What does it mean to be a Geordie? Barry Nelson looks at an updated collection of essays giving a unique picture of the region.
GEORDIES: Roots of Regionalism by Robert Colls and Bill Lancaster (Northumbria University Press, £11.99): WHEN the first edition of this fascinating collection of essays was published back in 1992 the North-East was still recovering from the worst excesses of Thatcherism.
Smarting from the apparently wilful neglect of mining and shipbuilding and fearing for the future of any remaining industry, the region's mood is reflected in the defiant, sometimes angry tone of some of the contributors.
Playwright Alan Plater writes bitterly of North-East working and community traditions being kicked to death 'by the bovver boots of Thatcherism'.
While the overall tone of the collection is serious and scholarly, anyone with an interest in North-East history, tradition and culture should find something to fascinate or amuse them in this slim 198 page volume.
Apart from the political - with a small 'p' - stuff, the mixed bag of contributors discuss comic regional dialect, North-East sporting heroes (did you know that champion rowers were the toast of the region back in the 1860s and 1880s, long before professional football began?), the rise of North-East drama and comedy, the feminisation of the region's workplaces and even the little known history of the South Shields Yemeni Arabs, who overcame racism to become part of the Tyneside community.
The overall mood of the more political essays is of resistance to what is perceived as a politically-hostile, uncaring establishment in the South and the need to rebuild the region.
There is tremendous pride taken in the region's leading role in Britain's industrial revolution but a feeling that it is time to look to the future.
Amusingly, one of the first edition essays has a mocking dig at the "re-branding" of Glasgow which was going on in the early 1990s, implying that this could never happen to Newcastle. Any neutral observer would agree that the image of today's tourist-friendly 'Newcastle-Gateshead' owes much to what happened on Clydeside more than a decade ago.
In the original 1992 preface the editors Robert Colls and Bill Lancaster suggest that an essential part of that process of rebirth is setting up some form of devolved regional government for the North-East.
But any North-Easterner who reads this book who has no connection with Newcastle, or what the former Newcastle United chairman Sir John Hall memorably described as "The Geordie Nation", may feel left out.
Despite the editors stressing that they make no apologies for using the term "Geordies" to stand for all of the North-East's different tribes, from a Darlington perspective this flies in the face of reality in a still culturally divided region.
Many smaller communities in the North-East will regard being called 'Geordies' as a bit of a cheek (or an insult if you favour red and white stripes and hail from Sunderland).
This lack of awareness of the gulf between the metropolitan regional capital and the rest of the North-East does not bode well for the future success of the Great Geordie Project.
As we now know from this year's emphatic referendum rejection, the dream nurtured during the 1980s and 1990s of a semi-autonomous 'Geordieland', appears dead for the forseeable future.
This departure from the plot is acknowledged, regretfully, in the new 2005 foreword. According to the editors: "The 'No' vote on the 2004 referendum to establish a regional assembly was a sad, if predictable, answer, and a reminder that regional identity and cultural particularity are not necessarily the same as political regionalism."
These views sum up the dilemma for the North-East. Are the editors' dreams of a single, democratically-accountable voice for the region a lost cause?
TYNESIDE: A History of Newcastle and Gateshead from Earliest Times by Alistair Moffat and George Rosie (Mainstream £20 hardback)
WHEN the authors of this lively, well-written and attractive survey of Tyneside history say 'earliest times', they really mean it. Not content to take readers through the usual story about the Romans constructing the first major river crossing to the building of the New Castle by the Norman invaders, Messrs Moffat and Rosie start their story way back in the mists of prehistory.
How many people in the North-East realise there was a gigantic 300 mile per hour tsunami wave which struck the region thousands of years ago? How many people know about the sunken land scientists know as 'Doggerland' which once lay between the North-East coast and continental Europe?
My one reservation about a book published in Edinburgh and written by two Scots is the occasional lapse in local knowledge. Please take note gentleman, Darlington is not in Yorkshire.
Overall, though, I would unreservedly recommend this to the general reader.
Published: 17/01/2006
