Antony Daly and Steve Maddison
We lived in Hampshire Place. Growing up it felt like a safe place to live, with any number of places to go and have an adventure. We were very fortunate to have fields on one side of the street and a play park on the other. The play area had a climbing frame, rocking horse, roundabout, slides and swings. I remember rubbing candle wax on the slides, because you thought it made you slide faster down them! The slides themselves were metal and could get very hot on a sunny day. My favourite though was probably the monkey bars. I lived right next to ‘the ET’, which was a local spot for all the BMXers in the mid 80’s. It’s where I first met people like Steve Maddison, who I’m still close friends with to this day.
Despite living right next to Acre Rigg School, I went to Howletch Infants and Juniors and from there onto Shotton Hall Comp. In my first year of Junior School I had trials for the school football team, and I went on to become a regular in the team. In my final year at Howletch, I was co-captain with Darryl Burns and we made it to the final of the Sunderland Echo and Hartlepool Mail Cup, although we lost that game 2-1 to Horden & Easington RC Juniors.
Around this age, as well as playing for the school team and Easington District Boys, I was also involved in a five-a-side league on a Sunday, which was at Lowhills Road Sports Centre where they had all-weather pitches. A little bit later they started a five-a-side league at Peterlee Leisure Centre on a Saturday evening, so there were lots of opportunities to play football. In 1986, Peterlee Boys FC was formed, and I started playing for their Under-13’s side.
After leaving school, an early job was at the Fisher Price Toys factory in Peterlee. I couldn’t have been there more than three or four months. It was possibly the most mundane job going – putting cardboard boxes together for the rest of the line, or just working on one of the machines. There was no glory in there if your face didn’t fit. Usually people had been there for God knows how long, and you would just help them as best as you could. So yeah, I was just doing the donkey work. Later, about 1994 this will have been, I worked at Walkers Crisps. This was around the time when they started putting those little envelopes in the crisp packets that could contain a money note. When the line went down, we’d pop a few packets to see what you were going to win. Lo and behold, it was another packet of crisps!
We lived at Hampshire Place until I was about 15 or 16. At the back end of the 1980s, the council started putting the roofs on the houses, so we were moved and put in a ‘transit house’, as I think they called them. Ours was in Warwick Place, which isn’t far from Hampshire Place. I ended up living there until 1998, when I left Peterlee. My parents had both passed away a few years before this.
The photograph I have of my parents on a night out must have been taken some time in the mid-late 1970’s. They didn’t go out very often and I’ve no idea why they were there on this occasion. When they did go out for the evening it was generally for a meal. Here they are at the Senate, which was one of those chicken in a basket type of places that were popular at that time. The place changed hands in the early 1980’s and was renamed the Colosseum. If memory serves, this is where my older sister met her future husband. I think it had a vibe of being the place to be in Peterlee for a while.
Steve Maddison
The nearest BMX track to Peterlee was several miles away at Crimdon, so we had to make do with what we had, which in our case was the mud bank and large tarmac playground at Acre Rigg Junior School. It was affectionately known to the youth of Peterlee as ‘The ET’, because it was great for jumps. You would go flying off the bank, like in the BMX scenes from the film, ET. BMXing brought a lot of locals together from all over the town. We formed friendships for life with people we would never have otherwise met.
Note: Steve Maddison did not wish to be interviewed. The above memory was sent by him in an email in response to a low resolution digital copy of the photograph of Steve on his BMX that had been provided by Antony Daly. Steve later found the original photograph after agreeing to search for it in his loft at the request of Antony.