July 12, 2015
Newbiggin, England: For those in peril on the sea - and below ground
DON'T ASK ME why but two people stand permanently at sea off Newbiggin. There they are, calm or storm, gazing at ships that pass. They're wonderfully detailed, five metres high, so from the shore they look life-size. They're just high enough that at high tide they're standing on the water.
Just a way of cheering people up on this cold stretch of North Sea between the grander attractions of Newcastle and Edinburgh, I think.
Anyway, we've stopped in Newbiggin after a demanding but varied day of town and country, cyclists met and disasters and steam trains discovered.
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Pity Me neatly fills the gap between Durham and Chester-le-Street, which in turn stands south of Washington and then Newcastle. It's Newcastle upon Tyne, by the way, no hyphens, pronounced New-CASSLE. It's Geordie country, picking itself up from repeated recessions. In 1936 two hundred men marched to London for 25 days in the Jarrow Crusade, after the town from which they came. Only three in ten men had jobs and there was no sign of getting better.
Emaciated men walking in ragged clothes and oilskin capes moved - shamed - the nation. Many hundreds joined in as they passed. The government, which believed in a market economy, was forced to blush and build a shipyard and an engineering works. But not until the war three years later were the men of Tyneside sure of eating again.
With all these post-industrial towns to cross, and they all but join up, this was never going to be a spin past cuckoopint and dozing moles. But things went well enough and we got through Gateshead, across the Tyne from Newcastle, by housing streets, pedestrian underpasses and bike paths. And then the Tyne, majestic and arched by its seven bridges, all in a row.
The cleverest is for cyclists and walkers alone. It's too low for ships to pass so, instead of parting or rising conventionaloly, it swivels and rises above the water. We sat on the bank eating hot dogs and hoped it would happen. But it didn't. Instead we chatted with a stallholder across the pathway who knew about cycling and asked if we knew Josie Dew.
We said we did, a tiny girl with a blond, electric-shock haircut and a perky personality to match. But we hadn't seen her for years.
"Read any of her books?" he asked.
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"Yes, several," I said. One told of her ride in America, "a strange state" but familiar because of her American mother.
"Got any news of her?" he asked, with unusual interest.
I said I hadn't and asked why.
"Because I'd heard her knees and back had gone and I wanted to know if that was true. Shame if they have."
We passed a chunk of Hadrian's Wall and pressed on to the graveyard at Earsdon. My interest in social history and the hardship of humans and they way they have been treated made me keen to see it.
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"You want the memorial?" a German voice asked as the owner leaned out a dark blue Land Rover (like Newcastle upon Tyne: no hyphen).
I agreed we did and asked how he knew.
"You look the kind of people who'd be interested," he answered, although he didn't say how.
We found it at the bottom of the dark, leafy graveyard behind St Alban's church at the end of the village. It was a moving moment. In 1862 the single shaft to the coal corridor collapsed when the pump at its head broke, fell down the shaft and brought timbers down with it.
The owners had refused a second shaft because of the cost, so men below were trapped. And there were more than usual, including 10-year-olds, because the old shift was still down there when the new one arrived. More than 200 died, suffocated or choked by gas.
Sixty thousand were at the funeral and thousands from all over the country, especially other miners, sent so much to help widows and surviving children that the total reached six times more than the amount needed.
It was never again legal to have a mine with only one shaft.
Today's ride: 81 km (50 miles)
Total: 1,801 km (1,118 miles)
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