The historian David Olusoga has been in the news quite a lot recently. He was one of the celebrities in the popular series Celebrity Traitors, and an acclaimed new series of his own on the BBC entitled Empire. While David Olusoga is becoming more of a household name, what is less well known about him is that, while he was born in Lagos in Nigeria in 1970, to a Nigerian father, he grew up in his mother’s hometown of Gateshead.
When speaking on another of his BBC series, Union about the history of the United Kingdom, Olusoga described Gateshead as his hometown.
What is not so well-known is how Olusoga went to the same school as another very famous person from Gateshead: Paul Gascoigne. And it was on the school playground that the two met in a memorable encounter many years ago.
Combating racism on the school playground
Sadly, when David Olusoga was growing up In Gateshead in the 1970s and 80s, the area in which he lived suffered from more than its fair share of racism, with a considerable amount of support for the National Front.
David Olusoga has recalled that:
“My older sister, Yinka, was three years ahead of me and in her class was Paul Gascoigne. I have one memory of Paul, one strong memory, which is of lying on my back having been pushed over and hit in the playground and this kid with light coloured hair and very bright blue eyes leaned over, he was beside my sister and he gave me his hand and he pulled me up.
“He must have been maybe nine, I must’ve been maybe six or seven, something like that. He was one of the tough kids, you won’t be surprised to learn. It wasn’t really in his interest to be looking after this couple of black kids. And I’m very grateful for that.”
When asked about the incident years later, Gascoigne is said to have responded:
“I was only young but I do remember. I hated bullies and I did not like what was happening.”
Geordies against bullying
We have two stories here, of life in Gateshead in the 1970s. One of small boy being racially bullied, because of the colour of his skin and his background, and the other a story of a local lad, who helped a black boy out because he hated bullying. The question arises then; which story represents the true spirit of Tyneside and the North East?
I am reminded of the chapter in the 1992 book Geordies about the assimilation of the Yemenis in South Shields. In the chapter Barry Carr tells the story of Yemenis who came to the Tyneside port town in increasingly large numbers just after the First World War, there was then something of a racist backlash. In time though, South Shields came to represent a beacon of multicultural hope in a country experiencing immigration from the Caribbean and South Asia in the 1950’s and 1960’s.
When talking of the future of the North East, Carr states that:
“The shape this future takes in each place will depend on the regional identity of these places. South Shields’ history does suggest that the North-East identity has the character and flexibility to make this future a decent one.”
In relation to Gascoigne’s explanation of why he helped David Olusoga up off the playground all those years ago, Carr also talks of the assimilation of Yemenis that:
“When the practical results [of] this prejudice became apparent, many people must have realised that the whole ethos of Tyneside working-class culture was anathema to the bullying on which racism is built.”
While some may challenge this optimistic view of Tyneside and North East culture; not least David Renton who wrote a book doing just that, Colour Blind? Race and Migration in North East England Since 1945, published in 2008; the region has seen a number of episodes down the centuries, which seem to display just such a dislike of bullying and racism.
These have included support for the abolition of first the slave trade, and then slavery in the British Empire, the assimilation of the Irish and Yemeni communities, and the rejection of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists Blackshirts in the 1930’s.
At a time when the far-right are on the march again, both in this region and across the country, it is good to be reminded of the generosity of spirit of the young Paul Gascoigne that day many years ago, when he rejected the bullying of the racists and helped David Olusoga. Let that kind of memory be an inspiration, as we oppose the bullying of racists in the North East today.
