My colleague Peter Sagar’s reflexions on the death of US President Jimmy Carter and his visit to Tyneside in 1977 re-awaken my own memories of that day and its aftermath. If readers will allow what is a purely personal indulgence, I will share my own somewhat hazy reminiscences.
As a political reporter on the Evening Chronicle at that time I had been allocated a seat in the Press section outside Newcastle Civic Centre to hear the speeches by President Carter and UK Prime Minister James Callaghan.
As a Mackem, I would have encountered an unexpected problem when reporting what the President had to say: “How do you spell Howay? Or is it (Ha’way)?” I still don’t know the definitive answer, if there is one.
However, instead of facing that puzzle I was caught up in another inconvenient difficulty which affected my experience of the working day much more radically: I was in strike.
Taking industrial action was a much more frequent occurrence in the 1970s than today, and the National Union of Journalists was no exception. The union had called the one-day strike, as I recall, not with Carter’s visit in mind, and it wasn’t local to Newcastle either. It was meant to sabotage coverage of the previous day’s council election results in England and Wales.
As a result, instead of sitting in my privileged seat in front of the Civic Centre I stood at the back of the crowd, where I could just make out in the distance the President, the Prime Minister and, choregraphing the whole show in full ceremonial regalia, my near neighbour and Lord Mayor of Newcastle, Councillor Hugh White.
Friendship Force
I wasn’t completely uninvolved in Carter’s visit however. Ahead of the day itself I reported that Newcastle would be twinning with Atlanta, Georgia – Carter’s home state – through the Friendship Force established by the First Lady, Rosalynn Carter, and that the President would be honoured with the Freedom of the City of Newcastle.
But around the time of the visit itself my main preoccupation as a reporter was more routine – the abuse of car allowances at the Civic Centre.
The Friendship Force did, though, give me an opportunity to become involved in the follow-up to the presidential visit. On 4 July that year a planeload of around 250 citizens of Atlanta landed at Newcastle Airport while the same number of Geordies, including one of my colleagues from the Chronicle, travelled in the opposite direction.
Mike, a reporter on the Atlanta Journal (an evening paper) was to be the guest of my family for the duration. I don’t think he was impressed when I picked him up at the airport and asked him to squeeze into the back seat of my old Mini. But I think he still enjoyed the North East.
Mike later moved to Washington (no, not the Sunderland suburb) to work for a prestigious political newspaper, and I like to think there has been at least one journalist working in the American capital over the past 40 years who remembers the historic sights of Durham, Holy Island and Roman Wall country as well as the raucous enjoyment of Newcastle’s nightlife.
A year later I got a second chance to see the President at close quarters when it was my turn to travel to Atlanta with the Friendship Force. Carter was speaking at a gathering of the men’s group of the 30,000-strong Southern Baptist Convention in the city’s main conference centre. I’m afraid I can’t remember a word he said, but he certainly didn’t hail his evangelical audience with a repeat of “Howay the lads.”
I reported for the Chronicle on the rapid transit system under construction in Atlanta at just the same time as the Metro was being built on Tyneside. In spite of some differences, the similarities between the Metro and Marta (the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority) were notable.
If Carter picked up a Geordie phrase while in Newcastle, the visitors to Atlanta took a traditional Tyneside song with them to their twin city. During an evening in a local club they soon had the jazz pianist, rather like Sam in the film Casablanca, leading them in a rendition of Blaydon Races.
Somehow I doubt that the residents of this twin city of Newcastle are still singing about “gannin’ alang the Scotswood Road” in the same way that Geordies remember Carter uttering their own football cry of encouragement.
