Metadata
WORK ID: NEFA 10912 (Master Record)
| Title | Year | Date |
| A WORLD OF MY OWN: JAMES MITCHELL | 1969 | 1969-01-01 |
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Details
Original Format: 16mm Colour: Black & White Sound: Sound Duration: 23 mins 47 secs Credits: On screen participant: James Mitchell Film Director: Jeremy Lack Production Company: Tyne Tees Television Producer: Leslie Barrett Camera: Norman Jackson Genre: TV Documentary Subject: Ships Seaside Politics Industry Family Life Education |
| Summary Autobiographical documentary on James Mitchell, the English author of crime fiction and spy thrillers (pseudonyms James Munro and Patrick O. McGuire) who also worked as a film and TV scriptwriter. Born during the General Strike, Mitchell returns to his home town of South Shields and reminisces about his family and childhood during the Depression er ... |
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Description
Autobiographical documentary on James Mitchell, the English author of crime fiction and spy thrillers (pseudonyms James Munro and Patrick O. McGuire) who also worked as a film and TV scriptwriter. Born during the General Strike, Mitchell returns to his home town of South Shields and reminisces about his family and childhood during the Depression era. He revisits places remembered from his youth, including the River Tyne, South Shields Town Hall, Marsden Rock and Sunderland College of Art,...
Autobiographical documentary on James Mitchell, the English author of crime fiction and spy thrillers (pseudonyms James Munro and Patrick O. McGuire) who also worked as a film and TV scriptwriter. Born during the General Strike, Mitchell returns to his home town of South Shields and reminisces about his family and childhood during the Depression era. He revisits places remembered from his youth, including the River Tyne, South Shields Town Hall, Marsden Rock and Sunderland College of Art, where he taught, and talks about the long established Muslim community in the town. This is an edition of the Tyne Tees Television series A World of My Own [no credits], originally broadcast on Wednesday 2 July 1969.
The documentary opens with a general view of the Old Town Hall in South Shields. A car turns into Market Square. Close-ups follow of author James Mitchell as the driver. Travelling shot from the car driving around Market Square, then turning left past the Ridings store on the corner of the main shopping street, King Street. The car (a Jensen Interceptor Reg. No. RBB 99F) then turns onto a residential street. Close-up of Mitchell driving. Travelling shot of the car moving along the coast road with a view of a harbour and ship yard crane, and on up River Drive.
The Shell tanker Dingle Bank sails up the Tyne. James Mitchell gets out of his car and surveys the mouth of the Tyne. A boat is sailing out of the Tyne between Tynemouth Pier lighthouse and the South Shields lighthouse.
The Pando Strait and Iron Crown cargo ships are moored at a Shields shipyard, the North Shields Fish Quay on the far bank of the Tyne. A crane looms at the end of another residential street. A door-to-door insurance salesman (Man from the Pru?) collects payments from a woman in one of the houses. A woman plays football with some children on a street, a dog barking at her. Two women call at a local corner shop. A few adults and children hang out on another street of terraced houses leading down to the Tyne.
Pigeons perch on roofs. An elderly Asian man in braces feeds his hens in a back yard. A teenage boy visits to show him a racing pigeon. The man examines the pigeon and strokes its head.
At South Marine Park a woman and her child feed the ducks on the lake.
James Mitchell drives through South Shields on a steep residential hill. He arrives at the grand forecourt to the prominent Edwardian Town Hall on Westoe Road, with fountains and nymph lampholders in the forecourt alongside a statue of Queen Victoria. Various close-ups of sculpted figures on the front of the building follow. Mitchell walks up the front steps. Inside, he climbs the stone staircase, pauses to look at a bust, walks a corridor and enters a panelled chamber. He looks at a photo of his father amongst councillors. He sits on the Mayor’s Chair in the council chamber. Piece to camera about the family’s pride when he became Mayor of South Shields.
Mitchell walks down a derelict street of terraced houses with smashed windows, glass on the pavements. He looks through a smashed window pane, a cigarette dangling from his house. He enters one of the houses where debris and leftover possessions litter the floor. He walks into a back yard strewn with debris and on down a back alley. General views follow of boarded up houses and corner shop as he strolls down the deserted streets. Old advertising for Woodbines and Brooke Bond Tea still adorn the front of the shop.
Next, he walks through gardens lined with nymph lamp holders and down the stone steps leading towards the Marine Park South lake, a grand vista facing the North Sea.
A short sequence shows the exuberant Durham Miners Gala procession past the County Hotel with banners and brass bands and dancing crowds.
Portrait shot of James Mitchell. General view of an empty bandstand in a park. A young man walks his dog through an empty fairground. All the rides, including the Helter Skelter, are closed. He continues walking the dog along the Groyne Promenade.
[Countdown leader]
Mitchell gets a ride on a police launch sailing past the Herd Groyne lighthouse and into the Tyne. Travelling shots follow from the boat as the author sits towards the stern and watches the industrial riverscape pass. The boat passes the cargo ship ‘Bamburgh Castle’ (built at Swan Hunter) and another large ship. The three police on board the launch sit up front. Mitchell sits out back to watch the sights of the river. The boat comes in to moor and Mitchell hops off waving goodbye. On the riverside, he heads across the deserted forecourt of the grand Customs House in the Mill Dam area, east of the old Tyne Docks.
Back in South Shields town centre, women stroll through the Market Square, some with prams and children, past the Old Town Hall and a market cross. Saint Hilda's Church on Church Way also faces the market place. People browse and shop at the market stalls. One or two young women have bouffant hairstyles popular at the time. Children are curious about the caged birds on sale at the market.
A bus advertising Binns on its rear passes a road sign pointing to North Beach and South Beach, and the Lifeboat Memorial on Pier Parade, between the North and South Marine Parks.
Waves roll onto the beach. The Ritz restaurant sign is visible through the columns of Ghandi’s Temple, a 1930s bandstand on the seafront.
Mitchell drives along the seafront. Various shots of Marsden Rock and Marsden Beach follow. A young woman in a bikini runs along the beach. Slow motion footage of her running follows. A lift moves up the lift shaft from Marsden Grotto, a pub on the beach. Mitchell enters the lift, graffiti on the wall outside, and travels down to the beach, lighting a cigarette as he goes. On the beach, he glances around. Shots of Marsden Rock follow. One or two people are scattered on the beach. Hundreds of birds nest on Marsden Rock. A man’s pet dog runs out of the sea with a stick. As a woman knits whilst seated on a deckchair, children play with buckets and spades in the sand. General view of Marsden Bay. Mitchell walks the beach, sits on the rock and looks out to sea. View of the sea through a rock stack.
Still on Marsden Beach, Mitchell short piece to camera about writing a spy thriller series under the name of James Munro, his main character John Craig. A ship waits in the distance out at sea as waves crash onto the South Tyneside shore.
Back on the River Tyne, various cargo ships moor around the harbour at South Shields including the James Rowan and Sir William Walker. A smaller boat heads upriver.
Exterior view of Sunderland College of Art at Ashburne House, Backhouse Park. Interior shots of the arts students painting, sculpting, working on technical illustration, and making collages. Various exterior shots flash between the old Ashburne House and modern 60s extensions for the art college at the campus. A selection of paintings of the architecture follows. Students work away in the sculpture workshop with welding and other techniques. The section closes with exterior views of the college buildings.
The next sequence opens with a close-up of Arabic writing on a sign. A man enters the building, a seamen’s boarding house in the Holborn area of Laygate. The Indian restaurant of Shah Jan sits on a busy street. Two children wander by. An Arab man with two children enters a door to a building, the sign above the door reading ‘Licensed Seaman’s Lodging Housekeeper (A.A. Hussein)’ This is probably the Yemeni boarding house at 50 - 52 Brunswick Street.
In the play area of a small, modern 60s low rise housing estate, probably still around Holborn, a group of young children pet two dogs.
Mitchell walks across a lawn at South Shields Marine and Technical College. A domed observatory tower sits on the building. He gets back in his car and drives off. High angle view of a main road looking out over South Shields towards the Tyne shipyards and cranes.
[Mitchell was also creator of two of the most acclaimed television drama series of the late 1960s and 1970s, Callan and When The Boat Comes In. Before 1964 he taught libreal studies at Sunderland College of Art.]
Context
The best-selling Tyneside author James Mitchell was born on March 12 in South Shields ‘into a world of heavy boots, cloth caps, back-to-back housing and the dole’. It was the turbulent year of the General Strike, 1926, when around 1.75 million miners walked out against enforced pay-cuts with Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin claiming it to be ‘the road to anarchy.’ The strike lasted only nine days in May, and the poverty continued. Britain’s economy was already struggling after...
The best-selling Tyneside author James Mitchell was born on March 12 in South Shields ‘into a world of heavy boots, cloth caps, back-to-back housing and the dole’. It was the turbulent year of the General Strike, 1926, when around 1.75 million miners walked out against enforced pay-cuts with Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin claiming it to be ‘the road to anarchy.’ The strike lasted only nine days in May, and the poverty continued. Britain’s economy was already struggling after World War I. Then the US stock market crash in 1929 triggered the Great Depression and plunged northern industrial areas into greater economic deprivation. By the end of 1930, unemployment more than doubled to 20 per cent.
In his early years during the Depression, Mitchell’s father was a shipyard fitter on the dole who spent his days with young James at local craft classes for the unemployed. In this marvellous autobiographical documentary from Tyne Tees Television, James Mitchell’s great admiration for his self-educated and politicised father is evident and his anecdotes of the hardship on Tyneside during those years memorable. Politics seeps into children’s games and into a Shields street life punctuated by the drama of evictions. His father was involved in labour relations as a shop steward, then as an organiser for the Amalgamated Engineering Union; later he was a Labour councillor and became Mayor of South Shields in 1945. ‘An old-fashioned radical, he refused to wear a dinner jacket to the annual civic ball, although his wife wore a formal evening dress.’ Mitchell won a scholarship to South Shields Grammar School and another to St Edmund Hall, Oxford, then trained to be a teacher at King’s College, Newcastle. He worked in a rag bag of jobs including repertory theatre actor, shipyard worker, teacher and travel courier, before chasing success as a writer of crime fiction and spy thrillers, sometimes under the pseudonyms Patrick O’ McGuire and James Munro. As Munro, he created tough Geordie MI-6 agent John Craig (The Man Who Sold Death the first story in 1964) who he admits is ‘every man’s wish fulfilment, including my own’. Well, it was still the 1960s. The extremely popular and chillingly grim Callan was his first break into television drama, with Edward Woodward superbly cast as the ruthlessly efficient government assassin, a moody working class outsider who takes ‘all the rotten jobs’. Was Callan TV’s first anti-hero? Produced by ABC Weekend Television and Thames Television, Callan became a cult favourite and ran for 52 episodes between 1967 and 1972, the early monochrome episodes pared back and edgy with an iconic swinging light bulb title sequence. Reputedly, this was the favorite show of two-time Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson who was not a fan of the British Intelligence Services. A film followed in 1974 and a reunion TV film for ATV in 1981. As James Mitchell muses in this documentary, shot five years after he had moved to London to work as a TV writer: ‘Like Lord Byron, I awoke one morning and found myself famous.’ Mitchell’s next creation for TV drew on his working-class roots in South Shields. The BBC period drama When the Boat Comes In (1976-1981) was shot in the north east, including locations in Wallsend, North Shields, Whitley Bay’s Spanish City, Cullercoats and Easington coal beaches. It featured James Bolam (born just six or so miles away from Mitchell) as stroppy, militant Sergeant Jack Ford, a de-mobbed World War I veteran returning to his fictional Gallowshield home, a Tyneside mining village gripped by decline during the Great Depression. It was a series "full of very powerful women characters". Other talented writers from the north east contributed episodes to the first series at Mitchell’s request: Alex Glasgow from Low Fell (who also sang the folk song intro), Tom Hadaway from North Shields and Sid Chaplin from Shildon, County Durham. Sid’s son Michael Chaplin has said of the programme’s legacy: ‘People were able to see their own history on the TV screen. Able to tap into their parents’ and grandparents’ lives in a way that wouldn’t have been possible before.’ It was on the small screen in the 1960s and 70s that the north east was finally written into the national imagination. It's more than 40 years since When the Boat Comes In first hit our TV screens. In 2018 James Mitchell's son, Peter Mitchell, director of programmes at Tyne Tees TV until 1997, published a novel called Jack High that fills in the gaps of character Jack Ford's life in 1925 (missing from the TV series) when he returns to mythical Gallowshield (based on South Shields) and also Northumberland. “He’s living in London but is drawn back to the North East [...] “I loved doing it. Writing about those characters was like renewing acquaintance with old mates." Mitchell told David Whetstone at The Chronicle. He also adapted the show for a play at the Customs House, South Shields, which featured in some of the original scenes from the TV series. He decided to tackle the novel after first working on four 70s-set re-worked Callan scripts with production company Big Finish, who specialise in audio dramas. “When they offered me that I just thought, it’s just short stories – it’ll be a bit of fun. But I found the process... well, I felt it brought me really close to my dad." South Shields ‘figures largely’ in James Mitchell’s work. He remembers ‘the streets, the cobbles and the rain on them. All the clichés of northern industrial life were very much my clichés. But in South Shields there was a difference. You were cut round by the sea.’ A town situated where the great Tyne flowed out to the North Sea and a multitude of shipping routes, which always offered the possibility of escape. But if people did escape their roots in Shields, whether as sailors or writers, ‘they always came back’. The pull of this sea-faring Tyneside town, once known locally as Scarborough-on-Tyne, also drew the first Yemeni seamen who worked on British steam ships from the 1860s, often as firemen in the boiler room as these jobs were the least desirable. Yemen was drawn into the British Empire after the annexation of the port of Aden in 1839 to provide Britain with a base between the Suez Canal and British Occupied Bombay. The contribution of South Shields Yemeni sailors was immense during both world wars. The town lost the largest proportion of Merchant Navy sailors in the Great War, with 1 in 4 of these Yemeni men, who often worked below decks where they could rarely escape from a torpedoed vessel. The original Arab seamen who decided to make South Shields their permanent home peacefully integrated with local families and created one of the oldest Muslim communities in Britain, centred on the streets of Holborn and Laygate where Ali Said opened the first seaman’s boarding house for Arabs in 1894. One of two remaining boarding houses is pictured here in the 1960s on Brunswick Street, A. A. Hussein’s, first opened in 1945 by a former seaman from the Yemeni Al-Sayadi tribe. Despite the disappearance of Tyneside’s shipping industry, it survives today, catering mainly as lodgings for Indian college students. The Yemeni Project is a fantastic resource for those researching the fascinating and informative history of the Yemeni community in South Shields and nationally. The website includes the memories and thoughts of British-Yemeni descendants remaining in the area, and research into the so-called race riots, which occurred in 1919 and again in August 1930. Laygate is home to the Al Azhar Mosque, a cherished local landmark built in 1971 to satisfy the religious needs of South Shields' established Yemeni community. It was here that boxing legend and ‘People’s Champion’ Muhammad Ali had his marriage to Veronica Porché Ali blessed on his extraordinary visit to the north east region in July 1977, a four-day charity tour to help raise money for local boys' boxing clubs. Tyne Tees Television news footage of Ali’s visit is preserved at North East Film Archive and available to watch online. Muhammad Ali Visit to the North East 1977 References: https://www.david-campbell.org/wp-content/documents/Arab_boarding_house.pdf http://www.theyemeniproject.org.uk/ https://www.theguardian.com/news/2002/sep/19/guardianobituaries1 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1407711/James-Mitchell.html Historical Dictionary of British Spy Fiction, Alan Burton ( Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2016) https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/whats-on/arts-culture-news/seventies-favourite-boat-comes-back-14613116 https://www.shieldsgazette.com/news/new-when-boat-comes-novel-set-be-launched-299564 https://garyalikivi.com/2018/08/09/life-in-a-northern-town-in-conversation-with-writer-and-tv-producer-peter-mitchell/ |
