DEVASTATION OF WAR Striking memories of 1920s
TRAMS and horse-drawn transport on the streets. A war memorial being unveiled. A luxury cruise liner on the River Tyne. Striking workers holding placards aloft.
A century or so has passed since our photographs from the Sunday Sun archive were taken.
They capture scenes around Tyneside between 1920 and 1929. For many it was a very difficult decade – one which was almost entirely shaped by the devastation brought about by the Great War of 1914-18.
As we mentioned in our recent feature, Tyneside In The 1930s, the conflict and its largely dire consequences directly led to another catastrophe, the Second World War of 1939-45 – and future historians will likely view the whole grim 1914-1945 period as one drawn-out 20th-century conflict.
The start of the 1920s found British industry in a difficult place.
Its 19th-century techniques had long since peaked and were no longer appropriate in a competitive world.
British technology had been in decline since well before 1914.
Post-war Europe was in chaos and a return to the Empire days of before simply did not happen.
Our region was badly hit and the once-thriving industries of shipbuilding and coal never fully recovered from the slump they experienced at the end of 1920.
Large areas of the industrial North East suffered great hardship.
There was further trouble in the middle of the decade when the country was gripped by widespread industrial action as hard-pressed workers and their families suffering worsening living conditions reached breaking point.
There were two police strikes, a national rail strike, two national coal strikes, a two-month shipbuilding strike, a two-month engineering strike and the nine-day general strike in which nearly two million workers withdrew their labour.
Yet away from the gloom, there was some positivity to be found. For some, this was the decade of “bright young things”, jazz and new, daring fashions.
In the home, some families were acquiring basic wireless sets while, in 1924, John Logie Baird created Britain’s first television transmitter.
Young people might go to the local dance hall and, by the end of the decade, the first “talkies” had arrived in Tyneside’s picture halls, although our sister title The Journal declared in 1929 this new form of cinematic entertainment “was like roller-skating, a phase of entertainment which will be short-lived.”
There were notable events here in the North East during the 1920s. The region gained a striking new physical symbol in the shape of the New Tyne Bridge (to give it its full title) opened by King George V in 1928. In sport, Newcastle United won the FA Cup – for the second time – in 1924.
Three years later they lifted their fourth and, to date, last league title.
Fittingly, fans could celebrate with newly-produced Newcastle Brown Ale, first brewed in that same year.
In 1929, the massive North East Coast Exhibition held in Newcastle’s Exhibition Park was intended to showcase the industrial talent and energy of the region at a time of economic hardship.
Yet just days after the exhibition closed, the Wall Street Crash in New York unleashed a wave of worldwide economic chaos which would deliver a host of problems during the next troubled decade – the 1930s.