| Status: | Temporarily inactive |
| Coordinator: | |
| Group email: | WD40 group |
| When: | Fortnightly on Tuesday afternoons 1:00 pm |
Answers for the 2026 AGM quiz...
September 23rd 2025
Our 'Rhyme and Rap' recording session with Jude Murphy from the Washington Heritage group. Podcasts and more...watch this space!
The Podcast is now live! Listen here...
July 2025 Phase 1 completed...And here it is… Our Collage 1949 – 1989
Still no answer to Who did start the fire?
We do however know who completed the collage… Ann, Edith, Eileen, Hilary, Laraine, Margaret and Sharon managed to use perhaps half a tub of modge-podge to complete out tribute to Billy Joel. We managed to reference all his memories and then added from our side of the water.
Please take a closer look…
Phase 2 about to start in September with an emphasis on our lifetime experiences and influences ,so much to talk about…anyone who would care to join us , you’re welcome – dates available…
March 2025 - The plans are taking shape...we are aiming to create three photo montages; the first based on Billy Joel's song, then the second one which will reflect our own experiences over the decades, and thirdly highlighting Kate Adie and her memorable challenges during her news reporting career.
Visit to Sunderland University archive on 27th November 2024 to view Kate Adie collage designed by Peter Blake and hope to produce our own images inspired by Billy Joel’s song…
It is always a surprise when things start to come together… a song, a rap, a photomontage, a double LP cover, research, news clips from Durham and many places around the world, notebooks itemising events second by second as they happen, a hat, a memory box containing a piece of the Berlin Wall, piece of shrapnel, a gold medal, a souvenir model of St Peter’s Church and a visit to the Sunderland Heritage Day at Bethany Church in May 2024 - a chance meeting with Rachel Webb, Library Archivist of Special Collections at Sunderland University. (Please see below for photos of this first meeting)
Rachel her colleague Ellie offered us, the WD 40 group, the opportunity to view items from Kate Adie’s archive at the University. Many of the events she covered for the BBC we remember those broadcasts…they are part of our history…Ireland, Bosnia, Tiananmen Square, Libya , Dunblane, the Herald of Free Enterprise, Gulf War, SAS storming of the Libyan Embassy, Iraq…
Rachel and Ellie were both so enthusiastic and knowledgeable that we all felt by the end of our visit that we knew Kate Adie the person and certainly Kate Adie the professional.
We were encouraged to pursue our project and develop ideas. Thank you both. We all loved the visit and found inspiration in Kate Adie’s story.
The archive is basically a huge resource of stories, more than 200 boxes for Kate. What we are trying to do is to tell our story using our history as we see it…so at our next meeting we will be looking at our resources, and planning with ideas of our own plus those we have gleaned from our visit, what we do next and who might help us.
So what happened next? We wrote our own individual ‘raps’ and 'rhymes' 1989 – 2024 using similar criteria as Billy Joel…”Rishi Sunak, Beyoncé, Fujitsu, George Galloway”… Interested? See the 'raps' that our group members have created...
We Didn’t Start the Fire sung by Billy Joel
The song ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ sung by Billy Joel provided the inspiration for our group research which focused on the people, places, events, music and fashion which impacted on the world between 1949 and 1989. This exercise brought to light information about the Mob and its effect on Presidential elections in the 60s…the role of the Catholic Church in planning the escape routes for Nazis at the end of World War II and their contribution to the Space Race in USA and USSR…and in the pharmaceutical industry plus the inevitable conflicts of race, class and economics as well as international conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, Suez and Palestine. It gave us pause to reflect on the politics of the time and the leading characters involved.
Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" 1949-1989 News
See the lyrics to find out more about key players in Billy's song...Billy Joel's We Didn't Start the Fire
Jorge Santayana the Spanish American philosopher commented…
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”