Reminiscences of visits, family roots and the social environment By Robert Crichton Priddy (b.1936, Cirencester, England)

I was still only a boy boarding at a preparatory school in Sussex, twelve years old, when first I visited South Shields. My mother took my younger cousin and I there to visit our grandparents for a fortnight's holiday. Travelling up by the record-holding Flying Scotsman express to Newcastle on the London-Northern-Eastern line (or L.N.E.R.) was itself a dream come true, especially for cousin Leonard, my junior by four years. By contrast, a little Tyneside train with one steam engine fore and one aft then chuffed us along above the grimy riverside dockyards and steelworks to the working seaside town of South Shields.

Author & Cousin Leonard, South Shields 1949

It was all a marked change from my boyhood 'world', with its adult restrictions on movements and activities... which was all a far cry from the homely streets and beaches of Shields. I do know which I enjoyed most! Roaming the streets of that safe and friendly place was a revelation of freedom to me. To have virtually the keys of a town was unbelievably rewarding to me, coming from my quite sheltered background. How could I resist enthusiasm at the mile of sand beach, the rugged rocks and cliffs towards Marsden Rock and Grotto, the longest stone pier in the world, the funfair and several amusement arcades, two Marine parks and a visit from Scott's circus? Also attractions were the many lemonade and chip-shops and the two fine ice-cream parlours along Ocean Road, Minchellas and Mancinis... claimed by some to be keeping up a regular ice-front Neapolitan vendetta with each other. Not least were the town's many other young 'freemen'. My younger cousin and I were welcomed well enough, perhaps at first as uncommon visitors from the south in our brightly-striped school blazers, like two exotic birds off-course. Our two local younger cousins introduced us to a whole gang of boys and girls, and we came to know many more in the back-streets, playing ball games, roller skating or just hanging about. Soon we felt very much at home. I was naturally cautious and nervous about my accent - that of a posh prep. school - when venturing out into what might well have been a hard world of streets. My first visit, however, opened a window onto an entirely different way of life to anything I had heard about. There were no problems in getting on with the boys and girls in Charlotte Street. Having come straight from a prep school, I was welcomed as something of a walking, talking phenomenon. I willingly answered questions about what boarding school was like, matters that were evidently quite arcane to those lads who had only heard of Billy Bunter at the highly-fictitious Greyfriars School and who had themselves doubtless not yet known anything but the secure hearth of their own homes. Some of them thought it must have been tough to be away from home so long and they thanked their lucky stars that it was not their lot. I remember that I was either unwilling or unable to enlarge much on the sufferings of it, probably because they were yet too close to me. Such differences between us, rather than being a stigma, were really my ticket to the gang, which simply meant all those who lived nearby and were friends and acquaintances. It was a change for me, after many moves of home and school across various class divides, to be accepted so readily as a friend and without any sense of there being competition, envy or deceit. It took a while for me to get the hang of the wryness of Geordie humour and its frequent macabre and grotesque elements. Once I had cottoned on, it appealed greatly to me. I think it was probably from the hard life of the mines and shipyards with their frequent trials and tragedies that 'black humour' first came... and the blackness was perhaps as much that of grime and coal as of desperation. The South Shields lingo was hard to understand at first, but I came to be able to tell South from North Shields and even now and again to hear the difference from Tyne Dock. But to pick it up myself properly was a challenge that slew me! Nor have I ever heard anyone not born to it who mastered it, I doubt even whether Peter Sellers himself could have managed it. Because it was for so long forced to serve as an industrial backbone for Britain, exploited and forgotten, there is perhaps little that is obviously romantic about Tyneside, whether in outward appearance or culture. But I have always appreciated its amusingly laconic talk and canny style, which is still alive. The Geordie lifestyle seems to me to be one of the most original and well-preserved still existing in Britain. This is surely due to the Geordies long having been seen more or less as a race apart by Southerners, and to their proud solidarity as Tynesiders. Their insularity has doubtless been reinforced by the poor treatment the North-East has always received from the ruling classes, sheer neglect and patronising class arrogance. The Jarrow marches and what caused them are a striking symbol of this. The dialect is also very hard to understand for most southerners, which may well be due in part to the need for an 'insider-speak' among the dispossessed. Interestingly, no actors or actresses not hailing from Durham or the Tyne have yet been able to imitate Geordie. At last, Geordies have been recognised and are themselves being as actors and commentators on British television.

Author in North Marine Park ca. 1949

My mother had only one sister and brother, while her mother had been one of thirteen children. Her grandfather, one Walter Chisholm, ran a variety theatre in North Shields. A novel was written around this revue or music-hall theatre called "The Angel of Comical Corner". His personal coachman's son was a friend of my grandmother, and that was the young Stanley Laurel. Jane did not much like to hear this fact mentioned except in family privacy, Stan Laurel not being exactly stylish or refined enough in her view to have a name worth dropping. She would probably have changed her mind if he had been given a title. That kind of snobbishness can only be understood on the background of the huge gap in prosperity and all manner of opportunities between the working class and gentlefolk in those times together with a very widespread Cinderella-like romanticism, a fairy-tale dream that only ever came true to any extent for few Northerners in those days. Grandpa Alexander Flint, her father, came of a family of ten children. Among all these there were some peculiar fates. At least two of her uncles had been 'keen on the bottle', which is not so remarkable, but one of them had also been an Oxford don in classics who was later caught red-handed at night on the West coast somewhere gun-running for Sinn Fein. Another apparently made his fortune in the USA. from an early form of cornflakes. One of her aunts actually eloped by shinning down a rope made of sheets from the second floor of her parents' house at night where her lover carried her off on horseback. What is more, she had only previously known anything of him through hand-written notes. He became an extremely rich man through the junk trade, which was nothing to do with drugs but meant old iron, rags and other thrown-away materials. Grandpa Flint was most kindly towards me. He was of mixed Scottish and Shields origin and, because his step-father had been to Oxford, he could speak in both a fairly cultured and a Geordie accent. He was actually called 'the gentleman' by those who knew him, partly because of his actual character and I think partly due to his acquired pronunciation. To my cousin Leonard and I, whom he used us for brushing up his elocution, he sometimes sounded affected. But we didn't mind that when he took the opportunity of listening to our accents, which he literally admired. We were ourselves able to witness that Pa, as we were allowed to call him, cut a bit of a figure on Tyneside. Pa took us around everywhere he went, probably both to show me off (I have apparently inherited his tall, slim physique and looks) and also to entertain us. We met his elderly cronies at the Albion Conservative Club in Ocean Road, and captains he played cribbage with on the Tyne tugboats. We were freely given the run of these grimy vessels while they lay in the river awaiting traffic. Pa held up the ideal of courtesy very high for me. "Whatever else you become, always be a gentleman!" he advised me. I believe he held the author George Borrow in much esteem because of his ethic of gentlemanliness to all types of people... not least the gypsy race. An opinion of the Romanies as being very special people was formed in me and I was thereafter always eager to hear about them. I understand that there were probably other reasons for his sympathy with the travelling people for an uncle has told me about certain of Pa's own marketplace enterprises, in which a certain dissembling of the sort some gypsies practised was an element. Pa's teaching was to be polite and courteous to everyone always. He might well have proven the value of this ethic in salesmanship and yet, on the other hand I feel certain he believed that a real gentleman's password was never to make any difference in the treatment of people, whether it be towards the poorest miner's lad or the rich and high-born. I should remember and respect that everyone has his hopes and sorrows, whatever else he may be. He insisted that I would never have anything to fear for myself from anyone if I kept to that. This surely contained much of the life experience he had gained in many places among the rough and the tough in circumstances of daily hardship that are now almost beyond the imagination of the living. Perhaps because he had the knack of explaining life without being patronising, he impressed all that on me with some success. As far as my memory is true, I practised his advice from then on and found it a passport to avoiding conflict and making pleasant relationships with anybody whose path I crossed. In fact, his is the only adult advice on how to live that I clearly recall from childhood today. It proved useful guidance when circumstances forced me down across the great British divide of the class barrier. Most of my elder relatives on my mother's side qualified variously for the Tyneside epithet 'canny'. It is interesting how the Tynesider uses the word 'canny' for a person who is shrewd or worldly-wise, but equally to mean gentleness, quietness and circumspection. This is not all, for it also conveys thrift and sometimes even miserliness.

When once I asked my mother how of all names we had been landed with the middle name Crichton she told me it was the name of the midwife who attended her birth. She mentioned that the name's unusual spelling was the same as in the well-known book "The Admirable Crichton", but she was no more forthcoming than that. Though a middle name was not much use to my mother or I, of course, I rather liked it because of the association with that satisfying adjective 'admirable'. It was not until I was in my forties that my uncle Charles disillusioned me about it. His version of it was that my mother - and subsequently myself - had come to have Crichton as our middle names after a person of that name of whom my grandfather had been a temporary admirer, a person who could perhaps best be described as a clever impostor and, at worst, was a con-salesman. How Crichton himself acquired his name, I don't know, but it seems that names were easy come, easy go for him. And who would not want to have such a name when, as Thomas Hughes wrote of a remarkable boy, in Tom Brown's Schooldays:- "...he was the Crichton of our village boys. He could wrestle and climb and run better than all the rest, and learned all that the schoolmaster could teach him faster than that worthy at all liked. He was a boy to be proud of..." Perhaps it was the book The Admirable Crichton that had inspired my grandparent's friend to take the name as a cover for his less than admirable activities. If so he had soon got himself a name for other doubtful pursuits too. My grandfather had met him when he was in business running a shop and stalls at the market up in Newcastle. This sideline on family history had never reached my ears previously, my mother having always aspired to become one of the more genteel classes. And there was more to come. During a long walk down the South Shields' pier, my uncle Charles - now too old to care about proprieties, I suppose - reminisced about somewhat shadowy early days. He told me things I think my mother had never mentioned, and surely had not liked to dwell on. Charles had known Crichton, who it appeared was a man often on the move from guise to guise and from place to place, mainly in the North Country or across the Border. He had various 'pitches' or lines of sales. Bottled 'perfumes' was one of these: Eau de Cologne, Jockey Club, Palma Violet and Lily of the Valley were the titles, but the wares were plain oil that had only been touched on top with the appropriate perfume. A more daring line that my uncle also held Crichton responsible for was an unusual fly-away product, a means to drive away flies from the open privvies that were universal in those days, before World War I. This was a small red cube which, placed on a codfish, effectively kept flies away... firmly proven by the fact that a codfish unprotected by it lay on the other side of his stall and was entirely fly-covered. The trick was that the fly-free fish had been soaked in paraffin for days beforehand. As to the tiny red cube, it was only a small piece of cochineal-dyed candle wax. Uncle Charles' accounts had a way of varying a bit from time to time, most likely due to the pressure of the sixty intervening decades on his memory. Either Crichton appeared in the guise of a Red Indian called 'Big Foot Sequoia' or it was another character altogether. In any case, the market pitches at that time were worked by someone calling himself that but who was a local man kitted himself out as an American Indian medicine man so as to ply his wares. I have since heard on a B.B.C. World Service programme about the pros and cons of 'alternative medicine'.

Big Foot Sequoia was apparently known and was despised by the medical profession as an itinerant charlatan of the snake-medicine variety, a dangerous con man of the suffering and medically ignorant poor.My uncle's account of Big Foot Sequoia - as my grandfather had seen him in action - though scientifically unconfirmed, was as follows:- His chief ware was 'the miracle medicine of his tribe', a greenish liquid sold in tiny bottles that was said to cure almost any minor and many a major ailment. A sample of it had been sent to a chemist's for analysis, but the complexity of its composition had reportedly wholly eluded the best experiments. Where and how he obtained his supplies was a complete mystery to those who followed his exploits... until my grandfather happened to come to their house in South Shields on an errand late one evening. (This suggests it was Crichton, whom the family knew and who had a place in Roman Road). The door being unlocked evidently by mistake, they had gone in to catch the man and his wife green-handed... busily straining gallons of cabbage water through silk stockings. Grandfather Flint had himself had some hand in what seems to have been a somewhat suspect business. His son (my uncle Charles) told me how he had helped run five or six stalls selling fancy goods and trinkets and the like on the method known as 'Dutch auctioneering'. He had organised or somehow co-ordinated the stalls and had sometimes done a preliminary warming-up talk, probably because his accent was an attraction that could make an impression there in those days. As a boy, Uncle Charles had himself earned what then was the princely sum of ten bob - or ten shillings written '10/-' (to those of you who are still green, so to speak) - on a Saturday helping to carry goods and set up or dismantle stalls, so he knew the ins and outs of this 'running-in trade'. One attracted some onlookers through amusing patter and then started selling things at very low prices, now and again even occasionally giving away fountain pens or tie-pins. People were soon asked to bid for objects, say a fountain pen, to 'suggest a fair price'. Someone might say 1/- (i.e. 'one shilling'), whereupon, after saying it was too little, the 'auctioneer' would sell it at half that price or even joke that the bidder must be hard-up and then give it to him without charge. Making much patter, giving time for word of giveaways to get around, he would build up an atmosphere, improvising as circumstances required. More bidding was invited for a different 'much more valuable' pen. When no-one wanted it, he would ask someone to lend him three shillings 'before all these witnesses' and put it beside the fountain pen in open view on the stall. To this he might add a tie-pin and offer the lot - pen, tie-pin and 3/- for the sum of 10/-. This he might reduce later, then add another item - a watch - and put the price at £2.10/-, asking the lender of the 3/- if he'd give that price for all these things. As confusion grew the price would be made to seem more and more reasonable and he would sell the goods to him for £2.10 sh., including his own 3/-! Confused by all the juggling of objects and prices, which seemed to get more valuable and also gradually cheaper, people would buy at the auctioneer's 'bottom price, one that may break us'. The result, my uncle claimed, would usually be at least 100% profit on the original outlay for the pitchers... about £10 a day per pitch. Even though it was only Saturday work, that was very good money in those days. But, despite everything - or more likely because of it all - the Flints did not become prosperous. If one bears the sins of one's forefathers, as doubtful scriptures claim, I don't think, it will be so bad for me all in all, for the morality of the running-in trade (to survive poverty) was after all hardly less doubtful or even dignified than that of all the profit-taking done in a less personal way by many shops today. Not that I condone any of it. Shops often 'run-in' people in a more refined (and a much less entertaining) way with printed untruths like "Clearance Sale! Prices slashed! All must Go.!" or they simply mark up reductions on fictitious 'normal' prices. When so much is reduced so much, someone must be lying. It still also amazes me that the '99.9 price syndrome' is still as effective a blind as those used in the market place by my grandfather's colleagues (he was apparently above the actual selling himself). Or is 99.9 much less than 100? I doubt it.

I already knew my grandparents from their stay with us in Gloucester during the war's worst period of bombing. Pa Flint had got himself a job of delivering goods by van around the Cotswolds, and sometimes he took me with him... saving petrol by coasting whenever possible. Ma Flint helped out in my mother's house, where we sometimes had soldiers billeted on us. When I visited Shields, Pa and Ma were old age pensioners living in a very old and small cottage terrace in Charlotte Street, now long since cleared away as slums. By the time of my departure, my strict Aunt Cis' denigrating asides and self-righteous shrugs had made it known what she thought of my mother taking me visiting to such a 'low-class area'. Grandma Flint always worked harder than anyone I have ever met, her life had been a continual struggle against poverty, and she had become incapable of much else than scouring and cleaning, knitting and sewing... always working harder than a scullion. Yet she had time for my younger cousin and I and she brimmed full of love and happiness in our presence.

'Ma' Agnes Flint with author's cousin Leonard Flint Ritson

I think of Ma Flint one hundred per cent heart of gold. Despite her entirely untutored head, she was sharp enough about the real things of life, she was a model of sympathy in action and putting herself last, something I saw the more clearly the older I grew... but alas, when it was too late. She would play the part expected of her, a simple woman who had worked as a small-time greengrocer and hence supposedly had no insight into what in the eyes of the au fait, at least, was the world of great things. Taken to see Pavlova dance on her one and only tour of Britain (i.e Pavlova's, not Ma's), Ma afterwards remarked in her broad Shields' accent:

"Eeee... the puuer lass. She moosta bin teired oot, jummpin' aboot laike a Jackinabox arl neet!"

Hardly anyone jumped about on behalf of others as much as Ma did in her life. By all accounts, she worked and charred and scrubbed and knitted and cooked and swept and scrubbed, scullioned, cleaned and washed, scrubbed, rinsed, ironed, mended etc. and about as close to ad infinitum as a mortal menial servant can in a normal lifetime. One of ten children, she lived in self-denial and often on the verge of going to the poor house virtually until she was too old to notice any difference. She lost her memory almost entirely in the final years. She had the near-permanent delusion that she was herself back in that time, holding conversations with long-dead persons and recounting certain events as having just happened... but my mother knew them to have occurred in her childhood. At the old people's home in the South to where my mother eventually brought her, not far from Sutton in Surrey where we lived, we heard that she regularly delighted all the residents and staff with the purest and most wonderfully angelic soprano voice. My mother was very moved to hear about it as she had never even guessed that Ma could sing like that. Ma had eventually also sung in her presence during one visit too. Despite advanced senile dementia she knew the popular songs of an age past from the music halls, one of which had once been owned by one of her grandfathers.

Parts of my mother's life might well have made a quite recognisable Catherine Cookson novel. It had the ingredients of poverty, toughness and of a simple purity of soul, of seeking betterment and rising in social life... followed by the hardships of loss and much other suffering. When I saw the famous novelist's photo for the first time recently, I was struck by the similarity of style and appearance to my mother. Later, upon reading the Cookson autobiography ('Our Kate' from 1969), I could recognise from what I have heard from my mother and her parents most of the scenes of grime, social lowliness and human callousness and humiliation side by side with selfless humility that Catherine Cookson knew so well. It so happens that they actually both attended the same school at Westoe simultaneously, though I think they were in different school forms. Though her family circumstances were certainly not as bad as those Catherine Cookson once had to endure, Jane's early years had been spent under such narrow conditions that it is hard today to understand what it must have been like. Jane Crichton Priddy was born as Jane Flint in South Shields in 1901, where she lived until her late teens. She had only one sister and brother, while her mother had been one of thirteen children. Through a series of circumstances she at first thought unfortunate and against all previous expectations, she also ended up there to spend her last 8 years until her death at the age of 82. During her last 8 years I rediscovered something of South Shields on my many visits from Norway, where I still live.

Jane Priddy in the 1920s

Uncle Charles was definitely what is commonly recognised as 'a character'. He had knocked about a bit, as they say, both through Canada and the USA in the Great Depression and not least in North Africa and Italy during that even greater depressing period, the 2nd World War. His daughter prevailed on him to recount his major exploits for me when I visited South Shields in my sixteenth year. I was enthralled and could hardly believe him... but I was actually able to check up with relatives and others. There was no doubt of his veracity, though his retellings lost some of the original detail and maybe some accuracy. Many years later, when he was staying near to my mother's house and partly looking after her in her last few years, I was able to persuade him to tell me the full story again as we walked the length of the pier. It was as I had remembered it... for it had made a vivid impression. His frequent throwaway humour was accompanied by a completely poker-faced look which he only softened at length by a passing glint in the corner of an eye. When the Great Depression hit the world, it's blow was felt harder in the industrial North than elsewhere, for the great majority there were wholly dependent on their weekly wages and didn't even have a kitchen garden to spin things out. There was no work, so there was no money and sooner or later there was no food, benefits and social services hardly existed - apart from the parish and the workshop. In fact there was nought. Uncle Charles, then in his early twenties, and his gang of young lads were willing to do any kind of work, but never could they get more than a day's labouring now and then at best. Eventually one of the lads came across an advert in the papers, "Come to Canada and make your fortune! We'll pay your fare... no experience required." Unbelievable! (As it proved, too) But this seemed about right for the lads... all that was required was able-bodied workmen for farming labour. Six of them - apparently known collectively to some as terrors of the back streets - applied, were accepted and received a one-way passage by liner. Steerage class was very cramped, but at least they didn't have to man any oars... and by the time they had recovered somewhat from the stormy passage, they arrived in Montreal. They were met by their employer, who carted them off directly to a farm somewhere in Ontario far from any human habitation. The promised housing was communal in the upper floor of a barn, the food was lousy and the regime was draconian. They were set to pick root crops, with an overseer who sat on top of a ladder and would not allow them even to straighten their backs. Shirkers were to be lopped in pay. When pay day came at the end of the month, they found that heavy deductions were made for their housing and, worst of all, for reimbursement of the farmer for their fares from Britain. Their angry complaints were treated with sardonic laughter and the information that there was nothing they could do about it. Besides, they were miles from anywhere, there was nowhere to go and money could only be spent on things like cigarettes and beer sold at the farm. They were told that they could not go anywhere as they were under contract and the police would soon pick them up. Someone other than the lads ought to have told the farmer that is not the way to treat a Geordie and that you can't keep good men with a sense of fair play down. Between them they soon laid a plan of departure and, on the night they left they gave the farmer something to occupy him and his foreman... they set fire to his hayricks. They did a lot of walking through fields, forests and lanes and soon used up the proviants they had saved up to take along. They knew that they had to get on a highway, but also realised the danger of hitching because of the risk of being picked up... especially as they were now doubtless being sought as incendiaries. Being exhausted and starving, they had to take some chances, and they were fortunate and managed to get well away from the area. I forget what and who helped them in that period, whether they got some work or met friendly people. The idea was to get to some out-of-the-way places and try to get some casual labour. Now, one of the leading spirits among them, George Wilson by name, was what in those days was regarded as a mechanical genius. He knew about everything about cars and how to fix them. Fortunately for them, they came across a car-wreckers' yard, a very large collection of vehicles piled up on top of one another and no one in the vicinity. George Wilson directed operations, salvaging parts of cars to build up a working vehicle. This took a long time and they were about at the end of the tether when he finally managed to start up and drive them all away. They travelled as far as possible by back roads. They moved about from place to place, looking for odd jobs and surviving together in a rough way, for which their deprived backgrounds had conditioned them fairly well. However, one day they were driving along and were stopped by US police. Without realising it, they had crossed the 49th parallel into the US. Since their papers were not in order and their stories were somewhat vague and inconsistent, they were held in jail pending further investigations. Now their isolation was in a prison somewhere near Chicago. But hardly had they been incarcerated more than a few days than he produced a skeleton key he had made from the springs of his mattress. The lads had been well fed and could find out a good deal from talking with other prisoners. They traded their knowledge of the key for various goods and money... George made sure that he could open all the cells in their block. When the night that they had planned to break out arrived, they let out a number of other prisoners, and Uncle Charles insisted that this included some real old jail lags and even either suspected or convicted murderers. The great irony of the episode, however, was that poor George Wilson was fast asleep when they made the breakout and, in the excitement, no one noticed that he was missing until it was too late to go back and get him. The sequel to this was that George Wilson's mother back in South Shields was shown a mug shot of her son by the local police who were trying to identify him for the US authorities. With his cropped hair and thin looks, she failed to recognise him, "Not our George," was her verdict. This apparently caused much trouble and delay for her son, who was eventually extradited and sent home. The remaining five got to Chicago somehow or other. Some wrote home with desperate pleas for money. Eventually, Uncle Charles and two others arrived in New York. It was wintertime and very cold. The three of them slept rough for a while, ate mostly at soup kitchens. They got shelter at cheap charity hostels, but the big problem was how to keep warm during the day. They solved mainly by walking all the floors of all the apartment stores, examining all the goods in detail... keeping in the warm. They even took to trying on suits and commenting on the style to each other, dragging out the time until the hostel opened its doors. All three had written home for money and, after much waiting, their poor relatives in Shields managed to send some. It amounted to enough for only two of the cheapest possible steerage passages New York-Southampton. It was clear that a decision must be made, or else the money would soon dwindle until only one would be able to travel. So they played cribbage to see who was to go and who remain. My Uncle Charles was known to both expert and lucky at cards, but this time he was the loser. The harsh reality of his fate sank in fully only when he had said goodbye to his pals and he sat, cold, hungry and alone on a bollard opposite the liner which was to take them home. His desperation became so great after he had seen them waving goodbye to him from the after deck that he made up his mind to take a big chance. He had noticed some ropes hanging into the water from one of the decks, so he dived into New York harbour, swam to the ship and climbed the rope unseen. He found himself on the 1st class lifeboat deck, where he hid here and there hoping his clothes would dry before he was noticed. The cards were in his favour now, for he saw that a tarpaulin lifeboat covering was loose and he was able to climb in. He tightened the ropes to close the tarpaulin down in case anyone came to investigate it. There he stayed until long after the ship had begun to take the swell. He found some barley sugars and other emergency rations in a locker and so thought he would sleep the night there... then there would certainly be no way to send him ashore with the pilot's cutter. It rained during the night, so when he tried to get out of the boat, he found the ropes had tightened so much that he was literally trapped. After some time he thought that he may slowly suffocate and, anyway, he would have to give himself up as a stowaway eventually. But once again his hand came up trumps. He could hear voices now and again, judging by the accents and what they said, they were passengers taking a stroll. But he also heard the passage of someone bearing cutlery, perhaps a steward. After a while he noticed someone speaking with a South Shields accent! By waiting and listening he was able eventually to attract this person's attention to himself, and it was indeed a steward. Now, as every Geordie will know, the solidarity of Tynesiders against the hostile world was unsurpassed in those days. Having found one of his own, nothing was easier than to get out of the lifeboat when the deck was deserted. The steward hid him in an empty 1st class cabin and heard the whole saga. Before long, the steward brought his 'compatriot' a first class meal on a trolly, not long after which he wheeled in a rack with suits. They were part of the wardrobe of one of the very rich passengers whose frame the steward judged most similar to Charles' stocky build. He invited Charles to take his pick of a couple of suits, 'compliments of the Cunard Line', saying that the owner would never miss them, or the new shirts, ties etc. that were included. If there were any complaints, it would be said that they had been mislaid at the cleaners or in the wash. Charles had a very good night and an excellent breakfast. Then his befriender told him that it would be a problem to continue in this way, so Charles should rather take his meals in the First Class restaurant. A place at a suitable table was arranged and Charles ventured out and mingled inconspicuously with the rich and famous who were aboard. He managed to get a message to the lads in steerage to go to a point from which they could see 1st class passengers. Charles revelled in their amazement when they recognised him in an elegant suit waving a cigar at them from on high. By the end of the second day afloat, he was sufficiently confident to wander freely and make use of the amenities that he entered the casino and risked some of his precious cash on a card game. Yet again, his luck held. Next day he joined a poker game with well-to-do players and won more... and went on winning. His luck and uncommon appearance attracted the attention of a bystander, who later approached him and asked if he would mind sitting for a portrait. It was some well-known painter who wanted him as a subject, and a canvas was actually painted with Charles looking expressionlessly over a hand of cards which the artist entitled 'The Poker Player'. As they neared Southampton, the question of how to get off the vessel arose, and not least how to get through customs and immigration. Having become a bit of a figure aboard ship, this seemed difficult. His steward friend arranged for him to join a party of porters who were replenishing the ship's stores of vegetables and the like. He got Charles a vermilion-coloured jersey and told him to spend a few hours going back and forth, gradually drawing eyes to himself on the dockyard so that the staff and dock guards got used to him. Then one of the other bearers - also a North country man - was to show where he could sneak away and get out of the docks without being noticed. In this way, one might say, he got back any fare he might have forfeited from his pay to the Canadian farmers, and made enough at cards to get him home safe and dry.

Charles Flint