Mary English
Mary belongs to: The Fishermen's Mission
Mary grew up around North Shields Fish Quay. Her father was a fisherman and she has many memories of both the Fishermen's Mission and North Shields Fish Quay. Mary still helps out at the Mission.
Mary was interviewed by Carl Greenwood on 20 January 2006. The interview took place at North Shields Fishermen's Mission and lasted 1 hour, 6 minutes and 46 seconds.
The smell of the guano works
"Oh the smells are brilliant, but what smell what you don’t have is the guano works"
Oh the smells are brilliant, but what smell what you don’t have is the guano works. You know where Tyne Tyres is? You go just past Tyne Tyres and you’ve got Digibox or something before you get to the grinding works- and you used to go down there and there was this place called the guano works. Now, what is that thing to you? It was fertiliser, wasn’t it? It was fish fertiliser.
And they used to…some of the boats, they would settle in debt- they would have all this fish and it wouldn’t get sold properly on the market and it would go to the guano works dirt cheap. And so instead of getting a lot of money and having money at the end they could end up in debt.
A lot of people could have, if they worked for a fortnight and ended up owing the company money, they would go off it. This happened a lot of the time with the fishermen. So the fish would go to the guano works and it used to ming. And you always used to know it was the guano works because you would think, “eh, there’s snow all over,” but there wasn’t- it was maggots.
There used to be a bone yard up at Walker, and you used to go there, if you got out of the van there and you would think, “didn’t know it had snowed or it was frosty,” it wasn’t it was maggots. I always had a white covering on the ground – “crunch.”
The smell- you can’t describe that smell. But you’d gag and when it used to blow up over- if it hit Shields, guano works is working well.
Mary has 12 memories in the memorynet:
Mary's memories with a Adventure theme:
Playing on North Shields Fish QuayMary's other memories:
Fishing boatThis memory has these themes:
Change | Childhood | Sounds and Smells | The North East
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