Search on for relatives of Tyneside boys saved from 1930s poverty
CITY STREETS SWAPPED FOR A NEW LIFE IN THE COUNTRYSIDE
BOYS from the back streets of Tyneside in the Great Depression of the 1930s were transported to a startlingly different world.
Coming from a region blighted by deprivation and mass unemployment, their new home was amidst a 12th century abbey, a 17th century hall and 822 acres of landscaped parkland rated one of England’s most spectacular Georgian water gardens.
Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal near Ripon in North Yorkshire is now run by the National Trust and is a world heritage site.
The boys were brought from the North East by Commander Clare Vyner, who lived at Fountains Hall.
In class terms, Cmdr Vyner and the new arrivals were worlds apart. He was the son of Lord Alwyne Compton, and the husband of Lady Doris GordonLennox, a friend of the Queen Mother who, as Duchess of York, often stayed at Fountains Hall with her husband, the future King George VI.
The Vyners’ other guests from Tyneside were accommodated in wooden huts next to the abbey ruins.
Their time at the Studley Royal estate was part of an attempt by Cmdr Vyner to do something about the poverty and lack of opportunity in the North East of the ‘30s, which prompted the Jarrow March.
In 1934 he set up the Settlers Society, which also built homes at Swarland in Northumberland to which families from Tyneside were re-located so that they could start a new life in rural surroundings.
Now the National Trust is searching for the North East relatives of the boys to find out what happened to them after they left Studley Royal and to gather information about their families for a long-term exhibition opening at Fountains Hall next month. The boys were trained in a range of skills, from gardening and forestry to general estate and farm work and domestic service, to help them find jobs.
Trust visitor experience officer, Jennifer Taylor, said: “We know that 40 boys stayed at the camp between 1934 and 1937 and we are hoping to make contact with their families to tell their stories. It would be fantastic to hear the
It would be fantastic to hear the stories of many more of these young men Jennifer Taylor
stories of many more of these young men and to explore what happened to them after they left the Settlers Society.”
The training scheme ended in 1937 as military re-armament created work on Tyneside.
Jennifer said: “Clare Vyner obviously had a social conscience. One wonders what the boys made of their new surroundings. We would love to know more about them.”
Cmdr Vyner bought a chunk of the Swarland estate to bring families, mainly from Jarrow and Gateshead, to a new life in the countryside.
The Swarland settlement housed around 70 families, mainly from Jarrow and Gateshead.
Houses were built, each with one and a half acres of fenced land, and work was provided for the men at Swarland brickworks and sawmill, and for women at Swarland Tweed Mill.
The only surviving unaltered example of the smallest of the four types of settlers’ houses, built in 1936, is now listed. It was also in 1934 that the plight of the unemployed in the North East saw Sir John Jarvis, High Sheriff of Surrey, launch a scheme for the adoption of Jarrow by the county of Surrey. Subscriptions provided employment through public work schemes such as the creation of a park at Monkton Dene in Jarrow which bears his name. The 1930s also saw the opening of a school in rural Northumberland to allow children from the industrial North East to benefit from fresh air and exercise. Brown Rigg at Bellingham, established by the National Camps Corporation, was used during the Second World War to accommodate children evacuated mainly from Tyneside.
• If you have any information on any of the boys contact jennifer.taylor@nationaltrust.org.uk or telephone 01765 643 116