This is a marvellous half-hour 1971 "fly on the wall" TV documentary about the 1966 England football world cup winner Jackie Charlton, visiting his childhood home in Ashington Northumberland.
I have previously written about the astonishing way that this mining village has - over several generations - produced international sportsmen - first in football, and now in cricket.
All through my childhood I spent Easter and Summer holidays staying with grandparents in the next-door-to-Ashington villages of Newbiggin, and later Newsham; before, after and during the time this documentary was made.
So, what is depicted is both familiar and nostalgic. Nostalgic, despite the decidedly un-glamorous nature of these smoky and coaly Northumbrian villages - a stark contrast to the bosky Devonshire and Somerset villages where I grew-up.
We certainly enjoyed our holidays - much helped by the fact that Newbiggin - unlike Ashington - had a good beach, with rock pools, only a stones-throw from my grandparents house; and did not feel in any way deprived by comparison with our neighbours who were going abroad or to more genteel resorts.
If you do decide to watch this programme, then you may find it difficult to understand what is being said. The dialect is mid-Northumbrian - sometimes called Pitmatic - and is still (even when the speaker is trying to speak posh) strange, or largely incomprehensible, to those who were not exposed to it as children; but in 1971 it was even more extreme.
I taught high school in Ashington for a year back in 2014-2015, and it took me a good couple of weeks to tune my ears to the Pitmac dialect. My overall impression of Ashington was mixed. I found the town drab and somewhat depressing, but the people were quite lively and interesting, especially among the high school kids I taught. Put another way, Ashington struck me as a characterless place packed with intriguing characters. There's a kind of honesty about the place. I'm not saying the people there are all necessarily honest, but they certainly seemed more "real."
ReplyDeleteI liked Newbiggin-by-the-Sea a lot when I visited there, and came close to renting a flat in the village, but ended up choosing the more "posh" market town of Morpeth instead. I really enjoyed my time in Morpeth, but I sometimes wonder how my time in England may have been different had I rented that flat in Newbiggin. I still have vivid memories of St. Bartholomew's Church, located on a flat, barren yard beside the sea. However, one thing I didn't like about Newbiggin was The Couple statue. Northumberland has a poor track record when it comes to contemporary statues (Angel of the North, anyone)?
@Frank - You were in Ashington more than 30 years, more than a generation, after the documentary was made - and like most places in England there had been a massive transformation in that time.
ReplyDeleteI think it was indeed always physically a characterless, drab, depressing kind of place - also everything was covered in soot.
But there was until the late seventies a vigorous working class culture - depicted in the movie by whippet racing, brass bands and keeping pigeons; other aspects were juvenile marching bands, tending allotments, growing prize leeks, folk music and more.
(In the interwar period, there was a nationally regarded school of naive working-class folk "pitman painters" called the Ashington Group - https://museumsnorthumberland.org.uk/whats-on/the-ashington-group-gallery/)
That evaporated rapidly through the 1980s, under the influence of mass media, global youth culture, and the rest of it.
I lived in Framwellgate Moor for a few years and was bemused by my inability to imitate the local accent. Only after leaving did I realise that it's partly about inserting extra syllables, e.g. 'Framwellgeat Mo-wah'
ReplyDelete@Ron - Yes that's it. And maybe just ten-fifteen miles away - on Tyneside - these diphthongs have disappeared.
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