Introduction
Location in the North East
Location in the U.K.
TeesSpeak:An Urban Dialect
words: alley to bleb
words : bogie to butterloggy
words:-cack-handed to clammin
words:-Clarry to dut
words:-eariewig to get
words:-Geordie to knackin'
words: lace- -mozz
words: mell- -mozz
words:nab to parmo
words: parkin to rully
words:sackless to Stee-as
words: steelie to tungie
words:village to youse
Regional Stereotypes
Gravel Voiced Gadgies
Nowt by Gob
East Cleveland
East Cleveland Dialect
East Cleveland Dialect 2
Teessiders' Origins
Smoggy
Norman Connections
Discussion Page
Northern Dialect Societies
From both ends of the Tees
Local History Sources
On Not Being a Geordie
Then and Now
Familiar Places with Strange Sounding Names
BBC VOICES PROJECT Listen to Teessiders
On Being Canny
Middlesbrough's Language & Identity
The Iron Miners
Links for Lower Tees Dialect Group
Guestbook
Mail Form
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Origins of Teessiders
There is an awareness amongst Teessiders that our Victorian ancestors came from all over Britain and further afield.The first Mayor of Middlesbrough was a German, (Henry Bolckow) Of my eight great grandparents, two were from Dungannon in Ireland, one from Dundee in Scotland ,one from Portsmouth,one from Pontypool in South Wales and three were local ,from Richmond, Darlington and Thornaby. (The parents of my Thornaby great-grandmother were not local) This makes me a typical Teessider.
Up to 1825 the lower Tees Valley area was rural and agricultural. The birth of Teesside can really be dated to 1825 , the year the Darlington to Stockton Railway was opened to ship South Durham coal out along the River Tees. Extending this railway lower down the Tees in 1830 led to the construction of Middlesbrough on a former farm.A decade later, a rival railway resulted in the construction of West Hartlepool around the village of Stranton. It was the railway which brought the iron industry to Teesside. It was the coming of this iron industry which gave the incentive to look for extractable iron ore in the locality.When in the 1850's rich iron ore seams were discovered in the Eston Hills and Cleveland Hills , urban Teesside grew phenomenonly.
There was an sudden demand for labour in the iron works and the iron mines which could not be fully met by the immediate local North Yorkshire/South Durham area. This resulted in a large incomer population. The rapid growth of Middlesbrough is well documented. In 1901 the borough contained over 90,000 people. The total of people in this same area ( ie original Mbro + Linthorpe + Acklam) in 1801 was only 337.
The story was the same in all parts of Teesside.The parish of Eston and Normanby experienced a phenomenal population growth. From 400 in 1851 these two villages had grown to 4000 by 1891 and nearby, within its parish area by the river, two entirely new towns, South Bank and Grangetown had been built so that, in this whole parish area, there were 20,000 people by 1891, a 50-fold increase in 40 years
In 1801 the original Hartlepool had a population of just under 1000. Although it was later linked to the coal fields by railway the main development was around the village of Stranton,called ,at first, the West Dock which became known as West Hartlepool. Old Hartlepool’s population had increased to 12 000 in 1881 but the new town of West Hartlepool now had a population of 28 000
Most Teesside and Hartlepool people seem aware that there was considerable Irish immigration into the area. We read that in England, Middlesbrough was second only to Liverpool in its percentage of Irish.There were similar percentages in the other Teesside towns also. The Welsh too seem to have made an impact even though fewer than the Irish. They were drawn mainly from Glamorgan and Monmouthshire and were no doubt attracted or recruited to the area because of their expertise in iron making. They tended to occupy skilled and managerial positions in the iron industry
There was a third significant incomer group which seems less well known outside of the local Local Family History Society namely the East Anglians and East Midlanders. Teesside's need for labour coincided not only with the Irish famine but also with a severe agricultural depression in Lincolnshire and East Anglia.The first serious breakdown in law and order in the new town of Middlesbrough occurred when East Anglians clashed with Irish labourers over work in building Middlesbrough dock. The outnumbered Irish were saved by a local farmer who locked them in his barn and held their foes off with a shotgun until the forces of law and order arrived.
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Origins of Iron-Miners
Populations in the Mining Villages
There is anecdotal evidence that the population composition of the iron-miners was weighted differently from that of the iron works. The Irish and Welsh seemed to be more evident in the iron works and thus in the riverside towns whereas the iron mines attracted more East Anglians, East Midlanders and Cornish and thus were better represented in the mining villages to the south of the Tees.
I checked the 1881 census for the origins of the adult population of New Marske a new village founded in the 1870's to house workers for the Upleatham Iron Mine. New Marske is about four miles south of Redcar.
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New Marske 1881 Census
| North Riding of
Yorkshire |
146 |
Kent |
10 |
| Norfolk |
87 |
Suffolk |
10 |
| Lincolnshire |
77 |
Huntingdonshire |
7 |
| Northamptonshire |
38 |
Surrey |
6 |
| Cornwall |
37 |
Leicestershire |
6 |
| County Durham |
31 |
Cumberland |
5 |
| Devon |
27 |
Northumberland |
4 |
| West Riding of
Yorkshire |
27 |
London |
3 |
| Lancashire |
16 |
Dorset |
2 |
| Wiltshire |
16 |
Prussia |
2 |
| Ireland |
14 |
Wales |
2 |
| East Riding of
Yorkshire |
13 |
Buckinghamshire |
1 |
| Essex |
12 |
Middlesex |
1 |
| Hampshire |
11 |
Nottinghamshire |
1 |
| Cambridgeshire |
10 |
Worcestershire |
1 |
| Somerset |
10 |
France |
1 |
Dialect and the Origins of Teessiders
The most striking feature is the wide area from which the 'incomers' came. Although the North Riding provided the single biggest group there were significant numbers from Norfolk, Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire. (The latter were drawn from the iron mining area around Corby.)No doubt the Cornish were from that county's tin mines. The managerial/overseer class were mainly from Durham and probably learnt their skills in the coalmines.
In the early 19c the traditional North East Yorkshire Dialect i.e ‘Cleveland ‘ was undoubtedly spoken right up to the River Tees and the South Durham speech on the other bank was probably very similar. (The traditional dialect of North Yorkshire and East Yorkshire are in some respects, more closely related to County Durham than they are to West Yorkshire. Both the traditional Durham and North Yorkshire dialects are descended from the English spoken in the ancient Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria whereas West Yorkshire traditional speech is descended from the Kingdom of Mercia .)
Given the varied origins of the Victorian Teesside population. It is not difficult to see how accommodation , i.e. modifying and adapting speech to the speech patterns of other varieties of language with which you are in constant contact, would erode many of the features of traditional Cleveland/Sth Durham speech too different from standard English. This could explain Teesside speech losing many of the distinctive ‘Northumbrian’ characteristics which can still be heard in both rural Cleveland and Durham. For example you will still hear older rural Cleveland people using the second person singular ‘thoo’ . It can still occasionally be heard also in County Durham but you will no longer hear it in Teesside.
However I think it would be wrong to overstate the impact of incomers on the local speech. There was a pre-industrial population. Stockton, Darlington, Yarm and Hartlepool were established towns. At the time of the building of the new town of Middlesbrough, Stockton had a population of about 8000. Industrial Teesside also drew in considerable numbers from the immediate locality as well as from further distances. The Teesside area was, by no means, unique in attracting large numers of 'incomers'. This was common to all the industrial areas. There is evidence that the migration to Teesside was part of a general migration to the whole North East region. Census records of birth places of children, suggest some incoming families had moved around other parts of the North East before settling in Tees-side. These children would come to Teesside speaking a North East dialect not the dialect of their parents.
There may have been large numbers of Irish and East Anglians settling in and around Victorian Teesside but it might be fanciful to hear echoes of their speech in the modern Teesside accent and dialect. Perhaps only 'youse' the Teesside plural of 'you' can be attributed to Irish influence. It has also been suggested to me that 'pancrack' which means 'the dole' may be of Cornish origin but I have no firm evidence of this and there are alternative possible explanations. Apart from a few words ,some recently evolved examples, the dialect words I've collected in 'TeesSpeak' are either shared with County Durham or with North Yorkshire or, more often, with both and, in many cases, with East Yorkshire and Cumbria also.
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