A Riven River

As a community arts worker, writer, publisher, raconteur and general man about town, I’ve been around a few blocks in my home city of Newcastle. I’ve helped set up a whole heap of projects and every now and then one has worked. Off the top of my head, I can remember Tyneside Street Press, a community broadsheet for alternative opinion, the community directory Tyne Bridge, the rather quaintly named Tyneside Trade Unionists for Socialist Art – TTUSA for short – and the Strong Words oral history publishing series. What these and many another scheme had in common was that they sprang from the grass roots. From Newcastle Neighbourhood Projects, where I once worked, they cocked a proverbial snook at authority, they nibbled at the Lord Mayor’s coat-tails, they promised a slightly better life for ordinary folk, a chance for them to speak in their own words of their own aspirations and problems. Working class folk, you might say, and the search was for socialism. Theatre groups performed in clubs and community centres and spoke of resistance to rent increases, cut-throat landlords and council officials. Poets read at housing campaigns and musicians sang on picket-lines.

Look at what we’ve got now on the banks of the riven Tyne. A cosy blanket of council promoted culture. Pip-squeak leaders of business and municipal conmen preaching the virtues of Art and Business – the very types who did not come near cultural projects like TTUSA years ago in their arrant philistinism. No votes in it then, you see. And, of course, we had an industrial base then which they pissed away in favour of the new call-centre culture. See where that got them! British rail enquiries based in India! And I can just see the Arts Council people at Central Square downing tools in solidarity with their redundant Lloyds TSB fellow workers! In short, we have cultural opportunism on the grand scale, it is a-buzzin’ all around us. Shallow little quango men with shallow little ideals who see money in everything.

They lost us the Love Parade, they lost us the Capital of Culture bid and now, ladies and gentlemen, the very same merry crew proudly present: Club 10!Club 10! – the Blairite Reich – more harmless cultural goodies to boost the economy. More New Labour partying – ain’t it just lovely to have them organise our lives for us? What a lovely sight to see our Heads of Culture and Leaders of Council dancing in tights down the Quayside in the shadow of the horrendously ugly Law Court! Except that they never get drunk! Where is the anger? Where is the integrity?

I’m sorry but we’ve seen too many cock-ups – not to mention the Dome – to trust this little lot. Let them free the people. Let 50,000 rebel voices sing at St James’s Park – their own working-class folk songs you understand, not written by the Vicar or Tony Flynn. A football club with a say for its supporters. A culture based on an understanding of the history of the North East, its fighting days and its dramatic landscape. A culture which builds on the strength of the indigenous in a cosmopolitan way, that welcomes the input of the world but only if it respects positive local tradition and understands what has made Northumbrian castles and the struggling peasants who still chip away in their shadow. We’re all for new libraries and new resources.

What we want is people power, autonomy for the back-streets of Walker and Scotswood. A resistance to the high-rise millionaires and the lottery-funded arts class who ride on high in their conceptual towers and inflict their crap public art on the hapless locals who subsidise it in the first place. We’re not all Billy Liars, thank goodness. We can dance but we want to stay and trip the light fantastic in the freedom of our own streets – preferably without a soundtrack from Elton John! Some of us are campaigning for a memorial to Newcastle radical Thomas Spence (1750-1814). Why? Because he too cocked a snook at authority, wrote his own poems and pamphlets, campaigned for the the Rights of Man (and woman) and went to jail for his belief in grass-roots democracy. Who amongst our little cultural leaders would do that? To echo J.B. Priestley’s view of Tyneside in the thirties, today’s riven Geordie landscape could do with a poet with such a flame in his heart and mouth that at last he could set the Tyne on fire.

Keith Armstrong

Culture, Work and Everyday Life on Post-Industrial Tyneside

The Observer (7th of December 2003) carried two stories which had resonance for Tynesiders. One, illustrated by a photo of three attractive but for night life Newcastle surprisingly fully dressed – only décolletage on show – young women, asserted that Newcastle’s loft dwellers – residents of a place transformed from coal city to cultural capital – lived in the new cool capital, a boom city with a glittering night life and affordable luxury living. The other described how UK based global capital in its continuing search for maximum possible exploitation of the workforce was exporting call centre jobs to the massive reserve army of graduate English speaking labour in India with consequent returns to its profits. I don’t know if the three graces of the first article were call centre agents, but on post-industrial Tyneside there is a pretty good chance that they were. Party on girls but it may be the last chance saloon.

There is just so much to rant about here. Contemporary Newcastle as a ‘City of Culture’ – not really I would say. Sure we have some new provision – notably the Baltic which was essentially a product of Gateshead’s desire to do something with a well liked industrial landmark and that borough’s long term old fashioned social democratic commitment to art for the people. Alongside that – even behind it in the case of the Baltic and ruining the impact of that building against the definition of the Tyne gorge – we have exceptionally banal property speculators’ over-priced flats for people perhaps with more expectations than sense. Never forget that the Newcastle-Gateshead City of Culture bid was fronted by Sir Ian Wrigglesworth – SDP turncoat turned property magnate. The bid got kicked into touch exactly because the judging panel saw just how over the top it had gone in kowtowing to the property money and ignoring the people. However, this is not a city which is producing culture – if that word means something which relates the experience of life to the production of artistic representation both ‘popula’ and ‘high’. Rather it is a ‘fantasy city’ – useful expression of the American urban commentator Hannigan to describe the urban core as a corporate dominated bland consumption experience.

There was a time not so long ago when Tyneside was a place with a culture producing culture – the city of Sex, Brown Ale and Rhythm and Blues – the title of Pearson’s lovely book about the ‘the world that made the Animals’ – an industrial city full of life, character, music made by local bands who could rehearse in wresting halls, drunken mad poets, an ability to relate people’s own experience to the global music of resistance and just plain hell raising. Burdon is still keeping it up. At his last gig on Tyneside he looked like a middle aged betting shop manager, sang like a boozy angel, and called George Bush worse than muck – that’s the way to do it bonny lad.

What do we have really? A city of booze and boozers – not the old industrial boozers with than term covering both the people and the pubs but of new, spangly, bland drinking dens which serve much the same purpose as the beer halls of black Jo’burg under apartheid – or as Joe Wilson recognized in his later life as the gin palaces of mid-Victorian industrial Tyneside – places to keep the proles happy and disorganized whilst capital and capitalists make hay – rooking the workers both at work and at play. I truly hate working men’s clubs but this kind of thing makes me think that they have a point. And alongside this, young people with aspirations to quayside lofts – don’t mention global warming by the way and the River Tyne in the living room in twenty years time – aspirations based on insecure jobs in a deferential and disorganized (dis- not un- : this is an active process) workforce. The new networked society of global helots is here and now and partying fit to drop.

Of course there are exceptions – real cultural makers who can put experience and art together – but how much they depend on a sense and sensibility drawn from what has gone before. David Almond is a prime example – a brilliant writer in that most alive genre of fiction – books for children – with a skill and style to knock the typical Booker winner into a cocked hat – whose work is permeated with the very essence of the Felling. AMBER keeps plugging along with the most honourable record of documenting people’s lives and how they change. Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s wonderful photos of the post-coal Durham coastline have been one of the best things in the Baltic – delete qualification, one of the two best, because I was very taken with COBRA as well but that is what Fred Johnson – Gateshead’s original Chair of Libraries and Arts – wanted when he started the council’s commitment to art – the best from here and from the world. This is well outside global corporate entertainment and 55° North in a converted office block!!

I am running out of rant and steam but have one last toot left in me. The Tyneside of my adolescence and young adulthood – the city of 60s – was a much livelier and more vivid place than our contemporary facsimile of a ‘city of culture’. There was just as much booze, plenty of drugs, frankly I think rather more sex, and a real world whose people still thought that organized workers had the power and right to change the future. Tyneside could speak out – in massively popular TV. When the Boat Comes in was middle-brow and radical – a truly dangerous combination; in a poetic sensibility which as not the bloodlessness of Bloodaxe – milky spoon more like – but something which could bring together the heritage of Pound and Pickard’s howling at the moon; and in which the main Theatre season could be non-stop Brecht – for the liberal bourgeoisie OK but Brecht all the same. However, nostalgia is not the point. What of now? There are surely stirrings. It may be that it is from exactly the domain of culture and lived experience – the territory where people make sense of what they are outwith the world of work – that the next rising up will come. Certainly we do well to take note of what Jack Grasby – a dramaturge of insurrectionary resistance in the everyday if ever we have had one – notes at the end of his The Unfinished Revolution – South Tyneside 1969-76 when he quotes from Neal Ascherson writing about the 60s in the Guardian thirty years on. To paraphrase: could it happen again, this defiance out of nowhere, probably yes. Here’s hoping. Because we certainly need it.

1: The delightful George Monbiot, part of the new ‘anti’ coalition being put together by Galloway, the SWP and assorted other Stalinist and related fragments overdue for a date with the dustbin of history, thinks this is a good thing by the way. New Labour and new whatever seem to be singing from the same hymn sheet here. Trade unionists take note.

Dave Byrne

The Great Newcastle Reform Demonstration of 1819
Research Report

A vast, but little known, reform demonstration took place in Newcastle on 11th October 1819. Strangely this demonstration is not a celebrated event in radical history. It was widely reported at the time but modern historians, with the exception of Edward Thompson* who did notice its significance, have given it very little attention.

There are a number of possible reasons for this. It took place in the shadow of Peterloo which registered as a deeply significant event. There was no violence. No one died. So far as we know no one was injured and there was no associated riot. It took place far away from the epicentres of revolt in 1819: London, Manchester, Yorkshire and the east midlands.

I started to research the event about six months ago and have shared my enthusiasm with friends and local historians. Many of them have looked askance when I have mentioned the contemporary reports of over seventy thousand people attending. Some have put that down to the common tendency of participants to exaggerate the numbers taking part in such events. When I have pointed out that non-participant observers also reported such numbers it has met with the rejoinder that no one at that time had any experience of large crowds so that any estimates could be wildly inaccurate.

There is probably some truth in both of these points. On the former I can speak with personal experience. There is a tendency to exaggerate but to what degree? Organisers and reporters get a feel for the size of an event. Rounding up does take place. So if an event ‘feels’, say, over twenty thousand you might round up to thirty thousand. Why not fifty or a hundred thousand? Largely I think because of the need to maintain credibility with those participating. Ludicrous exaggeration is damaging to the movement itself.

Of course rounding down takes place too, usually by the law enforcement agencies anxious not to give the demonstrators too much credibility. This may be relevant to the military estimate for 11th October. When it comes to estimates no one is neutral. On the latter point whilst it is true that there could be little or no experience of massive political events, citizens of Newcastle would have regularly attended race meetings and fairs. Indeed the rally took place at the Race Course on the Town Moor and one of the estimates relates to previous experience at that spot. What grabbed my interest was noticing the size reported in the press and the lack of research interest in it by historians. So I decided to pursue it to try to establish the truth of the numbers and to look at how it came about both in terms of political context and organisation.

I started by looking at the press accounts. Newcastle (thirty thousand inhabitants) had three newspapers in 1819. The Times carried a pretty full and not unsympathetic account. The Manchester Observer also followed the event. Of the semi-underground papers only The Black Dwarf covered it and it was also invaluable in reporting pre-demo happenings. The Chairman of the October 11th platform, Eneas McKenzie subsequently wrote an excellent history of Newcastle in which he included a full and lively account. Two pamphlets were produced soon afterwards and one of them included a marvellous engraving of the event on the Moor which provided a lot of iconographical information. The 1820 General Election Poll Book carries the names, trades and voting choice of 2,500 electors. This was a very large electorate for the unreformed Parliament and a useful source for understanding the social structure.

Home Office and Parliamentary Papers were also trawled and revealed, among other things, that the north east was viewed by the authorities with intense anxiety in that autumn. There were more references (September-December) to the area than any other single area including Manchester. There were also a couple of diaries with useful material. Of course as with most attempts to reconstruct such events there is a frustrating absence of ordinary people’s voices but with the usual reading between lines sense can be made.

Political activity in the present can supply a way of thinking about past situations. One example will suffice. A contemporary journalist helpfully supplied a list of slogans appearing on banners on the day. Having been part of placard making squads before demos over the years it is possible to imagine the situation in the workers lanes and houses ‘the night before’ frantically working out the most telling slogans. The words chosen give clues to the political thoughts of those distant activists and the large movement to which they belonged.

Two further points can be made. The political thought embodied in banner slogans and the sheer volume of support suggest the presence in the area of a long and deeply rooted democratic tradition. Finally the evident success of the event was a very important factor in helping to push forward this tradition in the several radical campaigns of the next two decades in which the people of north east of England played a vital part.

*The making of the English working class, 1963.

The full article was published in North East History, 39, 2008.

John Charlton
johncharlton@blueyonder.co.uk .