Bensham Lad

A Memory of Gateshead.

I grew up in and lived in Bensham for the first 26 years of my life, albeit the last 5 of those years were spent in the Merchant Navy as a sea-going engineer.

My first school was Chester Place School which was across the road from the Bensham picture house. I was evacuated to Askgrigg Yorkshire from Chester Place School in 1939, on coming back in 1942 I went to Brighton Avenue school until I passed the scholarship and went to the Central School on the corner of Whitehall Road & Alexandra Road. I left the Central School in 1948 and started serving a 5 year apprenticeship as an engineer's fitter at Clarke Chapmans. At 21 I went into the Merchant Navy with Royal Mail Lines. In 1959 I left the sea and emigrated to California.
As a young'un I went to Bensham Grove Nursery School. While in Bensham I lived in Prospect Terrace, Gibson Street, and mostly Prospect Street which ran off Claremont Street then became Osborne Terrace which ran down to Bensham Road.
Prospect Street was a fairly short street yet it had 5 corner shops, one of which was an ice-cream parlour which I never saw open and was nick-named Pongo's. The owner was an Italian and I remember him being taken away during the war.
There was a billiard-hall on Coatsworth Road where I mis-spent some of my youth, kicked a ball around quite a bit on the Windmill Hills, but most of my younger days were spent at the Shipcote Baths where I was a member of the Gateshead Amateur Swimming Club.
Danced a lot and the Oxford, the Bewick, the BBC Hall, Hawks on Low Fell, the Wallsend Mem, and Sunday dances at St Joseph's Church Hall, were not strange places to me. The Bradford Barn was my favourite dance as you got to meet more girls.
The Rats, Loppy Lloyds, the Bensham, Coatsworth, Shipcote, Ritz, Odeon, Capitol, Scala, Classic, the Pal on Saltwell Road, and the Empire, all saw me enter at one time or another. But not on a Sunday night as movies on a Sunday were to come later.
Still consider Gateshead my home town, stay there whenever I visit 'Home', and always walk the old Bensham neighbourhood I grew up in although the streets I lived in are now gone forever.