A modest birthday wish

When did Newcastle-on-Tyne become Newcastle upon Tyne?

That was the question posed on a Facebook page I enjoy visiting to look at old photos of the toon.

It was the cue for a lot of fiercely patriotic Geordies to assert that it had always been called Newcastle upon Tyne, at any rate since it stopped being called Pons Aelius.

Reminding themselves, for good measure, that it had been a proud county in its own right and never a mere part of Northumberland.

The finest street in England ...

... leading to the finest riverside in England ...

... via a magnificent railway arch ...

... bearing the world's least likely warning sign

Clearly no one recalled, as I do, a decree being handed down that we should stop calling the place Newcastle-on-Tyne, which was the normal form when I was a small boy.

I can’t remember whether it came from the City Council or the Post Office, and remarkably in the age of Google and Wikipedia I can find no record of he pronouncement being made, but I guess it was around 1960.

I do distinctly remember my father moaning about having to change the wording on our letterhead, and the postmarks on all local mail changing to the longer and grander form of “upon Tyne”.

A few years later my dad had occasion to moan again when the introduction of postcodes demanded another print job, and I was grateful for his blood pressure that the change in the county boundaries in 1974 did not make him print the things again.

Because although we were shunted from Longbenton in the historic county of Northumberland to North Tyneside in the new-fangled and bogus county of Tyne & Wear, our postal address remained “Newcastle upon Tyne”.

We lived yards from the city boundary and I cherished the grand sign bearing the coat of arms and the legend welcoming visitors to the “City and County of Newcastle upon Tyne”.

The road sign was much better than this; shame I never took a photo of it

It was one of those distinctive things, like yellow buses, the Tyne Bridge, singing Blaydon Races, and displaying unquenchable loyalty to an underperforming football team, that set Newcastle apart and gave me a surge of pride in my birthplace.

Which was, indeed, described as “upon Tyne” on my 1954 birth certificate.

I must admit that I have always thought of Newcastle as being part of Northumberland, not least because of the large, white LNER signs precisely halfway across the river on the King Edward Bridge, proclaiming that that was where Durham ended and Northumberland started.

Then there was the fact that Northumberland County Council based itself next to the New Castle, in what is now the Vermont Hotel, until the end of the 1970s. If, as I must accept, Newcastle was recognised as a county in its own right in 1400, it seemed odd that it took the council nearly 600 years to take the hint and move their base to Morpeth.

(They should, of course, have gone to Alnwick, which as any fule kno is the true county town of Northumberland, but that is a story for another day.)

A claim undisputed in Alnwick

Finally, and critically for a royalist like me, Newcastle did not have its own Lord-Lieutenant, but was part of Northumberland for this purpose. Though I note with pleasure that the first Duke of Northumberland, when appointed to this role in 1753, was titled “Lord Lieutenant, Custos Rotulorum and Vice-Admiral of the county of Northumberland, and Lord Lieutenant of the town and county of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.”

It seems a shame, given this quirky history, that we have not managed to create any pleasing apocryphal tales, like the widely-held misconception that Berwick-upon-Tweed is still at war with Russia over Crimea. Maybe we should work on that.

One fact on which we can all sadly agree is that is Newcastle formed part of the county of Tyne & Wear from its creation in 1974 until its welcome abolition in 1986. Why it retains a vestigial existence for ceremonial purposes, such as the Lord-Lieutenancy, is a total mystery to me.

Just plain wrong. Good riddance.

I am very proud to be a Novocastrian, Northumbrian, Englishman and Briton. But I can no more identify with Tyne & Wear or NewcastleGateshead than with the European Union.

Today, coincidentally, is my 61st birthday. If anyone else can remember the official clampdown on “Newcastle-on-Tyne” and let me know who issued that order and when, it would truly make my day.

mail@keithhann.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Coals to Newcastle

What phrase can replace “carrying coals to Newcastle” as the shorthand for total pointlessness, now that the Tyne is indeed a river importing coal?

How it was: shipping coal out

How it is: shipping coal in

I pondered the question at some length as I sat by my fireside over Christmas, particularly when excavations in my depleted coalhouse finally broke through more recent strata of Polish and Colombian dust. Unearthing, in all their glory, some substantial lumps of genuine Northumberland coal.

They had an effect on me pretty similar to that madeleine on Proust, transporting me back to the glorious blazes of Shilbottle cobbles that had me shrinking back from my parents’ hearth half a century ago.

There was a peculiarly dismal phase when we went “all electric”, until I faithfully promised that I would clean and lay the fire before school each morning. It was, I think, pretty much the only childhood promise I actually kept.

I suppose I should have kept back just one piece of this black gold: coated it in lacquer, perhaps, polished it up and put it on display. But instead I just revelled in the simple joy of a good old-fashioned fire.

Now I am hoping to harness the power of the press to see whether anyone can point me to a source of decent quality house coal, ideally from a British mine?

After all, it is to the imported stuff I have been buying for the last few years as a fine Islay malt whisky is to industrial drain cleaner, and I would be content to pay an appropriate premium price.

I have tried majoring on fashionably “renewable” logs but I am increasingly convinced that more warmth is created by lugging in several baskets of the things each day than my stove ever throws out.

Enough logs to warm my house barely perceptibly for about six months

Perhaps there is an opportunity here for a new generation of community micro-mines. After all, every pub and restaurant these days seems keen to emphasise the local sourcing of its food, practically telling you the name of the beast you are about to eat and the grid reference of the field where it grazed. So how about adding locally sourced coal fires to the list of attractions?

While for Guardian readers, the rival pub across the valley could offer state-of-the-art loft insulation, electric convector heaters powered by its very own wind turbine and free jumpers and mittens for all customers on those days when the wind disobligingly fails to blow.

Some will argue, no doubt, that we should not be burning coal at all if we are to “save the planet”. British coal fired power stations are closing left, right and centre at the behest of the EU.

Yet Germany, which was also in the EU last time I checked, is currently building no fewer than ten new ones, which seems odd to say the least.

Does anyone truly believe that converting coal-fired power stations to burn wood pellets that have to be shipped halfway round the planet will really make a useful contribution to mitigating the effects of climate change?

Any more than pricing our own heavy industries out of business so that the same processes can be carried out in China using coal-fired energy over there.

“Exporting aluminium smelting to the Yangtze” might be a reasonable summary of utter futility, though it can hardly be said to trip off the tongue.

So how about “teaching humility to politicians” or “giving climate change fanatics a sense of proportion and humour”? Or must we fall back on that sad old stand-by: “buying a new trophy cabinet for St James’ Park”?

I had intended to close by wishing all (both?) my readers a very Happy New Year and apologising for my absence for the last few weeks owing to a combination of depression, indolence and Christmas Day falling on a Wednesday. At least one of which will not recur in 2014.

But then I remembered that I should not mention my depression because, despite suffering from it for 40 years, every column on the subject provokes at least one irate reader’s letter complaining that I have absolutely no idea what I am talking about.

Maybe “a depressive writing about depression” is the new “coals to Newcastle” I have been looking for.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Older generation should OF known better than that

One of my dwindling stock of small private pleasures is taking an almost daily look at a website devoted to photographs of Newcastle in the past.

The sort of thing that gladdens my heart (copyright unknown)

I still hope that one day I will come across a picture of my mother leading a gabardine-clad boy on our weekly Saturday pilgrimage to the Tatler or News Theatre, then on to R.A. Dodds in the Grainger Market for our Sunday joint, and Tilley’s in Clayton Street for cream cakes for afternoon tea.

Or perhaps by some remote chance someone captured the look on my father’s face in the 1930s, when a backfiring motorcycle on Pilgrim Street caused two shire horses to rear and the LNER delivery cart they were pulling to reverse smartly into the bonnet of his brand new car.

But sadly I fear that I am going to have to close off this small avenue of pleasure because I am regularly driven close to apoplexy by the comments beneath the photos, and particularly by their authors’ almost universal conviction that the verb “have” is spelt “of”. (And the few who differ on this point are almost all convinced that the correct form is “uv”.)

Somehow this is particularly irksome because the natural audience for sites trading in nostalgia is the older generation. Such sloppiness may be forgivable in the young, who have had the benefit of our marvellous comprehensive education system, but surely their seniors should know better? They should be among the “haves” not the “of-nots”.

Surely teacher would have mentioned the whole "of / have" business?

I realise that I ought to be capable of rising above this sort of thing and simply rejoicing when people take pleasure in expressing themselves. After all, their observations are still intelligible (if not always particularly intelligent), so why should they be hidebound by tedious old rules?

I also know that I am in no position to cast stones, since an ex-girlfriend who teaches English regularly pulls me up on this column’s terrible grammar (for which my only defence is that the Royal Grammar School, in my day, seemed to regard it as the cornerstone of teaching in every language apart from English).

But while I find it increasingly hard to remember how I ever got through the day without constant access to the internet, the wilful illiteracy of so many of its users is becoming increasingly hard to bear. Along with their penchant for posting questions to which the answer is blindingly obvious, if only they could be bothered to do a five second search before asking them.

Then there is the constant bickering about crediting photographs, and whether they may be shared or reproduced. (Can anyone explain to me why, if you are jealous of the copyright of your material, you would post it on the internet in the first place?)

Plus the sheer venomous ill will to be observed in comments on every piece of writing ever published by anyone on every website in the world.

I yearn for that gentler and slower world in which people wrote polite letters in copperplate then sent them on their way by Royal Mail. In fact, the very world captured in those black and white photographs from the 1950s that I really must stop seeking out online.

Perhaps just the one last whiff of nostalgia ...

Particularly when there are alternatives available in my family albums of the time that I never, ever look at; and the dozens of picture books that I have acquired over the years to sit gathering dust on my shelves. While I click on inferior images on my laptop that have the virtue of being instantly accessible, and a welcome distraction from whatever work I am supposed to be doing at the time.

Early in my career, an unkind but perceptive superior suggested that my epitaph would be “He had great gifts but was too lazy to unwrap them”. Now I suspect it might be “He acquired a great library but was too idle to get up and open a book.”

The distinguished science author Steven Pinker, interviewed on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs on Sunday, expressed confidence that Twitter and textspeak would not destroy conventional English, any more than the telegram had done in the 19th century. I 4 1 wud leik to think he cud of bin rite.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.