A vanished Tyneside way of life captured in a classic Chronicle photograph from 1969

It was April 1969 when a roving Evening Chronicle photographer took this iconic image: Four small children in Leslie Street, Wallsend, playing together happily in the shadow of a giant oil tanker which was nearing completion at nearby Swan Hunter shipyard.

The photograph appeared in a story in the paper under the headline ‘The Friendly Giant’, which reported how the finishing touches were being applied to the 253,000-ton Esso

Northumbria before its high-profile launch by Princess Anne a few days later. Fifty-five years on, the Victorian-built street and the world-famous shipyard are gone, the ship was torn apart for scrap years ago, and the youngsters are now adults in middle age.

• Read more: Then and Now: A packed beach at Whitley Bay and the same scene more than 100 years later
• Don't miss out on our nostalgia stories and historical pictures from the North East with our free newsletter

The classic photograph vividly captures a lost world of heavy industry and back-to-back terraces, which for decades was the day-to-day reality for countless thousands living and working on Tyneside. For years, the image lay unseen in the Chronicle archive, before appearing as the front-page photograph on one of our Remember When nostalgia magazines in 2013. We asked if anyone knew who the children were. One of them, Paul Muir, saw the story and got in touch.

He told us: “Four generations of my family lived there – and I grew up there. I was very young at the time, but I do remember seeing huge ships at the bottom of our street and hearing lots of noise. My mam said that when they were building Esso Northumbria, they could hear the men shouting when they were on night shift, and the bedroom would light up from the flashes of the welders’ torches.”

But that wasn’t the end of the story. In 2014, the children in the original photograph were reunited as adults for the first time in years and photographed together at an event organised by Wallsend Memories and Photographs Facebook group. The emotional reunion, which was also attended by many former neighbours, took place in the grounds of Segedunum Roman fort on the very spot where Leslie Street had stood before being demolished, and not far from where the once-booming Swan Hunter shipyard had operated.

Paul was joined by his former childhood pals from the photograph, Neil Stoker, Hazel McLean and Pam McAllister - and the ‘Esso Four’ were soon busy swapping tales and reminiscing, before arranging to meet up in Newcastle for a meal. Paul said: “It was amazing getting back together after all these years and we were soon laughing and joking.”

Neil, who wore a snazzy woollen outfit in the 1969 photograph, told us: “It was a great place to live back then, and there was a real community spirit. We used to play in the street for hours - all the old games like British bulldog and kick the can. There were no computer games. We made our own fun. It was brilliant. As for the shipbuilding, it was just a way of life. We didn’t think twice about the banging, hammering, horns, and the shouting right through the night. The launches were amazing.”

Hazel McLean said: “I left the street with my family in 1970 - but I still remember the shipyard buzzer going and the human tide of workers coming up the street,” while Pam McAllister added: “The picture has always been in the background of my life. Now that we’re older, it’s really evocative, and it reminds me a lot of happy times with my family and my late mam.”

Back in 1969, on May 2, Esso Northumbria was launched at Swan Hunter by a young Princess Anne as thousands looked on. At 253,000 tons, it was the biggest ship in the world at the time, and the first in a succession of colossal supertankers to be built at the Wallsend yard.

The ship’s sea trials in February 1970 saw an estimated 250,000 visitors flock to watch the giant vessel majestically make its way down the River Tyne towards the North Sea.

However, the Esso Northumbria story would not be a happy one. The final cost of the ship was £6.5 million and, over the years, the Esso would be riddled with problems.

The vessel was retired in 1982, and broken up in Taiwan, 6,000 miles from where it had begun life on Tyneside 13 years earlier.