Coastal View & Moor News Issue 19


7 Farewell Newry - The end of an era


t always comes hard when in the festive period, we have news of a death of someone we knew and respected And alas for the Labour Party in East Cleveland, this happened this Christmas. In the week before Christmas, a well attended service at St Aidans Boosbeck, saw local people and Labour Party members paying their last respects to someone who was the oldest Labour Party member in the constituency, Mrs Newry Miller. Newry, as we knew her, was 91. Born in Moorsholm in 1920 to a family of Irish origin, she had been a member of the Labour Party since the 1940’s and for all of her teenage and adult life, lived either in the small adjoining communities of Boosbeck and Margrove Park.


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Newry was not, in fact, her first name, which officially was Grace, but Newry was the name she chose and it was as Newry that she was known and loved by everyone in the community.


She originally went ‘into service’ as it was known, to begin with at the Cleveland Tontine Hotel near Crathorne - a 20 mile bike ride to and from Margrove Park every working day - and then for various wealthy families in the East Cleveland area. She grew into maturity at a time - as today - when, under a coalition government based mainly on Tories and Liberals, unemployment was an ever present shadow haunting East Cleveland. The great slump of the 1930’s saw the local mines at Margrove Park, South Skelton, Lingdale, Kilton and Ayesdale Gate either shut or on bare short time working of a few hours a week. This,


and the poverty that was the partner of unemployment, was a fact of life for Newry when she met, and later married her lifetime companion, Bill, a young miner from Boosbeck.


It was made worse by the fact that her father, also a miner, was out of work too. However, ‘Love on the Dole’ was not just the name of a popular novel of the time - it was an actual part of life for many young families, and Newry and Bill gritted their teeth and carried on as best they could. It was the Church that was part of Newry’s defence mechanism - as it was for many local families. ‘The Church’ in East Cleveland meant simply one denomination, the Primitive Methodists - the church of choice for miners and their families. Now part of the Methodist Church, the ‘Prims’ were a powerful and socially radical force in English rural and mining communities, especially in East Cleveland. “We had a little chapel at Margrove,” Newry once said, “that was the centre point of the village.” As a child, she had enjoyed solo singing at the chapel as part of its frequent ‘services of song’. As a teenager, Newry was a witness to one local legend in Boosbeck - the saga of ‘Heartbreak Hill’, when unemployed pitmen and their families worked on a patch of land near Margrove Park donated to them by the wealthy Pennyman family of Ormesby in an attempt at self-sufficiency. This enterprise - which has previously been documented at some length in Coastal View - saw local families joined by idealistic students and left leaning intellectuals in a ‘back to the land crusade’ buttressed and


given weight by the Pennyman’s and by composer and musician Michael Tippett, later acknowledged as one of the world’s greatest 20th century composers. Newry was there when Tippett’s first ever written work - the opera ‘Robin Hood’ - had its maiden performance at the Boosbeck Institute. Later, fortunes revived and both Bill and Newry’s father were once again back at work. But the hardships of unemployment and life on the dole under a Tory dominated coalition government was never forgotten - or forgiven - by Newry and Bill. In a series of tape recordings made by Newry on life at the time, and which is stored to this day at the Cleveland Archives in Middlesbrough, she recalled the day her father returned to work after years of idleness. “If you’d seen the relief in these villages you wouldn’t have believed it. It was though someone had given me Dad a fortune. He went down to the pit. He got a start. He came back to me Mother (it was just before, or just after, me little brother was born). He said, ‘If anybody had said to ya’ here’s £100 I couldn’t have been more pleased. To think I’m going down that pit on Monday morning’.” It was memories like this that propelled Newry’s socialism, and these memories drove her to active Labour politics, canvassing for Labour in all the general elections since 1945, standing for, and being elected to the local Parish Council - then, in the days before large unitary authorities were heard of - crucial and important agencies of social change and administration - and supporting


Bill in his day to day work as a Lodge Delegate for the Cleveland Miners’ Section of the General and Municipal Workers Union - a vocation he loved. Indeed Bill wore his Union Badge proudly as a fixture on his lapels until the last days of his life. She carried on this tradition to the end. Too frail to canvass in latter days, she allowed her bungalow in Fenton Street to be used as local committee rooms for Election Day ‘knocking out’ of voters and - only last year - she made the journey to Guisborough to be present for the Parliamentary selection contest that followed the tragic death of Ashok Kumar. Her passing marks the end of an era. There is now no-one left who can relate at first hand the stories and tales of how East Cleveland had to face the inter war depression, and how these communities clung together in a tradition of mutual solidarity that still - just - endures to this day. It can be fairly said that Newry left two families - her own, a large one who still live in the East Cleveland area, and a wider one based on the local community and the local Labour Party. But, in the final telling, the spirit of Newry - and of Bill - still resonates, and at a time eerily similar to the 1930’s, the lessons of how to resist and stand up to adversity in a collective fashion are not one that has been lost to the present generation.


Farewell Newry. We will carry on the battle.


Tom Blenkinsop Labour Member of Parliament for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland


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