Mack’em and Tack’em
Sunderland’s ship-building history is a proud one, and a term for the locals has been reinvented as one of pride
Sunderland is a city on the North East coast with a rich history of heavy industry. Coal mining and more predominantly shipbuilding dominated the area for decades, and ships were sent around the world by generations of hard-working men.
Shipyards lined the banks of the River Wear and the coastline, and a booming city played a huge role in giving ships to the world. It is this industry that gave the people of Sunderland a nickname that, with some evolution over the years, has stood the test of time.
The term ‘Mackem’ has become one that many people from Sunderland have embraced. You’ll see it mostly through football, with various examples of it being used in local and national media about supporters in particular.
‘Mack’em and Tack’em’ is a name that comes from the city’s rich shipbuilding history. It refers to the ships built on Wearside. In its simplest terms, ‘we mack ’em and ye tack ’em”, which is essentially ‘we make the ships and you take the ships’. This was a term associated with Sunderland ship workers, and there is plenty of evidence to suggest it is this that the modern ‘Mackem’ term comes from.
The name ‘Mack’em and Tack’em’ was christened on Sunderland folk at some point in the mid-20th century in writing, but records show its origins could well be rooted over a century before that. One of the first traces of it being referenced was in County Durham historian William Fordyce’s take on shipbuilding by the Wear. He used italics on the words ‘make’ and ‘build’, and people believe this is to stress the importance of especially ‘make’ which of course came to be part of the nickname.
The 20th century arrived, with it, a new wave of interest and use in the phrase. In the 1950s, a Newcastle-based magazine wrote that the term came about through the occasional slurring of words the accent caused, this of course being a derogatory origin and is no doubt at least part of the reasoning behind Tynesiders using it to poke fun at those from Wearside.
The shipbuilding heritage of Sunderland was remembered through the football club’s badge in the late 20th century. It is a badge that, in the 2024/25 season will be brought back as a feature of the club's away kit- based on a design from the early 1990s.
A Sunderland University article references case studies of people saying when they first remember hearing the term ‘Mack’em and Tack’em’. The interesting piece helps to date just when it started to become more common, and how it started on its path to being a permanent fixture in local dialect- with references throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
To people from the North East, the accents of its various areas are usually clear to spot. Sunderland and Hartlepool, despite being only 20 miles apart, have two very different tones to their accents.
Mackem has its place in the North East of England, and it fits alongside other quirky names for people in the region. Pit yakker is given to those who live in the many former coal mining villages of County Durham, Sand Dancer for South Shields, and of course, Geordie for Newcastle are just three of these. Each has a backstory as interesting and complex as the last, but each also shows why that particular part of the country is one of the most dialectically diverse.
