Tees Politics, History & Ideas - 27 November 2021

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NEIGHBOURS & LOCAL HISTORY - THE NORTH OF ENGLAND - BILLINGHAM, DARLINGTON, MIDDLESBROUGH, NEWCASTLE, STOCKTON, YORK & YARM Most people living in the North of England think they know their neighbours and local history but how would you know your neighbour worked for MI6? Most who knew the Fairclough family didn’t have a clue that from the seventies Bill Fairclough was a secret agent (MI6 codename JJ) working for various intelligence agencies. What’s more they had no idea he was following in his parents’ footsteps. Bill's parents met during the Second World War when his father, ostensibly working for Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), worked secretly on creating bombs to wipe out the Nazi's industrial hinterland. They married in Yarm in 1941. After the war in Europe ended in May 1945, Dr Richard Alan Fairclough continued to work for British Intelligence (MI1). Not long after retiring from ICI in the seventies, Richard Fairclough opened and ran an antiquarian book shop business in Yarm until his death in 1987. The book shop was a bit of an enigma as it was also a haunt for spooks. When not gated at St Peter’s School, York Bill Fairclough spent most of his childhood and early teens in the North East of England. As a child in the fifties he was educated at Red House School in Norton. He lived in Billingham and then in a vast white house (once the home of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley) in Norton Green overlooking the duck pond. In Bill’s teens, the Faircloughs lived in Middleton St George and later in Yarm. He also lived in flats he rented near nightclubs he helped run during the late sixties and early seventies in Portrack, Stockton-on-Tees and Jesmond in Newcastle upon Tyne. Conveniently for him they were near the offices of the firm of Chartered Accountants he worked for in Middlesbrough and Newcastle upon Tyne. So if you lived, worked or visited any of these places you may well have unwittingly encountered this “spooky” family, been their neighbours or inhabited the houses they lived in. A quick web-search will even disclose some of the addresses where they lived. Mind you, if you live in any of them now, best sweep them for bugs! Details of where the Faircloughs lived and worked are given in most of Bill Fairclough’s bios on the web such as can be found at everipedia.org/wiki/lang_en/bill-fairclough. If you were as fascinated as we were, you can also read the raw fact based thriller Beyond Enkription, the first stand-alone novel to be released in The Burlington Files series (theburlingtonfiles.org/#/reviews). It’s a memorable and distinctively different noir espionage thriller based on his and his family’s experiences in 1974.