From juvenile jazz bands to a pint at the club
Nostalgia Editor REMEMBER the 1970s?
If you do recall the decade, and you’re from South Tyneside, these pictures just might make you feel nostalgic for those vanished times.
We step back for just a while to the South Shields, Jarrow, Hebburn and Boldon of four decades ago.
Our selection of photographs recall an era of social club beauty contests, colliery wagons, juvenile jazz bands, leek clubs, and shipyards - all reminders of a different world to today.
And what about prices? Down at the corner shop, a pint of milk would knock you back 6p, a loaf of bread 11p, and a1lb of butter 12p.
Down at the Viking pub in Jarrow, or the Mill Tavern in Hebburn, or the Criterion in South Shields, in the same year, a pint would cost you about 16p, and 20 ciggies around 25p.
The average UK house price was around £9,000 and a gallon of petrol just 35p.
Having said that, if this all sounds ludicrously cheap, the average wage for men was £40.90 a week and council workers received £23 a week.
Back in South Tyneside, its towns and vllages began the decade inside the old County Durham.
After April, 1974, and the reorganisation of boundaries, they would belong in the borough of South Tyneside.
If industry didn’t always boom here in the 1970s, there was still work aplenty at the shipyards, collieries and factories.
But this was a long goodbye, and the 1980s would see the end of many longtime staple Tyneside employers.
Looking at the bigger picture, the 1970s is often portrayed as a time of economic strife and political instability in the UK.
True, there were strikes, power cuts and governments pitched against trade unions, but the 1970s were also characterised by great music, TV shows, films and sporting action.
For football fans in South Tyneside, 1973 saw second division Sunderland, against all the odds, beat the then mighty Leeds United to lift the FA Cup.
Up the road at St James’ Park, meanwhile, Newcastle United centre-forward Malcolm Macdonald was one of English football’s most fearsome strikers.
But as the decade with its 1979 “winter of discontent” drew to a close against a sound track of disco music and punk rock, little did we know what the 1980s might have in store for Britain and, indeed, South Tyneside.
Front: Skinheads at Boldon Colliery railway station, late 1970s; Muhammad Ali in South Shields, 1977; Hebburn Newtorn School, late 1970s; a 999 training exercise in the Pedestrian Tunnel between Howdon in North Tyneside and Jarrow in South Tyneside, 1978