Very Tall People live in Prestwick!

We have recently had a magnificent new notice board erected in Prestwick by Ponteland Town Council and I'm sure all residents will be grateful for that.

But what a shame more thought had not been given to its erection. There are guidelines about "Accessibility" issues - it's far too high. Someone in a wheelchair has no chance of reading any notices posted and even tall people will have difficulty.

Ponteland Town Council Local Plan consultation

Make your submission to the Town Council before 10th august 2012.

Here is your starter for 10!

3.6.5                     In previous plans it has been recognised that Prestwick has no defined “development” boundary and that the whole of the “village” is “over washed” by green belt. It should be made clear that this case remains.

3.1.10                The plan fails to recognise the existence of area E2A in the previous plan. Omission of a policy for area E2A from the current plan could prejudice the resulting policy. This area is owned by Newcastle Airport and scheduled for industrial use.

Transport: The traffic flow figures clearly demonstrate that the amount of “bypassable” vehicles is modest and that it is East/West traffic rather than North/South. There appears to be a failure to recognise that the A696 is no longer a Trunk Road ( eg, 3.5.1) and that any bypass will have to be ‘locally’ funded. Whilst the building of a bypass in the next 30 years is going to be difficult to justify there is more chance of building a less expensive B6342/Berwick Hill link than an A696 bypass

W Armstrong and Sons, Prestwick

S Fix Workshop

I am told by someone who worked there at the time that the building was built by local joiner Mr Ditchburn - does anyone recall his fore name?

Ditchburn lived at No.1 Carr View, Prestwick and prior to moving into the workshop he rented Prestwick Chapel as a joiners workshop from Billy Welch, Mechanical Engineer at East Walbottle colliery.

Ditchburn moved to a farm near Chollerford.

Can anyone remember who the next occupiers of the workshop were?

The opening of Dinnington Village Social Club

Stan Taylor and Tommy Nicholson worked at Prestwick Pit and the Robert Pit, Dinnington (joined as one unit called East Wallbottle colliery by the National Coal Board and its pre- nationalisation owners - the East Walbottle Coal Company) 

Jack the Stripper

When the body of 30-year-old Hannah Tailford was found by rowers on the Thames shore near Hammersmith Bridge on February 2, 1964, the similarities to previous murders of Rees and Figg's corpses were uncanny. Naked apart from a pair of stockings, she had also been strangled, several teeth were missing, and her semen-stained underwear had been stuffed in her mouth.
It was an ugly end to a life that had seen precious little beauty.

Hanna Tailford

Born at Prestwick Pit Houses, Hannah was excluded from several schools as a child due to disruptive behavior. As a teenager she ran away to London, where she was soon "on the game", gaining convictions for soliciting and theft into the bargain. She became so desperate that on one occasion she even placed a classified ad in her local newspaper, offering her unborn baby for sale to the highest bidder.
The last confirmed sighting of Tailford was on January 24, and pathologists estimated that she could have been in the water for a week or more. As with Rees, there were several lines of enquiry that appeared to present themselves.
Tailford was said to have connections in a murky world of underground sex parties and "stag films" She frequented a coffee stall near Trafalgar Square where she was known to have been offered money to have sex on camera. One individual connected to these activities committed suicide a few days before Hannah Tailford was found.
In his book on the case, Found Naked And Dead, Brian McConnell reports that Tailford told friends of being paid to participate in bizarre orgies at the homes of aristocrats. Such stories tallied with the lurid tales of high society sex parties revealed during the Profumo Scandal of 1963, in which a British government minister's affair with a call girl was exposed.

John Profumo

Tailford told a friend she had attended an orgy at the home of a French diplomat named Andre, and on another occasion had been paid £25 and taken by a limousine to a house where a man in a gorilla costume had sex with her while a crowd of upper-crust revellers cheered him on.
Could Tailford have been silenced by someone with connections to this sleazy world? Tempting though the theory may have been, it seemed unlikely. Nevertheless, during the investigation police interviewed hundreds of people who they knew to have consorted with prostitutes, among them an international soccer player, and several clergymen.
Yet the possibility that Tailford had fallen victim to a "maniac," as the newspapers put it, was shortly to become even more terrifyingly plausible.

The Jack the Stripper murders have never been solved.

1953