Fifty Years Or So Ago

A Memory of Earsdon.

I lived on Hesleyside Road, Wellfield in the late 1950s/early 1960s and as a boy knew all the local fields and highways and by-ways. Although I left the area some years later as I entered my teens I never really lost touch with the vicinity due to a wealth of relatives and friends living in SE Northumberland and on Tyneside. In those days Earsdon had three pubs that I was too young to visit, although I undertook a Scouting 'bob a job' task at the now long gone Phoenix Inn. At that time the no 17 bus used to wind its way through Earsdon village as did the burgundy/chocolate coloured Hunters single decker from Seaton Delaval to Shields. From my bedroom window I could see the beam from St Mary's lighthouse flashing across the night time sky and the distant roof of the Beehive Inn over the flat fields; also in my first year or so living there, the faraway plumes of smoke from the steam-hauled local trains from Monkseaton up the Blyth and Tyne to Ashington. These were soon replaced by the first generation of diesel multiple unit trains as the line through Holywell Dene faced its final years. As a family we always referred to nearby West Monkseaton station as Toytown station due to its simple 1930's architecture. Here the Tyneside electrics passed through every twenty minutes in each direction of the loop to and from Newcastle. Nearby farms I seem to remember were either owned or leased by the NCB and their fields were often populated by large hares that boxed one and other in the most amusing fashion.One of the girls at SouthWellfield Primary was I believe a local farmers daughter called Rosa Meadows - which even then I thought a very apt name for a farmers offspring.  Some of the area had been subjected to opencast mining just after the Second World War - hence the flat billiard-table-like fields. Over the hill from Earsdon lay the coal field in earnest, with the Eccles and Fenwick pits and the Backworth rail network complete with its smokey engine sheds and even smokier industrial tank locos. When I visit the area now, mainly to see Newcastle United play, I have pinch myself to remind myself it's the same place. Fewer fields, no pits, more houses and few I remember that are still in the land of the living!   

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