Ernest Matthew Magnus YOUNSON (b 1891 d 1974)
(Headmaster 1938-1953)
The family was originally from Fair Isle, between Orkney and Shetland. Economic conditions in the mid -18th Century (particularly the potato famine) resulted in large scale migration. Our remote American cousins kept the original spelling of Eunson; Dale Younson was a frequent contributor to the Saturday Evening Post and also wrote the script for The Day They Gave Babies Away, starring Glynis Johns, which portrayed the arrival in North America of the founder of the American branch. However, the British branch was divided as to whether to retain the original Eunson or to adopt Younson or even Youngson. A web search will reveal several of each.
The British branch, which had already been engaged in the export of Shetland ponies to work in the Northumberland and Durham mines, decided to settle in Sunderland, where my grandfather, Ralph Younson was born in 1854. The 1881 census shows him living in Monkwearmouth and his occupation was that of Hand Driller. He later became a Foreman Plater at Hawthorn Leslie and on occasions as a child, I took his "bait" from the family home at 7 Barrow Street down to the shipyard gate. He had seven sons; five engineers, an academic (my father), and a carpenter. It was a strict Scottish household – the fire could be laid on a Saturday night but never on Sunday morning – and my father remained Church of Scotland throughout all of his Army service.
Both my father and mother attended the Higher Grade School, which was in the premises later occupied by the Central School. In 1910, my father went to Borough Road Teacher Training College that had been recently relocated in Isleworth.
He studied for an external University of London degree in Science, but the two years of teacher training did not allow sufficient study to succeed. He obtained a teaching post at Dunn Street School, from which he obtained permission to enlist in 1914 in the Welsh Fusiliers, together with two of his College friends, Eric and Colin Hunter. There is a Website photo of the three in training in Wales, but I can’t locate it immediately. He was seriously wounded in 1916 on the Western Front (Mons Star) and evacuated to the UK for treatment. His injuries included shrapnel wounds to his leg, for which he was still undergoing treatment in the mid 1920s, and the loss of the use of the fingers of his left hand because of nerve damage. My mother, who had also qualified as a teacher, gave up her job to stay near the hospital on Merseyside to help his recovery. Her father was a miner at Hebburn A Pit, and I was born in 1919 in his house in Railway Street. Housing was very scarce in Hebburn, even for wounded ex-soldiers and after my birth; we spent two or three years in a rented room in Whitley Bay. Eventually Hebburn Council built houses in Victoria Road East, to where we moved in (I suppose) 1922 and where my sister Joyce was born in 1923. In 1927 father bought a leasehold house in Bede Burn Road, Jarrow, probably with an eye to proximity to the Secondary School.
Soon after my birth my father set out to improve his academic qualifications. This involved evening studies at what was then Armstrong College, where in 1924 he received his Bachelor of Commerce degree. This stirred his interest in History and in the early 1930s, he did research on the Corn Laws under the tutelage of Professor Cobban, a University of London historian, leading to his M.Litt degree. At the same time, he had many outside interests. One was helping at a camp for the unemployed at Seaton Carew under the patronage of the Duke of York. Another was doing investigative work for the Tyneside Council of Social Service under Dr Henry Mess. He was an active member of the local Toc H group, having met their founder, the Rev Tubby Clayton in Ypres. He was also an active Mason, being sometime Master of the Perseverance Lodge at Hebburn and a founder of a Royal Arch chapter. He was a frequent speaker at Masonic events and at Burns Nights. He played in several Gilbert & Sullivan productions of Hebburn Amateur Dramatic Society.
During my schooldays, I was privileged to attend several of the school camps run by Major Dawson at which my father and Eddie Brown assisted. Initially these were at Budle Bay, then at the Hexham racecourse and finally at Low Farm, Redcar. I recently visited Hexham racecourse for the first time in over seventy years and found he was still remembered there. Just before WW II he rented a small cottage at Redcar and occasionally the family were able to stay there; it is now overbuilt by ICI. In about 1934 or 1935, my family were host to a Norwegian teacher seeking to improve his English. This led to interfamily friendships that have now persisted through three generations and to my father and sister becoming fluent in Norwegian.
At the outbreak of WW II I was still at University, and volunteered for the Army, but the usual bureaucratic ineptitude kept me on hold for several months. I had already, through the Scouts, been organising volunteers for Civil Defence and I was asked to take charge of the night shift at Jarrow ARP Report Centre. My father had volunteered to be an Air Raid Warden, but the school was evacuated to Crook, and the family was thus subject to upheaval.
The war took some toll on my father, and this was compounded by the increasingly unhelpful attitude of the education committees, both local and county. My mother had died in 1947 while I was serving in Egypt and in 1953, my father decided to take early retirement. He was not a rich man, he never had a salary of over £1,000 or owned a car, and he was pleasantly surprised to be offered an interesting task by an ex-student who was the accountant for Jackson the Tailor in Newcastle. The owners had realised that many of their newly recruited staff had gaps in their education, some through missed schooling during the war, some through lack of educational opportunity. They had founded a private college at Guisborough, this continued when Burtons took over Jacksons, to train some of their junior staff. Would my father lecture one week each month with a remit to enlarge their horizons? The arrangement lasted for several years and the firm were careful to pay him in a tax-efficient way. For instance, while I was in the British Embassy in Washington they provided tickets for him and my sister to visit me for holidays. I was happy on one of these occasions to re-unite him with his younger brother who had emigrated to the USA before the war and dropped out of touch with the family.
He had been active in his youth. I know that he and some of his brothers cycled regularly to Marsden to bathe, and later he and my mother played hockey for the J & H team. He was a keen golfer although his caddy (me) was less enthusiastic. As was common in his generation he was a heavy smoker and this eventually led to his death from lung cancer.
Most of you will know many things about him that are unknown to me and I have been impressed by some of your comments on the web site. I remember him as a kind, caring, extremely knowledgeable man who passed on to me his love of literature.
Eric Younson 2005