High Spen

This amateur film captures highlights from the High Spen carnival, in its fifth year in 1965. Its a great event for children, as the focus is on five competing juvenile jazz bands from the region (kazoos at the ready) and childrens fancy dress. The costumes allude to popular trends and concerns of the day. They include Coronation Street soap character Hilda Ogden, a Miss Bingo and a bandaged waif with a cautionary road safety message: Look right, look Left. I did not.

This young carnival may have been an attempt to motivate the communal spirit against council neglect. High Spen was one of the settlements classified as a Category D in a Durham County Council Development Plan of 1951, villages that were considered an extension of the collieries with no future and were scheduled for demolition, with residents to be rehoused, a decision fought by High Spen folk. It was saved when local government reorganisation placed it in the newly created Tyne and Wear. Whippet races also feature in this carnival footage, long considered one of the cloth cap sports traditions of the working class, and listed by American poet T. S. Elliot in 1948 as a defining part of English culture.