Pies and Prejudice

by Stuart Maconie

  Geordies really are big in spirit and humour. A lot of the time, though, they aren't actually Geordies. For instance, Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer are from Darlington and Middlesbrough. The narrator from Big Brother, maybe the most famous 'Geordie' currently on British TV, is actually from Stockton-on-Tees. Most bitter-sweet of all, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, the finest evocation of Geordie life and for me the best British comedy series ever, is almost Geordie-free. James Bolam is from Sunderland, Rodney Bewes is a Yorkshireman. Even Brigit Forsyth, the lovely Thelma, is from Edinburgh.

  The Great North is riven with factionalism. Tribes proliferate, they lurk in every corner, they give each other odd, colourful, mildly disparaging names. There's Geordie, of course, and then Mackem and Sand Dancer, which are themselves quite prosaic next to Monkey Hanger, Pit Yacker and Smog Monster. Let's begin with the most intense bit of tribal rivalry, the one between Newcastle and Sunderland or Geordie and Mackem. It's now chiefly football-related but it goes back centuries. Back to when a midfield general really was a general in the middle of a field and all police leave was regularly cancelled for those fierce local derbies between the Cavaliers and the Roundheads.

  In 1642, before the Civil War had kicked off in earnest, King Charles I awarded all east of England coal trading rights to the merchants of Newcastle. This gave them a monopoly on coal, and the rest of us a proverb on the futility of taking coals to Newcastle. It also put their counterparts in Sunderland out of business.

  Perhaps in gratitude, Newcastle and most of the north-east supported the King during the Civil War with the sole exception of Sunderland, which acted as a supply base for the Scottish army, also siding with Cromwell. Two years later when Newcastle was attacked by the Scots, Sunderland helped the Jocks and it was a combined Scottish/Mackem army which defeated the forces of Newcastle and County Durham at the Battle of Boldon Hill. Newcastle was subsequently captured by the Scottish with Sunderland's help. Keen as I am on football, that certainly beats a disputed offside decision as a way to start a rivalry.

  Make no mistake, though, football is a very big deal here and has been for a long, long time. In 1290 the first recorded mention of football hereabouts concerns a man who was killed at a match near Morpeth. The north-east still regards itself with some justification as the football heartland of Britain, the breeding ground of most of our finest talent through different eras and styles, from Wilf Mannion's widow's peak to the Brylcreemed Jackie Milburn through Chris Waddle's disastrous mullet to Gazza's thuggish number one.

  While there's some truth in this, cynics from the rest of the north will often chunter into their half-time Bovril about Newcastle United's absurdly inflated sense of self-importance. This is a team, after all, who haven't won a domestic trophy for half a century and have spent the GNP of several African states in the not winning of anything. According to the 'Toon Army', the self-mythologising name they've given themselves, Newcastle United are a 'massive club'. You hear this time and time again and frankly no one outside the NE postcode seems to know what that means. It seems to mean, as it does with Manchester City, 'used to be quite good'.

  If, as those cynics suggest, there is monumental self-delusion at work here, it gets stoked regularly. Chairman Freddy Shepherd's claim that the Newcastle job is 'one of the biggest in world football' shows a loyalty to the club somewhat undermined by his comments that Geordie women football fans were 'dogs'. Former Magpies striker Micky Quinn once claimed that 'Newcastle is a bigger job than England', which is the football equivalent of saying that the horn section of Dexys Midnight Runners are controlling the weather through people's televisions. Geordies may be everyone's favourite northerners but a sneaking resentment of the Magpies is fermenting of late. You may be wondering, though, why I haven't mentioned Tony Blair's infamous 'lie' about watching Jackie Milburn from the Gallowgate End (he would have been four at the time and living in Australia). Well, if he'd said it, it certainly would have been as grievous an untruth as any about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. But he didn't say it. He said that he became a supporter 'after Jackie Milburn' and it was twisted by Tory columnists. From the south of England, naturally.

  My theory is that this exaggerated self-belief comes from the fact that Newcastle is a big city with only one football club. In Manchester, Sheffield, Glasgow, Liverpool, Bristol, Nottingham and even Northwich, there's a healthy competition and a sense of balance. Everyone in Newcastle supports the Magpies with a unity of purpose that borders on mass hysteria and conveniently forgets that in 1991, when Newcastle were in the old Second Division, average gates slumped to 16,000. They say 'sleeping giant', others say 'dormant under-achievers'.

  All of the above would be echoed to the rafters by their nearest rivals in Sunderland, still smarting from all that coal shenanigans and the memory of skewering each other with pikestaffs several centuries ago. My boss at Radio 2, controller Lesley Douglas, is a Geordie who supports Sunderland due to family history and is by her own admission: 'Not rare – unique. This isn't a friendly local rivalry. It's hatred. The derby game is more important than the rest of the fixtures put together.'

  Sunderland, too, has a great football tradition though the team's glory days are even more distant than the Magpies'. They won the FA Cup in 1973 and their manager Bob Stokoe did a funny little dance in a trilby and a flasher's mac that was definitely not Armani. But their halcyon days are as far away as the 1930s when Roker Park roared on Len Shackleton, the 'Clown Prince of Football' who endeared himself to the Mackems by once saying, 'I'm not biased against Newcastle – I don't care who beats them!'

  That phrase Mackem is derived from the terms 'mack 'em' and 'tack 'em', dating from the early shipbuilding industry. The folks on Wearside were said to 'mak[e] them' and other people 'tak[e] them' and it began as an insult to the people of Sunderland by the more affluent, canny Geordies. Like many a term of abuse, though, the people of Sunderland have reclaimed the name to be worn as a badge of Wearsiders. If you really want to annoy a Mackem, call them a 'Plastic Geordie' as the Teessiders do, meaning that they sound like Geordies but they're not quite the real thing.

  As for 'Geordie', it's the local variant of 'Georgie' or 'George', and there are a couple of explanations as to how it came to mean a Tynesider. One holds that it refers to Newcastle's support for George II during the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion or maybe even of George I during the 1715 Jacobite Rebellion. It's easy to lose track of those Jacobite rebellions. Or they may have got the name from Sir George Stephenson (of 'Rocket' steam train fame) due to local miners' preference for his lamp rather than the safety lamp of Sir Humphrey Davy. I quite like the idea that here in the twenty-first century we still refer to the natives of one of our major cities because of competing fashion trends in underground helmet illumination two hundred and odd years ago. Purists say that a person must be born within the sight of the River Tyne to be a Geordie but a more relaxed definition includes anyone born within the area from Wylam in the west through Newcastle to Tynemouth in the east.

  Over the last few years, the rivalry has taken on a new dimension thanks to wildly differing perceptions of the two cities (yes, Sunderland became one in 1991). Newcastle, like Leeds, has acquired a definite air of cool and an already striking city has blossomed, as I'm to find out. News has even reached the salons of London. But Sunderland hasn't had a decent press in years. That's not entirely fair on the city; some of its failings may just be failings of PR. But there's no getting away from the fact that Sunderland's story was for many years a gloomy one.

  In 1834 the yards of the Wear produced more ships than all Britain's other shipyards combined. Sunderland was the largest shipbuilding town in the world. For decades the story was one of continual, unstoppable boom. Sunderland shouldered the burdens of war manfully, producing one and a half million tons of shipping during World War Two. Generations of Wearsiders worked in those yards. The sea and its craft defined the town.

  By the 1950s, though, orders for ships were falling. Mass
-produced ships from Japan and Korea were cheaper and quicker to acquire than the bespoke one-offs of the Sunderland yards. Over thirty dismal years, the yards of the Wear closed one by one. Finally on 12 December 1988, the last ship built here was launched with little fanfare, a workaday ferry called Superflex November. Six hundred years of shipbuilding on the Wear came to an end. The giant yards of Docksford are now silent as cathedrals. There is something ineffably sad about an island race having to buy its ships, no longer having the wherewithal to make the boats to leave its own shores. No, I'd go further than sad. I think it's humiliating. But I'm not sure whose fault it is.

  If you want a more upbeat view of the region, you should talk to 'Sunderland arc'. They're a 'public-interest, private company with the objective of delivering the regeneration of Wearside ... charged with the task of improving Sunderland's economy, infrastructure and quality of life and the creation of a thriving city centre'. You can tell that they're a modern consultancy by the fact that they've forgotten that the word 'arc' in the title should have a capital a.

  'Sunderland arc' are doing their bit in a buzz-wordy, power-pointy, send-out-for-sushi Shoreditch-y kind of way (except no one in Sunderland ever bought a motorised scooter, even ironically). There is a kind of pleasing irony, though, in the fact that the most powerful and practical jump-start for the people of the Wear came from the land of the Rising Yen; the very nation whose cheap mass-production techniques did for Sunderland's shipwrights.

  While I was touring the north-east for this book, Sunderland was gearing up quietly for a significant anniversary. It was soon to be twenty years since the first car rolled off the line at Nissan Sunderland. It was a white Nissan Bluebird. You can see it on display in the Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens. It's not a terribly pretty sight – in fact it's been described as 'the least attractive car in any British museum'. But that's not the point. The point is that it was made in Sunderland with pride, reversing a tide of decline on Wearside for over three decades.

  The plant's location isn't conventionally pretty, stuck in a triangle formed by the A19, the A1231 Sunderland Highway, and the busy Washington Road. But with a little Japanese elegance of mind, conservation areas have been developed; ponds, lakes and woodland, oases of calm. Greener still, in 2005, six second-hand 200-foot wind turbines were installed smack in the middle of the site with the expectation of meeting seven per cent of the plant's overall power needs through wind power and reducing 100,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions per year.

  That first boxy little white car – built on a belt while the factory transistor crackled to 'Ooh' Gary Davies playing Five Star, I'll bet – has been followed by 4.3 million others thanks to a total investment of £2.3 billion. Nissan Sunderland has been Europe's most efficient car factory for the last eight years. It's well ahead of its nearest rivals, General Motors' Opel plant in Eisenach, Germany, Italy's Melfi Fiat factory and the Volkswagen factory in Navarra. If only Sunderland FC were as formidable in Europe against Italian, Spanish and German competition, there'd be dancing in the streets of Ryhope.

  This success has been built in part on the application of some very Japanese philosophies. Through the doctrine of Kaizen or 'Continuous Improvement', Nissan encourages everyone to make changes in their working environment, no matter how small, in order to make it more productive or workable. That can mean introducing moving platforms so that assembly line workers don't have to walk alongside the car. Or it could mean just storing the Swarfega at head height. Every department has its own Kaizen team.

  The JIT or Just In Time philosophy encourages the use of the minimum amount of resources (space, time, material, workers) necessary to add value to a product, while in accordance with the principle of Job Rotation, each worker is competent in at least three different jobs and at least three people are capable of doing each job. In theory, the factory doesn't worry about absence cover; the worker doesn't get bored.

  For a nation whose industrial relations tradition often consisted of bricking the boss's Mercedes or burly shop stewards being manhandled into Black Marias, this talk of quiet co-operation and the application of philosophy is rather strange. But just as Skelmersdale people are slow to mock the TM community, Sunderland has embraced their occidental way. East meets east along the Wear, with the philosophies of the Orient applied in the heart of Mackemland. I don't know whether this has led to a boom in sushi bars in Easington or a run on kimonos in Matalan but Sunderland has a lot of reasons to thank Mister Nissan.

  His plant thrums with industry, then, though the shipyards are barren and silent. Sunderland's once-proud ships are now being scrapped, which itself has raised a contentious issue for the north-eastern coast. Shipbreaking is in its own way as painstaking as shipbuilding, particularly if you're going to do it right and not contaminate the seashore with oil, wreckage and radioactive crap. Six hundred ships are broken every year, most in Bangladesh, Pakistan, India and China and broken in a way that endangers nature and worker alike. By 2010, there'll be 3,000 ships needing to be scrapped. We can't keep on dumping them on the coast of developing countries. So in November 2003, four giant US warships from the NATO ghost fleet in Virginia were towed into Hartlepool, some twenty miles down the coast, to be expertly dismantled.

  They're still there; huge eerie rotting hulks dominating the waterfront. Ships that were once state of the art, our bulwark against the armed might of the Soviet Union, now languish in the maritime equivalent of the knackers yard, waiting for a knacker that never comes. That should be Able UK. They're the company who have won the contract to break the ships but who have been blocked by environmental groups. Greenpeace approve of the ship-breaking, but not Friends of the Earth. They say the ships are toxic and can't be broken in the water and that building a dry dock will ruin a seal breeding ground. And so the ships have rotted and rusted in Hartlepool ever since, the wards of a legal battle as tortuous and slow-moving as Dickens's Jarndyce v Jarndyce.

  As we've detoured to Hartlepool, I should mention that the people hereabouts are known as Monkey Hangers though Hartlepool folk themselves are more than a little ambivalent about the term. The story goes that during the Napoleonic Wars, a French ship called the Chasse-Marée was wrecked on the coast at Hartlepool. There were no survivors with the exception of a lone monkey wearing a French sailor's uniform; presumably the poor creature having been dressed up to amuse those on ship. Having never seen either a monkey or a Frenchman, the simple locals assumed the monkey was a French spy, an impression compounded by his simian jabbering. The animal was thus sentenced to death and hung from the mast of a fishing boat.

  Some in Hartlepool see the funny side of all this. Despite the obvious implication that they are sadistic peasants, the football team Hartlepool United now have a mascot called 'H'Angus the Monkey'. 'H'Angus the Monkey' stood for election as Mayor of Hartlepool in 2002 and the person inside the monkey suit squeaked in on a protest vote, though he later had to back down on an election promise to give all schoolchildren free bananas. The monkey has even got his own statue down at the pretty new marina and is sometimes incorporated into events at the Hartlepool Maritime Experience. A word of warning, though; there are just as many Hartlepool folk who find the term Monkey Hanger insulting and you may find yourself on the receiving end of some robust physical punishment of your own without recourse to even a basic trial on the beach. While we're about it, I'd watch what you're saying just down the coast in Redcar, a tough, grimy seaside town that's reputed to be one of Britain's prime spots to get beaten up in. Even Redcar is trying to clean up its act these days, though. With its big empty beaches and ferocious North Sea winds, it's perfect for the new extreme sport of kitesurfing and a little enclave of enthusiasts is becoming established in the town. You can even see the odd porpoise basking in water that once had a scum of petrol.

  Long before Lycra-clad dudes in dreadlocks came to Redcar, this stretch of coast took its fun seriously. In the years before the coming of the package holiday, Geordie, Mackem and M
onkey Hanger alike would spend their summers sucking sticks of rock in South Shields, surely one of the few mining seaside resorts in Britain and a kind of Castleford on Sea. South Shields may never give the Cancun tourist board any sleepless nights but the largest town in South Tyneside has its admirers and its delights. Radio 2 controller Lesley Douglas was one of many north-easterners I spoke to who said South Shields had the best fish and chips in England, though I found the absence of steak puddings demoralising. But there's nothing like eating piping hot battered cod yards from its harvesting grounds. Please don't tell me it comes from Netto.

  South Shields is the home town of Eric Idle and Ridley Scott but the town's modest reputation as tourist destination these days is largely thanks to having skilfully marketed itself as Catherine Cookson country. Catherine was for many years the most borrowed author from British libraries (it's probably Jordan now) and every year South Shields gets thousands of visitors keen to see where she was born and raised. They're all devotees of her many books or, uncharitably, her many variations of the same book in which a decent Geordie scullery maid is impregnated by her handsome blackguard of a master but triumphs over adversity to become the owner of Jesmond's first 24-hour haberdashery. Catherine was never rated by the literary elite, a criticism she bore stoically as she dined on swan pasties and Château Lafite-Rothschild 1947 in her castle made of emeralds.