Jarrow & Hebburn Athletic Club

Memories of the Road Race Course

Alan Purvis of Elvet Striders entered our annual road race for the first time in 2003. An ex 'Jarra-Lad', Alan moved away over 40 years ago and the route of the race brought back memories for him. Alan has kindly written the following piece for publication on our website. Thanks Alan.

"For me the Jarrow and Hebburn A.C. Riverside Run was a trip down memory lane. Even the drive from my home at Durham brought recollections of days gone by as I passed the site of the now-demolished Monkton Coke works which filled my childhood air with sulphurous fumes and sent out great clouds of steam every fifteen minutes. The start was a few hundred yards from my birthplace at Palmer's Hospital and where, as a boy, I spent many carefree hours exploring the river banks on my bike.

At the race headquarters at Dougie's Bar the elderly gentleman appealing for a driver to move a car blocking an exit turned out to be the legendary Jimmy Hedley, still active in coaching the Jarrow elite women. It was Jimmy, of course, who cultivated the talents of Steve Cram and David Sharpe in the 1980s and helped to bring the name of Jarrow to the notice of the athletic world. I knew about the precocious Crammie from the P.E. teacher, Miss Baker, at Jarrow Grammar School long before he came to national and international notice.

I also knew Monkton Stadium, before its tartan track days, when it was a cinder track where young men in black leather spikes dreamed of achieving the four-minute mile. Of greater interest to me, then, were the fortunes of Jarrow F.C., who played there in the North Eastern League, and achieved their record attendance of two thousand and one hundred in a cup-tie against Blyth Spartans. I was never a great athlete at school where my greatest achievement was winning the slow bicycle race!

Wagonway Road, which took the race into the setting sun towards Hebburn on a typically windy Tyneside summer evening, took its name from the Jarrow and Pontop Railway which carried coal down to the river and which passed my junior school at Bede Burn Road. Despite admonishments from the headmaster of the danger, the more adventurous boys used to hitch lifts on the slowly moving wagons. Across the railway were the heaps made by slag from the steel works which were our Himalayas where we scaled Everest before Tensing and Hillary. Many years later they were crushed into road stone and reduced to the present molehills of the Jarrow Harrier League cross-country course.

Near Hebburn Station was the curiously-named Power House which was the nearest thing the town had to a theatre and where we watched the scouts perform the Gang Show or sang Land of Hope and Glory on Empire Day. Further up the river was the ferry, which took passengers to Walker and its malodorous glue works, and which later starred in a sequence in the Michael Caine film, Get Carter.

The race turn at Bill Quay was the setting for my father's childhood where he was born in Brack Terrace and swam and fished for salmon in the river at Jonadab. He would have known the little shipyards, the allotments and the places where men played pitch and toss, now turned into the riverside paths followed by the runners.

Back to the present and up the steep Prince Consort Road and into the long final mile of the straight Wagonway Road, where the 24 and 47 Northern buses used to go, to the finish. Here reality set in as, once again, I failed to match the pace of other vintage runners who no doubt will have their own memories of times long ago."