Seaton Sluice Billy Mill

A Memory of Seaton Sluice.

My grandfather John Johnson was born around 1900 and lived all his early life around Billy Mill and Seaton Sluice. He told me that as a boy of about eleven he spent two weeks' holiday with his friend, the lighthouse keeper's son, on nearby St Mary's island and that they were able to explore part of an ancient underground tunnel leading from the island to Seaton Delaval Hall. I believe they were only able to go so far before encountering a roof fall - I've often wondered if any trace of this old passage probably used for smuggling, still exists. His cousin Joe Robson was, I'm told, the lifeguard at adjacent Colywell Bay. My elderly aunt (now in her mid nineties) tells me that as a girl both she and her sister saw Joe as a Northumbrian Adonis patrolling the coastline and winning the admiration of all. When I had a chance encounter with him in the mid- seventies outside the Working Mens Cub at Seaton Sluice, he pulled my grandfather's leg remorselessly in a ribald but kindly fashion. The image of the young god of the surf was replaced by an elderly Tyneside comic in a flat cap.
I remember nearby Holywell Dene with great affection and collecting brambles there in the fifties and sixties (it was only a walk away from my home near Earsdon) - and understand that my great-grandparents had a cottage by the old waggonway bridge at the Seaton Sluice end of the Dene - I think there are bungalows there now.The North Eastern Railway were going to turn the Hartley area into a resort but the First World War intervened. This former part of south-east Northumberland has in part now been swallowed by the sprawl of expanding Tyneside but part of its old charm still remains - the Edwardians loved the seaside and could see its potential.
When I joined the employ of the British Railways Board in Derby in the late sixties a face looked vaguely familiar - imagine my surprise when I discovered Eric Smith was a Seaton Delaval lad and had lived just across the fields from me during my boyhood. He shared both my love of the area and Newcastle United.Whilst on the subject of football, and NUFC in particular, it was always of amusement to me that my grandfather had journeyed to St James Park in a blizzard on the back of a haycart from Billy Mill to watch Newcastle play. I think he was also there on the black day they lost at home 9-1 to Sunderland.
All traces of the mill at Billy Mill disappeared in the late sixties - why no one thought to preserve it, goodness knows. The haycart no doubt became firewood long ago but Newcastle in recent decades have sometimes still played so badly that it would not be too hard to envisage another similar home trouncing! (God forbid!)

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