as Bob and Terry. 

 

[7] Readers who want a fine art quality medium-sized print (52 x 62 cm) can find one (framed) on the King & McGaw website priced at £160. Produced in partnership with the National Railway Museum, every purchase of the print helps support this institution.  

 

 

Reflections on the Miners' Strike (1984-85)

With Arthur Scargill (Madame Tussauds, London, 1985)

 

 

I. 

 

I was surprised that the year long miners' strike, which began in the spring of 1984, wasn't more widely commemorated seeing as we've just passed the 40th anniversary of the ending of what was a significant event not just within the coal industry, but UK history. 

 

 

II. 

 

Led by the charismatic figure of Arthur Scargill, President of the National Union of Mineworkers, the strike was an attempt to prevent the closure of pits deemed by the Tory government under Margaret Thatcher as uneconomic (although the political goal was clearly to smash and humiliate the NUM, as well as weaken the wider labour movement; the fact that the miners had been able to bring down the Conservative government under Ted Heath in 1974 had neither been forgotten nor forgiven).

 

Of course, it was a battle they could not win; few major trade unions officially backed the NUM and some miners, particularly in the Nottingham area, continued to work throughout the dispute, thereby helping the government keep the lights on (what would D. H. Lawrence have made of this, one wonders; would he have supported the men of Eastwood, or would he have condemned the crossing of picket lines and called them scabs?).

 

I was living in Leeds when the strike started, so it very much felt as if it were unfolding on my doorstep, even if Cortonwood Colliery, where the strike kicked off, was based in South not West Yorkshire and the infamous Battle of Orgreave on 18 June 1984 took place 30-odd miles away in Rotherham [1].

 

In July, however, I moved to London: nevertheless, I followed events with interest and would regularly put what I could in the buckets held by those collecting money for striking miners and their families, for whom it was impossible not to feel tremendous sympathy and with whom, indeed, one felt a sense of working-class solidarity (my own father had gone down the mines after leaving school in Newcastle aged 14, in 1926, just a year after the Montagu pit disaster in Scotswood, in which 38 men and boys lost their lives).         

 

I also remember buying Arthur Scargill and the NUM Christmas cards, though I can't vouch that any of the money from such ever went to the strikers, as it should have done. 

 

And I still have (in a box in the loft) a copy of a 7" single by The Enemy Within called 'Strike' and which featured voice samples of Arthur Scargill. Released on Rough Trade Records in October 1984, I'm pretty sure that proceeds from sales of this did go to the Miners Solidarity Fund [2]. 

 

Despite my meagre efforts at showing support - and despite all the sacrifice made by the striking miners and their families - on 3 March, 1985, the dispute ended with a decisive victory for the Coal Board and the Tory government, opening the way for the closure of most of Britain's collieries [3]. 

 

 

III. 

 

In a diary entry, I noted:

 

This is a very dark day and a very sad day - almost one might call it tragic. The striking miners return to work on Tuesday. Many of them clearly feel betrayed. Rightly or wrongly, Scargill points the finger of blame at the TUC and the Labour Party.

      I suppose this marks the end of militant left-wing opposition to the Tories (at least for the foreseeable future) and Thatcher is gleeful and triumphant. Not sure this is an England I want to live in. Feel a lot of  admiration for the miners - proud men who deserve better. When asked on the news by a reporter what he intended to do now, Scargill simply smiled and said: 'Go home.' 

      Sadly, if his predictions about pit closures and the destruction of mining communities are even half correct, then a lot of people are going to find that might not be an option for them much longer. [4]

   

 

Notes

 

[1] For those who don't know, the Battle of Orgreave was, as the name indicates, an extremely violent confrontation between pickets and a huge army of bluebottles - some of whom were drafted in from as far away as London - at a British Steel Corporation coking plant. It was a pivotal event in the strike and, indeed, British history; one that changed industrial relations forever in the UK and how many people now view the police. 

[2] The enemy within is how Thatcher referred to the leaders of the miners' strike and other militant trade unionists. The single was written by Keith LeBlanc and produced by Adrian Sherwood and Keith LeBlanc. To play both sides of the single (the B-side is a mix of the A-side) on YouTube, click here. 

 

[3] What remained of the coal industry - in public ownership since 1947 - was sold off in December 1994 and by the end of 2015 the last of the deep-mining coal pits, The Big K (i.e., Kellingley Colliery in North Yorkshire), had closed. Prior to the 1984-85 strike there had been 175 working pits. Many of the coal mining communities have never recovered and some are now ranked amongst the poorest towns in the country. 

 

[4] Entry from the Von Hell Diaries (Sunday 3 March 1985). 

      This retrospectively surprising and slightly embarrassing mixture of sympathy, socialism, and sentiment, is still in evidence the next day, as I continue to heap praise on Scargill and approve of his walking off a TV-am set rather than share a sofa with Chris Butcher, a miner from Bevercotes Colliery - known as 'Silver Birch' - whom Scargill regarded (rightly as it turned out) as a scab and class traitor (Butcher was secretly being funded by the Daily Mail to travel around the country opposing the strike; he was also involved in legal action against the NUM).   

 

It's Not the Cough That Carries You Off ...

Capsula Mundi

 Anna Citelli and Raoul Bretzel

 

 

Growing up, whenever I had a cold my father liked to joke (à la George Formby Sr.): It's not the cough that carries you off - it's the coffin they carry you off in [1].

I remembered this when reading the following passage from Heidegger in relation to the German regular verb stellen (which in English means to set in place, or to position):

"The carpenter produces a table, but also a coffin. What is produced, set here, is not tantamount to the merely finished. What is set here stands in the purview of what concernfully approaches us. It is set here in a nearness. The carpenter in the village does not complete a box for a corpse. The coffin is from the outset placed in a privileged spot of the farmhouse where the dead peasant still lingers. There, a coffin is still called a 'death-tree' [Totenbaum]. The death of the deceased flourishes in it. This flourishing determines the house and the farmstead, the ones who dwell there, their kin, and the neighbourhood. 

      Everything is otherwise in the motorized burial industry of the big city. Here no death-trees are produced." [2]   

Personally, I would love to be buried like King Arthur in a coffin made from a tree trunk, preferably oak, that has been split longitudinally and hollowed out by a skilled local carpenter. 

 

Having said that, I'd be just as satisfied with any number of alternative arrangements, providing they can legitimately be described as natural (eco-friendly) forms of burial; i.e., methods of interment which use biodegradable materials and do not artificially inhibit decomposition of the corpse. 

 

Basically, as long as my body is free to rot, I'll be happy - although, at the moment, I'm particularly keen on the egg-shaped burial pods envisioned by designers Anna Citelli and Raoul Bretzel, which will have trees planted directly above them, so that decomposing waste is sucked up by hungry young root systems in search of nutrients.

 

In this way, death flourishes, as Heidegger would say, and this flourishing determines (in part at least) the surrounding woodland and the life within it.     

 

 

Notes

[1] George Formby Sr. (1875-1921) - known as 'The Wigan Nightingale' - is acknowledged as one of the greatest music hall performers of the early 20th century. His comedy played upon northern stereotypes and his own poor health; he even incorporated his bronchial cough into his act and came up with the saying that my father liked to repeat whenever the opportunity to do so arose. He died of pulmonary tuberculosis aged 45.    

 

[2] Martin Heidegger, 'Positionality', from the 1949 Bremen Lecture series Insight Into That Which Is, see Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell, (Indiana University Press, 2012), p. 25. 

 

 

This post is for Heide Hatry: Königin des Todes und eine Ausnahmekünstlerin.