Beware the Black Middens
by Noreen Rees
directed by Bob Webb
The sixth triennial Tynemouth Pageant was produced as part of Newcastle Gateshead’s 2005 ALIVE INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF RIVERS AND THE SEA running from 25th June to 7th August 2005. The Pageant play was staged in the week leading up to the arrival in the Tyne of the Tall Ships Race 2005.
For centuries the mouth of the Tyne was a place of shifting sandbanks and dangerous rocks. Most feared of all were the Black Middens rocks. Covered at high tide, the Middens caused the death by drowning of hundreds of sailors and their passengers. Most poignantly, they all died within a rope`s length of the safety of the shore.
The sixth Tynemouth Pageant told the story of one such shipwreck: the sinking of the schooner ‘Friendship,’ the passenger steamer ‘Stanley’ and the lifeboat ‘Constance,’ all wrecked together on the Black Middens during a storm in November 1864.
Partly narrated by four rough-grained ships’ figureheads, the tragedy was told through the lives of the characters involved, including the men of the Tynemouth Lifeboat, the ships’ crews, members of a girls’ choir from Aberdeen, and a pair of Scottish farmers.
The disaster was the event which led to the formation of the Tynemouth Volunteer Life Brigade which is still in existence today.
