Grandma's 1920s Photo Album

Amongst all the many sentimental treasures discovered following the death of my uncle earlier this year was a photo album belonging to my grandmother. Labelled in her handwriting the inside front cover proclaimed "Annie Burke, 1927" and approximately half of the pages contained photographs most of them labelled (yahoo!) with dates and place names but sadly not with the names of the people shown... Take back some of that "yahoo"! The photos I have scanned so far date from between 1918 and 1927.

Some of the photos are very small. An inch along the longest edge. Most have been closely cropped with a pair of scissors. Some are sepia toned. Some are black and white - well... grey and lighter grey... Many show areas of damage from fogged light on the film, wear and tear, stains and cracks or fold marks. I've spent some time preparing them therefore and the following photographs and those of the follow-on articles (there will be a few...) have been repaired as best I can and are presented in a consistent sepia tone.

On the left is a 1920 photo of Annie Brierley, who in 1921 would marry John (Johnnie) Burke and then in time become my grandmother. Until this year I had never seen any of the photographs in this article. Apart from family members who I personally remember in their later age, I had never looked on some of my forebears that appear here. On the right is Annie's sister Elsie, who I would know as my great-aunt. This photo was taken in 1919.

Here are the girls again with their mother, Margaret (Maggie) Brierley who I would know as (Great) Grandma Brierley. The photo was taken in 1921 and both girls were to marry within a few months, so perhaps a last chance to be photographed as "Brierleys".

A different occasion but also from 1921, the girls are seen here with their father, who died before I was born. Until recently I had never seen a photo of him and I'm afraid I still don't know his name.

Two unknowns I'm afraid. They could be Maggie's husband's parents, or Johnnie's grandparents perhaps - the man has a slight resemblance. It's equally possible that they weren't even related to each other... The man's photograph is dated 1919 and the woman's photo a year earlier in 1918.

I have no idea who the man on the left is, but the other two are (centre) Percy Alston, my great-uncle, who I remember as a very jolly chap. The photo was taken on Morecambe beach in 1927, so by this time Percy was Elsie's husband. I've mentioned him on this blog before - he ran a photographic shop on Spotland Road in Rochdale through the 1950s and 60s and they retired to a bungalow in Overton, near Morecambe. On the right is my grandfather John Burke, for whom I was named. A pipe smoker, he kept the habit all his life, preferring flake tobacco which he would rub in the palm of his hand before loading his pipe with it.

I've already showed a photograph of Johnnie and Annie's wedding in an earlier article so here is the wedding of Percy and Elsie Alston. Of all the people on the photograph, I only know John, standing on the far left next to Percy and Elsie and Annie on the front row. Elsie has a new hat for her wedding, Annie is wearing the hat that she got married in, a few weeks previously. The girl sitting on the far left of the front row appears to be wearing Elsie's hat from that previous wedding! I would hazard a guess that the younger girl standing on the right is Percy's sister, but there must have been some family fall out at some point and I know nothing about and certainly never met or heard about any of his family at all.

Four years later, it's 1925 and there is a family holiday to Blackpool. Again I don't know, but the couple on the far left back and front I take to be man and wife (as they appear together on other photos) and perhaps they are Percy's parents? Next to him, second left on the back is Great-Grandad Brierley - he of the mystery first name (now known to be Fred Brierley) and I think the lady in front of him is Maggie - strangely, she looks so like her mother it is hard sometimes to tell them apart but given the date, Maggie would be 45 so I think this is her. Percy Parasol is next - I'm sorry - I mean Percy with a parasol! I did say he was jolly... Johnnie brings the back row to a close. Making up the centre and right of the front row are Elsie in the middle and Annie on the far right flanking a young lady who could be the 18-19 year old version of the 14-15 year old girl seen at Percy and Elsie's wedding above.

Middleton Sands, Morecambe in 1927. This must have been the same trip that we saw these three gentlemen on Morecambe beach earlier. Both Johnnie and Percy had motorcycle combinations - as a motorbike and sidecar was known in those days. I think they were members of a club in fact. At one time my Grandad had had the much coveted Ariel Square Four, but it backfired once when he was kicking it over. The whiplash of the kick pedal broke his ankle and he sold it straight afterwards without riding it again. Johnnie is in the centre, Percy - somewhat blurred - on the left.

There are not many purely scenic photographs in the album, but I'll finish with this one. It was taken from the top of Blackpool Tower in 1920 and shows a Promenade Road virtually empty of cars. Even on the expanded version that I can look at I can identify few cars for definite. There is just one car or van behind a horse-drawn landau about to disappear off the bottom edge but all other larger vehicles could be cars or landaus. I remember when there were a few boats that used to take half-hour sea trips but there are at least 16 on the Promenade in this photo! Apart from the novelty of being on the water, a boat trip at Blackpool doesn't compare to most other places. There are no rocks, no headlands to go round - just a straight coast so that the bit between sky and sea got thinner and thinner for quarter of an hour and then thicker as you came back again... The other novelty to see, almost 100 years after this photograph was taken are the two rows of bathing machines lined up below the boats with a number already by the water's edge near the pier.

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Musing In Morecambe

Wednesday 1 June 2016. We decide the day is too nice to stay in and drive up to Lancaster first for a look round the antiques warehouse. I come away with a plastic bag full of postcards, mainly from the 1990s but a full bag for a couple of pounds still seems like a bargain!

There are one or two interesting ones amongst them and there was also a few bits of ephemera - newspaper cuttings, bags from foreign postcard shops and an old paper bag from a Ministry of Public Buildings and Works souvenir shop. It carried an advert for a season ticket to ancient monuments for just fifteen shillings (75p) - sounds a bargain to me!

Then we went on to Morecambe where, bless them, there is still free parking to be found on the Promenade. It was a busy old day though - we didn't find our space on the first pass, but spotted it on the other side of the road and had to turn to come back to it.

Morecambe always got the brunt of the variety comedians even during the heyday of seaside resort holidays. It doesn't deserve it really, because here you will find much less of the dilapidation and neglect that is all too horribly visible in other resorts. Morecambe have worked extremely hard over the last decade or two. Whilst many Promenade properties are now shops with no connection to the holiday or tourist trade, they have saved the seafront from degrading to a peeling-paint shabby look.

This bit of land is what is left after the tidy up following the closure of the open air swimming pool. It's perhaps not ideal, but it's far from hideous. A spot of landscaping and the additions of some flower beds and seating in the concrete space in the middle distance would make it a very nice space.

The War Memorial is unusual in that it dates the First World War to 1914-1919. Most memorials date it as 1914-1918. Built in 1921, it commemorates 216 men from Morecambe and Heysham who died in World War One; 180 from World War Two and one more who died during the Korean War.

The Midland Hotel is Morecambe's Art Deco masterpiece. Designed by architect Oliver Hill, it was built in 1933 on the site of a previous hotel, the North Western Hotel of 1848 which had changed its name to The Midland in 1871. It has two three-storey curved wings off a central circular tower which contains the entrance and a spiral staircase.

Two Art Deco sculptures of seahorses sit at the top of the circular tower. These, a round plaster relief of Neptune and Triton on the ceiling of the spiral staircase, a map of the north west coast from Whitehaven to Birkenhead and a bas-relief mural of Odysseus welcomed from the sea by Nausicaa which formed a backdrop to the Reception desk, were all designed by Eric Gill. As a nice aside, he is the one whose name is remembered in the name of the font he designed: Gill Sans.

Birds play a significant role in the decoration of Morecambe's Promenade. You will find many examples of bird sculptures along the Promenade paths, in seafront gardens and in railings and stand alone sculptures. This cormorant is one of many, sitting atop the finials of bollards.

Trains still run to Morecambe, but these days they stop some 400 metres from this station building whose platforms have been demolished and whose ticket hall and waiting rooms now house a pub and restaurant and where today we found sequence dancing offered as a diversion to the seafront attractions. Where the platforms used to be is a new market hall and a cinema.

Brucciani's famous ice cream parlour opened its doors in 1939 and four generations of the family have managed it since then. It is another example of Art Deco - all geometric wooden panels, formica tables which evoke memories of the Forties and Fifties and with a traditional menu including knickerbocker glory - the monster ice cream dish of the connoisseur (and large appetite...)

We had a lovely lunch here just off the seafront at The Grove cafe bar and restaurant. The food was good as was the service and I imagine that we shall enter their door again at some time in the future.

Having fed the inner man, my appetite was for having a good rummage and just north of the restaurant and back on the seafront we found one of my favourite places in Morecambe. A bookshop where browsers are requested to switch off their mobile phones and where there are many alcoves just like this one, each containing just as many or more books with each alcove holding a different genre. Bliss - call for me in an hour or two...

When I came out, wincing slightly at the brightness of the sunlight and with my purchases clutched lovingly to my chest, we crossed the road and walked back slowly along the seafront towards the car. We paused halfway back to buy ice creams and sat on a bench to enjoy them.

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Books and Knickerbockers...

I took Miss Franny to Morecambe for the day today. We had a coffee at the next table to two ladies who I would guess at being in their late seventies or possibly early eighties and who had just been served with huge Knickerbocker Glories (ice cream, jelly and fruit to the uninitiated).

"Can I be cheeky and ask you a question?" asked one.
"Go on then!" I grinned.
"Do you know anything about taking photographs?"
"I have been known to take one or two..." I admitted.

She rummaged in her handbag for what I presumed would be a camera. But no, out came a Samsung Galaxy phone - these were old ladies of a certain calibre... It did have to be switched on from scratch - she wasn't going to have her day interrupted with nuisance calls, after all...
"Ooh, don't they take a long time to warm up...?" she shrugged.

I dragged a chair round to take them from the correct height and delivered the phone back with what I thought was a nicely framed picture of the two ladies grinning at me - long spoons held in eager fists and with tall ice cream and jelly and fruit concoctions topped with whipped cream and a couple of wafer biscuits each.
"Oh that's lovely, dear, thanks!"

She turned the phone off carefully and put it back into her bag and as we sipped our cups of coffee the two old ladies demolished the ice creams before them.
"We won't want any dinner after this..." the second one commented.
"Nonsense, dear, it's only eleven o'clock - we'll be alright having fish and chips for dinner!"

We finished our coffee and wandered round the streets of the town for a while - there's a couple of good antique - sorry: Retro shops there. One had a 1960s radiogram playing records in the shop and I was so tempted to ask the price...

Then we ended up in the huge second-hand book store that I had found on our last visit and we found the owner pulling his outdoor display under the cover of the shop's awning as dark clouds gathered in the sky.

"Have you been before? Ah - well I've just taken some more stock packed in around 30 banana boxes, so not all of the passages can be accessed I'm afraid..."

It didn't matter. I found four books to buy without any problem at all. Fran came back with a bunch of Fyffes and I have the first pressed tarantula of a new collection...

We had dinner in another cafe where a slightly bizarre conversation could be overheard from the table behind me.
"I don't think much of our coach driver..." complained the rather large mother of a family from middle Lancashire, "He's a great fat thing!"

Now forgive me if I'm being picky, but is that a reason to dislike a driver? I could dislike a driver for swerving all over the road for no apparent reason, but for being on the large side??? And this from someone who was recognisable from countless Bamforth seaside postcards herself...

More About Morecambe's Polo Tower aka Blackpool's Space Tower

This is by way of an update and correction to my article on Blackpool's Space Tower on 15 March 2015. I ended that article by saying the Tower had now been demolished at Morecambe. Thanks to a response on Facebook by Dave Oldfield, I now know that not to be the case.

The tower itself is still there, fulfilling its secondary and contracted purpose of mobile telephone mast. These photographs were taken yesterday on 30 March as I found myself in the Morecambe vicinity and stuck the camera bag in the car boot to take advantage of being near!

The revolving gondola has indeed gone but the tower is indisputably still there. A rather sad remaining reminder of the Morecambe Pleasure Beach or Frontierland as it became in its later years.

There are a few other elements of the park remaining too as this photograph shows. Thank you Dave for posting a response via Facebook and giving me a chance to give the true facts. I know... it's rare I allow facts to get in the way of a good story...

Mixed Nostalgia

A bit of an assortment again for this entry. I've been going through a few of my old web pages from the Freeserve days, long before the blog started. Over the years 2002-2004 I featured the following items.

The first one is the old Space Tower from Blackpool Pleasure Beach. It had ended its days in Morecambe at the short-lived incarnation of Morecambe Pleasure Beach as Frontierland.

Frontierland was a mid-1980s attempt to "theme" the park as a wild west town. We may not be as grim up north as the jokes make out, but the average worker does in fact feel just a little self-concious I expect, wearing western garb and yelling "Yeehaw!" every now and then. As I remember, they didn't smile or enter into the spirit of the thing as much as their Disney counterparts over in Florida might have done. Frontierland closed down in 1999 although a few portable rides remained in use for a further year.

By the end of 2000 only the Polo Tower and the Log Flume remained. These photos were taken in 2004 and the Polo Tower remained only because it was in use as a telephone mast. It was to remain a while longer as the contract was in force until 2013.

A 1960s Fidelity tape recorder taking seven inch reels of a quarter inch wide magnetic tape and recording at a speed of three and three quarter inches of tape per second. This is a four-track machine. That means that a bit of sound quality was sacrificed in order to record along the tape twice in each direction. Imagine four stripes along the tape - stripe 1 along one edge of the tape is recorded on as the tape passes from its own spool to the spare. Then the spools are turned over and the now full spare spool is transferred to the left hand spindle. On the next pass, stripe 4 on the other edge of the tape now occupies the same position as stripe one had done.

Next the Track 2-3 switch at the bottom centre of the tape deck is depressed and the two middle tracks can be recorded on over the next two passes. On some models both stripes 1 and 3 could be recorded on during the same pass, allowing a stereo signal to be recorded. On turning the tape over the next pass would record on stripes 4 and 2. On this machine that wasn't possible but you could record twice the amount of music on a tape.

I used to have a similar Fidelity Playmaster but it was only a twin track machine - one stripe being recorded in each direction. No stereo and no push button 1-4 and 2-3 buttons in the middle. In fact the space taken by those buttons on the machine shown held a magic-eye light which acted like a sound level meter when recording.

I'm sure many of you will recognise this little optical piece of equipment. It's a View-Master - it was used for viewing a stereo (see the clever link with the previous item? What? Oh, yes the Polo thing was just a red herring...) Ahem! It was used for viewing a stereo pair of images to give the illusion of a picture in 3D, 3 dimensions with a feeling of depth. They were really popular in the 1950s and very early 1960s which is when this bakelite version dates from. Later they were plastic and bright red and the View-Master reels you could buy changed from photos of the world to naff subjects like Scooby Doo and other cartoon figures.

In other words, they changed from being aimed at adults to being a child's toy. In the mid 1960s I had quite a collection of reels showing scenes of the Bernese Oberland in Switzerland and a set that showed the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

What I always wanted in my early teens - but never actually managed to get - was a View-Master stereo camera which let you take your own 3D photos. Taking 3D photos is not hard. You can do it with a normal camera just by taking a photo, moving the camera six inches to one side and taking another - providing the subject does not move in the meantime... The hard bit is in viewing them so that one eye only sees one of the photos and the other eye only sees the other. They have to be lined up just so. It is possible for the eyes to actually move apart a bit too much - which is why watching 3D films in the days of green and red glasses made your eyes so tired. All my View-Master reels got thrown away long ago in some great Mum-induced tidy-up. Shame...

Morecambe FC Part 2

Yesterday we were back at the new Globe Arena in Morecambe to play for an hour and a half before the match. There were some seriously mouth-watering smells coming from food being served in the room.

Thanks to all those who gave us such wonderful feedback and comments both about yesterday and our performances on Tuesday.

Creeping Bentgrass at the Globe Arena

Great night last night as we played at the very first home match at Morecambe Football Club's new Globe Arena.

We were filmed by a Sky Sports News crew, playing before the match.

I had a little trouble with feedback through the guitar for some reason - never happened before but the ceiling was very low where we were and there were accoustic panels next to us bouncing sound back so I suspect it may have been that. We set up in a corner during the match, coming off the stage area and it improved enough to allow us to play a decent volume with a clean guitar sound.

We had to keep away from anything requiring fuzzed guitar but we have over 6 hours of material to draw on and we played for only a couple of hours after the match.

We got some good feedback (from guests and staff rather than the unwanted sort) and picked up another booking for a wedding and are back at Morecambe FC for a pre-match spot on Saturday! Morecambe won their match against Coventry 2:0 so it was a winning night all round!

Vanished Blackpool - Space Tower

There are lots of photographs in my collection of things that no longer exist. Even were I to limit the photographs to my home town of Blackpool, there are still lots of photos showing things that are no longer there.

This photo showing the Space Tower at the Pleasure Beach is one such. It opened as a new ride in 1974, a 160 feet high column with a slowly spinning pod that rose to the top, spun round a couple of times and came down again. It stood next to the Watson Road junction with the Promenade and for around 20 years was a landmark of the Pleasure Beach.

It stood in the way of the development of the Pepsi Max Big One in the 1990s and was taken down in 1993 and re-erected in the company's Frontierland park in Morecambe, repainted in green following a sponsorship deal with Polo Mints. That park has since disappeared but the last time I was there, the only thing that still existed to show the park had been there were the sad, neglected remains of the Space Tower. More Vanished Blackpool to come!

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