Memories of Esso Four and Friendly Giant
IT was April 1969 when a roving Evening Chronicle photographer took this iconic image: Four small children in Leslie Street, Wallsend, playing together happily in the shadow of a giant oil tanker which was nearing completion at nearby Swan Hunter shipyard.
The photograph appeared in a story in the paper under the headline ‘The Friendly Giant’, which reported how the finishing touches were being applied to the 253,000ton Esso Northumbria before its high-profile launch by Princess Anne a few days later.
Fifty-five years on, the Victorianbuilt street and the shipyard are gone, the ship was torn apart for scrap years ago, and the youngsters are now adults.
The classic photograph vividly captures a lost world of heavy industry and back-to-back terraces, which for decades was the day-to-day reality for countless thousands living and working on Tyneside. For years, the image lay unseen in the Chronicle archive, before appearing as the front-page photograph on one of our Remember When nostalgia magazines in 2013. We asked if anyone knew who the children were. One of them, Paul Muir, saw the story and got in touch.
He told us: “Four generations of my family lived there - and I grew up there. I was very young at the time, but I do remember seeing huge ships at the bottom of our street and hearing lots of noise. My mam said that when they were building Esso Northumbria, they could hear the men shouting when they were on night shift, and the bedroom would light up from the flashes of the welders’ torches.”
But that wasn’t the end of the story. In 2014, the children in the original photograph were reunited as adults for the first time in years and photographed together at an event organised by Wallsend Memories and Photographs Facebook group.
The emotional reunion, which was also attended by many former neighbours, took place in the grounds of Segedunum Roman fort on the very spot where Leslie Street had stood before being demolished, and not far from where the once-booming Swan Hunter shipyard had operated.
Paul was joined by his former childhood pals from the photograph, Neil Stoker, Hazel
Mclean and Pam Mcallister - the ‘Esso Four’.
Meanwhile, Esso Northumbria was retired in 1982, and broken up in Taiwan, 6,000 miles from where it had begun life.