I’ve always admired Park Crescent
I was born in New York just up the road, but I always count myself as a North Shields girl because I was brought up in what was known as the flats in North Shields. We first of all moved into Hudson Street but that was slum clearance, so we were only there about 6 month and then we moved into the flats in North Shields.
But looking round North Shields, especially over the last few years, there’s a lot of changes going on and I like to look at all the old streets and one in particular I’ve always admired is Park Crescent. I think they were built round about the mid 1800s about the same time as Northumberland Square and St Agustín’s church, but it is just a very impressive arched kind of terrace, it really is nice.
It became a bit more prominent in my mind when I joined the Tynemouth World War One Project. That was a group of people researching it so I took a great interest in men from Park Crescent and realised we lost 21 men from that one street. At number 18 you’ve got Alex Hastie but he was nicknamed Sandy Hastie. He was the skipper on the Reaper which was a steam trawler, and they sailed out on the 21st February 1918, they got just outside of Tynemouth piers, and they hit a German mine. Another one was William Purdy who lived at number 11, and he was killed in France on the 10th April 1918. He was the great nephew of the William Purdy who was the originator of steam trawling. There was also two young brothers, Thomas and John Errington lived at 42 and 43 Park Crescent, they were killed within 6 months of each other in 1916. George Stenhouse was killed in August 17; he lived at number 55. He’d been a telephonist for Richard Irvin and Sons on the fish quay, but he was also telephonist for Wilson and Gillies optician in the Square.
Linda in the WW1 Memorial Garden at The Linskill Centre
When you walk along Park Crescent, you probably see little blue plaques on the houses, and they were for the causalities and to commemorate in 2014 the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War One. Most of the 21 men would be remembered on memorials inside St Augustin’s. All 1700 North Shields and Tynemouth casualties are remembered in the memorial garden based at Linskill Centre North Shields.
I think there’s quite a few places I like in North Shields mainly the old buildings, but I do like Park Crescent. That sticks out in me mind because when you stand on one corner you can see it arches around and it’s just so, what I can call old fashioned.
Like most people these days I’ve been very lucky visiting different places but it’s an old saying, “There’s no place like home,” and I don’t think you can beat North Shields. Although I know you’ve got to move to the future and some things have to change there’s no doubts about it, I think it’s good to preserve the historical buildings too so that you’ve got a bit of the future, the present and the past in the town and I think that would be nice to do.
I was quite amazed how much I learned by doing that research and I do have some lovely memories of people I was very lucky to meet because they had relatives we were researching. It’s quite amazing how you can pass old memorials and just not realise who is on there. I do have another memory of another young lady coming in because an old Aunt had told her, “You’ve got a great uncle who was connected to the First World War.” She’d seen newspaper clippings that we used to put in the newspaper and she came in because of that and when I showed her on the computer what we had I turned round to talk to her, and I realised she was getting quite upset. So, I turned back to the computer to give her a minute to compose herself and eventually by the time I was saying goodbye to her she was okay. She was really thrilled with the information she was given and could take back to her family. But I asked her, “What really got to you, what was it that upset you?” and she said, “I walk past that memorial every morning walking me dog and I didn’t know he was on it.” She says, “I’ll say good morning now.”
Linda was interviewed as part of the North Shields 800 Voices Project.