Adamson Book Chapter 2 Send Me A Winger

     I think it must have been seeing that old picture of Jimmy with the Scottie in his garden that set me thinking I really had to do something about this Adamson book. It intrigued me. It made me feel a link with him because for several years I had a Scottie too. What little beggars they are, stubborn and independent; but they grow on you, make you smile, a big dog in a little body. These dogs have a heart the size of a bus.

   Then it was whilst working with one of Jimmy Adamson’s protégés, Paul Fletcher, that I learned that in addition to all the memorabilia in the club’s glass cabinets, Jimmy’s grandchildren had collections of his souvenirs and pictures. I had my own collection too that I’d amassed over the years along with huge scrapbooks of the 70s that someone gave me years ago. I’d written books about Harry Potts and Jimmy McIlroy, and articles about Bob Lord so that the 60s were a familiar period. The library in Burnley I knew had newspapers going back years on microfilm.

     The urge to do something grew. Paul gave me a phone number, Jennie Halstead, one of the grandchildren who lived in Chorley, and I got in touch. On the Claretsmad messageboard I came across the pen name ‘Ashingtonclaret’. I’d no idea who it was but put a request on that board that he might get in touch with me. A reply came quickly. His name was Alan Parker and yes it turned out he lived in Ashington. He even knew John Angus who played alongside Jimmy in the great team of 1959/60. Alan, retired from the RAF, happily agreed to help and dig out what he could up in the north-east. With help assured from Alan including an invitation to stay with him should I ever head up to Ashington, and contact details for the local historian Mike Kirkup, the decision to press on with the book was confirmed. That first email from Alan was a huge boost.

     Mike runs an Ashington local history magazine called ‘A Creeful of Coals’ and immediately agreed to put a short feature into it outlining the book and inviting anyone who had known Jimmy to get in touch. ‘I have a copy of Jimmy’s signing on papers,’ he replied.

   May, 1947: Jimmy was just 17 and had joined Burnley in the previous October having been ‘spotted’ by Burnley scout Jackie Dryden at East Chevington Juniors. Yet here he was on the train to London with people like Harry Potts, Alan Brown, Harold Mather and Manager Cliff Britton. Was he wide-eyed and filled with anticipation? Did he look at the players around him in awe or was he mature beyond his years and take it all in his stride? Having already spent three years working down the mines he was already well on the way to being a man. Jimmy Strong was Burnley’s goalkeeper and came from Morpeth near Ashington. Harry Potts was from the north-east. It’s reasonable to think they put an arm round Jimmy’s shoulder and helped him along and tried to make him feel at home. At least, hearing their voices he wouldn’t feel too out of place. There was a hotel bedroom the like of which he had never experienced before, three-course meals for the first time ever, the sights and sounds of the bustling city, and then the first sighting of the Twin Towers on an unseasonably hot day. It’s reasonable to assume he might have pinched himself. Only months earlier, he had been just an ordinary lad working down the pit in Ashington and maybe thinking he’d be there for the rest of his working days with the background of a home life that had never been easy.

     There used to be this joke up in the north-east many years ago that you could shout down a pit for a footballer and a dozen would appear. In Ashington they refined that. You could shout down not just for any footballer but you could shout ‘send me a winger’ or ‘send me an inside-forward.’ Burnley Football club made full use of this and the stream of footballers from the north-east down to Lancashire seemed endless. There was a time in the fifties and early sixties when a Burnley first team could easily have been made up of Geordies.

     Ashington was once labelled the biggest pit village in the world. It had five mines and a huge workforce; the Ashington Coal Company alone once employed 10,000 workers. In 1960 the total workforce in the town was 30,000 although by 1980 it was declining to under 20,000. By then only half of them were men and only a small proportion of that number was employed in mining. Whilst a woman’s role was once solely in the pitman’s home, today the gender of employment has changed and employed women outnumber employed men. The world of Ashington that Jimmy Adamson entered no longer exists. It was a man’s world and men’s values dominated everything. They were pitmen – and in this there was a fierce, provincial pride.

     Mike Kirkup in his introduction to Images of Ashington provides a snapshot view of the development of the town which was to shape the young Jimmy Adamson.

     ‘The Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century shaped both the landscape of Ashington and the lifestyle of its inhabitants. Prior to this, the few village residents had huddled together for warmth and security in their tied cottages next to one of the mere half dozen farms in the vicinity.

     Lying sixteen miles north of Newcastle upon Tyne, Ashington’s strength was always destined to lie, not in historic buildings or scenic beauty, but in its people, the canny folk who worked long and hard in an effort to put Ashington on the map. Yet until the pits arrived, no cartographer even bothered to include the village on the map of Northumberland. However, that changed when the entrepreneurs moved in, howked great holes into the green fields, and decreed that Ashington should be the biggest mining village in the world.

     That village soon became a town with all the trappings of an urban district council. The Reverend J.E. Gordon Cartlidge, vicar of St John’s, Seaton Hirst, highlighted the problems facing the first council in those early days: “It is difficult to realise the arduous task – poor roads, ash footpaths, little lighting, pools of water all over the place where ashes were worn down or washed away, open ash-pits, earth closets, no Picture Palaces, no public park, no buses – and yet there was an amazing friendliness wherever you went. .. “

    …The new community in Ashington was a rare mixture. Most counties in England were represented: tin miners from Cornwall, lead miners from Cumbria, coalminers from Durham whose own pits had closed. All were intent on making a new life for themselves and their families. Irish men and women, who had abandoned their native isle during the potato famine, discovered pots of gold, black gold, on every corner- end in Ashington. Italians found that the local children were ready-made customers for their particular brand of ice-cream and fish and chips. After the Second World War yet another ingredient was added to the Geordie pot when a large Polish community settled in town; little wonder that the broad Ashington accent reflect s this heady concoction.

     With the influx of people came the mushrooming of houses; colliery rows, back-to-backs, built within spitting distance of the pityard. Amenities were few and wages were kept pitifully low. But the miner accepted his lot, not knowing his true worth to the coalmine owners or the country. This was to come with the conflicts of two world wars. When the government of the day shouted out for coal to fuel its munitions factories, trains and ships, their plea did not fall on deaf ears. The Ashington miners responded to a man. But, when the time came to give the miners a lift, a helping hand, political backs were turned.

     With the growth in population came the need for more shops, more schools and more places of worship. Soon, Ashington spilled over to join Hirst, the division between the two being the railway line. The population grew to almost 30,000 between the two wars, almost 10,000 of whom worked in the coal trade.

   In the heyday of the town in the 1950s it was thought nothing could change the euphoric optimism that swept everyone along with it. Miners’ wages crept to the top of the earnings ladder; a strong, well-led union saw to that. Much of the surplus cash was spent in the splendid shops that lined Station Road, the main street. The five-day week meant more leisure time and holidays could be spent either at home or abroad. How could the good times possibly end? Didn’t the experts say that the town was sitting on enough rich seams of coal to last well past the year 2000? Perhaps they did.

     But time proved them wrong. (Courtesy of Mike Kirkup)

     The mining way of life vanished from the sixties onwards as one by one the mines closed. All that is left today is a museum. It was this community way of life of comradeship, danger (there were 13 deaths in one incident in 1916), injuries, coal-dust, and lines of terraced housing; domestic hardship, poor facilities, and limited leisure into which Jimmy Adamson was born. Some of the tunnels the men worked in were no more than three feet high. The associated illnesses were pneumoconiosis (a lung disease), and nystagmus (an eye problem). Day after day Jimmy saw his father come home covered in pit grime and coal dust, face blackened, limbs aching.

     At the beginning of each shift his father had a metal disc with his number on. A second disc was given to the banksman on entering the cage at the top of the shaft. The banksman then signalled to the engineman that they were ready for the descent. The disc was then hung on a board at the pithead. At the end of the shift the disc that the miner had taken down with him was handed in to match the one hanging on the board. It was a kind of symbolic proof that another day had been survived underground. Just as his father did, Jimmy did the same until football provided his release. At home after his shift he washed in the tin bath in front of the fire, his mother no doubt washing his back, just as she washed his father’s. Not till 1947 and nationalisation of the mines were showers gradually provided at the pitheads.

     Jackie Milburn’s father also worked down the mines and Milburn’s words in later life might well have been echoed by Jimmy Adamson. Milburn would wave to his father as he crossed the back lane to the pit not that far away and said, ‘I used to shiver as he disappeared into the deep shaft leading down to the coalface.’ Bobby Charlton used to go with his father to collect the wages, waiting in the canteen with a pie and a bottle of milk. Whilst waiting he would watch the black-faced, weary-eyed miners returning to the surface, getting out of the cage, all of them relieved they had emerged into the natural world once more.

     Adamson worked down the pits as soon as he left school and the background to his teenage working years was World War Two. Air raid warnings happened often with industrial targets in and around Newcastle. Ashington itself was hit just once by a bomb that landed on the ice rink according to one report, or on Woodhorn Colliery according to another. When the sirens went and bombs dropped on Newcastle, families would hide under the stairs until air-raid shelters were built across the streets.

     Mining wasn’t a vocation that you were born for; it was more a sentence to which you were condemned unless you found a way to escape. So Ashington produced its share of footballers who found a way out – the Charltons, Jackie Milburn, Billy Gray and Jimmy Adamson among them. The Jackie Milburn statue that Ashington boasts today is a tribute not just to Milburn himself but represents just how significant the area once was in providing the players who graced so many football teams.

     Eight people lived in the Adamson home; three of them his sisters and two his brothers. Local historian Mike Kirkup says the Charltons and Jimmy were born in Laburnum Terrace. Cissie Charlton writes about the terrace in her book Cissie. It was only much later in life, in old age in fact, that Jimmy talked to his grandchildren about his boyhood. They had been difficult times with a father who (granddaughter Katie thinks) drank most of his wages away and then upped and left them. If that is the case, his mother must have had a hard and debilitating time raising the family. As a result Katie thinks Jimmy eventually disowned him and significantly he is certainly absent from any of Jimmy’s wedding photographs. When his older brother left to join the RAF, it was left to Jimmy to help his mother bring up the remaining siblings.

     The Charltons eventually moved to Beatrice Street. In one of his many books Mike Kirkup wrote about Laburnum Terrace:

     ‘ Laburnum is a street of about 25 red-brick houses built in 1897 by W. G. Gordon of Stakeford for the Ashington Coal Company, and costing £93 and 10 shillings. The back doors are really front doors, opening onto a concrete surfaced back lane which was both a thoroughfare and a communal backyard. The houses when first built were described as four-roomed cottages with two rooms downstairs and two up, designed for miners with larger families. During the Second World War each house had on average two sons, and because in Ashington boyhood and football were almost inseparable, this meant about 50 soccer fans and aspiring players were kicking a ball around the street from the moment they could walk. Among them were the two Charlton lads, Bobby and Jackie from number 18, and young Jimmy Adamson from number 31. Cissie Charlton often said that the greatest footballers were born not made. But the same streak of lightning which endows football players must have struck the same place, not twice, but three times. On Thursday, 14May 1967, Jack Charlton, the Leeds United and England centre-half was to receive the title of ‘Footballer of the Year’ from the Football Writers’ Association. By doing so he was following in the footsteps of his younger brother, ‘Wor Kid’, and of Jimmy Adamson, to form a neighbourly triple crown of winners making Laburnum Terrace the most famous soccer nursery street in Britain.’

        In the daytime, boys spent most of their free time kicking a ball around Hirst Park and then when night fell continued in the streets or the back alleys in between the terraces if there was a lamp. Jackie Milburn kicked stones all the way from home to school, and then back again. It’s what Jimmy and most lads did. Pitman Laurence Robinson told Mike Kirkup for his book that, ‘Us fellas would often have a game in the backstreet and join in with the lads. The polis didn’t like us playin’ here though and there was always the fear of getting caught. Although ah have never heard of anyone bein’ prosecuted. Just to be on the safe side though, like, we used to run when we heard him comin.’

          Jack Charlton remembers how it was impossible to get a football during the wartime years of blackout curtains and ‘making do.’ If someone had a ball they were the envy of the neighbourhood. So, they made do with tennis balls and played with them going to school, on the way home, in the schoolyard, against walls and in the games that often had 20 on each side. There were street competitions and the doors where the coal was delivered to each house were the goalposts as they played across the alleys.

     The imagery of mining is still vivid; the underground heroism, grime, darkness, blackened faces, washing in the tin bath in front of the kitchen fire, long hours, back-breaking work; the descent in the cages down to the workplace, roof-falls, pit ponies, the galas and treasured days of leisure. The men were dominant whilst the women ran the little houses and brought up the kids virtually single-handed. The men might have been employed, but there was real poverty and hardship. Life was a continual struggle to survive but this in fact provided the common bond of togetherness that held communities together. The Miners’ Clubs and the pubs on the way home for a ‘wet’ and a ‘broon’ after a day down the pit, were sacred places. Women were unwelcome unless it was to collect a jug of ale for their men. And if there were 6 kids to bring up as in the Adamson home, in their different ways the mother and father worked relentlessly to keep them fed and clothed; that is to say if the father was a fair man and gave his wife his wages. It didn’t always happen that way. Luxuries were a rarity in any household.

     There is this nostalgic image of the dignity of the miner, his sense of pride in his labours, the miners’ picnics held every summer, the ‘coal queen’ atop the float in the procession, brass bands, bright colliery banners, for some an allotment, men’s running races and occasional outings. But this belies the daily drudgery in a house that had no hot running water, no bathroom and meals were cooked on a fire-range; or what to do when injury and illness meant absence from work and the wages stopped. Becoming a footballer was one of few avenues of release. Such was the pride felt by the community when a local lad made good that when the Charlton brothers returned to Ashington for a reception at the Town Hall, they were feted in style and paraded in a Rolls Royce. No-one begrudged them that. ‘They’re one of us,’ said the townsfolk proud that they had brought such fame to Ashington.

          Even then it is possible to surmise that these young lads who made the break never deliberately set out and said, ‘I will be a footballer and get away from all this.’ They might have had their dreams, as all of us do, and depending on where they lived in the north-east there were the two great cathedrals of football at St James’ Park at Newcastle, and Roker Park at Sunderland. But the progression from pit to professional football came from playing in the local leagues for local clubs and by chance you might be spotted by the ‘scouts’ that came to watch. But, there were so many teams, and so many leagues with such huge numbers of players that to be ‘spotted’ and invited for trials at one of the leading clubs meant you had to be outstandingly good.

     Jimmy Adamson was born in 1929. By the time he was 14 he was one of legions of lads who left school for the only world available to them – underground – and he worked down the pit for something like three years. Undernourishment was widespread so the Ashington Coal Company gave all these lads, initially employed as trainees, a bottle of milk each day before they went down the mine. The fact that this was done is evidence of the poor diet of the day where the women did their best to make ends meet seven days a week. On some days the children were barely fed.

     The Ashington in which he grew up, a place of row upon row of crowded, straight-lined, terraced houses was a busy, bustling place. There were 26 fish and chip shops and 19 Working Men’s Clubs. On Woodhorn Road alone there were five, almost all next door to each other. It was a strong man or a rare teetotaller who could walk past them all on the way home from work. Cheap beer slaked a working man’s thirst and cleared away the shift’s coal dust.

     Improvements to living conditions had taken place through the preceding decade; lighting, roads were paved and earth closets were replaced with flush toilets, but these had never quite solved the problem of the palls of coalfire smoke that hung over the town, covering the washing with flecks of coal and ash. For those who lived near the railway lines it was even worse as the engines that pulled the laden coal wagons belched out their thick black smoke. Maybe his mother found some consolation from the Littlewoods catalogue that supplemented the shopping; or maybe she found it represented a distant unobtainable world with its glamorous models and pictures of washing machines and vacuum cleaners. The Provident, however, provided a way of buying on credit with weekly repayments – if you could keep them up. She shopped, no doubt at the Coop, known as the Arcade with its different departments and upstairs dancehall, or Doggart’s a large department store, or corner shops like Rodways that sold everything you could possibly think of.

To be continued soon.