Stuck in the snow in South Shields

Skiers and tobogganists on Cleadon Hill.

And what will poor robin do then, poor thing?’.

It was certainly popular in infant and junior school classes at this time of year when youngsters watched out the window for the first flurries of snow to start falling.

It's February 1970 and crews are pictured pushing one of their buses out of a drift on the Coast Road.

Who remembers reciting it in the classroom, perhaps accompanied by a recorder or the teacher’s piano, or singing it in the playground, along with some of the many other nursery rhymes, which are still favoured by children today?

And when the North wind did blow and brought with it a winter white-out, do you remember how those little bottles of milk which children used to get at primary school in days gone by used to grow – as the milk froze and pushed up the silver caps?

Going back to the robin, it’s funny isn’t it, how they’re with us all year round, yet we rarely see them, except when it starts to get cold.

And it was certainly cold when the Gazette’s photographers were out and about to capture the images that make up this week’s picture spread.

There’s fun and misery in equal measure, from 1969 all the way through the mid to late seventies as snow turned South Tyneside into a skier’s and sledger’s playground, but a pedestrian and road-user’s skid-pan.

What can you tell me about the pictures and the people featured in them? Please drop me a line.