The Village that Forged the Working Class

Winlaton, the birthplace of the working class; PLUS Amelia Earhart, Gaza docs doc, AI artwork

This weekend, the second Saturday in July, sees the 139th annual Durham Miners’ Gala take place in the city of Durham, in the North East of England. The Gala is billed as the world’s greatest celebration of working-class life, community, and international solidarity. Known as the “Big Meeting”, more than 200,000 people will gather for a parade of banners and brass bands from former colliery communities, and speeches from political and trade union figures.

Over the past few months, I’ve been writing about the ancient village of Winlaton, which was historically (until 1974) part of County Durham, and how this strange little place, with lots of pubs and even more myths and legends, is a long-forgotten birthplace of the working class. I’ve now written an article about Winlaton’s claim to working-class fame, Birthplace of the Working Class, and it’s been published ahead of the Miner’s Gala by Tribune magazine. Here’s a taster:

There is a small sandstone building hidden behind the public library in the village of Winlaton, high on a hill across the river from Newcastle upon Tyne. This is Winlaton Forge, a 300-year-old grade II-listed building, which once glowed with the heat of a furnace and thrummed with the sound of hammer on anvil. Winlaton is an ancient place with several pubs and a large number of strange myths and legends. Perhaps most notable of these is the fact that the long-shuttered cottage forge is the last remnant of a remarkable industrial experiment, the legacy of which should be written in iron, but is barely known… [Read more]

You can read the full article here.

And you can read my previous posts about Winlaton here.

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Recommended

Article: Amelia Earhart’s Reckless Final Flights by Laurie Gwen Shapiro (The New Yorker)

Amelia Earhart was a tremendously brave and pioneering character, but she was woefully ill-prepared and underskilled for the round-the-world flight attempt that ended in her disappearance in 1937. As this article explains, Earhart’s risk-taking was partly driven by her publicity-hungry husband, George Palmer Putnam, and partly by the pressures of being a famous female pilot. For many of her previous flights, Earhart, who could not operate a radio, struggled with landings, and lacked the stamina for long distance flights. Her experienced co-pilot would often take over during flights. But on her final flight, she travelled only with her navigator, Fred Noonan, who suffered from a drink problem. The pair disappeared over the Pacific Ocean somewhere near the Phoenix Islands, between Australia and Hawaii. Bones found on Nikumaroro island in 1940 have been suggested to be Earhart’s remains. And an expedition is planned to determine whether an object spotted in a lagoon on that island in an Apple Maps satellite image could be Earhart’s plane.

You can read the New Yorker article here. It’s drawn from Laurie Gwen Shapiro’s forthcoming book, The Aviator and the Showman.

You can watch a video about the proposed expedition here.

TV: Gaza: Doctors Under Attack (Channel 4)

The BBC has got itself in another big tizzy due to its insistence on placing “impartiality” above accuracy, deciding not to show the documentary Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, which is strongly critical of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF). It’s an important documentary, like those previously screened about the October 7th attacks, and it deserves to be widely seen. Perhaps BBC bosses don’t understand that it’s possible to criticise the IDF without implying criticism of the wider Israeli or Jewish population. Fortunately, Channel 4 has stepped in to show the documentary in the UK, and it’s available online. Anyway, give it a watch and make up your own mind.

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Notebook

Last month, I mentioned my use of AI to generate images for this newsletter. I’ve been considering ditching AI art before it inevitably destroys the world. However, the image at the top of this newsletter was generated by ChatGPT. I uploaded a very old, low-quality sketch from a newspaper — an image of an old house in Back Street, Winlaton from a 1892 edition of the Newcastle Chronicle — and asked ChatGPT to clean it up while retaining the original’s feel. I think it’s done a pretty good job, and no humans were hurt in the process. There is certainly a place for AI tools in the creative process, but I’m still working out what that might be. Here’s the original image for reference:

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