June Coburn
We got to hear of this place called Peterlee through my older brother John. He’d heard there were houses available in the New Town through some boy he met while working at a holiday camp. Where we’d been living in Scotland was very cramped and the kitchen and outside toilet were shared with other tenants. Here in Peterlee, we were offered a modern three-bedroom house with its own bathroom and kitchen.
It was just before Christmas 1970 when we first arrived in Peterlee and picked up the keys to 67 Basingstoke Road. I was 17. We literally had nothing to our name because the place we’d been renting in Scotland came fully furnished. My mother myself and our dog Ghiela shared a single horsehair mattress in the living room. On Christmas Day we had a slice of bread each. The dog had nothing. I still feel guilty about that. With it being Christmas, nowhere was open to get any help or to sign on. The elderly lady living next door was a life saver. She fed us for the next few days, and the dog! What kindness. We repaid her by doing her shopping, running errands and things like that.
We signed on at the dole after Christmas and both of us got jobs within a few weeks. I started at AEG in Hartlepool, while my mum got a job at Charnos in Peterlee. I didn’t stop at AEG for very long and got a job at Reltons, a sweet shop and off licence in Peterlee Town Centre. Feeling in a rut after a year or so working there I moved down to London where my brother was then living. While I was there, I got into a relationship with a guy. He was Scottish and we got on great together. At least to begin with. I then fell pregnant, after which the relationship turned abusive, so at six months I came back to Peterlee to live with my mum at Basingstoke Road.
John was born in 1974. He loved playing out. The photo showing him sitting on his first toy vehicle was taken in the street outside our home on Basingstoke Road when he was one year old. When he was about three, I bought him a peddle go-cart, which was top of the range. He loved me pulling him along on it to the town centre, so that he could ride down the ramps as fast as he could go. The photo [top right] with John sat on the back of the gocart must be from around 1978. That’s Ronnie Coxon and Nichola Coxon [standing] in the photo with John. They also lived on Basingstoke Road. I bought him his first bicycle when he was four or five. It was a Rally and came with stabilizers, though these were taken off after
two or three weeks. He just took to riding a bike. Zoom, he was away. He quite quickly outgrew the Rally and was bombing around the estate on a BMX by the time he was six.
In 1981 we moved to Helford Road in the South West area of Peterlee. John and his group of friends would ride down to the Dene on their bikes all the time. Elizabeth Cannon helped me to make the bogey that John is playing on outside our house at 59 Helford Road. Her mum and my mum worked together at the fish and chip shop in the town centre.
About six months after giving birth to John I got a job at Clix Fasteners, which I heard about through a friend of friend who worked there. It was in packing and distribution filling the orders. I left after six months. The pay was poor, and I was a single mother, with a baby, a dog, and my mum to keep now that she was having to look after John while I was at work. From Clix, I went to work in the Tudor Crisps factory on Stephenson Road. I absolutely loved working there. There’s a circle of us who still meet up and keep in regular contact. To make extra money, I also joined the cleaning squad. I cleaned the mezzanine (the flavour floors) every Saturday 6am-12pm and every other Sunday. It was time-and-a-half for the Saturday
and double time on a Sunday, so it made a big difference to my take home pay.
In 1985 I became a ‘white coat’ working in quality control. This involved checking things like the oil and the potatoes and the calibration settings on the cookers. If you spotted some you weren’t happy with you would halt the production line, which didn’t make you very popular. There was many a time I came into conflict with the floor managers. They tended not to like having a young woman telling them how it was!
Walkers Crisps bought out Smiths in 1989. Because I worked in ‘the Lab’ (quality control) they wanted to stop my overtime work on the weekends. Well, I couldn’t afford not to! Because I’d been on the cleaning squad for so long the union backed me. To cut a long story short, I left Walkers in 1990 with a redundancy payment of ten thousand pound. The day after receiving the money I went to the bank and paid off the balance of my mortgage. Having left school without any qualifications, I then decided to enrol at Peterlee College after speaking with Pam Baxter, who was Head of English. Her son Alastair was best mates with my son John. There I did an Access Course, before going to Sunderland University to do a degree in Health Studies. After this I did my PGSE teaching certificate and ended up working at East Durham College. While there, Malcolm Fallow handed me the job of setting up Adult Connections, which gained a Gold Standard. I left the College around 2011 to join the NHS Stops Smoking Service, retiring from there in 2018.