{"id":9212,"date":"2023-05-25T16:00:41","date_gmt":"2023-05-25T16:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/southshieldslocalhistorygroup.co.uk\/?page_id=9212"},"modified":"2023-09-12T17:04:14","modified_gmt":"2023-09-12T17:04:14","slug":"blower-janis","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/southshieldslocalhistorygroup.co.uk\/index.php\/people\/local-history-heroes\/blower-janis\/","title":{"rendered":"Blower, Janis (Journalist\/Author)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I was born and brought-up on the Lawe Top, where I still live.

It meant, as a child, my playground was the Roman Fort and the North Marine Park, especially the Hill Top where the old pilots\u2019 lookout, Trinity Towers, with its battlements and secret spaces, provided endless scope for adventure.

Growing up in these streets, with their evocative Roman names, was probably where the first seeds of my interest in history were sown.

After Ocean Road infants\u2019 and junior school, I gravitated to the Girls\u2019 Grammar School where I was taught by, among others, the late Edna Thornborrow. Edna was a leading light in South Shields Archaeological and Historical Society and did much to encourage me in my interest.

From school I started a three-year apprenticeship as a trainee reporter at the Shields Gazette. One of the jobs of juniors in those days was to write-up a week\u2019s \u2018Agoes\u2019 as they were known \u2013 extracts from 25 years, 50 years and 100 years ago from the old bound files of the Gazette. Left to my own devices, I could lose myself among the old pages of the paper for hours!

A decade and more of court, council and news reporting followed and by the 1980s I was holding the posts of Assistant News Editor and also Women\u2019s Editor, while at the same time developing an interest in feature writing.

Then, in around 1987\/1988, it was decided to drop the paper\u2019s old-established Odd Man Out column \u2013 essentially a daily digest of gossip \u2013 and replace it with a new column, to be called Cookson Country. I was asked to take it on.

The name, Cookson Country, never really had anything to do with Catherine Cookson, other than that it was inspired by the tourism initiative, Catherine Cookson Country, which the South Shields-born writer had agreed to lend her name to.

The closure of the shipyards, pits etc had left the area with high unemployment and in the economic doldrums. I remember interviewing her about it. \u201cIf it takes just one person off the dole, it will be worth it,\u201d she told me.

To illustrate the column, I\u2019d long had my eye on a cabinet of glass photographic negatives which had been given to the paper after the death of the photographer, James Cleet, in the late 1950s.

I asked if they could be printed up \u2013 some had, most hadn\u2019t \u2013 to see what was on them.

Of course what we turned out to have was a wonderful collection of pictures of parts of Shields which had virtually vanished. But which parts? Few were identifiable, so I put them in the column and asked readers if they knew where they were taken.

The response was huge \u2013 partly, I\u2019ve always thought, because it was a period of huge change for the borough. We had always been an area that had been defined by what we did \u2013 building ships, hewing coal, making things. With all the heavy industry going, I think we\u2019d started to feel a bit lost, to not know who we were anymore. The past was a more familiar country.

I have to say, though, that I have never liked the word \u2018 nostalgia.\u2019\u00a0 I always tried to make sure in Cookson Country that we didn\u2019t look at that past through rose-tinted spectacles. Many people\u2019s lives were hard.

But it meant I found myself launched on a massive learning curve. How had I not known that where I had played as a child down on the riverside below the Lawe, there had been a whole town that had been swept away in the slum clearances of the 1920s and \u201830s?

The photographs bred others from readers\u2019 themselves, supplemented by pictures from the Gazette\u2019s extensive collection of shipping photographs which allowed me to indulge my interest in maritime history.

And if the success of the column taught me one thing \u2013 as useful for young journalists as it is for historians \u2013 the best stories are told by those who\u2019ve lived through them.

In 2015, having become features editor, I eventually retired. It was sad to give up the column but I\u2019m still writing \u2013 and still endlessly curious about this amazing place we live in.

Publications

<\/strong>Through Northeast Press:<\/p>\n\n\n\n