Shipbuilding on the Wear, help needed with terminology .....

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Cheesy Feet said:
Pallion..served my time as a Plater 1980 - 1984 and was down the yards till the end..i actually got transferred to Deptford in September 1988 and we all got finished early 1989.
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I did my time as a Boilermaker/welder at Le Blond's from '76 to '80, and got finished in mid '81.
Went to work in the yards in West Germany as was then, in the summer of '81 and have never worked in Sunderland since.:eek:

Now retired - hung the bucket up:cool:
 


Butcher's Coat said:
I did my time as a Boilermaker/welder at Le Blond's from '76 to '80, and got finished in mid '81.
Went to work in the yards in West Germany as was then, in the summer of '81 and have never worked in Sunderland since.:eek:

Now retired - hung the bucket up:cool:
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I'm at work and i'm supposed to be welding now..instead i'm in the bogs posting on here..it's like the yards but without the newspapers..quick nap anarl me thinks..cherr.
 
Kitch said:
Chur was prevalent with the Teddy boys and Barrow boys in the fifties,some of my mates still use it.
As for "Marra" never heard Townies use it,only pitmen and Yowlers from the villages.
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That's right I'm a townie , sometimes we would be lazy and not speak correctly especially when playing if my mam overheard any of us saying "Whats a marra" instead of "What's the matter" she would give a stern look and say "a pitmens mate" :eek:
 
Reiver said:
We never ever used 'marra' and it was only when we moved to the East Midlands, in the late 60's, that I heard people from the Ashington area using it.
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'marra' was common terminology in mid durham in the mid 50's. dad worked down the pit at Sunnybrow and often talked about who he was working 'marras' with. I think it was sort of teams of 3. Hewers, Putters and Tubloaders.
 
socrates said:
'marra' was common terminology in mid durham in the mid 50's. dad worked down the pit at Sunnybrow and often talked about who he was working 'marras' with. I think it was sort of teams of 3. Hewers, Putters and Tubloaders.
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Usually a coal miner had one person working close to him who he looked on as his marra, to the exclusion of others.
 
Butcher's Coat said:
Deffo a shipyard whoosh cherr.

What yard were you in by the way Marra?
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We've had this conversation before on the SMB and I'm sure Tiptoad mentioned Cherr was derived from our Norse ancestors, as to ket, It was always the word for sweets when i was a jam eater,alang with chummies, or bullets, my family had shipbuilders on one side and Miners on the other, i always associated marra with pit yakers and Cher with yard workers, but I'm going back to the fifties and sixties, fatha was from Ford estate, he moved there from Hendon when he was a kid.
 
Teed said:
We've had this conversation before on the SMB and I'm sure Tiptoad mentioned Cherr was derived from our Norse ancestors, as to ket, It was always the word for sweets when i was a jam eater,alang with chummies, or bullets, my family had shipbuilders on one side and Miners on the other, i always associated marra with pit yakers and Cher with yard workers, but I'm going back to the fifties and sixties, fatha was from Ford estate, he moved there from Hendon when he was a kid.
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You better write some of your stories down before you turn your toes up marra. Otherwise they'll be lost to younguns like me!
 
consettsafc said:
Any excuse to post this classic, sorry @Reiver
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Don't apologise mate, it's a beautiful song even thought there are parts I don't understand.

I'm sure there are people who would turn their nose up at it ........ weirdo beardie in a wheelchair singing about shipbuilding :rolleyes:

Bollocks to them.

Teed said:
We've had this conversation before on the SMB and I'm sure Tiptoad mentioned Cherr was derived from our Norse ancestors, as to ket, It was always the word for sweets when i was a jam eater,alang with chummies, or bullets, my family had shipbuilders on one side and Miners on the other, i always associated marra with pit yakers and Cher with yard workers, but I'm going back to the fifties and sixties, fatha was from Ford estate, he moved there from Hendon when he was a kid.
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It's always weird when these threads appear.

I'm 61 from a mining family near Leadgate.

My uncles were at Consett Iron Company and my Dad was a hewer ...... until I came on the board I'd never heard 'yakker', or 'Cherr' and we went to Durham Big Meeting every year!

I'm sure some people find this weird but we had expressions, in our little world, that other people in the NE have never heard of.

My Dad would warn me about certain people, who couldn't be trusted, by saying 'he's a bit Spanish'.

He'd say 'what fettle' when he met his mates waiting for the pit bus but never said 'marra' to my knowledge.
 
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Tex said:
You better write some of your stories down before you turn your toes up marra. Otherwise they'll be lost to younguns like me!
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There's one already written down Tex, it's an earlier post, it's in song form mind...;)
 
Reiver said:
Don't apologise mate, it's a beautiful song even thought there are parts I don't understand.

I'm sure there are people who would turn their nose up at it ........ weirdo beardie in a wheelchair singing about shipbuilding :rolleyes:

Bollocks to them.



It's always weird when these threads appear.

I'm 61 from a mining family near Leadgate.

My uncles were at Consett Iron Company and my Dad was a hewer ...... until I came on the board I'd never heard 'yakker', or 'Cherr' and we went to Durham Big Meeting every year!

I'm sure some people find this weird but we had expressions, in our little world, that other people in the NE have never heard of.

My Dad would warn me about certain people, who couldn't be trusted, by saying 'he's a bit Spanish'.

He'd say 'what fettle' when he met his mates waiting for the pit bus but never said 'marra' to my knowledge.
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Marra is used quite a bit in West Cumbria.
 
Reiver said:
It's always weird when these threads appear.

I'm 61 from a mining family near Leadgate.

My uncles were at Consett Iron Company and my Dad was a hewer ...... until I came on the board I'd never heard 'yakker', or 'Cherr' and we went to Durham Big Meeting every year!

I'm sure some people find this weird but we had expressions, in our little world, that other people in the NE have never heard of.

My Dad would warn me about certain people, who couldn't be trusted, by saying 'he's a bit Spanish'.

He'd say 'what fettle' when he met his mates waiting for the pit bus but never said 'marra' to my knowledge.
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Thing is mate, a lot of slang lives in a very narrow window of time, someone mentioned "Shan" in an earlier post, I'd say that was mid to late 70's along with choss and heck high\heckish\hellish, those terms seem to have vanished, I remember coming back to Sunderland after 18 years in London and hearing the term "Yinar worrit is" before a sentence, I'd never heard this in my life before in the way it was used, also in my trade, joiners talking about "blocking out" meaning a first fix, this was never used when I worked in the area before, I'm sure Gillythediff will be familiar with the term like, slang changes very quickly.
 
Teed said:
Thing is mate, a lot of slang lives in a very narrow window of time, someone mentioned "Shan" in an earlier post, I'd say that was mid to late 70's along with choss and heck high\heckish\hellish, those terms seem to have vanished, I remember coming back to Sunderland after 18 years in London and hearing the term "Yinar worrit is" before a sentence, I'd never heard this in my life before in the way it was used, also in my trade, joiners talking about "blocking out" meaning a first fix, this was never used when I worked in the area before, I'm sure Gillythediff will be familiar with the term like, slang changes very quickly.
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Yinar worrit is I used to say that loads, in fact it was almost my catchphrase :D but yinar worrit is I'd completely forgotton about it until you mentioned it. Yinar worrit is I'm getting old :lol:
 
Matt Hopkins said:
Yinar worrit is I used to say that loads, in fact it was almost my catchphrase :D but yinar worrit is I'd completely forgotton about it until you mentioned it. Yinar worrit is I'm getting old :lol:
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Machine driver that works with us says it all the time,E.G.;

"Ya Knar what it is Adam,this is bad ground here"

It's constant tbh
 
Tex said:
My English teacher told me 'ket' was an old Norse word from the Viking days meaning trash (like the penny chew type kets) but @tiptoad on here is the linguistic expert and IIRC he said most of our dialect words are more likely oldmSaxon rather than Norse. Anyway 'kets' was in very common usage throughout my time in the NE.
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'Ket' is an obsolete word that means 'rubbish', which is still used here with a more specific meaning. This is covered in 'Words And Phrases In Everyday Use By The Natives Of Hetton-le-Hole In The County Of Durham', published in 1896 by the Reverend FMT Palgrave: "KET not good for food. (Often applied to sweetmeats)."

The word 'ket' should always be singular, never 'kets', just as rubbish doesn't have a plural.

Charmless Man said:
One thing @tiptoad does mention often though is that if you look at placenames - the traditional Norse place suffix of '-by' basically stops at the Tees, which suggests they never really settled or had much influence North of it. So probably didn't have that much influence on our dialect.

Certainly, most Norse loan words we use are common to all modern English speakers - skirt etc'.
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As a general rule of thumb - i.e. not 100% true, but usually the case - words with the letter 'k' in them tend to be of Scandinavian origin, 'sky' and 'skirt' being common examples. And 'ket'.

There are no archaeological finds and almost no place names to suggest the Scandinavians settled in Durham and Northumberland, except on the border with Yorkshire. They certainly visited and raided the region, sailing up the Tyne and spending at least one winter there. Tyneside has two extremely rare examples of Scandinavian place names, Byker - "village by the swamp" and Walker - "village by the wall", which may relate to these winter camps. Both have the letter k in them.

Cumbria and Yorkshire have thousands of Scandinavian field and place names, which proves they were heavily settled, their capital was York/Jorvik (with another k). So it's inevitable that words would have seeped over the borders and into the exclusively Anglo Saxon dialect of Durham and Northumberland. But there are very few of these in everyday use, which is further proof that there was little or no direct contact with speakers of old Norse.
 
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