Newsletter Hartlepool & District U3A Issue 42, November 2020 Comments from the Chair We managed to conduct a face-to- face Committee meeting at the end of September, which was a big step in the right direction. We met in the Covid-safe Grange Road Methodist Church and followed social distancing. I knew my mental faculties were unimpaired as I recognised the other Committee members and even remembered their names! This meeting gave us the opportunity to sort out the issue of membership fees for this year and next year and came up with a simple solution: those members who had managed to renew their membership this year before the lockdown would renew free of charge next year. Those who didn't manage to renew this year would pay the normal £15 next year. Looks like the Committee members are back to emails, phone calls and the occasional Zoom meeting for the time being. Ho hum! I continue to have virtual meetings with the Chairs from SE Northumberland and South Durham and the main message back from these meetings is that we are all in the same boat and doing our best to keep going under these difficult circumstances. An important point which keeps coming up was keeping in touch with each other by all possible means including using Zoom, emails, the phone, and letters. I try and contact all of our members by phone who don't have access to the internet at least once a month. I regularly see members walking in small groups along the promenade on The Headland and it is good to stop to see them and have a chat with them. My Creative Writing group also maintain regular contact through the phone, emails, and letters. I can't emphasise enough the importance of keeping in contact with each other by whatever means possible in these uncertain times. I think we all have access to a phone so please use it to support each other and have a chat. Stay well and keep safe. Roger Say, Chair Hartlepool & District U3A. Registered Charity No 1153641. www.u3asites.org.uk/Hartlepool Page 1 Hartlepool History Column Chris McLoughlin Group Leader: Archaeology/History The Pulitzer Prize winning book “The Prize” by Daniel Yergin, tracing the history of the development of the Oil Industry from 1850 through to 1890s, has been through many editions since it was first published in 1990. Anyone with an interest in the development of our carbon-based lifestyle would enjoy it and apparently it has been read by recent US Presidents. The book also includes a small number of maps outlining the major developments in the oil industry such as Titusville in the USA and the Middle East plus of course, a map showing the voyage of the tanker “Murex” in 1892 from Gray’s Shipyard in West Hartlepool via the Black Sea and Suez Canal to Singapore! The voyage of the Murex from the yard off Middleton Road to the Far East is of importance because it broke the hold of the Rockefellers and Esso (Standard Oil) through the rise of what became Shell Oil. Crude oil had hitherto been carried in small cans before a designer called Fortescue Flannery designed the “Murex” (Latin for ‘’shell’’ by the way) for the Samuel family, founders of what became Shell Oil. After sailing from Hartlepool, the Murex loaded a cargo of Kerosene in bulk at Batum before becoming the first tanker to transit the Suez Canal. And the rest is history as the saying goes. Another more recent book called, “Someday we’ll understand” by Scarborough author Mark Quinn has also highlighted another local maritime story. An ancestor of Mark had sailed on the Hartlepool owned trawler “Doris Burton” (she was owned by R H Davison’s from Hartlepool and named after a young lady from Stockton, whose family were major shareholders). The vessel left Aberdeen on November 29th 1914 for the fishing grounds and simply put, has not been heard of since. Some nine men and boys from Hartlepool and Scarborough made up the crew and were all lost. She was eventually officially declared as lost early in January of 1915, at that stage of the War there were hopes that she had been stopped by a U Boat and the crew taken off as prisoners but the general consensus is that she struck a mine. The only sign of her was a small boat found around 150 miles from Hartlepool with her name on it. By chance, the Robert Wood Poster collection in our local Museum has a poster advertising a fund-raising football match to raise money for the dependants, and one of our U3A members is a descendant as her Grandfather was a crewman. Mark has cleverly woven the story of the crew and her loss from fragments of the story remembered by the family over the years. The postscript to the story is that divers working off Whitby a decade or so ago, discovered the wreck of a vessel with her stern missing, from the description it is believed to be the remains are the “Doris Burton”. Hartlepool & District U3A. Registered Charity No 1153641. www.u3asites.org.uk/Hartlepool Page 2 As you will see from the dates, the disappearance of the trawler took place against the background of the Bombardment and would have been just one of many tragedies unfolding in the two towns that fateful December. “Lost at sea” is often seen on memorials in seaports and equally often, tragedies seem to fade from memory. As a child I was aware from tales from my extended family of the loss of the “Millpool”, a Ropner vessel from West Hartlepool. It was lost with all hands in early October of 1934 during extreme weather in the North Atlantic whilst carrying a cargo of rye from Danzig to Labrador. A total of 26 crew members– mainly drawn from the Hartlepools went down with the vessel. It seems that although the “Millpool” kept in radio contact until the end, the search vessels were unable to locate her position and the search was eventually abandoned. This loss was foreshadowed shortly before hand when another Ropner vessel “Ainderby” (on passage from Swansea to Montreal with coal), had a young apprentice also from town, lost when he was swept overboard in the same area of the North Atlantic. “Ainderby” though damaged like the “Millpool”, managed to turn in the storm and get back to Swansea. Discovering Local History in Hartlepool: ‘Remembrance’ Hartlepool North Cemetery (originally known as West Hartlepool Cemetery) By Wendy Borthwick On my very first visit at the beginning of lockdown I was struck by the number of Commonwealth War Grave (CWG) headstones. They are themselves iconic and stand out in a crowd. Suffice to say, today there is less of a crowd in this cemetery but the CWG headstones which number eighty- one stand in solitary splendour at intervals across this now virtually bare ground. Not counted among the eighty-one is what at first glance appeared to be a CWG headstone, similar shape, similar coloured stone but there was something that didn’t quite fit. Closer inspection revealed that it was slightly taller, not quite as wide, not quite as thick and the inscription was in French! Research proved difficult until realising it may be better to start closer to home, so I returned to the Hartlepool North Cemetery Web Site (listed below) which states, that there are in excess of fifty-three thousand burials including eighty-one war dead, twelve Nuns of St Joseph’s Convent, over seventy Hartlepool & District U3A. Registered Charity No 1153641. www.u3asites.org.uk/Hartlepool Page 3 identified as ‘Unknown’ and one ‘French mariner’ interred. Curious indeed but to date little is known about this individual from France or why he is buried in this cemetery – the date given on the memorial is 4.3.1919; he is remembered on 11 November each year. Commonwealth War Graves are a familiar sight, televised at times of public remembrance. Neat rows, beautifully manicured grass and just the right amount of floral display, all part of the prescribed design. In municipal cemeteries unless there is an area set aside for these memorial items they will be dotted around, snuggling in some cases between the larger more ornate private headstones but still commanding that iconic dignity and are known as isolated graves. Standing in the long grass recently, my research assistant was puzzling over the name on a CWG headstone which also appeared on a close by family memorial. On this occasion the deceased a Private with the Durham Light Infantry (DLI) had lost his life during the Bombardment of the Hartlepools on 16 December 1914. Another positioned close to a family memorial and also named with family, a Major with the Royal Garrison Artillery (RGA) died of wounds at the Battle of Messines Ridge in Belgium. That terrible battle epitomized by the one of the largest man-made explosions in human history using over one million pounds of explosives, the noise from which was heard in London. How touching that loss due to war activity is given due national respect but ultimately, they are returned to the loving embrace of family. 1 www.northcemeteryhartlepool.co.uk Down Memory Lane: West Hartlepool High School for Girls By Jacky Armstrong Sitting at home relaxing after a good meal, the telephone rang…. "Is that Jacky?" "Yes" "It's Stephen here. Are you the lady who organised the High School for Girls reunion at the school in Eldon Grove?” "Yes, that's me." "Would you like to meet me at the school in Eldon Grove.