I’ve been
involved this year in Write Around The Toon, a student-led project which places
PhD Creative Writing students at Newcastle University in cultural venues across
Newcastle and Gateshead to undertake writing residencies. I first took
part in the project in 2012, at the request of Viccy Adams, when I spent time
at Bessie Surtees House on the Quayside. This time, as a full-fledged student,
I asked the project organiser, Joanne Clement, if I could – along with Bernie
McAloon – take up a residency at The North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers, to give it its full title.
The
Mining Institute (TMI) is an amazing building on Westgate Road, slap bang in
the middle of Newcastle, 2 minutes walk from Central Station. Adjacent to, and
effectively twinned with (though, there were ructions, I was cryptically told) the
Lit and Phil next door, TMI is an example of Victorian splendour and a monument
and memorial to industry not just in the North-East of England, but across the
world. As well as being a repository and source of information for mining in
times past, it continues to be used for contemporary studies into mining and
offshore drilling, as well as various other engineering projects, and it is –
to put it bluntly – an absolute joy of a place to behold. It’s a huge, huge
shame, then, that relatively few people know about it.
My visit,
in early November, was my first, and I very much had what Jennifer Hillyard,
TMI’s librarian, described as the “wow” look on my face as I first stepped foot
into Neville Hall. The view that greets the first-time visitor really is one to
make the mouth drop agog. After coming in from a typically balmy Geordie day
(read: hoyin’ it doon), and being welcomed with a cuppa tea, I quickly settled
into my day of enquiry and writing. Jennifer showed me around the building,
introducing me to the tracts, a store cupboard containing items of varying miscellany,
gifted or donated to the Institution over the years, and of course to the
lecture theatre with its magnificent semi-circular arrangement of seats
overlooking the lectern and a wall of past presidents beaming out at you from
their sepia frames.
Back in
the main hall, sat with a fresh brew at the huge, communal table, I began
ploughing through the tracts, amazed at the wealth of information and medley of
mining-related literature they contained. Wrap your head around these ‘Questions
For Mining Students’, below, as an example of just one of the wonders to be
found. Even the ‘Elementary Stage’ baffles me: “Q1.—How is the ore-bearing
character of lodes affected by variations in the nature of rocks forming the
wall? Give some examples.”
It didn’t take long
before I began writing, fairly aimlessly at first, into my notebook. Having
spent the morning talking with a variety of characters – the cleaner, who greeted
me; Jennifer, the librarian; two volunteers who were painting the doors
downstairs; Simon, the secretary; and a BSc student from Sunderland University,
doing his dissertation on Northern coalfields, and being ably assisted by the
cavernous knowledge of one of the Institute’s members – it quickly became
apparent that TMI is a place bound together by its community and acts as a
space, literally and figuratively, in which to think, ponder, research, study,
perform (a local circus act were rehearsing for a performance while I was there)
and, if you like, simply be.
Coming in from the
wind-whipped street and settling down to work for the day in TMI, I felt
incredibly fortunate. Not only to be in such a space, of solitude and learning,
of indebtedness to an aspect of the past of this place I come from, but a space
which simply values people sitting and getting on with their own silent acts of
study, repair, research or collaboration.
Having been shown an
assortment of Davy and Geordie Lamps, donated to the Institute, I soon began to
think about the Miner’s Lamp which belonged to my Great Grandfather and which
still has pride of place on the windowsill in my Grandparent’s house in South
Shields. Much of my PhD research is concerned with representing the past in the
present – a process of ‘palimpsest poetics’ which features in my thesis title –
and it was only a matter of time before I had to embrace, as far as the
North-East is concerned, one of the Elephants in the room of that past.
Seamus Heaney, in Finders Keepers, discussing the work of
Geoffrey Hill in a chapter called ‘Englands of the Mind’, says that:
“Hill’s celebration of
Mercia has a double-focus: one a child’s-eye view, close to the common earth,
the hoard of history, and the other the historian’s and scholar’s eye,
inquisitive of meaning, bringing time past to bear on time present and vice
versa.”
The poem I ended up
writing, ‘Forst’, hopes to achieve Heaney’s multiplicity of time, bearing –
simultaneously, perhaps – onto the past and the present. I use two Geordie
dialect words – ‘forst’ (first) and ‘marras’ (mates/equals) – in combination
with a more standardised English language structure. Readers, or listeners, of
my poem will note that the dialect, combined with non-dialect words and
phrases, often in complex patterns of consonance, make it a tough thing to read
or listen to. Without going into a detailed assessment of my use of stressed or
unstressed syllables and rhyme schemes or their lack, I will just say that the
inconsistency in dialect throughout the poem is something that I have been
quizzed about. But this is how we talk (taa’k), isn’t it? I’m proud to still
call myself (caall mesel) a Geordie, or a Sanddancer, but I realise that I (aa)
don’t speak the way my Great Grandfather would have done, his life spent
beneath the earth in South Tyneside, with his marras, hewers and putters. I’ve
never been down a pit (unless you count the replica drift mine at Beamish), and
here I am doing a PhD in Creative Writing, for God’s sake. Nicholas Moore, me
Great Granfathaa, could never have dreamt of such an existence!
So, the poem is an ode,
of sorts, to the past: an acknowledgement of where I’ve come from and how the
working lives and their associated traditions (the New Year ritual of first
footing didn’t, as far as I can ascertain, reach any further south than County
Durham) of the people in this area that birthed me have come to bear on the
reality of my present. Which is what I think The Mining Institute does: it
serves as a time capsule, in a way, chronicling the documents, maps, diaries
and logs of mines and miners, yes, but it also functions in the present day as
a place for learning to continue to flourish. A living genealogy.
Joanne kindly made a
recording of me reading ‘Forst’, which will be up on the Write Around The Toon
website soon. Sadly, I was unable to be filmed in situ within the venue, though
Bernie was, and you should take a deeks (have a look) at her film, which
explains her own research into the effect of mining in parts of County Durham
on the lives of its women. Additionally, why not make a visit to TMI yourself?
You never know what you might find, beneath that great statue of the Institute’s
founder, Nicholas Wood.
