For the last forty years or so the North East has been at a crossroads, gradually shedding its old identity as a place of heavy industry, like a reluctant snake shedding its old skin. Yet we haven’t fully built a new North East, although there have been many tantalising glimpses of what the future might hold for us.
Perhaps to build a truly successful Northumbria of the twenty-first century we need to look back at how and why we had such a strong and distinctive identity in the first place, as the region grew from being the cradle of the first industrial revolution to the place that Thatcher and her acolytes so determinedly destroyed forty years ago.
One way to learn about the old industrial North East and all its customs and traditions is to read the delightful Man with A Nose, by Maureen Taylor-Gooby, who is one of our North East Bylines writers.
Maureen was born in a colliery village on the East Coast of Durham, very similar to that in the story and says that she has “researched family history for myself and others. Along with observations, this book is a composite picture using this knowledge”.
The Man with A Nose
In the story we follow the trials, tribulations and successes of Florence, or Rencie as she comes to call herself, as she grows up in a County Durham pit village in the 1940s and 50s, passes her 11-plus exam, and winds up in the adult world that had seemed so strange to her, when she was a little girl, but a world where she is still determined to be herself.
Along the journey, Florence is accompanied by a number of companions, who are going on similar journeys of discovery about both themselves and the world around them and by Shadow, an intriguing inner voice within Florence herself.
Along the way, the reader is presented with their own journey through so much of the atmosphere and nature of the -North East when coal was king and people lived in supportive, if occasionally suffocating communities, awash with warmth and humour and a set of codes of behaviour, which while they may seem strange to an outsider, made perfect sense to those in the villages.
We see the overriding importance of the coal industry, but also the aspirations of a post-war generation who took advantage of the provisions of the 1944 Education Act, to reach for something that would have been beyond their parents’ grasp, or perhaps even understanding.
That it was a time of hope, in sharp contrast to today, is also ably demonstrated, with the sense of an exciting new world developing before Florence’s eyes as something new is built out of the ashes of the Second World War and not least by the ready availability of jobs and a hopefulness about the future.
We also see the importance of the chapel and other features of community life that seem to have been sadly lost today. Yes, those communities could be claustrophobic and you really had to toe the line to fit in, but something precious has been lost, since the sense of common purpose that was provided by the one main employer, a pit in the case of The Man with A Nose, but it could equally have been a shipyard in somewhere like Wallsend or iron and steel works in a place like Consett before they closed their doors for the last time.
The book also gives us a window into the wider world throughout the course of the story, as major events such as the launch of Sputnik and the Munich Air Disaster are gently interwoven into the storyline.
The story ends appropriately on the sound of the pit siren, thankfully not to herald another of the many terrible pit disasters that were a part of life on the Northumberland and Durham coalfield, but the New Year of 1960. The siren also signals that Rencie, as she and other call her, has perhaps found what she always wanted…and even Shadow seems happy at the end.
And who was the ‘man with a nose’? Well, you will just have to find that out for yourself, won’t you?
The book is an easy read, and the characters are well-formed and believable. I can well imagine that they are based on real people that the author knew, but I wouldn’t know exactly who they were!
The story provides the reader with a clear window back into a world that has disappeared, but should not be forgotten, especially as we seek to forge a positive, new way forward for our region. We can take the best of our heritage with us as e go forward and The Man With A Nose, can help us to do just that.
The Man With A Nose is available from Drakes Stockton, Featherbed Books Houghton and Back of Beyond Books Sedgefield Blossom Spring Publishing, and Amazon.
