How Britain Worked Page 14
The seaside is where Britain’s class system is sometimes said to have started breaking down, with people from all walks of life enjoying holidays at the same resorts. That’s not entirely true. Visitors with plenty of money stayed in grand hotels, while those who didn’t have so much money had to make do with a B&B if they were staying for more than a day. If a resort had more than one beach, it was more than likely that the better beach would be kept as a quieter, more refined area for the genteel holidaymaker, while the other would spawn the pubs and seafront entertainment that attracted the less refined visitor. At Blackpool, the posh people stayed away from the pier when the day-trippers were around: a second, more downmarket, pier was opened in 1868 with more entertainment and half the admission charge to lure the lower classes away from the North Pier. As visitor numbers grew, a third pier was added to provide further entertainment for the masses in 1893, making Blackpool the only resort in Britain with three piers.
TIME OFF FOR GOOD BEHAVIOUR
There weren’t only upmarket and downmarket areas in resorts – there were entire resorts that were considered a cut above their neighbours. Staying in a fashionable hotel in Cliftonville was definitely seen at one time to be more desirable than staying in rowdy Margate, even though they are right next door to each other. There was, of course, no stopping the working classes once they were given the chance to take a holiday at the seaside, and the chance was provided by the Bank Holiday Act of 1871. The Act provided for four Bank Holidays in England, Wales and Ireland giving workers the day off on Easter Monday, Whit Monday, the first Monday in August and Boxing Day (St Stephen’s Day in Ireland). In Scotland the Bank Holidays were slightly different – New Year’s Day, Good Friday, the first Monday in May, the first Monday in August and Christmas Day (Good Friday and Christmas Day were already holidays in the rest of Britain).
Christmas Day, Boxing Day or New Year’s Day weren’t the most obvious times to visit the seaside (although the original sea bathers were often winter visitors, their doctors telling them that the colder the water was, the better it was for them), but the bank holiday day-trippers soon had longer holidays to look forward to. The ‘Wakes Week’ started as a religious festival centuries before the Industrial Revolution, to commemorate the building of a local church or chapel, but developed into more general public celebration. In country villages, the Wakes Week was a big event because it was when the fair came to town. The fair was a livestock show and might even be a ‘mop fair’ when domestic and agricultural workers who were out of contract looked for new employers: a ‘domestic’ might carry a mop so that potential employers would immediately see what work she was used to doing; a gardener might carry a flower. They wore their best clothes in order to make a good impression, but once they were hired and had accepted a shilling or two to seal the deal, many made straight for the nearest pub.
With little or no other holidays to speak of, the workers weren’t about to give up a tradition that dated back centuries just because they were moving from the land to the factory. Mill owners knew that during Wakes Week, they could expect workers to be absent, either out on drinking sprees, sleeping off hangovers or simply enjoying all the fun of the fair. Wakes Weeks became unofficial, and then official (but unpaid), holidays for factory workers across the Midlands and the North. In Glasgow, the last fortnight in July is still known as The Glasgow Fair. Mill and factory owners closed down for a week, using the time for essential repairs and maintenance, something that ever more stringent government legislation was making compulsory in any case. It wasn’t until well into the twentieth century that the workers’ unions were powerful enough to be able to demand holidays with pay.
Wakes Weeks had long been at different times in different areas, as the fairs travelled from town to town. This tradition continued, with towns like Bolton, Bury and Blackburn shutting down their mills on different dates to let the workers head for the coast. People saved up all year to be able to afford the family holiday, with whole streets heading off together. The factory communities were very close and people enjoyed having the comfort of their neighbours – extended families – around them when they went to the strange place on the coast. From the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, it was boom time for the British seaside. By 1911, there were around 145 major resorts around the coast of England and Wales.
WELCOME TO LLANDUDNO
The miles of sandy beaches on the Welsh coast were to provide some of the most picturesque British seaside resorts, and none more so than Llandudno. Much of Llandudno has remained unashamedly unchanged since it was first built in the 1850s and became known as the ‘Queen of Welsh Resorts’. The two-mile stretch of beach that runs between its headlands – Great Orme and Little Orme – has a wide Victorian promenade that curves around the bay, with an elegant sweep of Victorian buildings following in its wake. These include the four-star St George’s Hotel, the first to be built on the promenade in 1854. You might expect to see amusement arcades and gift shops squeezed in amongst the beachfront buildings – let’s face it, you would in most other British resorts – but you won’t find them blighting the front in Llandudno. The reason is that Mostyn Estates, which owns the land on which Llandudno is built, has been controlling all of the development here since the first brick was laid.
There was no resort at Llandudno 200 years ago. The Welsh-speaking people who lived in the area were farmers, miners and fishermen – sometimes all three. As miners, they dug not coal but the copper ore that was to be found in the limestone rock of the Great Orme. These copper mines were abandoned at the end of the Bronze Age, but reopened in the seventeenth century, with some miners still working the ore right up to the end of the nineteenth century. Until the middle of the nineteenth century there were only a few dozen cottages scattered around the Llandudno peninsula. All began to change when the most influential family in the area, the Mostyns, took over the common land in the area. In total, 832 acres were commandeered under the Inclosures Act laws, leaving just 1.5 acres to the locals. Lord Mostyn couldn’t quite make up his mind what to do with all the land he had suddenly acquired. He thought about creating a commercial dock to export coal or a ferry port, but at a meeting in the King’s Head inn (which is still there, opposite the Great Orme Tramway’s Victoria Station) it was decided to cash in on the emerging seaside holiday fashion and build a resort.
The town was laid out as a basic grid with streets either following the line of the north shore promenade, or running away from the north shore to the sand dunes of the west shore. Many fine buildings developed over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, including a Victorian shopping centre (or ‘emporium’) that would later become the Empire Hotel and, in 1877, Llandudno Pier.
Because so much of Llandudno has remained unchanged, it seemed the ideal place to go when we wanted to make a film about traditional British holidays. You can certainly find nightclubs and other modern amenities in Llandudno easily enough if you go looking for them, but the town is in no way as obviously commercialised as, for example, Blackpool. Preserving all of the older elements of the resort is, as you might expect, a never-ending task and there were plenty of jobs that I could help out with around the town.
TRAM-A-LAMA-DING-DONG!
There were a lot of things on the tramway that runs from the King’s Head up the Great Orme that looked familiar to me at first glance. A railway is a railway after all, right? Wrong – the running gear and operating system on the Great Orme Tramway were nothing like the sort of thing that I had seen before on the Severn Valley line. There were wheels running on rails, but that’s just about where the similarities ended. For a start, this line was running up a hill steep enough to bring a smile to my face if I was coming down it on a bike. Your average railway doesn’t really do that, but that is exactly why the tramway in Llandudno was built. Visitors to the resort could climb the Great Orme to enjoy the wonderful views, walking up the road to make it easier if they were reasonably fi
t. The steep roads, though, weren’t much use to anyone who was in the least bit infirm and the solution was to build a railway that would go up the hill. They did it in San Francisco in 1873, after all, so why not in Llandudno?
The Great Orme Tramway first opened in 1902 and although it’s often thought to be based on the system used in San Francisco it has far more in common with the cable haulage systems that were used in the coal mines, to bring heavily-laden wagons up to the surface. Steel cables, originally with a hemp core, ran in a slot between the tram rails that haul tram cars to the Halfway Station, which allowed the tramline to cross roads without other traffic fouling the cables. The cables then ran above ground to the terminus near the summit of the Great Orme, at 679 feet. The big difference between the Great Orme system and the San Francisco system was that in San Francisco, the cable cars detached from the cable when they needed to stop and gripped onto the moving cable when they wanted to get going again. In Llandudno the cars were permanently attached and the cable stopped and started.
The whole venture was seen as a huge gamble when the first car left the station to the sound of the town’s silver band playing the national anthem, but in the first month alone the tramway carried almost 39,000 passengers, double what had been estimated. They rode in four forty-eight-seat cars, with the cars working in pairs – the weight of one car running downhill helping to haul its partner to the top. At Halfway Station, the real power was supplied by two steam-powered winding engines, one for the upper section and one for the lower. Passengers change cars here for the upper leg of the journey. It can get quite blustery and, as there’s no glass in the tramcar windows, you sometimes have to hold on to your hat.
The tramway still looks pretty much as it did over a hundred years ago, thanks to the skills of the people who keep it in top condition. There have, though, been a number of significant changes. The steam engines were replaced by electric motors in 1957, still at a time when most railway locomotives were steam powered, although the steam engines’ fifty-five years’ service is pretty good going by anyone’s standards. The original overhead copper wire that controlled the bell and telephone communications between the driver and the winding engineer is now a state-of-the-art underground electronic system, showing the engineer exactly where each of the cars is on a video display. The brakes and safety systems are also much improved on the originals. Even so, the Victorians who built the tramway would still recognise their handiwork. Though they might have heart attacks if they saw the £4 million bill for the tramway’s centenary restoration, especially given that they only paid £20,000 to build it in the first place...
THE PLEASURES OF A PLEASURE PIER
Something that has changed a fair bit since it was first built is Llandudno Pier. The pier is at the foot of the Great Orme on the north shore and reaches out over 2,295 feet into the Irish Sea, making it the longest pier in Wales and the fifth longest in Britain. There has been a pier of some sort at Llandudno since 1858, although that original wooden pier was less than 250 feet long and was destroyed by a storm only a year after it opened. It was rebuilt and used as a landing stage for steam ships, but as the town had its own railway station by 1858, the pier wasn’t quite so important for bringing visitors into the resort. Even after the current pier was built, however, it continued to be used as a landing stage, most recently for pleasure cruises.
The present pier was begun in September 1876, designed by Scottish engineer Sir James Brunlees and built by Walter Macfarlane of Glasgow: Macfarlane used decorative cast iron from another Glasgow manufacturer, the Elmbank Foundry. Originally the pier entrance was at ‘Happy Valley’ at the foot of the Great Orme, but it was extended to provide another entrance closer to the promenade in 1884. It opened to the public in August, 1877 and has always been primarily a pleasure pier.
When the railways became the most popular mode of transport for everyone heading to the seaside, piers that had been landing stages for steamers quickly found a new function as pleasure piers. Holidaymakers enjoyed, and still enjoy, being able to walk out over the water and look back at the town to take in a view of the resort, as opposed to their more usual view out to sea. While taking a gentle stroll along the flat wooden deck of the pier, they were, inevitably, tempted to part with some of their holiday money at stalls and kiosks set up on the pier. Just as the pier was an extension of the resort’s promenade, so the pier vendors provided an extension of the town’s shops and entertainments.
By 1894, you might have been tempted to buy a postcard on the pier to send home, using the new halfpenny adhesive stamps that pretty much guaranteed next-day delivery now that the railways could transport the Royal Mail so effectively. The postcard would have been pretty plain, though – probably without even an illustration. What we would recognise as a postcard nowadays, something printed with an illustration or photograph of Llandudno, didn’t come along until around 1902. This was when the postcard really started to become part of the seaside holiday tradition. Comic postcards – the fat lass on the beach, the henpecked husband or the honeymoon couple – featuring saucy cartoons didn’t really appear until the 1920s and 1930s, but there were other things on the pier that reflected the slightly ‘naughty’ atmosphere at the seaside.
Drop a coin in a slot and crank the handle on a Mutoscope and you could see ‘What The Butler Saw’ – a through-the-keyhole moving image of ‘M’lady’ disrobing to step into a bath or go to bed. The Mutoscope worked like a ‘flip book’, turning over a series of images illuminated by a lightbulb inside the machine and viewed through an eyepiece. From the time these machines first began to appear in the late 1890s, they became hugely popular, but were denounced in a letter to The Times in 1899 as ‘vicious demoralising picture shows’, contributing to ‘the corruption of the young that comes from exhibiting under a strong light, nude female figures’. It’s quite surprising that the machines weren’t banned completely given Victorian attitudes to proper dress and behaviour in public, but they survived along with a host of other coin-operated machines that would tell your fortune, test your strength, weigh you, measure you or even give you an electric shock (which was thought to be very therapeutic).
Entertainment on the piers of Britain was not only by machine, though. Once you had taken a stroll out to the end of the pier, you would be able to sit for a while and listen to a band play at a bandstand or in a pavilion. The Llandudno pier’s sundeck pavilion at the end of the pier was so popular that they needed somewhere bigger to stage musical shows. In 1881, the Llandudno Pier Company decided to build a 2,000-seat venue at the shore end of the pier. It was three storeys high, had a beautifully detailed cast-iron veranda facing out to sea and in its basement boasted the largest indoor swimming pool in Britain. The Pier Pavilion Theatre opened in 1886 and, although there were water quality problems with the swimming pool that led to it being filled in, it remained as an entertainment venue into the 1980s, with top acts such as George Formby, Ted Ray, Petula Clark and Cliff Richard including the theatre on their tour schedules. Sadly, the pavilion closed in 1990 and was destroyed by a fire in 1994.
TIME TO GET STUCK IN...
The pier, of course, survived and I was lucky enough to be allowed to help out with some essential restoration work. Of all the jobs that I tackled during the making of the TV series, this was the one that I enjoyed the most – and it takes some doing to beat driving a steam locomotive, let me tell you. It wasn’t just that it was interesting work, there was also a real element of danger involved and, if you hadn’t already guessed, I am a bit of an adrenalin junkie. The guys that I worked with were proper grafters. Their attitude reminded me of the stories about the navvies: the blokes working on the pier restoration loved their ale, and they stayed out till all hours downing pint after pint. That’s not something I can cope with – one sniff of the barmaid’s apron and I’ve had it. But these lads were there ready for work at the crack of dawn to make the most of all the daylight they could get.
The job that I was able to he
lp with involved replacing the cross–members that braced the legs of the pier. Naturally, the bolts that had originally been used to hold them in place had long since rusted solid. There was no way you could ever hope to move them with a drop of release oil and a spanner. They had to be cut off using oxyacetylene torches. The only way to get to them was to climb down from the pier itself. We had all the right sort of safety equipment – hard hats, gloves, masks and, most importantly, safety harnesses. To begin with, the lads wouldn’t even let me clip my own safety line on and off. They might act a bit rough, but they’ve got a proper respect for their job. It’s not just the height we were working at that made it dangerous: you’re also working in a constant breeze or even a strongish wind (too strong and you’re hauled out of there); then there’s the tide either coming in or going out, waves lashing against the legs of the pier making everything wet and slippery. That’s no joke when you’re trying to find a good, solid foothold so that you can brace yourself properly in order to hit the spot with a cutting torch that burns at 3,500 degrees Celsius.
I’m no stranger to using a welding torch, but dangling underneath Llandudno Pier gave me a whole new respect for the thing. The last thing you want to do under those circumstances is to slip slightly and drag that flame across your leg. As it was, when the flame hit the flaky rust it sent sparks flying everywhere. Most of these cool off almost instantly but a few fly free, burning red hot for a couple of seconds. I had a proper hot rust flake spark off and shoot down the top of my boiler suit – that left a scorch mark in a very tender place! That night we went to the King’s Head for dinner (they do fantastic speciality pies) and took part in the pub quiz. In my honour, the TV crew named our team ‘Burnt Nipple’!