FRIENDS OF THE GRAVES (for the Birtley Belgians)

 

‘Never forget that you are a Birtley Belgian.’

(Ida ‘Anderland’ Dergent)

This is the story of the Birtley Belgians,

the shellers from hell,

the wandering men 

and the women they wed.

You can say goodbye to your friends.

These are the remnants of Elisabethville,

the shattered relics of battered soldiers,

the shards of savagery,

the empty shells of discarded folk.

This is what’s left of the carnage,

the last of the war effort,

the smiles of the children

and the severed limbs.

This is the story of the Birtley Belgians.

From Flanders and Wallonia they came

leaving beloved roots behind

to do their bit for the ritual slaughter,

to bring up well their sons and daughters

to dance and sing

under the hails of bullets.

Fishing for sunshine in the Ijzer brook,

kicking stones on the Rue de Charleroi,

the Birtley Belgians

planted their seed on Durham ground

and made do

and made explosive dreams.

What more can we tell?

‘Home is made for coming from,

for dreams of going to 

which with any luck

will never come true.’

Sweating in uniform

on assembly lines,

pulverising their brains

to keep the powers that be in power,

they were strong

and at the same time weak

and screamed and cried

like anyone.

This is the story of the Birtley Belgians.

They’re gone now,

blown to dust

in the festering fields,

memories strewn over the way

to fertilise another day

with the same weary mistakes

and thrusts of love.

I can see the boys in the Villa de Bruges

slaking their frustrated fantasies

to drown the horror 

and the girls

seductive behind the huts

in between

the grind of daily production.

Let me take you

up the Boulevard Queen Mary,

along the Rue de Louvain,

knock on the door of number D2

and blood will pour

and the ground will open up,

‘mud will take you prisoner’

and devour all those years.

This is the story of the Birtley Belgians.

You can hear their singing on the North Sea wind,

hear them in Chester le Street and Liege,

the brass band and orchestra

drowning out the distant pounding.

In and out of trouble,

we will always dance.

An accordion wails across the little streets,

the Three Tuns welcomes the living.

And at the crack of dawn

and in the battlefields of evening clouds

we will remember them,

in the words of the Walloon poet Camille Fabry proclaim:

‘Our thoughts fly like arrows back to the land of our birth.’

This is the story of the loss of lives

for causes we scarcely understand

but for love and grandeur too

and for the little Belgian children

and the joyous games they play.

This is the story of the Birtley Belgians.

KEITH ARMSTRONG

The Birtley Belgians emigrated from Belgium to Birtley, County Durham during World War 1 to build an armaments factory and lived in their own specially created village.  

Named after the Queen of the Belgians, Elisabethville itself became Little Belgium - a colony of 6,000 people, of boules and of boulevards. It had its own hospital, cemetery, school, church, nunnery and Co-op; only Flemish and Walloon were spoken. The Birtley factory was to the north of the town, British built but entirely Belgian run. By 1916 it gave work to 3,500 men, 85 per cent disabled in some way, with 2,500 family members also housed in the adjacent iron fenced village.

The poem was commissioned by the Birtley Belgians Euro-Network in 2015 in association with Borsolino and Berline Belgian Drama Groups.

What a good job you've made of it!  Like you, I find these nooks and crannies of the 20th century totally fascinating. (John Mapplebeck, Bewick Films).

DURHAM

GRAPES IN BULGARIA

Grapes bulge in the seering sun,
fresh and healthy as a young girl,
rich with optimism
in a back street vineyard.
Taste sweet as your lips, dear.
Trickle down my throat.
Wine today in my poems.
Hang your head for life’s sake:
the portrait, decked with black ribbons,
nailed to the door,
stares at us as we drink
blood from the glass.
Along the rails,
hurtling headlong, we
spit out the pips
from the fruit an old lady gives us;
fruit of her heart,
her old heart,
decked with black ribbons.
Black wine in the night.
Stars bunch
over Bulgaria.
The rain refreshes our skin.
Peeling off our clothes,
we enter new towns,
strange rooms,
beds drenched
in yesterday’s kisses.
Picture on the hotel wall
is of a grape mountain.
Climb the stairs,
until your thirst is
quenched.
Sew seeds on the map.
Bulgaria, we’ll squeeze you
out of love,
to live.




KEITH ARMSTRONG

FOLLOW THE SUN

FOLLOW THE SUN

Follow the Sun is a new project for this year's Heritage Open Days (September 8th to 11th 2016) to mark the bicentenary of George Stephenson's sundial at Dial Cottage, Killingworth.

Northern Voices Community Projects, with the support of North Tyneside Council, is encouraging local writers, artists, musicians and schoolchildren to come up with poems, songs, stories and artwork to celebrate the sundial. A booklet of the written material and artwork, together with an historical background, will be launched on September 9th in Killingworth with readings of poems and stories and performances of the songs.

Please send your contributions to NVCP:  k.armstrong643@btinternet.com

THOMAS SPENCE (1750-1814) - THE HIVE OF LIBERTY

(AFTER THE NAME OF THOMAS SPENCE’S BOOKSHOP AT 8 LITTLE TURNSTILE, HIGH HOLBORN)

I am a small and humble man,

my body frail and broken.

I strive to do the best I can.

I spend my life on tokens.

I traipse through Holborn all alone,

hawking crazy notions.

I am the lonely people’s friend.

I live on schemes and potions.

For, in my heart and in my mind,

ideas swarm right through me.

Yes, in this Hive of Liberty,

my words just flow like wine,

my words just flow like wine.

I am a teeming worker bee.

My dignity is working.

My restless thoughts swell like the sea.

My fantasies I’m stoking.

There is a rebel inside me,

a sting about to strike.

I hawk my works around the street.

I put the world to rights.

For, in my heart and in my mind,

ideas swarm right through me.

Yes, in this Hive of Liberty,

my words just flow like wine,

my words just flow like wine.

KEITH ARMSTRONG

'In England such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in.' (George Orwell)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IMy-h2re3g

Thomas Spence was born in Newcastle in 1750. Spence was the leading English revolutionary of his day, with an unbudgeable commitment to individual and press freedom and the common ownership of the land.

His tracts, such as The Rights of Man (Spence was, perhaps, the first to use the phrase) and The Rights of Infants, along with his utopian visions of 'Crusonia' and 'Spensonia', were the most far-reaching radical statements of the period. Spence was born in poverty and died the same way, after long periods of imprisonment, in 1814. 

FOLK SONG FOR THOMAS SPENCE (1750-1814)

Down by the old Quayside,
I heard a young man cry,
among the nets and ships he made his way.
As the keelboats buzzed along,
he sang a seagull’s song;
he cried out for the Rights of you and me.

Oh lads, that man was Thomas Spence,
he gave up all his life
just to be free.
Up and down the cobbled Side,
struggling on through the Broad Chare,
he shouted out his wares
for you and me.

Oh lads, you should have seen him gan,
he was a man the likes you rarely see.
With a pamphlet in his hand,
and a poem at his command,
he haunts the Quayside still
and his words sing.

His folks they both were Scots,
sold socks and fishing nets,
through the Fog on the Tyne they plied their trade.
In this theatre of life,
the crying and the strife,
they tried to be decent and be strong.

Oh lads, that man was Thomas Spence,
he gave up all his life
just to be free.
Up and down the cobbled Side,
struggling on through the Broad Chare,
he shouted out his wares
for you and me.

Oh lads, you should have seen him gan,
he was a man the likes you rarely see.
With a pamphlet in his hand,
and a poem at his command,
he haunts the Quayside still
and his words sing.


KEITH ARMSTRONG




(from the music-theatre piece ‘Pig’s Meat’ written for Bruvvers Theatre Company)

THOMAS SPENCE (1750-1814)

THE THOMAS SPENCE TRUST

93 Woodburn Square, Whitley Lodge, Whitley Bay, Tyne & Wear NE26 3JD

Tel. 0191 2529531

It’s good to welcome the establishment of The Thomas Spence Trust, founded by a group of Tyneside activists intent on celebrating and promoting the life and work of that noted pioneer of people’s rights, pamphleteer and poet Thomas Spence (1750-1814), who has born on Newcastle’s Quayside in those turbulent times.

Spence served in his father’s netmaking trade from the age of ten but went on later to be a teacher at Haydon Bridge Free Grammar School and at St. Ann’s Church in Byker under the City Corporation. In 1775, he read his famous lecture on the right to property in land to the Newcastle Philosophical Society, who voted his expulsion at their next meeting.

He claimed to have invented the phrase ‘The Rights of Man’ and chalked it in the caves at Marsden Rocks in South Shields in honour of the working-class hero ‘Blaster Jack’ Bates, who lived there.

He even came to blows with famed Tyneside wood-engraver Thomas Bewick (to whom a memorial has been recently established on the streets of Newcastle) over a political issue, and was thrashed with cudgels for his trouble.

From 1792, having moved to London, he took part in radical agitations, particularly against the war with France. He was arrested several times for selling his own and other seditious books and was imprisoned for six months without trial in 1794, and sentenced to three years for his Restorer of Society to its Natural State in 1801.

Whilst politicians such as Edmund Burke saw the mass of people as the ‘Swinish Multitude’, Spence saw creative potential in everybody and broadcast his ideas in the periodical Pigs’ Meat.

He had a stall in London’s Chancery Lane, where he sold books and saloup, and later set up a small shop called The Hive of Liberty in Holborn.

He died in poverty ‘leaving nothing to his friends but an injunction to promote his Plan and the remembrance of his inflexible integrity’.

The Thomas Spence Trust organised a mini-festival to celebrate Spence in 2000 when it published a booklet on his life and work, together with related events, with the aid of Awards for All.

Trust founder-member, poet Keith Armstrong has written a play for Bruvvers Theatre Company on the socialist pioneer which has been performed at St. Ann’s Church and other venues in the city.

Now the Trust has successfully campaigned for a plaque on the Quayside in Newcastle, where Spence was born. The plaque was unveiled on Monday June 21st 2010, Spence's 260th birthday, with a number of talks, displays and events coinciding with it.

Further information from: Dr Keith Armstrong, The Thomas Spence Trust, 93 Woodburn Square, Whitley Lodge, Whitley Bay, Tyne & Wear NE26 3JD. Tel. 0191 2529531.

SPEECH BY DR KEITH ARMSTRONG AT UNVEILING OF SPENCE PLAQUE

On behalf of The Thomas Spence Trust and Newcastle City Council, I’m delighted to welcome you here today to unveil a plaque in honour of that great free spirit, utopian writer, land reformer and courageous pioneering campaigner for the rights of men and women, Thomas Spence. Myself and other members of our Trust, especially Peter Dixon and Tony Whittle, with the support of people like Professors Joan Beal, Alastair Bonnett and Malcolm Chase and activists like Michael Mould, Alan Myers and Councillor Nigel Todd, have campaigned for well over 10 years for some kind of memorial to Tom Spence and it is with great pride that we assemble here with you today.

We know that Spence was born on the Quayside on June 21st 1750, 260 years ago to this the longest day and Summer Solstice. We know that his father Jeremiah made fishing nets and sold hardware from a booth on Sandhill and his mother Margaret kept a stocking stall, also on Sandhill, but it has not been possible, all these years on, to pinpoint the exact location of Thomas Spence’s birthplace, which is why this plaque has been installed here at Broad Garth, the site of his school room and debating society and where he actually came to blows with Thomas Bewick because of a dispute over the contentious matter of property. Bewick gave Spence a beating with cudgels on that occasion but, surprisingly enough, they remained lifelong friends. As Bewick said of Spence: ‘He was one of the warmest Philanthropists in the world and the happiness of Mankind seemed, with him, to absorb every other consideration.’

In these days of bland career politicians, Spence stands out as an example of a free spirit, prepared to go to prison for his principles - the principles of grass roots freedom, community and democracy, for the human rights of people all over the world.

Spence mobilised politically in taverns in Newcastle and later in London. That is why this afternoon, after this short ceremony, you are all invited to join us across the road in the Red House to raise a glass for Tom and to hear informal talks, poems and songs in his honour. You can hear further talks on Spence tonight at the Lit & Phil, courtesy of the Workers’ Educational Association, and next Monday at Newcastle Library, along with a display of his works, and, if you like, you can join some of us at Marsden Grotto, South Shields, tomorrow lunchtime, where Thomas first chalked the phrase ‘The Rights of Man’ on a cave wall, to raise another glass for this man who in his own words ‘dared to be free.’

This plaque puts Thomas Spence on the map for all of those pilgrims who hold human rights and political freedoms dear. It does not trap his free spirit rather it gives his life and work fresh wings.

Thanks to you all for coming this afternoon on this proud day for both The Thomas Spence Trust, Newcastle City Council and the citizens of this great city of ours.

I’ll now hand over to the Lord Mayor who will unveil the plaque, after which my friend Gary Miller, esteemed singer and songwriter, will perform a folk song which I’ve written as a tribute to Tom.


FOLK SONG FOR THOMAS SPENCE

(1750-1814)


Down by the old Quayside,
I heard a young man cry,
among the nets and ships he made his way.
As the keelboats buzzed along,
he sang a seagull’s song;
he cried out for the Rights of you and me.

Oh lads, that man was Thomas Spence,
he gave up all his life
just to be free.
Up and down the cobbled Side,
struggling on through the Broad Chare,
he shouted out his wares
for you and me.

Oh lads, you should have seen him gan,
he was a man the likes you rarely see.
With a pamphlet in his hand,
and a poem at his command,
he haunts the Quayside still
and his words sing.

His folks they both were Scots,
sold socks and fishing nets,
through the Fog on the Tyne they plied their trade.
In this theatre of life,
the crying and the strife,
they tried to be decent and be strong.

Oh lads, that man was Thomas Spence,
he gave up all his life
just to be free.
Up and down the cobbled Side,
struggling on through the Broad Chare,
he shouted out his wares
for you and me.

Oh lads, you should have seen him gan,
he was a man the likes you rarely see.
With a pamphlet in his hand,
and a poem at his command,
he haunts the Quayside still
and his words sing.


KEITH ARMSTRONG




(from the music-theatre piece ‘Pig’s Meat’ written for Bruvvers Theatre Company)