1977 Blackpool Photo Album 6 - Pleasure Beach Area

My photo album of Blackpool photos still has a few pages left to show. Today we are down South Shore, towards the Pleasure Beach.

It's a very different skyline to today's, where the blue and red steelwork of The Big One dominates the view. The column of the Space Tower is the tallest structure on this 1977 photo and instead of a row of shops stretching along Ocean Boulevard, there is open space and the pillars of the Monorail holding up the track.

In the distance is the Pleasure Beach loop of the tram network, a good spot for taking photos of trams as there was almost always two or three trams standing there or moving slowly around the tight curves. Only a minority of trams went down all the way to Squires Gate and those terminating at the Pleasure Beach would go round this loop to swap back to the northward track.

On the extreme right is the bridge over to the Open Air Baths. A sign warns vehicles on the car park underneath: "Low Bridge Height 8ft 10" (2.7m). After a bad storm and high seas that could mean the depth of the water that laps at the bridge. It wasn't the safest place to leave your car in winter as the following shot from February 1983 shows!

We'll nip down to the tram loop and see what's there...

This is a bit of a teaser! Not so much because of the photo of the 1934 "Boat" tram, but for the bit of the multi-coloured Brush tram seen at the left of the photo. This was a specially painted tram celebrating the Queen's Silver Jubilee year. Something stopped me taking its photo on this occasion, though I can't recall what it was. Maybe my wife was getting impatient, maybe the baby started to cry (she now has a three-year-old of her own!) or maybe the tram simply moved off before I could get a decent shot. So let me dig...

This is the best photo I have got of it and it's partly obscured by a sign. This is a crop, a small portion of a photo taken from the Central Pier on another occasion, this time on colour slide film. The tram had actually been painted in this colour scheme the year before. 1976 marked the centenary of Blackpool as a borough and during that year this tram had commemorated that event.

Still, at least they added the new lettering and the "Long Live The Queen" bit! Funny in a way to think that almost 40 years ago we were celebrating how long the Queen had been on the throne! Since then we have been through the Golden and Diamond Jubilees and seen a whole lot of change.

The album also holds this photo of a 1930s "Balloon" tram. These double decker trams were brought in as replacements for the formidable Dreadnought trams - we saw a preserved example of these in the first instalment of this series.

By 1977 trams were carrying advertisements along the side and a few trams were painted with all-over adverts. In later years these paint jobs covered the windows as well to the annoyance of passengers and the detriment of goodwill, though Blackpool Transport, i.e. the Corporation, raking in the money from the advertising, refused to acknowledge this. The paint went on a mesh over the windows. It was still possible to see through the holes and even if it was darker inside and appeared darker outside, not to mention the strain on passengers' eyes, that was thought good enough by the powers that be - who presumably never travelled on them and tried to look out of the windows...

This however carries a simple banner advertisement for Empire Pools. The National Lottery, which started in 1994, had a large impact on the popularity of football pools, whose heyday was probably during the 1950s and 60s. They were collected house to house by teams of collectors who braved elements and dark nights with bags of money around their shoulders with very little risk of being mugged. I collected coupons for both of the larger firms: Littlewoods and Vernons during the late 60s and early 70s without any incidents. I don't think I'd like to risk it now...

There were several ways to gamble on a football coupon with the most popular being the "any eight from ten" or "any eight from twelve" lines. Against a list of football fixtures (all held on a Saturday afternoon in those days before Sky arguably ruined the sport) you marked an "x" against those matches you thought would be a score draw. The scoring system awarded one point to a match where one of the two teams won, 2 points for a 0-0 draw and 3 points for a score draw. The object was to achieve 24 points from your top 8 scoring attempts which was the Jackpot score with the prize fund shared amongst all punters (if any) achieving it. Football pools were the general public's best chance at winning life-changing amounts of money without going into a bookmakers. In the early to mid 1970s after a few well publicised scandals where collectors had just pocketed money and thrown coupons away in the hope that punters wouldn't win anyway, public confidence in the collectors dwindled and most customers by 1977 either sent coupons off by mail, filling out coupons for several weeks at a time, or picked them up from and returned them with stake money to newsagents shops.

Empire offered a plan of "any eight from 20" with each attempt ("line") costing just one penny. Twenty such lines would cost you 20p per week with a chance of winning tens of thousands of pounds. The odds were far better than those of winning the National Lottery!

The 1937 casino building at the Pleasure Beach has never been a gambling casino. Designed by the Pleasure Beach's architect Joseph Emberton in the 1930s (replacing an equally-loved "casino" building of 1913) it housed restaurants and a banqueting suite and an Art Deco private flat that still exists. Although much altered internally it remains a Grade II listed building and is often described as the north's answer to the De La Warr Pavilion (at Bexhill-on-Sea). The Pleasure Beach monorail used to go round the outside of this building.

This is quite a personal memory jogger for me. This first-floor restaurant is situated between the Lucky Star amusements arcade and the pub on the corner of Station Road opposite the South Pier. In 1977 we lived with my parents in a hotel and guest house. My wife worked in the hotel and at nights after work, I would help out in the bar (hic!) On Sundays the main meal was served at lunchtime rather than evening and that was our free time - Sunday afternoons. Blackpool would be awash with guest house landladies, some of whom would even take off their headscarves and take out their curlers and go out eagerly to share the antics or scandals of the week with their friends and colleagues from other establishments over a brown ale or two.

This was our Sunday evening eating place. In 1977 you could still find pretty young waitresses in starched white pinnies over a black skirt and top. We would order steak cooked well done, believing wrongly that cremation made it more tender... Sometimes we'd get a little giddy and have a bottle of Blue Nun to go with it. Or (where's that bucket...) a bottle of Beaujolais (often called "Bow-jollies" by those trying desperately to impress!) By heck, these were sophisticated days...

Here's a turn up for the books! The photo album features this one photograph of Cleveleys whilst every other photo is of Blackpool! Here we see a Progress Twin-Car, tram and trailer, crossing the junction of Victoria Street West and East in the centre of Cleveleys. There's a lot more traffic lights and paint on the road these days but essentially the scene hasn't changed all that much. The thing that perhaps dates this photo the most is that delicious black and white striping on the traffic light poles. Never really needed much in Blackpool and Cleveleys, but as a young boy in Rochdale on the edge of the Pennines, in winter these stripes told you how deep the snow was... Global warming? When I was a nipper no one - and I mean no one - would dream of driving in winter without a spade and a few empty coal sacks in the car boot in case they got stuck in the snow. No, the coal sacks weren't to put snow in... you put them under the wheels to give a bit of traction to get out of a hole!

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My Life, the Museum

It's a sobering thing to walk round a museum and find loads of things that you remember and that some of them are from what you consider your adult life, not just childhood!

So it was when we had a look around the Science Museum in London last weekend.

Certainly there were loads of things from well before I was born. But then...

There was the iron that my Mum used to use. I remember exactly the feel of the dial and the little rocker switch on the front, even if I can't remember what the rocker switch was supposed to do.

Of course, when I played with it (and I'm not sure at this point, memory failing me a little, whether I was supposed to be playing with it at all...) it wasn't an iron but a hover-transport-cum-spaceship for Dan Dare in which the Mekon was imprisoned and taken away to the penal colony on planet Zongo.

As the spaceship pulled off against considerable gravitational pull (the iron was heavy...) I was able to communicate with the Chief Warder on Zongo (my brother Frank) by means of my Dan Dare communications tower.

This didn't exactly pass the stringent tests of expectation. The searchlight had a torch bulb, rather than a powerful beam that could be seen as you looked sideways at it. The walkie-talkie had only short wires and you had to remain so close to the Chief Warder that you could hear him talking anyway, without relying on the distorted buzzing coming from your handset. And the Morse Buzzer... well who wanted to use a Morse Buzzer anyway?

I've shown the box lid of this toy previously on the blog but here it was, complete and just waiting for me to smash the glass, load the spinning discs, turn it against the spring to a maximum of 8 clicks and dispatch the hordes of Treens who were trying to rescue the Mekon from the innards of the iron. I mean Prisoner Transport...

Now that was all very well and it all brought childhood memories flooding back. But then...

This was the adding machine that Mum and Dad bought to do all their calculations to add up hundreds of football coupons every Friday night. Dad was a main collector for both Littlewoods and Vernons Football Pools. He collected the packets of coupons from other collectors and then had to open each, add up the value of the coupons, check it against the money that each collector had handed in, deduct their commission, calculate his own share and then bag up the money for banking before taking the large bag of coupons into the Manchester office in Ancoats. The deadline was 2:00am and it would always be towards 1:00am by the time we got there.

The adding machine enabled Dad to recruit more collectors as it saved him time in adding up long lists of payment amounts manually.

And then if being reminded of teenage years wasn't enough, things got worse!

This was our first video recorder. It came out in 1972 but it would be around 1974 when we got ours I think. The big cassette tapes had the two spools set one on top of the other, a messy arrangement that quite often fouled up. You could record TV for an hour on each cassette, which were hideously expensive. The quality though, was excellent for the time. Far better than the VHS machines that came out a couple of years later and became the standard format.

I wonder whatever happened to my tape of Benny Hill...

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Teenage Years

As I entered my teens we were living in the village of Milnrow, outside of Rochdale and on the edge of the Pennines.

School was Heywood Grammar School which we reached by courtesy of Yelloway Coaches and my own transport was this 3-geared racing bike. Frank had a slightly more modest bike - a concession that I had to wait a year longer to get mine! We would ride all over the place on them but the usual outings would be to Hollingworth Lake, over to Rochdale via Stanney Brook park or occasionally up onto the moors at Owd Betts. This was a very hard slog uphill but a wild brake-defying zoom back down again!

We also found a block of wooden garages off a road in the next village of Newhey, where the ground was covered in cinders which made a great skid patch for riding at speed and putting the back brake on to skid round a full semi-circle.

We did all the usual teenage things - toys became more technical. We made hundreds of Airfix kits of fighter planes. Then we would tie them with cotton to the clothes line and shoot them down from the bedroom window with an air rifle... There were open fields at the back of us so it was safe to play with the airgun.

We also followed Dad's hobby of making larger model aircraft capable of flying. This is in the field at the back of the house and I'm holding a model aeroplane powered by a rubber band. Instead of a full propeller it had a half one that was hinged on a piece of wire. This was attached to a rubber band that was fixed inside the fuselage. You wound the rubber band up by hand and it had enough power to take the model up 50 feet or so. Wind pressure then closed the propeller back against the body and it glided back down for a minute or two.

The body and wings were made of a framework of balsa wood covered in tissue paper which was then painted with dope - no, not drugs - a lacquer that strengthened the tissue and stretched it tight over the balsa wood skeleton. Every now and then we would fly the powered control liners (see 1950s Childhood entry). My mate Sid was an enthusiast for those, though his "flying wing" had a sticky elevator and flying it was a nightmare of jerky movements almost always ending in a crash landing before you even completed one circle!

November always saw us gathering wood for a huge bonfire on the spare land at the other side of the field behind our house. People used to fly tip there and we would gather all the wood and any other combustible items and build a huge bonfire that when lit could be seen from several miles away. Loads of people would come from all over the place and share food, parkin cake and treacle toffee, baked potatoes and black peas (which I used to hate).

Fireworks were less noisy then. Air bombs were only just coming out at the end of the 1960s and normally only had one bang in them. Most fireworks were designed to look good rather than make a noise. There were helicopters for 6d which looked like a normal firework but had cardboard wings. You placed them on their side and when they went off they spun horizontally and lifted off into the air.

There were bangers of course, and also Jumping Jacks - a zig-zagged package tied together with string that banged, jumped and banged again. The typical firework you see in Westerns when the Mexicans are having a fiesta. Catherine wheels, rockets, golden fountains and Roman Candles were the staple of a a good bonfire night. Oh, and some sparklers to hold! There were some other larger fireworks designed for holding too - Spitfire was one.

Mum didn't like fireworks though because when we were living at Royton around 1960 one - a Screecher - had gone wrong and instead of shooting up, it burst through the side of the firework and hit her in the throat. It wasn't a bad burn (though obviously not a "good" one either) but the sights she saw in the hospital, waiting to be seen, put her off fireworks for life.

I got very interested in photography and had a mate called Arnold Soloman who was also very keen. We spent hours blacking out bathrooms by pinning blankets over the window, to develop black and white films and photographs. The enlarger and dishes of chemicals would stand on a board placed over the bath.

I decided the instamatic just wasn't delivering good enough quality for subjects like stock car racing! We used to go to the stockcars regularly at Rochdale Hornets rugby ground on Kingsway. It's now a superstore - not even a comparison for the excitement the racing used to generate! We also used to go to Belle Vue sometimes to watch both stock cars and Speedway racing.

I bought a Prinzflex 500 camera - it was a Russian Zenit B with no light meter, but with a decent lens. I had bought it from Dixons and they had an agreement with their suppliers that they could badge the Zenit cameras with their own Prinzflex brand. Now in order to make best use of the camera, I needed one other optical piece of equipment...

I'd known for quite a while that I really needed glasses. I'd gone from sitting at the back of classes to the middle and then to the front row but it had now got to the stage where I couldn't read what was on the blackboard anyway.

I was 14, almost 15 - a horrible age for feeling shy and insecure. No one that knows me would ever believe I could be shy but I totally was at that time. And I had teenage acne that used to drive me mad. If ever there was a time to dread having to wear specs it was then. But I had no choice. I went to an opticians and he must have been surprised that I wasn't already wearing them because he took me outside the shop with the huge test rig on and said "That's what things will look like when you get your glasses!"

I was amazed! I hadn't realised how bad things actually were. Anyway, my worst fears came to nought and totally turned on their head when I first wore them to school and the girl I secretly fancied said "I think they make you look really good!" Ooh! Ah! Jelly legs! But I was still too shy to follow up, even later when she made it plain she fancied me... What a steaming pillock I was...

I've said elsewhere that Dad was a Main Collector for both Vernons and Littlewoods football pools. That means he collected coupons and money from all the normal Pools Collectors. When I was 15 he gave me a round on our local estate. By the time I was 17 I was out 2 nights a week and covered rounds all over Oldham. It's easy to forget how huge football coupons were before the National Lottery came in. Thousands of Collectors were out on Thursday and Friday nights, picking up coupons for the weekend's matches and giving a blank coupon for the following week.

I had rounds in some rough places... Walking round every Friday night at the same time when everyone knows you have a bag of money around your shoulders is not for the faint hearted! There were times when I would turn round and confront a group of lads who were following me making increasingly threatening comments. Luckily they always assumed that since I was willing to turn and face them that I must be sure of handling myself!

There was one estate in Rochdale where on one particular street, the Black Peas salesman, the Man from the Pru and I used to meet up to cover each other's backs... "See you next week, lads!" we'd say with relief as we reached the end of the street! During two years of collecting on that estate they convicted 4 murderers from it, including one guy who'd walked in a pub with a shotgun and used it on the landlord behind the bar. No I didn't collect his coupon. But I did collect from next door and used to sneak through his garden as a shortcut to next door but one!

A few other memories of collecting coupons... There were lots of pretty girls, some of whom used to shout "I'll go Dad!" and I'd stop for a snog for five minutes! There were some terrible, filthy houses which really smelt awful, but with salt-of-the-earth people who always asked you in out of the cold...

There were people who would have a cup of tea waiting and people who tried to press sherry on me every week. There was my future wife, sometimes as a visitor, totally bloody ignoring me as I collected coupons from her auntie... and finally there was one incident as I tried to light a cigarette in the parked car. I couldn't hear the hiss of gas from the lighter and held it to my ear to hear better - totally ignoring the fact that the flame plainly indicated there was gas in the bloody thing. So I set fire to my hair which was shoulder length in those days. If anyone remembers seeing a 17 year old lad batting with his hand at the side of his head which was on fire, in an old Hillman Minx one night then that would be me...

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