The Coast of Kings

From sand dunes to slag heaps, this fascinating 1960s travelogue reveals a coast of striking contrasts along the shores of wild and windswept Northumberland.

A magnificent North Sea coastline, full of history and industry, is beautifully captured in this absorbing 1960s TV travelogue, from the bustling Tyneside shipyards and Blyth coal staithes, to fairy tale landscapes of feudal castles and holy Northumbrian island ruins. But an interview at Bamburgh Castle with charming Norah Balls omits her own very remarkable history as a militant suffragette who once campaigned with Emily Pankhurst.

Between 1962 and 1963 Tyne Tees Television broadcast superb documentaries on the rivers and coastline of the North East in the series Your Heritage. In the early 1960s Blyth was Europes biggest port for shipping coal. The North Blyth staithes now lie idle, the same staithes over which Michael Caine scrambled in pursuit of Ian Hendry in the closing scenes of Mike Hodges bleak British crime thriller of 1971, Get Carter. The extraordinary Norah Balls, friend of the martyred Emily Wilding Davison, was a member of the Womens Social and Political Union (WSPU), the leading militant organisation campaigning for womens suffrage in Britain until 1917.