Website Name

I spent a day sifting through documents and minute books at the rather wonderful Tyne and Wear Archives Service in Newcastle yesterday...I need to get back to do a more thorough trawl as there is still some outstanding source material.

Below - some notes relating to Wilkinson's taken from Tynemouth's Emergency Committee meeting minutes. There is one interesting resolution therein following the disaster on May 3/4 1941. Otherwise the Minutes are somewhat unsubtantial.

My observations...
1) There is the sense of censorship above and beyond what would be normal in any offical minutes. For example, in the meetings immediately after the disaster, the Shelter (i.e. Wilkinsons) is never named...it is on several occasions in earlier minutes.

2) Eyebrows may be raised at one of the Committee resolutions immediately after the bombing which is to remove 50% of bunks in all public air raid shelters.

Did the Committee fear that overcrowding contributed to the large scale loss of life?
According to reports 192 people were in the shelter at the time of the raid. The Home Office has allowed a maximum occupancy of 188 persons. But why the focus on the bunks? Did bunk provision (one per occupant or more?) actually severely limit the space in the Shelter? Why do the Committee ask for guidance from the Home Office on the number of bunks deemed essential in a public air raid shelter?

3) There is no explicit after the event recognition that Wilkinsons was inherently a dangerous location to house a public air raid shelter - no mention is made of the number of deaths caused by factory machinery, chemicals and glass falling from the upper levels of this Victorian building. What was said un-minuted of course we are unlikely to know.

4) It would be very useful to know what precisely the Chief Constable said in his report the day after the bombing. No details are given in the minutes.

I'll reflect on this over the next few weeks. Of course, one could expect reticence and the line being toe-ed in official minutes. What is strange though is the unemotional and almost distanced tone and content. Committee members will surely have known that they have lived through one of the worst air raid disasters in WWII to date.

Jim Rickard has very kindly given us permission to republish the following article.
It first appeared in the Northumberland & Durham Bottle Collectors Club Newsletter, number 107 p20-23
All copyrights belong to Jim Rickard.

W. A. Wilkinson’s Last Employee

It was 1990, and we were exploring the old part of North Shields that was once home to William Arthur Wilkinson’s thriving business. There was little evidence of his premises, the area had been redeveloped years before. Still living nearby was one of Wilkinson’s former employees, an elderly man called Billy. In his broad Shields accent he invited us into his small terraced house to tell us his story. He took us into his front room and settled into his chair beside the gas fire, he talked about his years working for Wilkinson and showed tremendous affection for his old boss. His memory was sharp for a man in his eighties, and we struggled to write even half of it down into our notebook. Unfortunately for all our high expectations, Billy didn’t have a house crammed with stouts and codds. In fact the only souvenir he kept was an enamel advertising sign which he had given to one of his children living in the Midlands. He showed us a photograph of his family holding it and it was a belter – about 3 ft by 2 ft in about 5 colours with a central picture of Wilkinson’s factory. I’ve tried to recreate it from the rough sketch I did then.

Site visitor Dr Jim Rickard has kindly provided us with images of Wilkinson's bottles from his personal collection. The notes are Dr Rickard's.

Click each image for a full size version.

Bottle 1: A pint capacity pop bottle, date around 1920-1930

Bottle 2: A pint capacity pop bottle, very similar to the first one but I would date it as the sucessor to Bottle 1, date 1930s.

Bottle 3: A 1/3 pint capacity pop bottle, probably 1930s or 1940s embossed North Shields on rear.

Bottle 4: this bottle is similar to the ones my father (born in New York village in 1943) remembers seeing when he was a boy. Could well have been in use in the 1940s.

Other side of Bottle 4.

Just procured (via eBay) a Wilkinson's soda bottle in neat condition. Probably pre-dates the 40's but I'll leave that to the experts.

The text imprinted on the bottle reads:
W.A. WILKINSON
REGISTERED
(image of unicorn)
TRADEMARK
SODA WATER MANUFACTURER
NORTH SHIELDS

UPDATE: 30.03.06

Site visitor Dr Jim Rickard comments:
"I have looked at the photo of the bottle you bought on ebay, this bottle is found on late Victorian and Edwardian rubbish dumps from Blyth to Newcastle and Sunderland. It dates from around 1900 and was used in great numbers, it is probably the easiest to acquire bottle from Wilkinson. I have a broken example of a variation of this bottle that has the words "1/2d deposit charged on this bottle" embossed on the rear. a reminder that these bottles had deposits and would have been used many times before finally being thrown away (sometimes you can see a lot of wear on the base to prove this)."

Ward's directory of 1899 - the Yellow Pages of its day - covered all the towns between the Tyne and the Wear. William Arthur Wilkinson must have had a thriving business to have felt justified in taking a full page advertisement.

He had come from Gateshead to North Shields in 1866 as a young hairdresser. It was not long before he moved into the manufacture of mineral waters. The business expanded, and in 1898 he was advertising his new premises at the corner of King Street and George Street.