YOU'VE GOT TO BE JOKING

if you think this is democracy,

this quango land

insult to our history,

this emptiness

of false celebrity,

this wretched shallowness,

this shattered ignorance

of all that shines from our fought-for heritage,

this media connivence

and bone idleness,

this following of the fast buck,

this grovelling to the greed of capital,

this sickening homage to materialism,

this lack of human spirit

in our city centres,

this brutal selfishness

encouraged by a government

that denies our European roots,

that scans the wonder of the vast Atlantic

for feeble ideas to run with,

this rat race of a society

that puts self above solidarity,

these feeble careerist substitutes for activism

who have lost any real will for change,

who have become corrupted by a power-lust,

who lack any passion

other than to climb grimly up their greasy poles,

clinging on to their self-delusion,

ignoring, in their centrist way,

the true beauty of community,

handing out their gongs to the servile

and rubbishing the selfless folk

who work their little miracles every breathing day.

KEITH ARMSTRONG

TYNE COAL

Cargoes

By John Masefield

Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,

Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,

With a cargo of ivory,

And apes and peacocks,

Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.

      

Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus,

Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores,

With a cargo of diamonds,

Emeralds, amethysts,

Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.

        

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke-stack,

Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,

With a cargo of Tyne coal,

Road-rails, pig-lead,

Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.

DURHAM: AN ANONYMOUS POEM

This city is celebrated
In the whole empire of the Britons.
The road to it is steep.
It is surrounded with rocks,
And with curious plants.
The Wear flows round it,
A river of rapid waves;
And there live in it
Fishes of various kinds,
Mingling with the floods.
And there grow
Great forests;
There Hide in the recesses
Wild animals of many sorts;
In the deep valleys
Deer innumerable.
There is in this city
Also well known to men
The venerable St. Cudberth;
And the head of the chaste King
Oswald, the lion of the Angli;
And Aiden, the Bishop:
Aedbert and Aedfrid,
The noble associates.
There is in it also
Aethelwold, the Bishop;
And the celebrated writer Bede;
And the Abbot Boisil,
By whom the chaste Cudberth
Was in his youth gratis instructed;
Who also well received the instructions,
There rest with these saints,
In the inner part of the Minster,
Relicks innumerable,
Which perform many miracles,
As the chronicles tell us,
And which await with them
The judgment of the Lord.

This is an Anglo-Saxon poem.

COLLIER LAD BY JOSEPH SKIPSEY - PERFORMED BY DRIVE THE BOGIES

A NEW POEM BY DAVE ALTON

Haunting

It is the living who haunt the dead,

Being pale and silent in graveyards and on

The scattering grounds, by ash-salted sea,

Flitting between somber saplings planted

By humanists in set aside fields. Our dead

Are possessed by us, their rot scented

With unsolicited flowers, names incised

Into stone as petrified memory

Over dates and doggerel as if

Of some significance. But, the deceased

Remain reserved, thoroughly undisturbed

By our pestering, about their business

Of death without any untoward show,

Utterly dedicated to absence,

Unrelenting in determined pursuit

Of their true vocation. For all that we

Pester them, demanding their attention,

Angered by their seeming indifference

To us, they keep a dignified silence:

And by that, and that alone, are we haunted.

Dave Alton

THE VIEW FROM THE RED HOUSE!

THE COLLIER LAD BY JOSEPH SKIPSEY (1832-1903)

poet joseph skipsey

MY lad he is a Collier Lad,     And ere the lark awakes, He's up and away to spend the day     Where daylight never breaks; But when at last the day has pass'd,     Clean washed and cleanly clad, He courts his Nell who loveth well     Her handsome Collier Lad. Chorus—There's not his match in smoky Shields;                     Newcastle never had                 A lad more tight, more trim, nor bright                     Than is my Collier Lad. Tho' doomed to labour under ground,     A merry lad is be; And when a holiday comes round,     He'll spend that day in glee; He'll tell his tale o'er a pint of ale,     And crack his joke, and bad Must be the heart who loveth not     To hear the Collier Lad. At bowling matches on the green     He ever takes the lead, For none can swing his arm and fling     With such a pith and speed: His bowl is seen to skim the green,     And bound as if right glad To hear the cry of victory     Salute the Collier Lad. When 'gainst the wall they play the ball,     He's never known to lag, But up and down he gars it bound,     Till all his rivals fag; When deftly—lo! he strikes a blow     Which gars them all look sad, And wonder how it came to pass     They play'd the Collier Lad. The quoits are out, the hobs are fix'd,     The first round quoit he flings Enrings the hob; and lo! the next     The hob again enrings; And thus he'll play the summer day,     The theme of those who gad; And youngsters shrink to bet their brass     Against the Collier Lad. When in the dance he doth advance,     The rest all sigh to see How he can spring and kick his heels,     When they a-wearied be; Your one-two-three, with either knee     He'll beat, and then, glee-mad, A heel-o'er-head leap crowns the dance     Danced by the Collier Lad. Besides a will and pith and skill,     My laddie owns a heart That never once would suffer him     To act a cruel part; That to the poor would ope the door     To share the last he had; And many a secret blessing's pour'd     Upon my Collier Lad. He seldom goes to church, I own,     And when he does, why then, He with a leer will sit and hear,     And doubt the holy men; This very much annoys my heart;     But soon as we are wed, To please the priest, I'll do my best     To tame my Collier Lad.

FROM A SWAHILI PHRASEBOOK

THE TYNESIDE POETS - IN THE SEVENTIES!

THOMAS SPENCE 1750-1814 - WATCH OUT FOR BICENTENARY BOOK AND EVENTS IN NEWCASTLE & LONDON LATER IN THE YEAR

NEWCASTLE BEER

When Fame brought the news of Great Britain's success,

And told at Olympus each Gallic defeat,
Glad Mars sent to Mercury orders express,
To summon the Deities all to a treat;
Blithe Comus was plac'd
To guide the gay feast,
And freely declar'd there was choice of good cheer;
Yet vow'd to his thinking,
For exquisite drinking,
Their Nectar was nothing to Newcastle Beer.
The great God of War to encourage the fun,
And humour the taste of his whimsical guest,
Sent messenger Murcury out for a tun
Of Stingo, the stoutest, the brightest, the best;
No Gods--tye all swore,
Regal'd so before,
With liquour so lively, so potent, and clear;
And each deified fellow
Got jovially mellow,
In honour, brave boys, of our Newcastle Beer.
Apollo perceiving his talents refine,
Repents he drank Helicon water so long;
He bow'd being ask'd by the musical Nine,
And gave the gay board an extempore song;
But ere he began,
He toss'd off his can;
There's nought like good liquour the fancy to clear;
Then sang with great merit,
The flavour and spirit,
His Godship had found in our Newcastle Beer.
'Twas Stingo like this made Aldides so bold;
It brac'd up his nerves and eliven'd his pow'rs;
And his mystical club that did wonders of old,
Was nothing, my lads, but such liquor as ours.
The horrible crew
That Hercules slew,
Were Poverty---Cahumny--Trouble-- and Fear;
Siuch a club would you borrow
To drive away sorrow,
Apply for a Forum of Newcastle Beer.
Ye youngsters so diffident, languid, and pale,
Whom love like the colic so rudely infests;
Take a cordial of this, 'twill probatum prevail,
And drive the cur Cupid away from your breasts;
Dull whining dcspise,
Grow rosy and wise,
No longer the jest of good fellows appear;
Bid adieu to your folly,
Get drunk and be jolly,
And smoke o'er a tankard of Newcastle Beer.
Ye fanciful folk for whom Physic prescribes,
Whom bolus and potion have harass'd to death!
Ye wretches, whom Law and her ill-looking tribes
Have hunted about 'till you're quite out of breath!
Here's shelter and ease,
No craving for fees,
No danger--no Doctor--no Bailif is near!
Your spirits this raises,
It cures your diseases,
There's freedom and health in our Newcastle Beer.





John Cunningham (1729-1773)

ANGELS PLAYING FOOTBALL

George Robledo & Jackie Milburn







Some weeks before he died in 1988, the legendary Newcastle United footballer Jackie Milburn was sitting in his Ashington home with a grand-daughter on his knee. Outside, there was thunder and lightning, which frightened the wee girl: ‘What’s that noise?’, she asked her grandad anxiously. ‘Don’t worry’, ‘Wor Jackie’ replied, ‘It’s just the angels playing football.’

It was this incident which inspired the following poem, given added poignancy by the placing of an Alan Shearer shirt on the Gateshead Angel’s prodigious back by local fans before the 1998 F.A. Cup Final!

Sprinkle my ashes on St. James’s Park,

Fragments of goals on the grass.

Hear the Gallowgate roar in the dark.

All of my dreams came to pass.

Pass me my memories,

Pass me the days,

Pass me a ball and I’ll play:

Play with the angels,

Play on their wings,

Play in the thunder and lightning.

I leave you these goals in my will,

Snapshots of me on the run.

I leave you these pieces of skill,

Moments of me in the sun.

Pass me my memories,

Pass me the days,

Pass me a ball and I’ll play:

Play with the angels,

Play on their wings,

Play in the thunder and lightning.

                                                                               

Keith Armstrong

THE MELLY-BELLY SONGS/FIVE SEA SONGS

VEITCH

(in memory of Colin Campbell McKechnie Veitch, 1881-1938)

‘One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.’ George Bernard Shaw 

Football brain,

you thought with your feet,

treading the boards

in a dynamic theatre

of passing action.

A winning way,

love of the glorious day 

and a sense of history

from Heaton Park

to socialism.

Your story,

from the pulsing Tyne

to the Geordie trophy room,

keeps us hoping

on Gallowgate,

alive with dignity

and strong respect

for the ideal of community

and the black and white love

of fairness.

Battling away,

in a skilled midfield 

and in the stinking trenches,

you fought

for your troubled lilting city

and all of those 

who ever kicked a ball

in its intimate soulful avenues.

KEITH ARMSTRONG

Colin Veitch made a total of 322 appearances for Newcastle United, scoring 49 goals. He  captained the United side which won League Championships in 1905, 1907 and 1909, the FA Cup in 1910 and were FA Cup finalists in 1905, 1906, 1908 and 1911, and also represented England on 6 occasions. 

Heaton History Group and Chris Goulding successfully campaigned for a commemorative plaque to be displayed on Colin Veitch’s former home in Heaton, Newcastle. The unveiling took place on 25th September 2013.

EVER THE TYNESIDE POET! - MR ALAN C. BROWN IN THE BALLOON PUB, FENHAM, NEWCASTLE

                                With Doctor Keith Armstrong

JOE SHARKEY- THE AKENSIDE SYNDROME

Coming soon from Jajosa Books: Joe Sharkey's 'Akenside Syndrome: Scratching the Surface of Geordie Identity'

Later this year I aim to publish my book entitled AKENSIDE SYNDROME: Scratching the Surface of Geordie Identity. Pending legal advice there will also be a subtitle: (or, Why Robson Green has a curious accent and Sting lives in Wiltshire). Some think it pithy, but bear with me prithee. In the preface I explain what Akenside syndrome actually is:

“Named after Mark Akenside, the 18^th century son of a Newcastle butcher who achieved some modest literary success, became physician to Queen Charlotte in 1761, and was famously touchy and sensitive about his humble origins, Akenside syndrome is a condition of feeling ambivalent towards Newcastle or Tyneside despite often retaining a strong emotional bond with and/or sincere affection for the area. A vague sense of unease and feeling of not quite belonging or fitting in is also a common characteristic of the condition. The information plaque next to All Saints’ Church, near Akenside Hill on Newcastle’s Quayside, says of Akenside: He is said to have been ashamed of his native place, so that “he would sneak through Newcastle when occasion called him thither”. Whilst acknowledging that naming it after Akenside is, to a certain extent, a conceit (being ashamed of your native place is not necessarily the same as having feelings of ambivalence towards it), it should also be observed that the condition can range from the relatively mild and harmless to the profound and detrimental to a person’s sense of well-being; a kind of neurosis even.”

Conceived of as neither hatchet job nor hagiography the book, broadly speaking, is a critique of Geordie culture and identity that seeks to examine why a condition such as Akenside syndrome exists.  Woven within a wider national and universal context, the first section examines The Four Pillars of Geordie Identity: Class, Accent, Drink and Football, and explores their potential for provoking Akenside alienation. In the second section – Akenside Syndrome: Group Therapy – which includes excerpts from exclusive interviews with the likes of Tim Healy, Val McLane, Sir John Hall, Chris and Simon Donald of Viz fame, Narinder Kaur, playwright Michael Chaplin, opera singer Graeme Danby, RGS Head Bernard Trafford and many others, groups believed to be in the high-risk category are given an Akenside syndrome assessment.

Some interesting and unexpected results arise as we find out why Chris Donald didn’t feel he could consider himself a Geordie when he was younger, despite growing up within a mile of Newcastle City centre. An attempt to get to the bottom of why Narinder Kaur said she wouldn’t bring her children up in Newcastle is made, and we discover Sir John Hall’s take on the word Geordie – a surprising one from the man who coined the phrase ‘Geordie Nation’. Chapter headings include Women: Y’alreet, Pet?, Race: Toon Toon… Black and White are we? and RGS: Class dismissed? but the longest chapter, the last, is dedicated to the group most susceptible to Akenside syndrome. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Geordie: Should I stay or should I go? has three sections; one on Geordie writers, one on Geordie actors and ending with Geordie rock stars. It is in this chapter that I try to get to grips with Robson Green’s verbal gymnastics and Sting’s living arrangements. However, as this blog is dedicated to Tyneside poetry I offer an extract from the first section, featuring Jack Common, Sid Chaplin and Lee Hall.

… … … … … …

Piss artists are the group most commonly associated with Newcastle, as we discovered in our exploration of the drink pillar of Geordie identity. However, there are Geordie artists of a different stripe including writers, actors and musicians, on whom the main focus will be here. Mark Akenside, like Jack Common, Sting and Brian Johnson, opted to leave Newcastle, never to return, and as an aspiring poet – his caricatured alter-ego in Peregrine Pickle is sarcastically referred to as “the greatest poet of the age” – he stands as an appropriate symbol for the group of people most susceptible to suffering from the syndrome I have named after him on the acute end of the scale.ⁱ Keith Armstrong’s description of Jack Common having a “desire to leave” Newcastle whilst “retaining a great love of the city of his birth”, and Sid Chaplin’s assertion that a miner depicted in a painting by Norman Cornish “is at odds with his world, but in a curiously ambivalent manner; a mixture of love and revulsion,” quintessentially epitomise the artistic strain of Akenside syndrome.ⁱⁱ

The dedication to Common and Chaplin as well as the people of the North-East in Geordies – two artistic individuals alongside the collective mass – inadvertently illustrates one of the root causes of Akenside syndrome. Perhaps felt more intensely by those of an artistic bent, Common explores the theme in his essays, as Armstrong points out: “the relationship between the individual and society; the tension between a collective approach and an individualistic one; and a search for a balance between the two.”ⁱⁱⁱ In an attempt to achieve this balance, or evade the emotional and psychological disorientation caused by staying in a place where they feel it is unachievable, many artists, as Rob Colls explained to Melvyn Bragg, feel they have to go.  And it’s easy to imagine indecision bugging them prior to their departure, as they brood over the fact that if they go there may be Akenside syndrome trouble, but if they stay it will be double.

A popular way for the Geordie artist to portray his sense of difference and dislocation from the Tyneside mass is by utilising the image of a young man resisting the uniform conformity of a crowd. Striving for self-definition we earlier witnessed Gordon Burn ploughing a lone furrow against the departing droves at St James’ Park, and a teenage Mark Akenside “Immured amongst the ignoble, vulgar herd”.^iv For Sid Chaplin, swimming with the shoal is imbued with imagery of restriction, entrapment, even a kind of death, with his protagonist Arthur Haggerston failing to heed Harry’s entreaty to navigate himself, to be an individual, as he ends the novel working in a sardine factory on the banks of the Tyne: “There I go. Stiff and straight and swimming in the gravy, but that’s no consolation when the lid’s clamped down.” Haggerston describes himself as “a Manor character brought up to pay his way, take his turn and stand by a pal” but is left languishing, his wanderlust unfulfilled, ultimately coming to the conclusion that his gang of friends, “are just tired cardboard figures who talk but have nothing to say to me… To the Manor lot I’m the crazy one… odd boy out.”^v

Having earlier been urged by another surrogate father-figure, Flack, to “Read books… Get learnin’. Be a somebody”, Haggerston’s fish-can-filling fate is a cautionary tale against unfulfilled potential.^vi How much autobiographical feeling went into the character from Chaplin is open to debate (though my inference is quite a lot; his son Michael Chaplin telling me, “As a young man [Sid] felt a great sort of ambivalence about the culture that he came from. That on the one hand he sort of gloried in aspects of it, but there were other aspects of it that completely appalled him”), whereas it is generally acknowledged that in the figure of Willie Kiddar the reader enjoys a vivid representation of the young Jack Common, albeit through the politicised prism of his adult self. Kiddar considers himself one of those “queer characters for whom words were more than words” and melancholically marvels at the “far-distant and miraculous folk who actually wrote books”, his own literary ambitions checked as he contemplates his heritage, which he fears will lead to, “the routine of the factory or some similar industrial hour-glass regularly turning the sands of uncelebrated and nearly-unconsequenced labour.”^viiMark Akenside also wrote of the poetically inclined; “What shall he do for life? he cannot work/With manual labour…” and Arthur Haggerston is ensnared in the nets of exactly such stultifying manual labour, calling it “work-misery” and bemoaning: “Every morning I rolled out of bed with a feeling of being trapped.”^viii

Common illustrates Kiddar’s resistance to the unremitting momentum of the mass in the Jesmond Dene scene, where he is irritated by the imposition of “the collective step” on his own and attempts to navigate his own individual path. Increasing the impression of the young Geordie artist inhibited by the collectivist environment that envelops him, as with Haggerston there is a sense of alienation from his friends: “I was becoming uncomfortably aware that there were attractions upon me that pulled in unknown directions and threatened to take me out of the orbit my fellow corner-lads so naturally swung into… I think it was becoming apparent to them that I had a life of my own that they wouldn’t want to share, particularly not now when they were near entering upon an early manhood that they most decidedly wanted to be orthodox.”^ix

Located on Lower Grainger Street in Newcastle is Sean Henry’s bronze sculpture Man with Potential Selves, comprising three representations of the same figure in different poses; standing, walking and apparently floating, and it chimes a latter-day echo to Kiddar’s plea that, “The younger you are the more important it is that you should consort with your unrealized selves. Friends prevent that by their presence. They can’t help insisting that you play the part they know as you and which is all the miserly economy of communication has so far allowed you to publish to them.”^x Lee Hall was born in 1966, two years before Common died, yet there are striking continuities and correlations between the two in terms of their experience of authorial Akenside alienation. Talking to Melvyn Bragg on The South Bank Show Hall recalled how, having left Cambridge University, there was a “divide that I’d been having in myself… was I a middle class Cambridge person and an academic, or was I like my mates in Newcastle that rather eschewed all that stuff.”^xi Here again we see education playing a crucial role in alienating an individual from his working-class roots, and a hint of what Wilkinson and Pickett describe in The Spirit Level, whereby in some working-class communities and cultures, “Talking about abstract ideas, books and culture, is seen as posh and pretentious.”^xii

Hall’s identity confusion would find expression in some of his most acclaimed work including Billy Elliot, as he made clear to pupils at his former school in the East End of Newcastle during a visit in 2009: “There were many similarities between our lives. I didn’t always fit in with the crowd because I liked films and writing, and Billy wanted to be a ballet dancer…”^xiii Expressing Yourself, a song from Billy Elliot – The Musical, includes the lines If you wanna be a dancer, dance/If you wanna be a miner, mine/Everyone is different… What we need is in-div-id-ual-ity, and the image of the lone ballet dancer silhouetted against a backdrop of miners is the leitmotif which best expresses Hall’s desire to be different, to be an artist (though in his breakthrough play I Love You, Jimmy Spud the more abstract conduit of an angel is employed in the same way). Prior to the production opening in London in 2005, Hall expanded on the interplay between personal biography and his writing: “Billy Elliot is a fantasy version of my childhood, a sort of ugly duckling fairy tale retold in County Durham. I didn’t have all of Billy’s personal problems but it was the same environment. I grew up roughly at the same time in the Northeast, and my aspiration to be a writer is akin to Billy’s to dance, in that nobody I knew was a writer and it wasn’t particularly understood what being a writer really meant. If you loved poetry, you were a bit of a poof.”^xiv

1. Tobias Smollett Peregrine Pickle (first published 1751 – this edition 1956). London: J.M. Dent & Sons, p208.
2. (i) Keith Armstrong Common Words and the Wandering Star, p12.

(ii) Sid Chaplin The Guardian 1960 © Estate of Sid Chaplin.

3. Keith Armstrong Common Words and the Wandering Star, p218.
4. Mark Akenside The Poet: a Rhapsody, p431.
5. Sid Chaplin The Day of the Sardine (first published 1961 – this edition 1983). Leeds: The Amethyst Press, pp286, 203, 267, 286.
6. Sid Chaplin The Day of the Sardine, p76.
7. Jack Common Kiddar’s Luck, pp127, 141.
8. (i) Mark Akenside The Poet: A Rhapsody, p429.

(ii) Sid Chaplin The Day of the Sardine, p191.

9. Jack Common Kiddar’s Luck, pp73, 127.
10. Jack Common Kiddar’s Luck, p128.
11. The South Bank Show: Lee Hall, ITV1 – broadcast 18^th October 2009.
12. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett The Spirit Level, p116.
13. Nicola Juncar Screenwriter steps into the limelight: Author goes back to school, Evening Chronicle 4^th June 2009, p20.
14. Terri Paddock 20 Questions With… Lee Hall 11^th April 2005 – accessed at www.whatsonstage.com.