MY ONLY BORO
A Walk Through Red & White
by
Will Nett
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SMASHWORDS EDITION
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Published by Sixth Element Publishing
Arthur Robinson House
13-14 The Green
Billingham TS23 1EU
Tel: 01642 360253
Copyright Will Nett 2011
ePub ISBN 978-1-908299-23-9
Kindle ISBN 978-1-908299-24-6
Will Nett asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
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Screw, God and the Universe by Graeme Wilkinson
Residual Belligerence (Thieves’ Guild: Book One) by C.G. Hatton
Disturbing Bedtime Tales by Dean Wilkinson
Chapter 1: The country’s outsiders, even to the outsiders
Chapter 2: A long and distinguished list of influential characters
Chapter 3: A wander through Middlesbrough part 1
Chapter 4: It takes more than heavy snowfall to blunt the belligerence of Middlesbrough folk
Chapter 5: A fine pedigree when it comes to public entertainment
Chapter 7: A wander through Middlesbrough part 2
Chapter 8: On the subject of unpopular political decisions
Chapter 9: On superstition and religion
Chapter 10: It wasn’t just about football – it was about a town and a people
Whaddya mean, “where’s the boxing bit?”
INTRODUCTION
It was like levitation. He hung in the air for an eternity, just waiting and waiting, until the ball arrived. Then he closed his eyes, as if to sleep and dream of glory as it struck his shiny forehead. When he opened them, he saw the ball drop into the corner of the net. He saw the goalkeeper flailing. He saw the unbridled ecstasy on the faces of his team mates, and he saw an explosion of hysterical joy convulsing through thirty-thousand open-mouthed onlookers that will never be surpassed, or even equalled.
That was the moment. An inanimate object launched from someone’s foot struck the head of a man from a far off land and in doing so, defeated a man from an even further off land, and propelled a town with a population of 142,000 onto the world’s sporting stage.
Massimo Maccarone’s gravity-defying 89th minute goal against Steaua Bucharest capped one of the most remarkable sporting comebacks of all time and planted a tiny North East football club into a major European final. After more than a century of immaculate footballing underachievement the club had enjoyed its most successful period, beginning with victory in the 2004 League Cup Final and ending abruptly on a disastrous night in Eindhoven.
I wanted to know how we’d got there. Not just the extraordinary run in that tournament, and not just in sport, but historically, as a town, and as a community. Who helped us? Who inspired us? Who led us? Who hindered us?
First and foremost, I wanted to know: Where are we?
I’ve lived in Middlesbrough for most of my life, save for a seven month period during that 2005/2006 UEFA Cup Final season when I travelled around the world. In doing so, I discovered the fingerprints of notable Teessiders in every corner of the globe, in one field or another – exploration, engineering and sport, to name but three – and this book begins outside of Middlesbrough, and Teesside, although where Teesside is actually located is a debatable point we’ll come back to. It begins in the disturbingly quaint village of Heighington.
Heighington is a picture postcard spot in Shildon, County Durham, and the birthplace of my mother, or “Our Mam”, to use local parlance. In fact, it’s so picturesque that in 2006 it was picked by BBC4 as one of Britain’s perfect villages.
I found myself there, in St Michael’s churchyard one damp autumn morning, in an attempt to find out where I came from. I was looking for the grave of my Grandfather, Frederick Wade, whom I’d never met and my mother couldn’t even remember, him having died when she was four. I couldn’t find it, and didn’t even know if it existed, as I tramped around in the soggy golden leaves and bramble bushes. Wherever I stood I couldn’t escape the enormous spectre of the blackened tree by the east wall that had terrified my mother and aunts half a century earlier, its leafless branches giving off an imposing gothic air. I was standing under the tree sheltering from heavy rain when I noticed a small, well-preserved, sandstone war grave, the only one of its kind in the whole cemetery. Well-kept war graves always stand out, as though preference of care is a reward for bravery, and this one was no different. A closer look revealed it was the resting place of one C Wade, an RAF Sergeant and air gunner, killed in action in 1945. He was nineteen when he died. He wasn’t what I was looking for, but he was what I found, a son of Heighington, and who knows, a son of Frederick?
The reason I was looking in the first place was because I was in the very early stages of tracing my family tree. I stumbled upon another grave as I wandered around that struck me for a different reason – it was that of a namesake of a former colleague of mine. I say namesake as the former colleague is still alive, and besides, the dates didn’t match up, but it made for an unusual discovery to say the least as his was not a particularly common name. As I walked past the village hall I noticed opposite the beginnings of the local bonfire, as neatly prepared as everything else in the area, and was reminded of the sinister community of Summerisle in the Wicker Man.
I returned to my car outside the Wesleyan chapel to be greeted by a pair of crows on the front steps, unaffected by my presence. The slamming of my car door and the engine rattling to life didn’t disturb them either. Driving down Darlington Road away from the village I momentarily lost control of my car and could only sit and await my fate as it skidded across the black gravel towards the junction of Coatsay Moor Lane. It ground to a halt right on the give-way line as the No 16 Newton Aycliffe to Darlington trundled past a lot closer than I would have liked.
I recounted all this to a friend the next day – the graves, the crows, the car/bus near-interface.
“Probably an omen,” he said.
I abandoned the family tree idea right there on the spot, half of it anyway. Dad’s side was much more straightforward. His family history, like that of thousands of others, was a history of Middlesbrough. Trace one and you trace the other – kill two crows with one stone if you like. As it turned out I killed neither crow, the family tree or the town history. Well not quite.
What I did was pick up the red and white thread and ran with it, in the process discovering a mish-mash of contrasting opinions, a wealth of myths and folk tales, and a deluge of downright madness punctuated by a cast of blind clowns, (and I don’t mean the football team), cowboys and indians, haunted cattle, and itinerant chavs.
With the exception of the facts, the following is a work of fiction.
To Mam and Dad
“In Comedy, Tragedy, Drama, or Farce,
In London I’m sure there are none can surpass”
From A Song of Middlesbrough
by Elizabeth Normington (1902)
CHAPTER 1
The country’s outsiders, even to the outsiders
Nobody looked at the clock. Nobody. Some looked at the floor. Others stared into the middle distance. George and Jimmy looked at a copy of the local paper, the Dagblad, that somebody had left. They were the only ones who could understand it but they didn’t really take any of it in.
Some of the lowered heads rolled their eyes up and saw the boss’s midriff, and the tip of his red tie, as he paced slowly around, his blazer pinned back at his waist by his thumbs, calmly making his point. He wasn’t one for histrionics or extravagant gestures, instead preferring measured sensibility and caution. It was 20.15 CET.
Jimmy grinned; he was always smiling, but his eyes were serious. Stewy sat straight-backed against the cold white tiles. Gareth had seen it all before and knew he must lead by example. He knew he had to lead them all – from the youngest to the oldest, the experienced and inexperienced, the good and the bad.
The boss led them away, through a door marked ‘uitgang’.
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We are Yorkshiremen and women – that’s indisputable. And have been since Middlesbrough started its spurt of growth in the 1830s.
“Aaah, but no,” I hear you chorus, “we are North Yorkshire.” Yes, we are. Geographically we are indeed in the northern part of Yorkshire, yet few Teessiders – we are Teessiders first, being as we are, beside the River Tees – don’t consider ourselves Yorkshire folk. They like to think of us as a separate body, which is where Cleveland (Land of Cliffs) comes in, although that doesn’t really exist anymore, depending on who you ask. It apparently ceased being as of 1996, yet Redcar and Cleveland Borough Council is proud to carry the name some fifteen years later.
I begin with the default information mine of the 21st century, Wikipedia, which states: “Middlesbrough is a town in the Tees Valley conurbation of North East England and sits within the ceremonial county of North Yorkshire.”
Apologies if you’ve just wretched/baulked or both, at the term ‘Tees Valley’. It’s the kind of phrase that probably appeals to people who work regularly with flip-charts.
We are certainly a town, and we are certainly in the North East, but it’s the North Yorkshire part that people tend to take issue with.
Reading on, phrases like ‘unitary authority’ and words like ‘agglomeration’ are thrown into an already confusing mix. Did I mention that Middlesbrough is “historically part of the North Riding of Yorkshire” and became “centre of the County Borough of Teesside” in 1968, before being “absorbed by the non-metropolitan county of Cleveland” six years later. We were ‘absorbed’ in 1974? And before that ‘agglomerated’? It’s little wonder we’re so confused.
Okay, so Wikipedia is famously unreliable at times – whilst researching a small Australian town where I once lived, I was amused to discover that the former head of the local secondary school was “a shitty arse” – but the above serves as an example of the geographical muddle we find ourselves in. Everyone you asked about it, and even those you didn’t, seemed to have a different answer, as proved during a cursory glance over the letters page of the Evening Gazette. Sift through the broadsides of the bickering local councillors and the mundane missives of residents, more of which later – I’ve howled with laughter on many occasions at what Teessiders deem letter-worthy and the letters page deserves more space than I can give it in this section – and you may find a few pointers as to where we are, or at least where we think we are.
On this day of writing for example, ‘A True Stocktonian’ announces that the River Tees is the boundary between Middlesbrough and the towns of Stockton and Hartlepool, which, for the record, we would need to ‘absorb’ in order to become big enough to be recognised as a city, (Middlesbrough still has town status). He goes on to say, much like a member of some extremist militia, that “until the River Tees runs dry and no more water flows, it will always be our boundaries”. Well, he’s certainly parked his tanks on the lawn there, hasn’t he?
Luckily for us smog-ingesting red infidels south of the Tees, we function reasonably well without the assistance of Stocktonians, (yes, you invented the friction match, well done.) The letter provoked one regular contributor into proudly announcing that, “I am and always will be a North Riding of Yorkshire man.”
And we’re back where we started.
A Teesside city state, as once touted, would appeal to many people’s republican tendencies but I know just how I’d feel about that if I was from Stockton for example, as it would probably be Middlesbrough that would be the central conceit, leading to surrounding areas taking the rebellious tone that Middlesbrough now does with Yorkshire. In the late 1960s this was a distinct possibility when the Teesplan project was introduced in order to survey public opinion and potential with regards to a superstate of sorts. Its downfall though was the costly improvements necessary to clean up the chemical industry, which unsurprisingly alarmed potential investors.
When these suggestions were made, local councillors – the majority of whom served on the boards of the very chemical companies that were being taken to task – turned their noses up at the thought of anything interfering with their licentious nest-feathering. Chief among them was Stockton Council architect John Poulson, who was eventually imprisoned for corruption. If the city state idea was launched in the early 1970s, as proposed, it would be now, forty years later that we would be seeing the advantages, or indeed the disadvantages. I’m not so optimistic as to think it would be a bed of fragrant red roses, but the idea of it still makes me wonder. It would be as much of an impossibility now as it was then though, for exactly the same reasons – politicians and councillors with ‘conflicts of interest’.
What then, would this mythical City of Teesside look like? If I tried to envisage back in the late 1960s what it would look like now I would have expected all the staples of science fiction – hover cars, people walking around in tin-foil suits, and entire meals in pill form. More likely it would have looked as Middlehaven does – a swathe of bright colours hiding a multitude of sins. Middlesbrough would be its administrative capital and you’d enter the city through an archway of magnificent home-grown steel – and by magnificent I mean one that can be seen as far away as Newcastle – bearing the legend: YOU ARE NOW ENTERING THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF TEESSIDE.
As the A66, which would be adapted into a ring road, whisks you into the city centre you’d be greeted by an enormous statue of Henry Bolckow. I’ve entertained the idea of a statue of a miner, fine examples of which can currently be found all around East Cleveland, but as a representation of heritage it smacks a little too much of the Soviet Union, that image of a moustachioed Ivan thundering away in a factory with a steel-driving hammer. Something more contemporary would be required I think, but not too contemporary or we’d end up with Temenos. Our regional anthem would be a rousing composition from the pen of Chris Rea and performed in a gravel-voiced duet with Paul Rodgers, and all chavs would be executed on their 21st birthday. That’s not so unreasonable, is it? Actually I seem to have described the beginnings of a totalitarian state there, which we already have. It has its downsides though; we’d have to fight off pockets of rebel resistance from the breakaway states of Stockton and Thornaby and have an amalgamated football team, where all the players are selected from one area. I suppose we already do that but at one point in recent history they were all selected, under the guiding hand of Gordon Strachan, from Scotland which seems to have acted as a farm-club of sorts for Middlesbrough in recent times.
No one really knows where we are up here in Middlesbrough, or down here in Middlesbrough, depending on where you are.
“Is it near Newcastle?” someone will always ask.
We get annoyed by this, even though when we’re explaining it to someone else we always use Newcastle as a reference point because it’s the nearest big city that anyone’s heard of, and that includes Sunderland. I switch on the television and Anne Robinson is interrogating a contestant from Stockton on the Weakest Link. The contestant announces that she has a degree in forensic science.
Anne Robinson: “So it’s like CSI Tyneside up there, is it?”
Me, (at the telly): “Give yer’ fuckin’ head a shake, yer’ ginger cow.”
The further away from England I’ve been, the bigger the frame of reference. Unless the enquirer was from a country that has produced a Middlesbrough player of note, they hadn’t heard of it.
When I lived in Australia, Middlesbrough FC was well represented by a surfeit of Aussies – Mark Viduka, Mark Schwarzer, and Brad Jones – but no one was any the wiser. In their defence, Australians aren’t known for their interest in association football, however they soon jumped on the World Cup bandwagon in 2006 when they reached the knock-out stages, most likely looking for something to lift their spirits after we macerated them in the previous year’s Ashes. It seemed like anyone living in the Southern Hemisphere had us down as “somewhere near Scotland”, which I suppose it is when you live that far away, in the same way that Sydney is near Melbourne.
“Is it in Yorkshire then?” was another popular question.
Yes, and no. Fairly confusing, but we know where we are, sort of, we’re just not sure where we’re going. We are the country’s outsiders, even to the outsiders. This was never more evident than when I worked on the edges of the North York Moors, in places like Lingdale, Liverton, and Moorsholm, just fifteen miles, give or take, from Middlesbrough, but I might as well have been the Man from Atlantis, such was the locals’ consternation, and it has to be said, suspicion, that I met with. In local shops for local people I was the infiltrating ‘townie’ that had defected to the East. Even though I was in my late-twenties at the time, I found myself learning what seemed like a whole new dialect.
By that time in my life I’d encountered Aborigines and Fijian noblemen on my travels but I was none-the-wiser as to what a ‘gripe’ was. Apparently it’s a type of gardening fork but I wouldn’t be surprised to see Skinningrove residents throwing one at a full moon in an attempt to knock it out of the sky. Garden sheds were lined with a material known as ‘brattish’ which I’d previously known as “that bumpy, rough, grey stuff on roofs”, but I was “as thick as a fucking wood wagon” for not knowing this. On that particular occasion I was banished temporarily from the woolyback Mafia and made to sit with a party of sand-gropers, which are people from Redcar, according to the in-landers of Skelton anyway.
We do have our own colloquial foibles that are an instant trigger for ridicule from our East Cleveland cousins. My personal favourite is the replacement of the letter f, or its equivalent sound, as in the word laugh, with the letter p. Its origins are unknown, (it’s probably something to do with a general lack of education, and/or laziness), but it’s well established now and especially popular at football matches.
“REPEREE… that’s a fuckin’ pelanty.” I haven’t misspelt penalty, I’m simply quoting from the numbskull who bellowed it over my shoulder at a Boro match once. See also: scappolder, snipping coke, scruppy, and, yer’ avin’ a lap’ arn’ yer?’ for wholesale abuse of the letter f.
We also bend our ‘ur’ sounds to such a degree that we virtually snap them in half. I’ve constructed the following sentence, incorrectly spelt, to highlight this and tacked a couple of gratuitous obscenities on the end for authenticity.
“Ahm’ goin’ to cherch at farv to naan an’ ah’ll be wearing mah’ perple werk shert an’ eatin’ a berger, yer fucken’ barmy bastard.”
I used to smile and nod a lot when I worked in East Cleveland. A wrong word from a townie amidst the rolling greenery of what my boss called God’s country could have earned me a firm clip round the lughole, or at the very least a swift prod with a pitchfork… sorry, I mean gripe. The crumbling backstreets of Brotton and Carlin How were a constant reminder of a time past on Teesside, of steps being scrubbed and pigeon fanciers shepherding their squadrons home with a swinging fantail. The first time I went to Skinningrove I felt like I was intruding on a closed society, hidden as it is in the deep valley at the knee of its big brother, Loftus. Its other brother, Liverton Mines, was at the other knee.
Despite the reciprocated piss-taking that was meted out, I loved the simplicity of the East Cleveland lifestyle, and that’s not meant as an insult in any way. I only point out that it’s not an insult because I know how reactionary they are – talk about acting first and thinking later. If misinterpreting simple instruction was an Olympic sport, the entire GB team would be selected from the population of anywhere between Skelton and East Loftus. Simple pleasures are of course the last refuge of the complex, so when a Lingdaler talks about visiting Middlesbrough or Redcar with all the intrepidation of Ranulph Fiennes tackling the North Pole, it’s probably part of an existential foray into a post-modern utopia. Well, it could be. They might just fancy a run out.
In fact it’s the simplest of all pleasures, fishing, that is most popular of all, much to my bemusement. They know absolutely everything there is to know about fish except how to catch them. I can hear the collective groan of the Grovers who said to me: “You lot think fish are born with batter on ’em.” John Steinbeck once said, “It has always been my private conviction that any man who pits his wits against a fish and loses has it coming”. It’s a double-edged sword though, this town and country badinage, as I can testify, being someone who was once successfully herded by some horses on Liverton Mines donkey field. They were tethered – “you don’t tie a fucking horse up, Will, you tether it,” they said, when I explained the story to my colleagues – on a patch of grass I was attempting to cut. Every time I approached the tethering point, the mare would circle around with the chain as its precocious progeny teamed up to push me into the catchment area of the chain.
When I told my boss about this equine-minded ambush he laughed the laugh of a man whose private conviction it is that any man who pits his wits against a horse and loses has it coming. It wasn’t the first time I’d been duped by one of these four-legged geniuses but at least on this occasion it didn’t cost me any money.
Eventually, I was accepted by my new colleagues for what I am, “a fucking smart-arse,” and soon enough I was dropping every ‘the’ for ‘t’ and stirring my drinks with a screwdriver. It was like an East Cleveland version of Stockholm Syndrome, Skelton Syndrome if you like. I returned their benevolence by introducing them to the wonders of air-travel and digital television. I’m joking, of course. They have little interest in such profligate endeavours, but are instead obsessed by sheds and allotments.
The allotment is the last refuge of the Teessider, somewhere he can retire to when he’s had enough of being hen-pecked by “our lass” – it’s not an exclusively male pursuit but the majority of gardens are male-owned – and instead be pecked by chickens and surrounded by pigeon droppings. These plots are guarded with an intense suspicion, mainly because they are constructed entirely from stolen goods. If an Englishman’s home is his castle then the allotment is his contraband dungeon. I’ve been party to many a furtive furlough – as a mere onlooker of course – in order to procure all kinds of acquisitions that may enhance a man’s garden. Once I was approached and asked if I wanted to build a green house out of phone box doors.
I mention the humble allotment as it’s one of the great Northern stereotypes, and also one of the most accurate, even in 2011. Around here the allotment has gone from being the sole preserve of crombie-coated, capstan-smoking blokes to the pursuit of many a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall-inspired youngster growing all manner of febrile peppers and odd-shaped onions. Personally I’d rather attend a driving instructors’ convention than spend my weekends scrabbling about on a carpet of shed hen-feathers yanking aubergines from the unremitting grip of Mother Earth.
So when I think of Middlesbrough, allotments come to mind, as do all the other things that most Southerners associate with Yorkshire, but the Middlesbrough in my head is one of wet cobbled streets, exotically lit – to my mind – by the orange phosphorescence of a lamppost, and across the same streets, washing lines strung between fences. I think of the belch and twinkle of ICI that was recreated by Ridley Scott for the set of Blade Runner – Port Talbot stakes a similar claim for the setting in Tom Chesshyre’s book To Hull And Back, but Scott, and his brother Tony, are from South Shields so his stimulation is probably of a more northerly bent.
I also think of the abruptness of our speech, for example the dropping of “What the,” from sentences, leaving just the essential, as in, “Fuck’s goin’ on ere’ like?”, or “Time is it, mate?”
We’ve got time for small talk, we just don’t like it, so we get straight to the point. I think of the homogenised town centre, that could be anyone else’s town centre, and wonder why we still don’t have city status. Then I wonder if we even want it. I quite like the fact that we’re punching well above our weight and we’re still, in the words of the Boro faithful “just a small town in Europe”.
CHAPTER 2
A long and distinguished list of influential characters
They all fell in line, knowing it was the last time they would do so together. They marched toward the Green, surrounded by the symbolism of victory – images of celebration, on banners, hoardings and signs, and words like ‘kampioens’, and ‘winndar’. There was nothing to remind them of defeat. There was nothing for losers, except oblivion. Some of them were already winners though, because of how far they’d come, and where they were going. Some of them had it all planned out – to a certain extent – some of them didn’t, but they would all return to Teesside, however briefly.
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We may never have had a steelworks to begin with if it wasn’t for John Vaughan, for it was he who discovered iron ore deposits in the Cleveland Hills, specifically those overlooking Eston and Normanby. He’d previously mined hills further down the Yorkshire coast, and as far away as Durham, with his German-born business partner Henry Bolckow, but now the materials were literally in their own back yard. When, in 1850, an ironstone seam as thick as a bouncer’s neck was successfully mined in Eston it spelt boom with a capital B for Boro. A town barely recognisable twenty years earlier – when Darlington businessman Joseph Pease foresaw the benefits of extending his father’s railway line from Stockton to Middlesbrough – would soon be known all over the world.