This Is Tees Valley This Is Tees Valley - Issue 1 2020 | Page 16

WE BUILT
THE WORLD!
Take a walk back in time through Teesside’s
proud industrial heritage with award-winning
writer Harry Pearson and his grandad…
“What’s the connection between Teesside and the
notorious Dr Crippen?” my grandad asked. It was
the summer holidays. He was retired. I was ten. Each
morning we’d walk along Teesside’s golden sands from
his house in Marske to nearby Redcar, eat a Pacitto’s
ice cream on the promenade and catch the bus back.
Grandad always had a question up his sleeve, a story
to tell.
History was all around us. I lived in Great Ayton, the
village where Captain James Cook grew up, across the
road from the little school where the great navigator had
learned to read and write. My grandfather was born in
Essex Street in the heart of Middlesbrough. His father
hailed from Cannon Street and worked as a tug-boatman
on the Tees. His mother was a painter at Linthorpe
Pottery where brilliant designer Christopher Dresser had
installed Britain’s first gas-powered kiln.
Grandad’s grandfather, George Fixter, had arrived
from Lincolnshire in 1860, one of the first wave of
migrants who poured into Middlesbrough at that time,
transforming it from a hamlet of half-a-dozen houses
into a town of 75,000 in under 50 years.
When Grandpa Fixter arrived there was no hospital,
no school and barely any roads. It was like a Gold
Rush town in the Wild West. By 1865, ‘Ironopolis’ was
booming. There were 30 blast furnaces along the River
Tees, smelting the iron ore dug from the Cleveland Hills.
It’s no wonder William Gladstone described the town as
“an infant Hercules” on a visit to Middlesbrough.
My mother’s grandfather – part of a sprawling
family from County Meath – worked down the New
Marske mine. Later he’d transfer to Lingdale – where
Middlesbrough and England football captain George
Hardwick’s father was employed and where the tough-as-
granite centre-forward in Tottenham Hotspur’s 1960-61
double-winning team, Bobby Smith, would begin his
career hewing iron from the rock face.
I liked to hear grandad talk about football. I was a
schoolboy in love with the game. It was an era when
Teesside managers dominated. The great football bosses
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and rivals Brian Clough and Don Revie were both from
Middlesbrough, Harry Catterick, who’d led Everton
to the League title in 1968, hailed from Darlington.
Even the coach of the New York Cosmos (Pele, Franz
Beckenbauer et al) was a bloke from Stockton, Ken
Furphy.
My grandfather and his brother Joe worked on the
roofing gangs that helped build the massive fabrication
and welding sheds where the steel for Dorman Long
was cut. In the years between the two World Wars
Dorman Long would construct some of the world’s most
celebrated bridges – the Sydney Harbour Bridge among
them. That great symbol of the Geordie Nation, the Tyne
Bridge, was also built by Dorman Long (and that other
icon of Tyneside, the Angel of the North, was built on
Teesside, at Hartlepool Fabrication).
Dorman Long built bridges in China, India, South
Africa and Egypt; bridges that linked Scandinavian
islands and crossed the Victoria Falls. My paternal
grandfather worked for Dorman Long. My father worked
for their arch (in every sense) rival, Cleveland Bridge.
They’d built the Blue Nile Bridge in Khartoum, Chiswick
Bridge and the great Waibaidu Bridge in Shanghai. The
latter is still standing today: a 1930s piece of Teesside
engineering genius against a backdrop straight out of
sci-fi.
My dad worked on some of the biggest engineering
projects of the 20th century – the bridge across the
Bosphorus, linking Europe with Asia, the Humber
Bridge and the Dartford Bridge. He worked on the
construction of the Docklands Light Railway and, finally,
in the years before he retired, Canary Wharf.
“My great-uncle Alf,” grandad said, “He worked for
Hopkins Gilkes, the first of the great Teesside bridge
builders, back in Victorian times. Trouble is, the one
they’re best remembered for was over the River Tay.
And that blew down in a mighty gale with a train on
it. It wasn’t the Boro lads’ fault, mind. The steel was
substandard, cast in Dundee. If they’d shipped the girders
from Teesside that bridge’d likely still be stood.”