Iron Awe: November 2011

Monday, 7 November 2011

Teesside Troubadour

In September 2004 as the Iron Awe team premiered "Demonstration Day" in Middlesbrough Town Hall, across the road outside the local cinema, hundreds of people were ignoring the new Harry Potter movie and queuing up to see Craig Hornby’s film "A Century in Stone" A film about the Cleveland ironstone mining industry

Craig Hornby’s latest film "Teesside Troubadour" tells the story of Vin Garbutt, who for over forty years has been using music and song to tell the world about the people and places of Teesside. Vin now lives in an old farmhouse near Loftus, half a mile from Cleveland's first ironstone mine.

Both these films are available on DVD and are both highly recommended.

Heartbreak Hill

In 1932, when the unemployment rate in East Cleveland was over 90%, James and Ruth Pennyman of Ormesby Hall near Middlesbrough gave land to out of work ironstone miners, one of these plots of rough land was close to Boosbeck and was nicknamed Heartbreak Hill. A friend of theirs, Rolf Gardinar, suggested a collective land scheme instead of allotments; similar to the one he had set up in Dorset, they also invited German and Scandinavian students to take part. The miners and students worked together to clear the land and joined together in cultural activities - music, dancing and educational talks, a young Michael Tippett became involved and wrote a balled opera called Robin Hood, this was performed in 1934 in the Boosbeck church hall.