Metadata
WORK ID: NEFA 16189 (Master Record)
| Title | Year | Date |
| NEWSVIEW MAGAZINE: NEWCASTLE WEST END FAMILY EVICTED FROM SLUM HOUSING | 1964 | 1964-01-01 |
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Details
Original Format: 16mm Colour: Black & White Sound: Sound Duration: 4 mins 23 secs Credits: Tyne Tees Television Genre: TV Magazine Subject: HEALTH / SOCIAL SERVICES POLITICS URBAN LIFE |
| Summary A Tyne Tees Television Newsview magazine report originally broadcast on 24 September 1964 on the eviction of the Hall family from a slum flat in the West End of Newcastle. |
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Description
A Tyne Tees Television Newsview magazine report originally broadcast on 24 September 1964 on the eviction of the Hall family from a slum flat in the West End of Newcastle.
The report begins from the backyard of number two Waverley Terrace in the West End of Newcastle as a Tyne Tees reporter speaks to camera. A flat in this house is the home to Mr David Hall, his wife and nine of their ten children. It is in a very poor state of repair for which they pay £3 17s 6d a week. Things are going...
A Tyne Tees Television Newsview magazine report originally broadcast on 24 September 1964 on the eviction of the Hall family from a slum flat in the West End of Newcastle.
The report begins from the backyard of number two Waverley Terrace in the West End of Newcastle as a Tyne Tees reporter speaks to camera. A flat in this house is the home to Mr David Hall, his wife and nine of their ten children. It is in a very poor state of repair for which they pay £3 17s 6d a week. Things are going to get tougher for the Halls as, the report says, they are to be evicted. The reporter goes inside.
Mr Hall sits at a table reading a newspaper. The reporter joins him and starts the interview. Mr Hall doesn’t know why he is being evicted, he brings out his rent book to show to the reporter, it is fully paid up.
Mr Hall is asked about the condition of the flat which he replies is ‘deplorable’. A view of the upstairs toilet follows which Mr Hall says doesn’t and hasn’t ever worked properly. This is followed by a view of a dirty and broken sink with a dripping tap. In the kitchen, a kettle steams on a gas cooker beside two large ceramic sinks.
Views follow of the upstairs attic which Mr Hall says is unusable because the roof leaks and the floor is weak. He installed a light for his children who used the room for one night, but he had to take them out because of the rain pouring in through leaks in the roof, which are clearly visible.
Mr Hall says that, before the family moved in, they had to strip the whole building before it could be fumigated, for which he had to pay 32s 6d for the rubbish to be taken away by the corporation. He and his wife don’t know where they will go once they are evicted. They haven’t slept for weeks. They hope the family won’t be separated.
In another part of the property, the reporter interviews Councillor Benny Abraham, Chairman of Newcastle’s Eviction Committee. He believes it would be a simple job to rehouse the Halls as his committee have systems in place within Newcastle to deal with such families. They’ve had to deal with about 1200 similar cases in the past 20 months. It's a problem especially in the west end. He believes it is wrong that the landlord is evicting the Halls especially since he is getting such a huge rent from ‘this shack’.
The film ends with the reporter speaking to camera advising that the landlord, Mr Muhammad Tufail has refused on two occasions to comment on this case.
Context
Independent TV finally reached the north east of England when Tyne Tees Television went on air at 5.00pm on January 15th 1959, broadcast from a disused warehouse in City Road on Newcastle’s historic quayside, transformed into state-of-the-art studios. A quarter of a million viewers watched on the first night. They broadcast from this base for more than 45 years until the studios shut down in 2005.
In time, the station aimed to create a portrait of the north-east, “a land of wide skies, bent...
Independent TV finally reached the north east of England when Tyne Tees Television went on air at 5.00pm on January 15th 1959, broadcast from a disused warehouse in City Road on Newcastle’s historic quayside, transformed into state-of-the-art studios. A quarter of a million viewers watched on the first night. They broadcast from this base for more than 45 years until the studios shut down in 2005.
In time, the station aimed to create a portrait of the north-east, “a land of wide skies, bent vowels, saints, footballers, shipyards and an inventive tradition which has produced the finest engineers in England: its landscape swings from wild moorland to industrial cities and back again to the sea-fretted coast of Northumberland, Durham and North Yorkshire” as author Antony Brown eulogizes in his book Tyne Tees Television: the first 20 years, a portrait (1978) “The north-east is as far as you can go from the centres of power in southern England.” Many of the Tyne Tees documentaries sprang from these regional roots. Tyne Tees reporters blazed a trail in presenting the news over the years. Mike Neville, a much-loved face of TV news in the north east for more than 40 years who launched his broadcast career with Tyne Tees, once suggested that the launch of Tyne Tees enabled local people to be able to hear local accents and dialects on television where once the BBC’s standard cut-glass pronunciation was the norm. On 30 March 1964, the nightly regional news programme North East Newsview was launched. This item from the programme highlighted one of the tougher social issues of the time - housing. The Conservative government, which had been in power for thirteen years, had focused on quantity over quality and honoured all their targets to achieve the biggest house building programme in British history – completing 350,000 each year they were in office. This success was due to more generous subsidies given to private builders and a loosening of private rents to help stimulate the private housing sector. However, a by-product of this was a proliferation of slum landlords creating empires of high cost multiple occupant housing in inner city areas forcibly evicting tenants and cramming vacated properties with more people for higher rents. This practice was known as Rachmanism so-called due to the notorious landlord Peter Rachman of Notting Hill. Not surprisingly, the landlord responsible for David Hale and his family's shocking living conditions, as documented in the Newsview item, declined an interview. The report is certainly an example of Rachmanism occurring in the west end of Newcastle. On 15 October that year, the Conservative party would narrowly lose the general election to Labour, led by Harold Wilson. References: Rewinding the Welfare State (2019-2020), Dr Ben Lamb, Research Lecturer in Media Studies, Teesside University Brown, Antony: Tyne Tees Television: the first 20 years: a portrait (Newcastle upon Tyne: Tyne Tees Television Ltd., 1978) |
