On this day in 1914 German warships arrived off the Hartlepool coast and bombarded the town, killing 130 people, including 37 children.
R I P to them all.
Imagine getting up to go to school or walking to work and being showered with shells, as you do so.

my old man was one walking to school that day. a day he never forgot and was lucky.

Which makes you lucky cos if he had been killed.................
My dad was 4 and me mam 1.

Same day I was born but I'm not quite that old fortunatly.

1915?

1. Happy Birthday Barry - surely, in your seventieth year, you'll buy a round?

2. I can't remember any lessons about the bombardment at school - which is bizarre - from Lister Street Infants, via Elwick Road Juniors to Brinkburn, you would have thought that we'd get some teaching on this piece of local history.

Schools only taught history from eras like Tudors and Stuarts which was strange with no reference to more recent history i.e. 20th century. Perhaps it was an attempt to avoid stirring up anti German sentiment as we were drawing closer to Europe in order to get all the economic, social and security benefits that would give.

Those will be the benefits which the Eton educated deny? You're right mind - I did the Tudors and the Stuarts, the Romans and Gladstone and Disraeli - and in hindsight I feel pretty much short changed.

So true on both comments.

One of my biggest regrets (amongst many) is that as a kid I never took the opportunity to sit down and have a talk to some of the old guys who went to France in WW1. I was born in 62 so those who went as 18/19/20 year olds will have been in their 60's or early 70's when I was born so plenty about to talk to. As a kid I knew nothing about War or WW1 in particular so it never crossed my mind.

Many will remember the old men who were a bit mad. Ever street had a couple. Undoubtedly many of them were suffering from PTSD, then labelled 'shell shock' or even worse the NNYD tag (nervous, not yet diagnosed) I wonder in these more enlightened times they might have got some treatment.

[quote="Mr Irrelevant"]One of my biggest regrets (amongst many) is that as a kid I never took the opportunity to sit down and have a talk to some of the old guys who went to France in WW1. I was born in 62 so those who went as 18/19/20 year olds will have been in their 60's or early 70's when I was born so plenty about to talk to. As a kid I knew nothing about War or WW1 in particular so it never crossed my mind.

thing is if it was like those who served in WW2 they would rather forget about it than talk about it. the ones i knew that did talk about their WW2 service were based in aldershot or RAF training and ground crew who actually admitted they never fired a shot in anger but somehow all came out with 3 stripes on their sleeves.

apart from football, history was about the only subject i was interested in and gave me my one and only A level pass. we started like others with the tudors and ended up with the 1870,s franco prussian war. left in 1964 so i suppose 50 years previous may not be what some regard as history. imagine WW1 will be or should be anyway on the history sylabus.

I remember my mates grandad who was a miserable man who had a spare tin leg hung up at the side of the fire. Its only in later life did I realise why he was like that.

Would an 18 year old also have fought in WW2? the age of conscription suggests they would have, or were blokes in their late 30s excused from the frontline?

I don't think it was the done thing to talk to old blokes when we were kids, however kids , if they were interested, could have learned a lot from their relatives, grandads, great grandads and uncles etc.

Geography for me. History in the context of British schooling , unfortunately has always been written by the rich elite for the benefit of the rich elite , in a context that suits their own narrative. I and many others I'm sure would to have learned about working class history but that was off limits for obvious reasons. Up until the 1960s the rich genuinely thought that revolution was never far away in Britain. As for education generally, why would the rich want to teach the plebs about what they did to their ancestors? having working class kids analyse and then possibly challenge what happened in the past , serves no benefit to the rich, hence education in Britain has always been geared up to what career you are likely to pursue , again for their benefit , rather than a more rounded education that might make you a more intelligent and better person.

Yes i think you are spot on there. Kids are programmed by a prescriptive syllabus not educated.

I was in Lister Street infants and only remember the polio sugar lumps. Me ma's in Charlotte Grange, which faces the old entrance I used to go through every morning.

[quote="horden"][

Geography for me. History in the context of British schooling , unfortunately has always been written by the rich elite for the benefit of the rich elite , in a context that suits their own narrative. I and many others I'm sure would to have learned about working class history but that was off limits for obvious reasons.
the problem was, certainly at 1960,s grammar school level, that subjects were taught for examination passes first. if you where interested you needed to do your own research and reading that were not on the sylabus. my main interest was the 2nd boer war and text books at the time were really only written from the british empire god save the queen position. years later i learned to praat afrikaans which enabled me to have a much wider knowledge on the subject due to not being english versions of books available.

Different world I suppose, and the country needed a steady supply of miners, mill workers etc, so maybe it wouldn't have been a good thing for everyone to be educated to grammar school level and have aspirations above that of manual work etc. I just feel sorry for like my dad, who could've done a lot better, had the system not concentrated solely on the few at the top of the class rather than the 30 or so below them , where possibly 6-10 of them could've done a lot better for themselves and led happier more fulfilling lives. Some of those would undoubtedly have caught up later on by self education and going to Poly etc. And even some of the rest would've went on to earn good money without qualifications , working abroad etc, which was still possible until very recently.

Lack of jobs though in future, will mean qualifications become more important than ever, but unlike in the past, still may not guarantee a good income.

[quote="horden"]Different world I suppose, and the country needed a steady supply of miners, mill workers etc, so maybe it wouldn't have been a good thing for everyone to be educated to grammar school level and have aspirations above that of manual work etc.
the govenments at the time would not want an educated manual workforce anyway. if this workforce had been there would have been a better chance at the time of some sort of revolution and ridding the country of the arristocracy and royalty for a start.

Yep! In the 50s the government of the time were very concerned about the workers turning to Communism and revolution.

Yep! In the 50s the government of the time were very concerned about the workers turning to Communism and revolution.[/quote

And the workers were concerned as to whether the price of fags and ale would be put up. McMillan took a penny off a pint in '58 and there was mass celebration. You've never had it so good he said. I celebrated with a shandy

Macmillan , possibly the only PM to have had a drink in a Hartlepool pub, the Spotted Cow on Musgrave St.

actually looking back at the late 50,s and early 60,s he might have been right especially looking at todays shit show.

Maybe but ordinary folk these days are better off (apart from covid). The options for a better occupation are much better than 1958. How many cars were parked in working class areas in '58. More home ownership. Holiday entitlement is better now, reduction in the minimum working week. More people are in education after their fifteenth birthday these days. Health care is a lot further advanced. More opportunities to travel. Nowadays people have giant TV's all over the house, they have phones in their pockets, as have their children. The first thing most children do on their 17th birthday is look towards learning to drive. Not forgetting the starting rate for tax was over 30% and the highest rate 96%. Although pensionable age is increasing, so is life expectancy. But the best of all is that less and less of the working class are having to work in the bowels of the earth digging coal which,in my view, is a massive step forward.

all that is true but i really doubt people are more happy now especially in families than they were in the late 50,s early 60,s. lots of this is due to expectations being much higher than they were and many fail to reach them. not their fault but ba system that gives the impression that anyone can get to the top which is untrue now as it was 100 years ago.

People generally , definitely have easier lives and in terms of possessions are better off, but the big thing many don't have, and it is a big thing IMO and something people had in the 1950s , was the hope that things will get better , and they did. You speak to most people these days ,especially the young, and that is really sad, and most people think things will get worse in future. That I think is sad and wrong, and is an indictment on the direction our country has moved over the last 40 years or so.

I also think a lot of consumerism and the strive for more possession or big and better houses, cars, holidays etc is starting to take its toll and making people ill and unhappy. A lot of working people these days could retire tomorrow if they chose to live a simpler life, but would rather put themselves through purgatory in a meaningless job, just to get that bigger house, car or holiday.

At face value things look better, and if you are one of the lucky ones they are , but a lot of the good things that keep us sane are being destroyed , just look at football for instance.

[quote="horden"][

I also think a lot of consumerism and the strive for more possession or big and better houses, cars, holidays etc is starting to take its toll and making people ill and unhappy. A lot of working people these days could retire tomorrow if they chose to live a simpler life, but would rather put themselves through purgatory in a meaningless job, just to get that bigger house, car or holiday.

think things with consumerism all started around 1980 with the rise of thatchism. before then people were just happy to have a decent house rented or not. have a holiday somewhere even in this country and a second hand car outside their house. from then onwards we have reached a situation where a holiday means a holiday abroad, a house needs to be bought, an up to date mobile is really a must and a car needs to be new or nearly new and the living rooms needing to be a mini version of an odean cinema. without all this they,d be bleating on about having mental health issues.

The only part of 1958 which was better than today for me was the fact that I was a lot younger. Having to go outside for a crap in mid February, chipping ice off the inside of the bedroom window, putting your clothes on before you got up. Aye the good old days.
Younger people today do strive for more, that is a fact but we have to remember who brought them up.
My dad never owned his own house and he blamed that on there always seems to be some bugger trying to blow it up and he expected wars to carry on. Thank Goodness he was wrong on that one but that's hindsight. Although there is always someone willing to start one.
There is an element of keeping up with Joneses but that expression was around when I was a kid.
Living in a back to back street house where landlords were never keen to upgrade the place or even make it safe wasn't much fun. They were never slow in putting the rent up. You'd go into your mate's house, whose parents owned it, and had built a bathroom extension and think what if. Then it started to get better with the building of council houses with a garden............a garden..........what the hell is a garden?

Think it started in the late 50s , but Thatcher took it to a new level. I often think the year I was born was a defining moment, when things changed almost overnight , from a black and white world to a one in colour. Of course it is an uneven transformation, with in those days anything up to 10 year difference between North and South and different groups of workers, but generally I feel the mid 60s was when the old working class way of living began to break down , going to football , pub , employment a five minute walk away and back to back terraced housing etc

This is always a difficult question to quantify. My dad told me about when he moved from a terraced slum in Hesleden to one of the new prefabs. He thought he had died and gone to heaven, because there was no longer ice on the inside of the windows, yes times were indeed tougher then. He also used to laugh when people mentioned the swinging sixties , replying " the only thing I swung in the 60s was a shovel " which was true, working down the pit as a young married man with 2 young children, having to do overtime on a weekend to make ends meet , it left him scarred for life, that was the catalyst for him getting involved with the union and going on to become a political agitator. He never forgot those days of the late 60s , and was very grateful for the better times that followed.

Kids don't know there born nowadays.
X box's Lap tops
Wudent b seen dead in a pair of under £60 trainers.
And that's just the kids who live on Benefits Street.

Then these shite footballers who actually think they decent.


Oh it's a difrent era now we're the older generation are accused of being racist because they remember why thousands of our ancestors died in world wars n won't lick the BLMs arses

UTP.