Hebburn lad took tea with Queen Mother
HEBBURN, like other Tyneside towns, has been transformed in the decades since the war. The shipbuilding and heavy industry that gave the town its early identity have gone. Today, its modern housing developments and reclaimed ‘green’ areas give it a very different feel.
One man whose eventful life has run alongside those changes is Michael Lynch.
Michael, 78, has produced an entertaining new autobiography called The Life And Observations Of A Hebburn Lad, recalling his early years in the town – and beyond.
He says: “I originally wrote it as a memento for my six grandchildren, but was persuaded by my wife Sheila to publish it as a book. Many Hebburn and Wardley families get a mention.
“I self-published 200 copies of the book in March last year to raise money for four charities.
“It sold out within 12 weeks. Now the book is available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle format.”
Like generations of Hebburn schoolchildren Michael, who was born in 1943, was educated at the town’s St Aloysius’ RC School. His working life saw him employed as a mining apprentice at Wardley Colliery. There were jobs at RWT Engineering and Hawthorn Leslie’s shipyard. And there was one Merchant Navy trip with Souter Brothers.
Fast-forward some years and Michael would become chair of a successful NHS business with 750 staff and budget of £170m.
Running parallel to all this, he became the youngest ever member of Hebburn Urban District Council and Durham County Council.
Then, after leaving Hebburn in 1971 to live and work in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, for British Gas, he became Mayor of St Ives and a Huntingdon district councillor.
The book is summed up on Amazon as “a contemporary social history of a working class secondary schoolboy who failed the 11-plus, but went on to have a successful and varied business, civic and social life”.
Along the way it describes how at 19, Michael became chairman of the National Association of Youth Clubs’ National Members’ Council, representing 360,000 members.
He also won a three-week scholarship
to the Soviet Union in 1961. There was tea with the Queen Mother at St James’ Palace in 1961; a meeting with Queen and Prince Philip in 1978; as well as encounters with Government ministers and VIPs over the years.
In the early 1980s, Michael would regularly commute to London, occasionally travelling with the MP for Huntingdon, John Major – the future Prime Minister.
Towards the end of his career, before he set up his own management consultancy, he was project development manager of the Greenwich Peninsula for British Gas, obtaining the planning consents and cleaning up the 320 acres of contaminated land to prepare the way for what stands there today, including the O2 Arena site.
Michael says today: “It’s been a long and interesting journey from the early days at St Aloysius’ School in Hebburn. Those teachers did a good job and I’m pleased with the way life turned out.”
Don’t miss our new Memory Lane local history website that’s packed with archive photographs and has an easyto-use picture colourisation tool.