The Martin’s Memories series has been reproduced with the very kind permission of Tony Martin from his posts on the Old Blaydon and Old Winlaton Facebook group.
OLD Blaydon and OLD Winlaton | MARTIN’S MEMORIES 27 | Facebook
We leave the villages of Blaydon and WInlaton today and go on a walk which combines memories of my introduction to local history and geography and what I call “the whooping cough walk.”
Leaving the Avenues we make for the top end of March Terrace and take the Buggie Lonnen to High Blaydon. Initially, we walk through fields belonging to Loup Farm and then we reach the west end of Delacour Road where there are steps and beside them three buildings arranged in tiers down the slope. The first is Hertford House, built as a rehabilitation centre after WW1; next came the Scout Hut and finally the Comrades Victory Club, built originally by ex-servicemen after 1918. As we proceed down what was called Fountain Lane, there are a number of derelict and semi derelict buildings on our left and the large expense of waste ground called the Foundry on our right. This was originally part of Blaydon Ironworks. As we reach the main road, we see the Black Bull pub on the opposite side and a little to the right is Humble’s garage. A road goes down the side of the pub and crosses the main railway line to a quay which was used as the starting point for trips down the river.
This is High Blaydon, the original centre of the industrial village of Blaydon before the Spike and other areas were developed. At the bottom of Fountain Lane, we could turn sharp left up Horsecrofts where the Blaydon keelmen lived in times past, but we continue over the New Bridge, built in 1936 so that the main road to Hexham did not have to go down the hill from the Black Bull and across a narrow bridge over the Blaydon Burn and up another steep hill to Stella House. As we cross the bridge, we can look down on the huddle of buildings crammed into the valley of the Burn on the river side and onto the brickworks from the other side. This area was a hive of activity in my childhood. Across the bridge, we see Stella House, the home of Peter Craig, the greengrocer in my childhood, but an historic building originally built by the Silvertops of Dockindale, a leading Roman Catholic family who later became the owners of Minsteracres on the A68 just south of Riding Mill. It was also the home of T.Y.Hall, the mining engineer who invented the cage used to transport miners from the surface to the coal seams below.
Here, at the bottom of Summerhill, there was also a bay where lorries to collect coal in bulk. We walk a little way up Summerhill, cross the road and along a path skirting some allotments. By the side of this path was a fountain donated to the village by the Cowen family and which once stood near the Black Bull. A similar structure was later transferred to Shibdon Dene and became the Dene Well. Continuing we start the climb up to the summit of Summerhill and the folly on the top. Here there was once a statue of Garibaldi, the famous Italian nationalist leader, but I was told that it was broken and rolled down the hill during the Great War because Italy was on the wrong side. I can remember spending time by this structure and having explained what I was seeing – first by Uncle Stephen and later by teachers at Blaydon West School. It is often said that geographers and Old Testament prophets have one thing in common – they make for high places!! When I was first up here, there were no power stations and one could see Stella Hall surrounded by woods….there was a bridge across the road at the Stella Staithes pub which carried the waggonway bringing coal to the riverside for shipment. Looking east one could really appreciate the layout of the town and see how important the riverside and, especially the Spike. was as an industrial area.
On leaving Summerhill, my uncle would take me into the village of Pathhead, where his father had been born and where he had worked for a year on a farm, walking every day from the Spike. and then crossing the road, we would walk down the road, passing Hobbie’s Dam and crossing both the railway and Blaydon Burn as we made for Otto Vale byproduct works or the German Ovens as locals called them because they had been built by German engineers in the years just before the First World War. Dr. Morrison senior warmly recommended a trip to the tarworks for people suffering from whooping cough so when I contracted that childhood disease, Uncle Stephen took me around this trip every day and for his pains, also got the complaint when he was 70 years of age.
Otto Vale had to be experienced to be believed….the smell of tar and pitch was everywhere, the hissing as water was put on the coke to cool it, the smell from the neighbouring Benzole plant which made petrol from coal; the tar and oily water that seemed to be everywhere. No pollution control in those days. It was an amazing place, especially at night, when it lit up the night sky. Amid this array of coke and tar works was a small terrace which housed the most important personnel of Otto Vale. I wrote a short piece about this street a few years ago and it can be found by typing “On the Street Where They Lived II in the search box at the top of the OBOW page.
Leaving the German Ovens behind us, we cross a field which takes us to the bottom of Twizell Avenue. The thing that struck me about this street was that the gable of the bottom house was shored up by a wooden framework….I have often wondered if the structure was still in place or whether the gable end had collapsed. From here a track went along the bottom of an area of allotments between Twizell Avenue and Till and Lanercost Avenues and then using the back lane of one of these one emerged on the road that led to March Terrace and back to the Avenues.
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