Shadows and Whispers

Remembering Graeme Miles (1935-2013)

Friends of Graeme Mile are delighted to announce this superb forthcoming biography of Middlesbrough songwriter Graeme Miles, written by Ailsa MacKenzie.  The book relives Graeme’s wartime boyhood days on the marshes near his Billingham home and which were his first and greatest inspiration.  It reveals his time as an unwilling soldier during National Service in the 1950s and the many jobs he deliberately undertook in order to be able to write his superb industrial songs, as well as detailing his life at home with his wife Annie.  Finally, readers will come to know this enigmatic man.

As a young man in the late 1950s, Graeme became fully immersed in the English folk music revival which gave him a platform for his songs to be aired. It is thought that he wrote 500 during a twenty-year period, then he ceased, to concentrate on poetry and other creative writings. His many sketches give accurate pictures of life in industrial Teesside at that time, his focus being mainly on its famed iron and steel industry, the Tees docks, estuary and marshes, and his beloved North York Moors with their ancient human history and glorious landscapes.

Dozens of his songs, drawings and writings are revealed here for the first time. Included are seventy five notated songs which reveal a rich tapestry of subjects – love, war, recreation, nature, and work in many forms.  They contain, sadness, humour, joy, admiration and are written as a result of a keen observation of the Teesside area and its people particularly during the first twenty years after World War Two when the world underwent great and rapid changes and advances in technology.

Ailsa MacKenzie, a retired journalist and an accomplished folk singer and musician, worked with Graeme when they were members of The Ironopolis Singers, formed specifically to bring his lesser-known songs to public attention.  The idea of a biography was mooted by Annie and a few of his closest and oldest friends. The book has a slight emphasis on old Middlesbrough and its people because it was Annie’s wish that the town should be seen in a kinder light than it so often is.

Graeme Miles and his songs are known and sung throughout the world, yet he is scarcely acknowledged in the town where he lived and which he loved. This book is partly an attempt to redress this undeserved imbalance.
Shadows and Whispers is now at the design stage and publication will take place very soon.  If you wish register your interest in this book, please check at graememiles.com for future developments, as well as on Facebook, or contact ailsamackenzie@aol.com.

“Middlesbrough might not have had such a devoted son in Graeme Miles had it not been for the Second World War. On its outbreak, his family moved from Greenwich to the village of Billingham-on-Tees, in County Durham, where his father, a medical officer at Chatham naval base, had accepted a similar post at Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) Billingham. Graeme was four when his family moved north. Graeme was born in Greenwich, Kent, on October 20th 1935, the youngest of four siblings, and christened Clive Graham Miles. In adulthood, he changed the spelling of his middle name, thinking it looked more interesting, and thereafter preferred to be so addressed. In 1935, the original Middlesbrough – that place “over the border” (the border being the railway line) – the old town, that Infant Hercules, St Hilda’s, Ironopolis – had been in existence for about a century. Graeme called it Smokestack Land. The old town was built about a market square. Its town hall, constructed in 1889 and now a Grade 2 listed building, was painted in 1959 by LS Lowry. It is currently disused. The old town’s foundries, forges and rolling mills, its docks, shipyards, offices and people inspired many of Graeme’s songs. After leaving the army, into which he was conscripted from 1955 to 1957, he made his home in the newer Middlesbrough “south of the border” where he worked.”