Metro name plates and Newcastle memorabilia up at auction
A TRIBUTE to an MP who played a key role in ensuring the Metro system came to Tyneside is to be sold at auction.
Harry Cowans was the first person to have a Metro car named after him.
He served as Labour MP for Newcastle Central from 1976-83 and then for the Tyne Bridge constituency.
A metal panel which describes Mr Cowans’s efforts to save the proposed Metro project from national spending cuts is to go under the hammer at Newcastle auctioneers Anderson and Garland’s collectors’ sale today, valued at £40-£60.
It would have been attached to the Metro car bearing his name.
The panel says of Mr Cowans: “He championed the cause of the Metro during the difficult financial circumstances that affected the national economy. “During a time when many infrastructure projects were shelved throughout the country, Harry Cowans helped ensure that Metro survived.”
The panel says that, after Mr Cowans’s death in 1985, Metro car 4041 was given his name “reflecting the contribution that he, and many colleagues in local political circles, had made to winning the battle to bring Metro to Tyneside.”
Mr Cowans, who was born in Benwell in Newcastle, began his career as a railwayman and as a shop steward for the National Union of Railwaymen for 19 years.
He was elected to Gateshead Council in 1970 and later served on the transport committee of Tyne and Wear County Council, where he was involved in the political side of arrangements for the construction of the Metro system. As an MP, he was a member of the Parliamentary Transport Select Committee. The sale also includes double plates from Metro cars named after novelist Catherine Cookson and rail pioneers George and Robert Stephenson. Each set is valued at £200-£400.
The Metro items have come from the estate of a Northumberland collector of “railwayana”, which also includes a sign for Tynemouth Goods Station at £400-£600. A spokesman for Anderson and Garland said that it is believed that the Metro plates were retrieved from a rubbish skip.
Also up for auction is a Newcastle United season ticket from 1919-20, which cost Mr J Fenton, who lived in Victoria Road in Hebburn, the sum of £1 and 10 shillings.
That was the season when football returned after the First World War, with St James’ Park needing considerable work after being used by the military for much of the war.
Mr Fenton would have seen a new attendance record set that season of 61,761 for the visit of Sunderland.
The season ticket, priced at £100£150, is signed by Frank Watt, who was appointed secretary of United in 1895 and, during a 37-year spell with the club, ran the team in the days before managers.
He died in 1932, aged 77, while still in the job.
The auction includes hundreds of Newcastle programmes, including a complete run from 1970-2010 and all of the Inter Cities Fairs Cup 1969 programmes.
There are also testimonial programmes for United players Bobby Mitchell, Barrie Thomas, Jackie Milburn, Joe Harvey and Kenny Wharton.
Also for sale is a 1907 poster advertising Hartlepool as “the Durham Health and Holiday Resort” with “natural beauty unsurpassed”.
Valued at £150-£200, it extols Hartlepool’s “splendid sands, magnificent expanse of sea” and the “most bracing sea air in the kingdom”.
Metro Services director, Chris Carson, said: “There were eight named trains in the Metro fleet which bore commemorative plaques about famous people who have made a real difference to the social and economic life of our region.
“After 2010, the then train operator Deutsche Bahn began a £30m refurbishment of the fleet on behalf of Nexus and the nameplates were removed as the trains were stripped down during this process.
“We don’t know how some of the name plates have ended up going to auction but we hope that they find a good home.
“Nexus is now in the process of procuring a new fleet of trains to serve the people of Tyne and Wear for many years to come. We have not decided yet if any of the new trains are going to be named but it is something that we are giving serious consideration.”