View from ... Shields Weekly News of 1985
Here's a page from the Shields Weekly News, the local newspaper for North Shields, dated Thursday, August 29th, 1985.
I found it in amongst some clippings kept by my old dad, Howard Thompson who was involved with the rescue boat team at Tynemouth Sailing Club. The reason he kept this item is because the club was hosting the national Enterprise dinghy yacht competition. It must have been over the August Bank Holiday weekend.
But disaster struck in the way of Force 6 gale, unusual for that time of the year.
The news item tells us that over twenty dinghies capsized.
Ordinarily, the sailing club holds races in the more placid waters of the estuary of the Tyne, inside the safety of the North and South Piers.
Because of the prestigious nature of this race, it was staged in the more dangerous waters of the open North Sea where safety would have been a bigger concern.
And now a storm kicked in.
Having a rough idea of forecast, one can only imagine if the race organisers had agonised over whether the event should take place.
Having had direct experience in helping my Dad with rescue operations in the inaugural 1974, primarily by sitting in Tynemouth Coastguard station with a powerful set of military-grade binoculars (captured from the Germans) and watching out to sea if any boats capsized, I know that twenty going over would have been highly alarming and a real danger to life.
Someone, then, made the decision to call out the RAF in Boulmer and deploy Sea King helicopters to rescue those sailors stuck overboard.
It must have been quite a dramatic and arduous day for the organisers, quite a relief to know that, too my knowledge at least, there weren’t any life-threatening casualties and that all the capsized boats recovered, presumably towed back into the Estuary and safely to Sailing Club’s base at the Prior’s Haven.
As a kid, I used to pore over the Shields Weekly News. I don’t know what attracts me to reading local newspapers – I would like to think it’s because I recognise a street or a place or the name of someone. Anyway, all human life – for good or for bad used to be in these pages.
The newspaper items are of the time – 1985 was a very poor era on Tyneside. It was at the height of Thatcher’s Britain where traditional industry and mining were in their final throes and the dole queues were long.
There wasn’t much money about in North Shields so it’s no surprise the news page is filled with petty crime – there were lot of break-ins and minor robberies.
So, in 1985 it was perfectly normal for somewhere like the Rex Bingo Hall next to North Shields railway station to have had its fruit machines robbed,
Somebody nicking nine cartons of frozen cod from the back of a lorry on the Fish Quay didn’t turn heads.
Couple of fourteen year old boys playing with matches in the backyard. So what? When a lit match hot exploded on impact with the petrol can, well the kid “was being stupid” – reported to the police and probably met with a clip round the ear.
What a page this was!
To top it off a “nightclub incident”! Yes, a bit of fisty-cuffs outside Mingles on the Whitley Bay seafront. Mingles was a notorious dive, popular with all the cool kids at the Sixth Form College. In its heyday when it was a rock club dive featuring frequent appearances from famous local band the Tygers of Pan Tang who went on to get a bit of national success.
As a gawky stay-at-home teenager, I was very jealous of missing out, although perhaps not if I’d been punched in the face by a drunk outside the front door.
Such fun!
Tynemouth
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