Tom Lennard

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TOM LENNARD'S TALE (To book for performancess of 'IRON RUSH' please contact my carer through www.tonymorrispoet.com ) I was born in Middlesborough in 1869. This was because, with an elder baby sister to look after, my Mother went home to her mother to have me. We then moved back to my Dad in Guisborough in the North Riding of Yorkshire to live.My Father had been born at Sleights near Whitby in 1849 where he had been apprenticed as a shoemaker but on getting married he needed more money so went labouring and then ironstone mining. I eventually followed the same path into labouring and then into the ironstone mines.I was a bright lad and didn’t go down out to work at 12 years old as was expected but was sent to live with my Uncle William at a little farming village called Roxby. He was the Village Schoolmaster and as sometimes happened to youngsters of my age I was expect to help the little’uns with their learning and get a bit extra myself in the hope of bettering myself. There were 39 pupils in the School at this time in 1881. The main farming family was called Welford.However, my Family were short of money with more bairns being born and I had to get a job labouring and give up the idea of becoming a Schoolmaster like my Uncle William. Eventually I married and went down the ironstone mine.Ironstone mining was the big thing in those days in the North Riding. It was like the Gold Rush in America, in fact some of the mines were called ‘California’ and ‘Klondike’. There were great tented cities of thousands of people camped all around the little medieval villages of the area right the way from Rosedale to Eston. In the early days ironstone went by sea from the port of Whitby to Newcastle and Teesside but when the railways came along everything went by rail. Still some of the miners were seamen in summer and miners in winter.For a time, as a result of this local supply of ironstone to extract iron ore and make iron, Middlesborough became the iron and steel capital of the World.I have been preserved to live in modern times (I’m with all this modern technology I may have lived a long time but you’ve got to keep up to survive) to tell the story of those early days of the Great North Yorkshire Iron Rush. It’s the story of ordinary folk in hard times who had to get by. Most of them took it in their stride, got on with and from time to time they had their fun (not without a bit of conflict with the law and the mine owners and the landed gentry).I tell the stories with songs and sometimes a bit of bowed psaltery, which hadn’t been invented then but gives a bit of dramatic sound to the stories. The psaltery in the Bible is a different instrument all together.I live in retirement in Whitby now so there some pictures of Whitby and the sea, as well as me.
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