By Harry Burn.
They met after my father was sent to Stoke to recover from an appendix operation, during his service with the Royal Marines, he happened to be billeted with a cousin of my mothers. They married at St Mary's Church, Bucknall in 1946. They spent the whole of their married life in Bucknall, devoted to each other, until my mother lost her battle with cancer in February 1989. My father died two years later on his 67th birthday of a heart attack. My father never lost his love for the Northeast (I've heard it said that you can take the Geordie out of Northumberland but you can't take Northumberland out of the Geordie) and in his case it was very true. I think that love still exists today, through me and it gets ever stronger.
By the time I was three months old I had paid my first visit to the Northeast, and as I grew older I always looked forward to the two weeks holiday we would spend with my grandparents each year, in Byker, but the place that I was always drawn to was High Spen. I can look back now to the happy times we would spend at my aunts Madge ARMSTRONG, and the thought of the walks we would take up Bone Hill and through Chopwell Woods, can still bring a tear to my eyes. I can still taste those mushrooms that we picked on those walks in August after the haymaking. My uncle Jack ARMSTRONG was a miner, (what ever happened to that old tin bath I must ask our Muriel) and he grew some of the biggest vegetables I've ever seen in my life, or so they seemed to a small boy.
These memories of The Spen have been stirred by a set of web pages generated by Brian PEARS, of two articles written by Col. Alex JOHNSON, one entitled Barlow and the other High Spen a Hundred Years. And yes I do believe he is one of my JOHNSON'S as yet we have never met but I would dearly like to change that.
My only regret now is that the time we spent up in the Northeast was so short, and that there were members of the family I have never met or can no longer meet. I think that's why I am now tracing my family tree and trying to find out just who the BURNS, JOHNSONS, DAWSONS and EVANS family's were, to put some flesh on the bones as it were.
I've been told that there are strange coincidences that happen when you start to do research into one's family. When we set a new auto electrician on some time ago and we were introduced, I was immediately drawn to that warm Geordie accent he had, and as we chatted I told him of my links to the Northeast and of my connection to The Spen through my grandmother, a broad grin spread across his face as he told me that his grandfather was the village blacksmith at High Spen, my new found friend is called Neil BELL, and his grandfather is mentioned in the book High Spen a Hundred Years, strange is it not?
If anyone who looks at any of the pages on this site, and sees someone who they recognise, or has any information on the people in the family's listed, please get in touch as I would love to hear from you.
Dedicated to my late parents Harry and Hilda BURN.
Since writing this page I have made contact with Col Alex JOHNSON (thanks to Brian PEARS) and I'm very pleased to confirm that we are indeed related, as Alex grandfather and my great grandfather were brothers. We are in fact second cousins once removed, and are now in regular contact. Alex has also put me in touch with his childhood friend Jim Witherington, who lives not too far away, in fact just over the Staffordshire border in Cheshire. I now call and see Mr & Mrs Witherington every two or three weeks for cup off coffee and a chat, and that famous Geordie hospitality is showered down on me each visit. It seems as if I have known them all my life. (Unfortunatly Jim passed away in October 2002 and will be greatly misssed).
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