Then I left and there

was somebody

set a rumour about that I was going to start on the council as well.

Oh, there was hell on in Thornley.'

They thought he was pulling strings?

'That's it. Anyway, I didn't. I started for J J Walton--Jack--a private firm and they couldn't do anything about it.'

That would be down at Albert Street where the photo was taken?

'He had a garage down there, but my first job was at Blackhall Rocks. Went up to the store on the Friday and my mother bought me a bike. Or it might have been the week before. And on the Sunday I went down to Blackhall Rocks to see where the job was, with my bike--that was right down going to Crimdon--and found the site and then I knew where to go on the Monday morning. Why, there was a few travelling down, Eddie Miller and all of them. There was a few from Thornley, we just used to drop in with them, used to knock about all together. There was no traffic on the roads then.'

The Pit in the 1930s

'They were on short time. They used to blow the buzzer at a quarter to six at night. "Pit's off the morn!" Everybody was up going about shouting "Pit's of the morn!" Over the bloody moon some of them! They were only on about three or four shifts a week.'

You were always all right for work?

'Oh aye. When I was 17 I was working on the Plough Inn at Haswell. There's still brickwork there that I did. It's fancy work, what you call "Herring bone". There's panels above the front and the bricks, they go up, all the way up to a point and it's in like a wooden panel. I did two or three of them and they're still there. Fancy work. There was no sill saws then, you had to do everything by hand. Everything had to be cut with a hammer and nicker, or a chisel.'

Talk about your apprenticeship.

'I worked with some good fellas. Some good bricklayers I worked with. The first lot I worked with, there was a bloke called Jack Raine, he lived at Kelloe and he started building on his own after the war. There was a little bloke from Horden, Tommy Lowry and then there was another one, he used to live at High Hesledon, Jack Muir, a Scot, and there was Wilf Luke, he lived at Wheatley Hill.'

They didn't have cement mixers then?

'Oh, they had. They were just starting to get them. We used to knock up the concrete for the roads and that, they had big wooden boards down. They were all hand mixed, all the roads down here, they were all down that way--at Wheatley Hill.'

Your were never tempted by the pit?

'No, why the colliery bricklayers were no good, man.'

So want did the others in your class do when they left school?

'The pit--the lads.'

NEXT: more on work in the 1930s

My father’s elder brother Hubert Tunney, who served his apprenticeship as a plumber with the local council after leaving St Godric’s RC. The original photograph is dated August 1932 on the reverse and seems to have been taken near the garden allotments of the village, which can just be glimpsed in the background..

On the site in Albert Street, Thornley in 1935. Left to right: Spike Laverick from Wheatley Hill, Tom Tunney, Bobby Watts from South Hetton, and Dougie Ashford, from Whitley Bay, who lodged in Thornley in the fish shop by the Queen’s Head pub All were working for local builder Jack Walton at the time.