Saturday, August 18, 2007

How good were these schoolboy footballers?

Many of the articles on site are informative and interesting but sometimes it is good to have a controversial edge. If that is how you feel, and you were born in 1944 or 1945, this article might be for you! It’s all about rating some of the local school team footballers that were parading their stuff at sometime during the period 1957/1960.

My long term memory is good, but not brilliant, so if you do not agree with any aspect of these ratings or I have used incorrect name details do tell me [I am sure that you will]. I would like to see some disagreement. By the way it is not the time for wilting wall flowers so I have not exhibited undue or false modesty!
 
Posted by cloughy at 11:16:01 | Permanent Link | Comments (4) |

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Hudson's

Having carefully researched photograph number 8 on gallery 5 (Ushaw Moor Historical Gallery )

I assess the date of it at c1904. Hardy, Francis and Edward Hudson lived at 36 Whitehouse Lane at about this time. Francis was born in about 1899, Edward in about 1897 and Hardy in about 1895.


Prize winning author Mark Hudson is related to the Hudson’s in the photograph. He visited the North East several years ago to research his family and spent sometime in Ushaw Moor. Richard Hoggart of the Sunday Times was really impressed with the prize winning book that resulted from Mark Hudson’s researches: ‘Hudson has told the story with emotional and stylistic depth, his eye unfilmed by sentimentality but open to sentiment; generous, open-hearted and quirkily reflective’ The book is entitled Coming Back Brockens’ and I referred to it in my 2001 booklet ‘4a and Friends’. I am sure that a local library can get the book for those of you who wish to read it. Much of the text is about Horden but there are references to Ushaw Moor.


Best regards


W Bell

Posted by cloughy at 15:05:56 | Permanent Link | Comments (4) |

A proud coalminer's daughter

I have just read Margaret Matson’s account of her childhood as a coalminer’s daughter and thoroughly recommend it to those of you who want to capture the essence of the Durham mining families.  It will take you little more than 15 minutes to read it. It covers the period 1936 to the late 1940s.


To access the article using Google simply type in the following:

Durham Miner [to find the article] then
Research Projects - then
Browse by title – it’s the very first of many interesting articles on the site.

 


Best regards,
W Bell

Posted by cloughy at 15:00:32 | Permanent Link | Comments (1) |

Friday, August 03, 2007

A JOURNEY THROUGH THE 20TH CENTURY

This is a brief trip starting at the beginning of the 20th century and ‘stopping off’ at a few selected places. It is reading for a rainy day.

The Ushaw Moor Wesleyan Church opened in 1900, three years after the Baptists had done the same thing. Attending church imbued respectability and gave an opportunity to network with fellow worshippers, often to mutual economic advantage. I suppose that church was also a balm that gave promises of a better life in the next world whilst deference was expected to be shown in this world to much better off ‘superiors’.

People of ‘the North’, at the beginning of the 20th century, usually [but not always] made the players of Derby County and their supporters very miserable every Christmas holiday. The evidence is as follows:
01/01/1901 Sunderland 2 Derby1
26/12/1901 Derby 1 Newcastle 0 [what a relief]
01/01/1902 Sunderland 1 Derby 0
01/01/1903 Sunderland 2 Derby 0
Revenge must have been sweet on 28/11/1903 when Derby beat Sunderland 7-2 at home.
Posted by cloughy at 10:28:53 | Permanent Link | Comments (14) |