Valley View

England’s Lane, Belsize Park, London 1974, at the home of Conroy Maddox England’s leading Surrealist: Vince Rea and I had motored down here from Jarrow. Vince was in his forties: I was 17. Vince Rea was looking for exhibitions material for his gallery, The Bede Gallery, Jarrow.

Vincent Rea was(is) a very handsome man, like a Caravaggio model, looks distilling from both Irish and Italian male beauty. Although more heterosexual than a Bison bull, Vincent Rea could talk freely about homo eroticism and often did. Tall, with a square Roman face, his wavy hair at once pewter and brown at the same time.

Perhaps these good looks helped him infiltrate the The Cultural Scene, like, of 1950's Newcastle.

“You look like you’ve been sculptured by Michelangelo”,
A trainer says to Arnold Schwarzenegger in Pumping Iron. And after all Arnold Schwarzenegger spent a short time in North Shields.

I first met Vincent Rea in 1973, when having played tennis with my two pals John Boak and John Richardson in Jarrow’s Valley View Park I walked into The Bede Gallery, Butchers’ Bridge Road, Jarrow. Pivotal to this first encounter was that Vince Rea’s father, a rough diamond, grew up with my father, a local union man and politician: Perhaps I could help him get planning permission from Labour led Jarrow Council.

Vince Rea’s ‘tischreden’ lasted two hours which consisted of fabulous stories of his life as a merchant seaman, the Remington typewriter office on Newcastle Quayside, and illuminating insights into Adult and Artistic life. His conversation was studded with axioms and astute observations, which stamped themselves indelibly on me.

Vincent Rea belongs to an Exclusive Club of Two: Jarra Lads whose fame was hosted in Newcastle. (Under Newcastle Culture strangers and strangeness begins at the city walls). The other Jarra Lad was Patrick Woods, the Jarra Lad and team-mate of ‘Wor’ Jackie Milburn.

Vincent Rea was unusual for a Jarra Lad in knowing Sid Chaplin, Sirkka-Lisa Konttinen and the founders of Amber Films and The Side Gallery. Vincent Rea was really like an English version of Richard DiMarco or Cyril Gerber. These were often opportunistic entrepreneur artists and writers accessing Arts Council Grants.

Vincent Rea’s achievements may at last be appreciated when his Bequest is built in to Jarrow School. Vince told me once, if England was towed out into the Atlantic Ocean they’d be sending divers down to find it. Now that sort of thing he may have overheard at the University Theatre interval.

But when he himself expires, perhaps only then will his legacy be understood.

The Wasteland of Jarrow Slake*, where Vincent Rea seems un-pretentiously tortured by a spirit, was the execution place of William Jopling.

*The nearby pylon is the tallest in Northeast England.

Lynemouth

Lynemouth, Northumberland a still elemental linear town, birthplace of Sid Waddell, a great Englishman, who describes in, The Road Back Home: A Northern Childhood, and in rich and evocative unreconstructed vernacular, growing up and returning to Lynemouth. The interlacing of pit villages of Ashington, Lynemouth and Ellington with the Duke of Northumberland's* Alnwick, Morpeth and Cresswell acted out at the edge of industrial towns is emblematic for All of England.

Sid Waddell notices the polarities of Manse versus Presbytery, County versus Town and Red and White versus Black and White and Land versus Sea with Cresswell in between. Newbiggin by sea he says is a rough fishing village, astute, because Sunderland FC, during the General Strike and Miners Strike 1926, offered Newbiggin by sea free season tickets to Roker Park. (Newbiggin by sea is just visible from South Shields Pier on a clear day.)

Morpeth, like Market Harborough, children are the most eloquent speakers in England, and Morpeth is The Prettiest English Town.

*Owns dredging rights of The River Tyne. Note that delineation of Northumberland is a clean line changing from rural to developed along the line of Killingworth New Town. Durham land use is more fragmented. NB Cycling from North Shields to Berwick upon tweed it is possible to penetrate into the Alcan/Coastal Power Station but not cross the outflow and this is the only obstacle on the whole of the Northumbria Cycle Path.

Morpeth

Morpeth means Murder Path where fights occurred when Scots, camped nearby entered Morpeth by stealth by night. Scotswood literally meant raiders camped in a Scot's Wood outside Newcastle City Walls: The Roman Wall was gone, being reconstructed later.

Cycling across the featureless moor through the necessary damp white mist into Roxburghshire (Dumfriesshire or Berwickshire) marked by a rampant lion carrying hammer and sickle single mace reminding you you are entering a zone of tribally pure (and therefore interbred characteristically ‘turning a blind eye’ to incest) nomadic Picts whose fickle and ferocious heritage is looting the dead bodies of English soldiers: It reminds you you are entering a Foreign Country.

These roving extended families guard the route up to Edinburgh where at Arthur’s Seat (a magnificent volcanic buttress) the defence of Scotland is surrendered to Jacobite Tim Roth on a Dapple Mere.

As I Look North The View From England of Scotland evokes two Queen Elizabeth I frigates (HMS White Bear and HMS Rainbow maybe)(tbc)140 miles off Newcastle, intercepting Mary Queen of Scot’s and the cerebral edge English women have over Scottish women. Its important the Elizabethan warship was dispatched from Newcastle.

John Knox graced England by staying for a short while exiled in Newcastle.

Briefly, on my imaginary cycle trip to Auld Rekie I muse England's gleichschaltung under Scottish Government of England since James V became James I of England, under Scottish Born (Or Named) British Prime Ministers* and yearned for English Independence from Scotland: The motto might be 'Get Shot of A Scot'. Thinking a little deeper though on ‘Scotland The What’ and Andy Stewart and remember what Scotland is: A land of Golden Autumn run by The Gay Scottish Mafia and Doric speaking Scottish Widows.



*The Earl of Bute, George Gordon Earl of Aberdeen, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, Andrew Bonar Law, Ramsey McDonald, Harold Macmillan, Alec Douglas-Home, Tony Blair and ‘Son of the Manse’ Gordon Brown.

Gateshead

Board a train from London or the English Regions for Lancashire alighting at Liverpool. Being furthest from the dangerous and raging Continent of Europe here England is A Virtual Paradise. On the train, to Liverpool from Manchester (on a sandstone bluff near the confluence of the rivers Medlock and Irwell) knowing the Manchester Ship Canal is across an Estuarine part of The Cheshire Plain, flat and to the south far enough away for me to have to imagine it.

Journeying west across Lancashire (the feeling of separateness as Liverpool is apart from Manchester as Darlington is to Stockton) is the feeling of going to a better place.

The most powerful and telling image of Englishness is to see Orthodox
Jews of Ashkenazi originals from Salford, Hackney and Gateshead, standing willfully apart from the rest of English holiday makers in unfashionable out of season resorts like Southport (ironically on The North Lancashire Coast): On The Beach, between seasons almost, they drift along the seafront (not spending money obviously) always charmingly affronted at any one of us having the temerity to address them.

How much does this tell of humanity's love of Freedom and of Silences?

Lancashire's joy is it's remoteness from Europe. The railway network is most intense here as if Beeching's wife was from Accrington. The towns though are fragmented but there is still time to overhear the pure disilled essence of Englishness: the rarified beauty of Lancashire small town (or Manchester Suburb of This or That) in local Lancashire speech patterns and dialects.

The strongest reserve of rational speech based talking England emanates from the girl's schools of The Wirral and Crosby.

Walk out into Morcambe Bay beyond Southport Pier and see Chinese Cockle Gatherers, faint crouching figures on The Event Horizon of where the tide currently is, linking Lancashire with Guangdon and Pearl River delta.

Here the silence is complete. We are furthest away from trouble than we have ever been.

Here is a potential for empty silences: Is it any wonder Orthodox
Jews of Ashkenazi* sought and found refuge here?

* Here on The Island (Der Insel in German and Yiddish parlance) The most the largest concentrations of Orthodox Jews of Ashkenaziare are in:
• Stamford Hill in North London in the five wards of Brownswood, Cazenove, Lordship, New River and Springfield in the London Borough of Hackney, plus the ward of Seven Sisters in the London Borough
of Haringey.
• Broughton Park in North Manchester incorporating the wards of Broughton and
Kersal in Salford, and Sedgley in the Borough of Bury.
• There are also haredim in the Borough of Gateshead in Tyne and Wear, and in the
wards of Golders Green, Hendon and Edgware in the London Borough of Barnet.