Marvellous Mackems
A look at some at some of history's most remarkable people from or with links to Sunderland.
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00:00Hello, I'm Sunderland Echo reporter Tony Gillan, and this is a celebration of marvellous Maccams.
00:06People from or with links to wayside who have notably enriched the world we live in.
00:23Eileen O'Shaughnessy is possibly someone that you haven't heard of but you will have heard of her husband,
00:29George Orwell, and her connection with Sunderland is that she went to school here.
00:34She was born in South Shields and her parents sent her to Sunderland Church High School,
00:41the fee-paying school that many people will remember in Sunderland.
00:45She was very passionate about English and she won a scholarship to go to Oxford University to study English.
00:54Now, Oxford at that time had only been allowing women to graduate for two years prior to that.
01:01They didn't really allow women to gain first class honours degrees in the way that we would do now in terms of merit.
01:10It was in terms of how many they were going to allow rather than how good they were.
01:14And she graduated with an upper second, which meant she couldn't do what she wanted to do, which was go into academia.
01:20She tried teaching, hated it. She set herself up as a typist and set up a typing agency,
01:28which she was actually quite enthusiastic about. She was typing manuscripts for people.
01:34And she also was working as a freelance journalist.
01:38About 10 years after she had started Oxford in 1934, she decided to go back to university and do a master's in psychology.
01:49It was at a party in 1934 held by a friend that she made on that course that she met a struggling young writer called Eric Blair.
02:00And at this party, they hit it off really well together.
02:05And after the party, Eric said to one of his friends that this is the girl he was going to marry.
02:10And Eric is the person who we know as George Orwell.
02:16So Eric and Eileen, or George and Eileen, married the following year.
02:21And she went with him to Barcelona when he fought in the Spanish Civil War in early 1936.
02:29She is responsible for ensuring he didn't die at that point.
02:33He was very badly injured, very famously shot through his neck.
02:39And she made sure he received adequate medical attention and also helped smuggle him out of the country when he fell onto the wrong side of the communist factions that were fighting at that point.
02:51And as I said, she had a typing agency and she was the one who was typing up all of his manuscripts.
02:57And we know from the original versions of those manuscripts that she edited them.
03:03She added her own ideas to them.
03:06And in her letters to her friend, she talks about how her husband was unable to read her handwriting at one point on the manuscript.
03:15And she was having to rewrite it for him.
03:18In the Second World War, they moved from their dilapidated cottage in Oxfordshire to live in central London.
03:26And they both worked for the BBC.
03:28Eileen also worked for the Ministry of Information.
03:33We know from letters that they wrote that Eileen is the one who is responsible for Animal Farm being written as an animal sort of analogy.
03:43And it's because at the point that Orwell was writing this rant about communism, the Soviet Union were the allies of Britain.
03:53So no publishers were willing to take on a book that was really criticising the Soviet Union.
04:01And so Eileen suggested it was written as an animal fable, which is how we now know it.
04:07Everybody knows about George Orwell and his problem with TB.
04:11That's the thing that killed him in 1950.
04:13Eileen herself, though, was very ill a lot of the time.
04:17She had what we think was cervical cancer.
04:21And she went into hospital in 1945 to have a hysterectomy.
04:27At that point, Orwell was reporting on the American liberation of Paris.
04:36He wasn't even in the country at the time.
04:38And Eileen came back up to Newcastle for the operation because it was cheaper than London surgeons.
04:49Unfortunately, the surgeon who was responsible for her operation was quite negligent.
04:55And he didn't test her for anaemia before she had the anaesthetic.
05:00And she actually died before she got to the operating table because she wasn't strong enough to sustain the anaesthetic.
05:09And this really affected Orwell.
05:11They had been planning to move with their adopted son, Richard.
05:15They'd been planning to move to the island of Jura so that he could concentrate on his writing in the aftermath of the Second World War.
05:24And Eileen was someone who had been very, very supportive of him.
05:31She had really forsaken her own career for Orwell.
05:35He went to live in Jura and finished 1984 whilst living up there with their son, Richard.
05:43It wasn't called 1984, though, when he first sent it to the publisher.
05:48It was called The Last Man in Europe.
05:51His American publisher didn't like the title, so sent it back to him and said, come up with another title.
05:58And he responded with the title 1984.
06:02Now, no one has ever really got to the bottom of why he called it 1984.
06:09A lot of people have assumed that because the manuscript was submitted in 1948, he simply transposed the last two numbers to make it 84.
06:18Anyone who has written the book will know that a title is never that arbitrary.
06:23What we do know, though, is that Eileen, in 1934, was part of an edited collection of stories and reminiscences about Sunderland Church High School.
06:38The school was celebrating its 50th anniversary, its Golden Jubilee, and they wrote to all the old girls asking them to contribute something for a special edition of the school magazine.
06:50Most of those contributions were reminiscences of time at school or fictional works of creative writing.
07:01Eileen, however, contributed a poem, and her poem was about the 50-year history of the school from the point of view of a girl looking back.
07:11She then brought it up to date for 1934, and it was quite a pessimistic future that she was looking at because Eileen was very worried about the rise of fascism.
07:22So she then wrote 50 Years in the Future and how things could be better in the future if we only got over this dystopian present.
07:31She called the poem 1984, and that's the only other poem, the only thing we know that is called 1984 is Eileen's poem, which has a lot of similarities with George Orwell and his own book, 1984.
07:47That link back to the school's Golden Jubilee in 1934 is something we can perhaps link to one of the best-known novels of the 20th century, 1984.
07:59The word genius is among the most overused and misused in today's English language.
08:04It is routinely applied to musicians, sports stars, actors, comedians, or just about anyone who might more accurately be described as very good, talented, or even competent.
08:15Along with genius is a cluster of cheapening hyperbole we have amazing and incredible.
08:23When such descriptions are applied to someone because they have balanced a tree of drinks on their head or Britain's got nothing better to do, it does little for the reputation of someone like William Herschel, 1738-1822.
08:36This is because Herschel truly was a genius whose accomplishments are genuinely both amazing and incredible.
08:43He is best remembered for astronomy, which is the study of the stars, planets, the galaxy, and so forth, as opposed to astrology, which is the study of one being born every minute.
08:53His discoveries include infrared radiation and the planet Uranus.
08:57He founded sidereal astronomy, which is measuring time according to the position of the stars.
09:02He increased our understanding of nebulae, which is giant gas and dust clouds in space, greatly improved the telescope, and made his own eyepieces, the strongest with a magnifying power of 6,450.
09:14This was the sort of thing he could do before he'd eaten his shreddies. He had a brain the size of Witherwack.
09:20In addition to a pile of other scientific achievements, and I can't even begin to understand, he was an accomplished musician and composer of 24 symphonies,
09:2814 concertos, and various other pieces for a range of instruments.
09:33Although born in Hanover, he was appointed as an astronomer by George III and knighted in 1816. A busy lad and clever or what.
09:43Patrick Mower described William Herschel as,
09:45the first man to give a reasonably correct picture of the shape of our star system or galaxy, the best telescope maker of his time, and possibly the greatest observer who ever lived.
09:55Wearing off his German origins, Herschel might well be on a banknote.
09:59And now for the punchline. He lived in Sunderland.
10:02It's why his English was so good. In the 1760s he resided in various lodgings in what is now Sunnyside.
10:09It was in Sunderland that he resumed his interest in mathematics and composed six of his symphonies.
10:14The symphony number 8 in C minor is sometimes referred to as the Sunderland Symphony.
10:18When he left Wayside, he remained unbeaten in the domino handicap in Sam's Bar, a nearby tavern.
10:23Fair enough, we made that last bit up to capture your attention, but the rest of it, and other remarkable stuff besides, is all completely true.
10:30What's odd is that most people in Sunderland now don't seem to know that he was ever even here.
10:35This seems anomalous and something easily and inexpensively rectifiable.
10:40If this city has any sort of drum to bang, then it should be banged. It doesn't take a genius to work that out.
10:46In Slough in Berkshire, where he also lived and is actually buried, a school, a street, a pub and a car park are named after him.
10:53Other streets are similarly named in his honour in Manchester, Cambridge, Oxford, Didcot in Oxfordshire, Biggleswade in Bedfordshire, Bradford, Brisbane and Paris.
11:03There is a dedicated Herschel Museum in Bath, where there is also a hospital laboratory named after him, plus a university building in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, a telescope in the Canaries and an observatory in Brazil.
11:13At the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, his statue stands next to those of Isaac Newton, Copernicus, Galileo, Hipparchus and Kepler.
11:21In Sunderland, where he lived!
11:24Now, in space, an asteroid is named after him, as well as a crater on the moon, a star on the constellation Cepheus, an impact basin on Mars and a gap in the rings of Saturn.
11:34So it can be reasonably contended that William Herschel is better known on Saturn than in Sunderland.
11:39What does a bloke have to do to get a blue plaque around here?
11:42There is one blue plaque here in Sunnyside. It's dedicated to Charles Alcock, who is the Sunderland man who created the FA Cup.
11:49Mr Alcock deserves his blue plaque too. But, more than William Herschel, one of the greatest scientific minds in all of human history.
12:05I think what we perhaps have forgotten is that Sunderland has a very militant history in terms of equal rights for people.
12:14And this was particularly in the 19th century. All the way through the 19th century, there were campaigners against racism, against slavery.
12:24One of the best known is a man called Celestine Edwards.
12:29And Celestine Edwards was born into a family of freed slaves in Dominica in 1858 or 59.
12:38He was the youngest of ten children. And as soon as he could, he escaped to sea to get away from this huge family where he was being bullied by some of his older brothers.
12:49He was French speaking, but learned English on the ship that he got onto at the age of 16.
12:56And somehow or other managed to find his way to Edinburgh.
13:02After he got off the ship, stopped being a sailor and started to be a building labourer.
13:08And he lived in Edinburgh for about a year, then moved to Sunderland.
13:14He had another change of career when he moved to Sunderland and became an insurance agent and actually earned quite a good wage for that.
13:23He lived in one of the boarding houses that was in the area that we have as Sunnyside.
13:30They were all demolished in about the beginning of the 20th century.
13:35And Sunderland is the only place he lived for any length of time.
13:41He was a passionate speaker in terms of Christianity, particularly Methodism.
13:47So temperance, he was a member of the temperance movement.
13:50He was a passionate speaker about Pan-Africanism.
13:54So the big African family that had spread across the globe, largely through enslavement.
14:01And of course, he was the grandson of enslaved people.
14:05He was a proponent of anti-racism.
14:08He spoke very passionately about how Darwin's work on evolution was making people from Africa appear that they were closely related to apes.
14:20And it was being used in a very racist way in a lot of literature at this point.
14:26He was very famous as a speaker.
14:30He would attract huge crowds to his public speaking events around the country.
14:35When he spoke in Sunderland, he spoke in the Assembly Hall, which was on the corner of St. Thomas's Street and Fawcett Street, which used to be the HSBC Bank, which is now flats.
14:49But that was a site of the Assembly Hall.
14:54He was someone who traveled around a lot.
14:58He didn't stay in any place for any long time.
15:02But he did come back to Sunderland and basically lived here for the best part of three years.
15:07He eventually moved to London and he became the editor of two different Christian magazines.
15:16And as such, he becomes the first black editor in Britain.
15:21He never really stopped.
15:24He was running around all over giving very passionate speeches about temperance, about anti-racism, about pan-Africanism.
15:34His doctor, because he was quite ill at one point, his doctor said, stop, calm down, make sure you look after yourself.
15:44And of course, he didn't.
15:46And he became very ill.
15:48He was found in an unconscious state after giving one particular talk in London.
15:57So he decided to go back to his family in Dominica.
16:02And he died six months later.
16:05He died at the age of just 34.
16:08But he was a very striking figure.
16:11Everyone would recognize him.
16:13He was six feet tall and was a very passionate wearer of very tall top hats.
16:20So he would tower over people and a very imposing speaker.
16:25But I think we should be very proud of the fact that we have someone like Celestine Edwards who chose to live in Sunderland while he was resident in the United Kingdom.
16:35Now, lest you imagine that Wayside has merely played host as a procession of marvellous men and women from other parts of the world milled through on their paths to glory,
16:44we can confirm the presence of native-born Maghams of some key moments in world history.
16:49The following selection of local heroes, whose lives have been a little less sumptuously documented than the Marquee names,
16:55have been brought to the attention of the Sunderland Ego and my fellow reporter there, Chris Cordner, by historian Derek Holcroft.
17:01Did you know that a Sunderland genius was one of the undercover heroes who cracked German codes during the Second World War?
17:08Joseph Gillis did vital work at Bletchley Park, once the top secret home which was the principal Allied base for co-breakers.
17:15Joseph attended Bede School in Sunderland before going off to Cambridge University, then becoming a lecturer in pure maths at Belfast's Queen's University.
17:24Gillis broke the codes in which Germans sent their weather reports, important to the Air Force's campaign.
17:29Another Sunderland man had the honour of guarding one of the most famous figures in British military history.
17:35Not only that, he did it while he was still a teenager.
17:38Leslie Sproxton was only 19 years old when he became a personal bodyguard to Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery.
17:45Before joining the army, Leslie worked in the booking office at Seaburn Station and was expecting to go back to the post.
17:52Monty, the man who led the Allies in the Battle of El Alamein in the Second World War, was on a visit to Paris in 1949,
17:59and Lance Corporal Sproxton was part of a team of officers who had to create a security screen around him.
18:04The Sunderland network carried a report which modestly read,
18:07Wearside National Serviceman with a much-envied army job is Lance Corporal Leslie Sproxton.
18:13Wearsider Bernard Remington played a huge part in the development of radar, yet almost no one was aware of it.
18:21You might say his work went undetected. Radar. Undetected.
18:27Bernard will still be remembered by a number of Sunderland folk at a certain vintage at the time of this recording,
18:32though perhaps more by the name Mr Remington, as he was a teacher at schools in Sunderland, including Southmoor, in the 1960s.
18:39He was in at the beginning of research into radar, according to a 1946 report in the Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette.
18:47Radar was the vital system which was key to Britain's success in defending its skies against the Nazis.
18:52Bernard was awarded the British Empire Medal in 1946 in recognition of his work.
18:56The resident of Neill Street went back to being a teacher, and Derek Holcroft was one of his pupils in the 1960s.
19:02Derek said that Bernard's heroics describe a hidden tale that none of his pupils ever knew.
19:07Ida and Louise Cook were sisters whose book royalties, Love of Opera and Sheer Nerve, helped make them war heroes and lifesavers.
19:14Among the honours bestowed upon them were British Hero of the Holocaust Award and the Righteous Among the Nations Award,
19:20an honour presented by Israel to non-Jews who risked their own lives during the Holocaust to save Jews from extermination.
19:27When you add to this that they were from Sunderland and lived on Croft Avenue, next to the Chester's pub,
19:32it begins to sound like the tallest of tales, but like all the best stories, it's entirely true.
19:38As the elder girl, Louise was the first to pass her clerical exams and became a secretary,
19:42earning £2.06 a week at the Board of Education Ida followed two years later.
19:47Tapping away in London about a century ago, they became obsessed with opera after Louise heard a phonograph.
19:53She spent a dizzying £23 on a wind-up gramophone.
19:57But recorded music, especially then, has never matched live sound, so they saved what they could to attend performances.
20:03Extraordinary scrimming enabled them to sail third class to New York in December 1926,
20:09where they saw Amelita Galli-Kirky in Verdi's La Traviata.
20:14Galli-Kirky would become a friend in the days before stalking was a consideration.
20:18The cook's opera obsession meant they needed more money to fund their trips to the great opera houses of Europe.
20:23Ida stumbled upon a very profitable new line of work.
20:26She had written about their rail adventures and sold the stories.
20:29This would lead to a highly successful and profitable career as a romantic novelist for Mills and Boone, writing as Mary Burchell.
20:36The first of her 112 novels was published in 1936.
20:40The mention of female romantic novelists of the period draws inevitable comparisons with Barbara Cartland,
20:45a far better known writer and commercially incredibly successful.
20:48However, whereas Cartland remains a quite ridiculous figure in the eyes of many and a caricature of herself,
20:54Ida Cook seems anything but. Ida was also a far superior writer.
20:58Yet writing was a means to an end and opera remained her first love.
21:01Saving people from the Holocaust is what Ida and Louise are best remembered for,
21:05but it was the combination of novel writing, opera and bottomless charm,
21:08which serendipitously combined to help them save the lives of 29 Jews.
21:13In 1934, a year after Hitler took over Germany, an Austrian conductor called Clemens Krauss
21:19introduced them to a Jewish woman who, for obvious reasons, wished to move to Britain.
21:24The woman was Frau Meier-Lissmann, a lecturer who gave talks on opera.
21:28The introduction led to the sisters doing what they could before World War II began in 1939.
21:33They felt compelled to help the desperate and went to extreme lengths to do so.
21:37In order to communicate with both the German authorities and refugees, Louise taught herself German.
21:42They smuggled very valuable jewellery out of Germany by hiding it in plain sight,
21:47wearing expensive brooches, pearls and the like as though they were ephemeral knick-knacks bought from Jackie White's market.
21:53Guards assumed it was all fake.
21:55They also sold the labels of cheap British brands on to expensive furs.
21:59Imagine buying a Chanel handbag and having to pretend it was a genuine top shopper.
22:03These items, which mainly belonged to Jews, were then smuggled into Britain.
22:06This was necessary as without some financial guarantee, refugees were not allowed into Britain.
22:11Had the cooks been caught by the Nazi guards inspecting the trades they travelled on, they could have been executed.
22:17But they had the added advantage of being a familiar and accepted sight at Cologne airport,
22:21just two English opera nuts who liked travelling around Europe.
22:25In the event of someone realising that the jewellery was real, I'd as cover story would have been,
22:29we were two nervous British spinsters who didn't trust our families at home,
22:33so when we went abroad we took all our jewellery with us.
22:36Before their first opera chasing trip into mainland Europe, the Cook sisters didn't know any Jews.
22:41They were unaware of what being a Jew actually entailed in Germany post 1933.
22:48Ida and Louise were unable to save any more lives after Germany invaded Poland in 1939,
22:53forcing Britain to declare war and making cultural trips to Germany impossible.
22:57As mentioned at the start of this piece, the Cook sisters were honoured for their achievements.
23:01In 1956, Ida Cook became an early subject of the TV show This Is Your Life.
23:06In 2017, a blue plaque was finally installed to commemorate them on Croft Avenue.
23:11However, while the well-connected yet somewhat ludicrous figure that was Barbara Cartland was given a damehood,
23:17the Cook sisters received no such honour.
23:20Ida died in 1986, Louise in 1991.
23:24Their honour is the esteem in which they are held, and their story, had it been presented to a Hollywood producer,
23:30would have been turned down like a bedspread for being just too far-fetched.
23:34Yet, it's completely true.
23:36And it all began here in Sunderland, right next to the Chesters.
23:47Thanks for watching!