“Newcastle was always the centre of commerce, retail and finance. It was more strategically important. Newcastle is the vortex, it sucks in people and investment. Sunderland didn’t have a financial sector or a legal sector. Newcastle has always been an important place, a Royal stronghold, a port and centre of commerce.
“Sunderland were the upstarts, it really got going as a coal port in the 1600s and Newcastle always did their utmost to hinder them, blocking the dredging of the River Wear for example, as it was a commercial threat to Newcastle.”
A tale of two accents
The accents are different, but not to the untrained ear. When they travel to other parts of the country for work or go abroad on holiday, imagine how irritating it becomes for people from Sunderland to have to constantly deny they are Geordies.
Football always gives the “Mackems”, as Sunderland folk refer to themselves, a wonderful opportunity to knock their preening rivals off their perch.
But the very term Mackems is believed to have begun as a Geordie insult, mocking the way their neighbours spoke, as well as their place in the shipbuilding industry that once thrived on the rivers Tyne and Wear.
It goes like this – Sunderland made the ships, the hull and the rest of the exterior, while the electrics, fixtures and fittings was finished on Tyneside. It led to the phrase, you make them, we take them. Which was shortened to refer to their neighbours simply as Mackems.
“It’s actually a bit of a hobby horse of mine,” said Jackson. “But there is a lot of evidence that the term Geordies was much more widely used than it is today. I know people who grew up in Sunderland in the 1970s who say they called themselves Geordies. There is a guy I know who went away to university a Geordie, in 1978, and came back to Sunderland a decade later and everyone was calling themselves Mackems.
“It was much more of a general North East thing. People from Sunderland spit feathers about that but it’s true. It was a non-contentious thing. It applied to people who worked across the North East coalfields and heavy industries, I’ve always believed it derived from George Stephenson and the North’s preference for his “Geordie” lamp.
“The first formal reference to Mackems I have found is in 1984. It probably starts from Newcastle people mocking the Sunderland accent. As has happened before with these sorts of things, the people of Sunderland adopted the term and transformed its meaning to one of pride in their identity.”
A friendly rivalry turned toxic
If you look at the history of this fixture, there have been plenty of ugly scenes, whether it was the Newcastle fans who sneaked into the Fulwell End in 1985 and fought their way out. Or the St James’ Park riot of 1990, when Newcastle fans invaded the pitch in a failed attempt to get their play-off semi final abandoned when they were losing 2-0.
More recently, there has been violence, most notably the infamous horse-punching incident of 2013, when Newcastle fans tried to attack the visiting fans and police after a 3-0 home defeat.
