After releasing a run of autumn gig dates on this site last week Emma got in touch with some more news…
‘I’m delighted to be nominated in two categories of the Independent Blues Awards 2024 in America.’saidEmma.
‘I’m the only UK artist to be nominated in both categories ofBest New Artist andBest New Artist Release for my album ‘Memphis Calling’. It would be great to win’.
‘You only have to click on the link below and keep scrolling until you get to Best New Artist and Best New Artist Release where you can vote in each category for me!’
All the readers are wishing you the best of luck Emma, fingers crossed!
So far this year Emma ‘Velvet Tones of Teesside’ Wilson has clocked up a lotta miles on the gigometer and this autumn adds a few more…
“It’s been great to see some of you on the road. I’m now looking for gigs in Europe and have just confirmed a date in Germany performing with the Milwaukee Band on 7th December 2024 at Messajero in Monchengladbach, Dusseldorf”.
Are you performing at any venues you haven’t played?
“There’s Diseworth Blues Club in Derby I’m really looking forward to. It’s a brilliant club run by Blues Enthusiasts. It’s these small clubs that are keeping the Blues scene alive in the UK”.
After releasing your latest album last year what has the feedback been like?
“I’m so delighted that a year after the release of ‘Memphis Calling’ it’s still being reviewed and played all over the world”.
“In May I was featured in the iconic Italian Music Magazine ‘Buscadero’, and all the songs are still being played on International Radio stations and hitting the rhythm and blues charts”
“The stand out song has to be ‘What Kind of Love’. The song written by and featuring Don Bryant has been in the top 10 iTunes blues in about 50 countries!”
Emma recently guested on an album by German band Milwaukee Music where she displays a softer jazzy side of her voice. Olaf Rappe of the band thanked Emma for her contribution.
“Milwaukee and Friends – Crossing Borders’ is twenty good friends making a special album. I’m very happy to have the wonderful Emma Wilson, the British soul and blues queen, as lead singer on two songs ‘Midnight in Harlem’ and ‘Rio de Janeiro Blue”.
Have you found time for a break this year?
“I went to the South of France in May and laid on the beach for a week. But all I could think about was music, music, music!”
Catch Emma on these confirmed dates >
Acoustic set Saturday 14 September at Claypath Deli, Durham
Seated gig on Saturday 12 October at Hutton Rudby Village Hall, North Yorkshire from 7 -11pm. Also on the bill are North East Blues Legend George Shovlin & UK Americana star Lola-Rose.
“I’ve always been fascinated with everything World War Two related and RAF in particular. My grandfather was in the Royal Flying Corps, and both my father and my son were in the RAF” explained Terry.
“I was in the Air Training Corps in South Shields but then a medic came to school to test us all for colour-blindness. I failed the test miserably and was told I would never be accepted by the RAF. I was gutted, as you can imagine”.
Terry lives in Marske on Teesside, but was born in South Shields at midnight 21st– 22nd December 1948…“My mum asked the midwife which day was my birthday. She was told it was the 21st as my head came out on that day. That crosses the Winter Solstice, so my top half is Sagittarius and my bottom half Capricorn. I think this explains why I’ve done so many different jobs in my life”joked Terry.
Throughout his school years his parents moved around the country…
”We lived above a wallpaper shop in Stockton on Tees, then moved to Billingham and later down south to Reading and Mitcham”.
Finally, the Wilkinson family moved back to South Shields where Terry was a pupil at South Shields Grammar Technical School for Boys.
“After leaving school, I worked for the Crown Agents for Overseas Governments in London, thenWise Speke stockbrokers in Newcastle where I became a Member of the London Stock Exchange”.
“From 2000 I ran a successful Theatre in Education company touring schools for 15 years. It won a Best New Business Award but I gave it up in 2015 in order to write”.
When researching his family tree and local history Terry has always been fascinated by one event.
“At midnight on 3 May 1941, the factory and Head Office of Wilkinson’s Mineral Water Manufacturers in North Shields was hit by a single German bomb. It went through the roof, descending through all three floors, taking all the heavy bottling machinery and chemicals down to the basement – which was in use as a public air raid shelter. 107 died, 43 of which were children. Whole families were wiped out.”
“It is written by my good friend, Peter Bolger, who also manages a comprehensive website on the incident”>www.northshields173.org
“Because of censorship and the government’s desire not to damage public morale, little is known beyond Tyneside. It was, however, one of the largest loss of life incidents from a single bomb during the provincial Blitz”.
“Nothing is known of the identity of the plane which dropped the bomb – type, squadron, mission etc – as German records were mostly destroyed in the closing stages of the war”.
“I wanted to write a story that answered all these questions and create a fictional alternative. Having said that, nobody could say with any conviction this is not what happened”.
Terry started on a series of five espionage novels. ‘Handler’ is set in 1941, ‘Sleeper’ in 1942 and is currently working on the third ‘Chancer’ which covers 1943.
“They’re a mix of fact and fiction and trace through the war years of an English-born German spy, Howard Wesley, and his nemesis, MI5 agent Albert Stokes”.
“Wesley is a figment of my imagination. Stokes is based on a real character. And this is the pattern for the other books in the series. I also like to plunder WW2 history for little-known incidents and people who feature against the broader background of what was taking place in the war”.
‘Handler’ won a ‘Chill With A Book’ Premier Readers’ Award just a few months after publication. This spurred Terry on to get others in the series out there as quickly as possible.
“A few of those who have given good feedback have made the point that it would make a good series. I am convinced that it would. I certainly write with a film or TV series in mind”.
“In the shorter term I am hoping to record the whole series as audible books. I recorded an extract from the book that author John Orton is currently writing (link to interview below) and he was happy with it”.
“I’ve spoken to my publisher – UK Book Publishing – and offered them my services as a narrator for others. I’m also an actor, card-holding Equity member and very good at accents and dialects”.
Terry Patterson had one foot considerably smaller than the other so wore a calliper.
“It’s known as a clawfoot. I was bullied by school gangs so decided to fight back”.
From gutting fish, to boxing to heartfelt poetry – this is Terry Patterson’s story.
Born in North Shields in 1956 Terry attended Ralph Gardiner Secondary modern school, he left with no qualifications but was taken on as an apprentice fish filleter at North Shields fish quay.
“Working on the fish quay was hard but good fun. Weighing, icing and boxing salmon to begin with, then learning how to fillet various types of fish and how to drive a popper lorry. I tell ya’ the smell took some getting used to”.
With school bullying still fresh in his mind, Terry joined North Shields Boys Boxing Club where he was taught by ex-professional Joe Myers.
His boxing career lasted a total of 22 years, in that time he worked in the shipyards and had been a school caretaker.
A couple of years ago I interviewed ex-boxer now coach Preston Brown from Sunderland.…”Yeah I know Pasty Brown very well” said Terry. “Over the years I fought a few Sunderland lads. Derek Nelson was a classy boxer who turned pro. I fought two ABA finalists in Gordon Pedro Philips and Willie Neil. I fought Pedro in the North Eastern Counties final but lost. Both lads were well schooled”.
“Willie’s coach asked if I’d fight him one evening because his opponent hadn’t turned up. I weighed in at 10st 6lbs (welterweight), he was heavier than me by 6lbs. I knew his reputation for knocking people out. Norman Fawcett negotiated with his team and £50 was slipped into my hand for taking the fight”.
“Willie could bang a bit – so could I – but he had me down three times during our bout. We set about each other unleashing hell for three fierce rounds. I had him going at one point after landing a good left hook but the bell sounded and my chance to finish him had gone”.
“Gordon and Willie are still good to this day – it’s been 36 years since we shared a ring. I see them at boxing dinners and Boxing Club Reunions. Both of them bought my novel ‘Like Mother Like Son’.
In over 200 bouts Terry won national honours and passed the advanced ABA coaching exam plus he was involved with coaching youngsters until 1986.
After an industrial accident left him unfit to continue his love of boxing, Terry was determined to focus on another sport and won the Disabled Sport England Snooker Championship five years in a row.
“I qualified as a UK professional snooker referee and got a call up to referee the Maltese open in 1997” said Terry.
In 2002 he became North Tyneside’s first World Professional Snooker Coach. He coached at Wallsend Supa Snooker for disabled and able-bodied youngsters, but after a fall on icy roads, not only had he injured his back, he suffered from a dark depression.
Terry added “I was diagnosed as clinically depressed. It’s something I just try to get on with. A surgeon advised me to take up knitting – no I didn’t – but I was determined to excel at something.”
Throwing himself into a number of academic courses at North Tyneside College Terry volunteered at Newcastle’s Percy Hedley training centre working for clients who had cerebral palsy.
He spent over five years working in various care homes until the injuries he sustained over the years got the better of him.
“Depression is something I’ve dealt with my whole lifebutI feel life still holds challenges for me”.
With an interest in poetry and short stories he began to spend his time writing. To date Terry has produced 46 novellas and three novels ‘Like Mother like Son’, ‘He Who Rides a Tiger’ and ‘Living with Grandpa’. His writing is free to read on Movellas.com.
“I’ve also written plays – two of which have been staged in various theatres. ‘Reaping the Benefits’ and ‘The Redundant Blade’ which was written as a tribute to Tom Hadaway”.
“We were only four days from staging ‘The House Across the Road’ when covid broke and we lost cast members. Eighteen months later we tried again and two days before the production two young cast members took ill. My producer and I lost a lot of money and we decided to walk away and the group disbanded.”
Prolific North East Writer and theatre producer Alison Stanley and cast will be reading one of Terry’s plays at Laurels in Whitley Bay, at 2pm on Thursday 22nd August. ‘A Home for Willie’ raises awareness of dementia.
Terry explains “At 68 years of age I’ve never done any for personal gain, never made anything from it butwould love to have one of my books or plays made into a television programme or series”.
“I would like to follow where Catherine Cookson and Tom Hadaway left off. I hope that one day when I’m no longer around I’ll be remembered like the people who inspired me”.
Now 85, Arthur talks about joining the police force as a cadet in 1955…
‘Yes, I was a polis in Newcastle, the city was a lot different then I’ll tell ya, it was still getting over the war to be fair. My first beat was Sandyford Road where the Civic Centre is now. That was all houses then’.
‘It was quite a tough beat, a rough area with pubs like The Lamberts Leap and another called The Sink near the Haymarket. You had to earn your corn, there were no radios or panda cars – you were just pushed out onto the beat and that was it, you had to get on with it’.
‘There was a police pillar (similar to a post box but with a telephone inside) on the corner of Sandyford Road. If you arrested anyone you hoped you could get the person to the pillar. It was difficult cos sometimes you had a couple of guys fighting…you had to get them there, it wasn’t easy’.
‘There was generally more respect for the police then, you would get more help from the public once you established yourself on the beat, which you had to do cos you were tested out straight away’.
‘Once they knew you were fair and straight you got a lot of help from them. You were on that same beat for years, you weren’t just passing through you got to know every shop keeper, every doctor, every villain…you got to know the whole community. But then the T. Dan Smith regeneration project of slum housing clearance began and the place changed completely’.
‘I always liked paper work, always took pride in my reports. A crime file for shoplifting or murder has a beginning, middle and end and you had to go to court and defend what you had written. In the end someone could go to prison so you’re under pressure, under scrutiny. That reality far exceeds any drama’.
‘I moved from department to department, CID, drug, vice, crime squad, then around 1978 I worked for the anti- corruption team in the Government based in Hong Kong. For the year I was there I would see people living in cages on roofs, people swapping babies in hospitals, it was a weird place. I wrote an article for the Police Review national magazine on what I saw, they paid me £25 for it. It was read all over the country’.
‘I didn’t start writing until I was 40 you know. When I came back to the UK, I worked in Washington Police Station, a young cop called Jeff Rudd came to see me ‘I used to be a musician in a band, I’ve still got all these tunes going round my head but can’t put words to them. I read your article and seen your reports, I wonder if you’d be interested in putting some words to my tunes?’
Well, I give it a go and then thought nothing of it until a few months later I was pleasantly surprised when he handed me a tape with the songs on. I really enjoyed my time with Jeff, he was a very accomplished guitarist. We ended up writing around 50 songs, one of them ‘Big Bren’ was about the athlete Brendan Forster, that was played on radio’.
‘That led us to doing an interview and playing some of our music on the Frank Wappat BBC Newcastle radio show, then we done a couple of gigs in Washington. Next thing my wife Irene said why not contact Tom Hadaway? (writer When the Boat Comes In, Newcastle Live Theatre).’
‘I wasn’t sure at first because I didn’t know him but as he was from North Shields we met and he told me to write a play. ‘What do I write about Tom?’ I asked ‘Write about what you know. What fires you up.’
‘So, I went away and wrote about the bait room. Tom read the play and was laughing at it ‘Yeah, you know how to write dialogue son’.
‘There was a police section house near Exhibition Park, in it was a bait room, just a pokey little room with a table to play cards on. If you’re on night shift you’d take sandwiches and a flask of tea in. That’s where you gathered around 1am where the events of the night would unfold’.
‘You would get advice on how to deal with someone, it was a good place to sort things out like the older cops would tell you how to deal with a death, how to deliver a death message to the unfortunate family. It was a sort of meeting of minds over a game of cards. Aye the bait room was a good place to vent your spleen so to speak.’
Running parallel with his police work Arthur was training in athletics at the running track at Ouseburn, Newcastle.
‘I was on shift in the Bigg Market from 5pm till 1am, that was rough, there was fighting most nights. After finishing I would grab a few hours sleep then go to court, then onto shot put training. I was in the British athletics team from 1962-71 and competed in the 1970 Commonwealth games in Edinburgh. I was very fortunate and saw the world with athletics’.
Arthur talked some more when the conversation turned to the present day and the riots that are happening this summer around England.He recalled a quieter time for the police.
‘I remember we had a huge kettle for the bait room. It was always on the stove. One day a big fish wagon went past the section house and dropped a fish out of one of the boxes. I picked it up brought it back into the station put it in the kettle and boiled it up. All day everybody was complaining about the smell from this mackerel…and no, we didn’t eat it!’
‘Another story was one night when I was up beside the Hancock Museum going to the section house at Park Terrace. Can you remember the litter bins that used to hang on a lamppost? Well, this one was upside down on the lawn outside the Hancock and it was moving around. I lifted it up and there was a hedgehog underneath it!’
‘So, I put it in my coat and took it up to the section station. Inside are lockers to put your bait in so I put the hedgehog inside one of them and waited for the copper to open it. He just about had a heart attack when he opened the locker!’
Hearing these innocent stories was a world away from watching how the police were dealing with the riots around the country, but then Arthur’s tone changed.
‘I remember it was winter time, snow piled up on the ground. I went in for my bait around 12.45am and heard a muffling sound, I opened the door and there was an older police officer trying to commit suicide with a plastic bag on his head. There was a scuffle as I grabbed hold of him but couldn’t get the bag off. I looked around found a fork and split the bag but caught his face at the same time’.
‘He was playing hell with me for saving his life ‘What right did I have’ and all the rest of it. As we were having this argument I could hear the other officers coming in for their bait so everything was put back right, we straightened up the chairs and table as if nothing had happened’.
‘That policeman only had a couple of year service left, he was very bitter, he didn’t thank me. Turned out he had a hell of a life with his wife and thing was he had seen action in the second world war’.
After writing about his experiences in The Bait Room, Arthur kept in touch with Tom Hadaway and wrote another play.
Tom looked at it and gave me pointers, when I finished it landed on two desks. One was the BBC in Manchester where I met them, it ended up on the Saturday Night Theatre radio show, which was a big thing’.
‘The other was the script reader for David Puttnam (producer Chariots of Fire, Local Hero, Midnight Express) who hated it at first but won her round in the end. She said she couldn’t do anything with it but put me in touch with an agent who was looking for writers for a tv show called The Bill. That’s where the writing started’.
Arthur being interviewed on BBC Breakfast about writing ‘Harrigan’.
In 1988 Arthur retired from the police force giving him more time to devote to his writing where over the next decade he delivered TV episodes for Wycliffe, The Bill, Casualty, Spender and Harrigan. The Bait Room was finally made in 2009.
‘I used the same discipline for writing as I did sport. Getting a focus, deciding what you want and going for it.’
‘What am I doing now? I’ve had a lot of my writing shown around the North East. ‘Pickets & Pigs’ was a story set to the background of the 1984 Miners strike’.
‘Later this year I’ve got a play on stage which I started writing in 2003 with Dave Whitaker. ‘Blackbird in the Snow’ is one of those that you leave on a shelf for a while then go back to’.
‘I worked with Dave on a musical about the Jarrow March called ‘Cuddy’s Miles’. John Miles wrote the music for it, Cuddy was a cook on the march, he was John’s relation. That was well received when it played The Customs House in 2004’.
‘Sadly, Dave passed away in 2021. He’ll be sorely missed so the new play is produced as a salute to Dave’s beautiful lasting memory’.
‘Blackbird in the Snow’ has a four night run with the premier on 5th November 2024 at Laurels, Whitley Bay. For more info and extra dates contact the official website >
New play by writer Ed Waugh (Dirty Dusting, Wor Bella) & directed by Russell Floyd (The Bill, Eastenders).
Royalties from over 20 professionally produced plays including Dirty Dusting,Wor Bella, Hadaway Harry, Carrying David and The Great Joe Wilson, plus financial support from Arts Council England allows playwright Ed Waugh to focus on what he loves best: working class history, in particular forgotten North East working class history.
South Shields-based Ed and the team behind this important work have unearthed another forgotten story about the North East.
“This is an incredible story, full of drama and tension, an almost forgotten story, despite the incident making headlines nationally and internationally.” explained Ed. The subject of the new play is The Cramlington Train Wreckers which premieres in November and tours the region.
To maintain their profits, coal owners told miners they had to take a 40 per cent cut in wages. Stanley Baldwin, Conservative prime minister in 1926, also said every other section of the working class had to take pay cuts ‘in the national interest’. A General Strike was called and Northumberland miners were ready to challenge the establishment.
Ed explained “The intention was to stop a blackleg coal train that the miners felt was undermining the strike. Unfortunately for the perpetrators, they accidentally derailed a passenger train, the carriages were part of the Flying Scotsman”.
“The upshot was eight Cramlington miners were sentenced to a total of 48 years’ imprisonment for their part in the derailment”.
Most of the 281 passengers were treated for shock and bruises with only one person slightly injured, fortunately there were no deaths.
“Although largely forgotten, the story is an important part of British history. With the centenary of the General Strike rapidly approaching I felt it was important to assess the events in an informed, dramatic and entertaining manner. Were they terrorists or workers defending their jobs and communities?”
A North East tour in November 2024 includes South Shields Westovian Theatre, Gosforth Civic Theatre, Alnwick Playhouse, Hexham Queen’s Hall, Cramlington Learning Village Theatre, The Glasshouse Gateshead, Playhouse Whitley Bay, Bishop Auckland Town Hall and Barnard Castle Witham.
The Cramlington Train Wreckers is supported by Arts Council England.
ALIKIVI : NORTH EAST UK CULTURE 