Second Blackpool 1977 Photo Album

Well I've still not managed to turn up the negatives of the photos from this photo album, so again I have resorted to scanning the photographs from the album.

Last November I featured the photos from its sister album, which was red. This time it's a blue bordering on cyan - I'll call it teal for lack of something more inspiring!

The photo album dates from 1977, the year after we had moved to Blackpool and I went somewhat berserk with the camera, loading film after film through it and ending up with a fair portrait of most of the bits of Blackpool I was most interested in at that time, which are the holiday bits... Because these are scans of printed snapshots, the quality is sometimes a little more rough than I'd like. Films had to be developed and printed in those days and quite often came back with horrendous colour casts that chemists were sometimes embarrassed about enough to put little stickers on to try to blame it on the photographer. "Red cast - film might be fogged. Load your camera in a dark place." Stuff like that. "Lens obstructed - keep fingers and camera straps away from in front of the lens." was another. I never remember one that said "Photo lab cock-up - very sorry" even when once an entire film came back with every print showing the right hand portion of one photo, a black line, and then the left hand portion of another photo...

So a few photos of Blackpool's intrepid workmen from the Illuminations Department, starting with this one of a string of lights going up during the early season. I remember summers like that - all sunshine and blue skies... Whatever happened to them...? At this time the Illuminations were changing from flat wooden boards with coloured lights on the outside to fibreglass 3D mouldings with lightbulbs placed inside. The one on the right comes from a set of puppies and kittens. I hope he doesn't jiggle that string of lights too much - it'll be over like a flash...

1977 was the Queen's Silver Jubilee year and these oversized crowns made an appearance for their second year. The Promenade has two lanes in either direction and an elderly chap with a walking stick feels quite safe walking along the narrow dividing pavement in the middle until he can cross. The car is a 1968/69 Hillman Hunter, my Grandad had one and passed it onto my Dad when he had finished with it. A nice car, I got to drive it about a bit too. The Devil's Den behind the lorry was a short-lived feature of the Golden Mile and the building with the corrugated cladding is Ripley's Believe It Or Not housed in the old Victoria Hotel, the first Ripley's "Odditorium" to be built outside the USA.

A little further up the Promenade more crowns are being lifted into place. In the background the Golden Mile Centre was the first of the large modern purpose-built amusement arcades. On two levels, it housed fairground rides on the upper floor. There was a dodgem car rink amongst them I remember.

The crown display hanging along the Golden Mile. The sun has disappeared - so much for me enthusing about those 1970s summers... The photograph was taken from the pedestrian footbridge over the Promenade. Still relatively new, it was supposed to be one of eight originally but no others were built and it was demolished finally in 2009.

But hey, whilst we're up here, let's have a look around! We caught a glimpse of the train illuminations last November in the first series from the red album. This shows one in much better detail. It shows The Rocket, George Stephenson's famous locomotive. Appropriately coloured bulbs illuminate the painted flat during the Illuminations and those on the billowing smoke trail from the funnel are controlled by relays to flash, giving the appearance of movement. Similarly there are two rows of smaller bulbs set along the two lines of railway track which do the same.

On the real tracks below, Balloon car 720 has just set off from the tram stop and the conductor is in the act of closing the doors. The family walking alongside it remind us just how popular blue denim was during the 1970s!

Looking north down from the bridge on the land side there's a glimpse of an ultra-modern high-speed Intercity train on the illuminations display and down on the Promenade, the open doors of the Purple Penny arcade.

And I'll finish with this one, taken way down South Shore, looking north towards the Pleasure Beach. The illuminations here are animated robots. Their heads turn and they have animated arms or legs but not - if memory serves me right - both. Some walked and others waved their arms up and down. This photo also shows (look hard) some illuminations tableaux which at this time were not entirely confined to the north shore cliffs.

This photo had a sticker from the chemists that said "Warning! Photo light at one side and dark on the other - reason unknown!" The actual reason was that I'd borrowed my Dad's camera and the shutter was a bit sticky so it speeded up after it had got going... After this I took the plunge and bought myself a Canon AE1 SLR. The bee's knees!

Grateful acknowledgement to Nick Moore whose epic and awesomely excellent Blackpool Chronology website easily reminded me of the name of the Victoria Hotel (Ripley's Believe It Or Not) which I couldn't remember even after force feeding my brain with tuna sandwiches... Also thanks to Andrew Hazelhurst who helped clear up my mistake on the year the crowns first made an appearance!

Bathroom Makeover

We've been saving up for years to get the bathroom sorted out. Recently we thought it was the time to get cracking!

This is what we started out with. I'd put the tiles on myself with Dad's help a couple of years after we moved in, but a replacement shower had left a bare patch on the wall at some point.

The sink was in front of the window which meant we couldn't have a mirror over it. So we trotted down to have a look at various places and ended up deciding that we would rip out the bath and have a walk-in shower unit fitted.

Norbreck Bathroom Design Centre was the place we chose to spend money. Then we sat back and wondered how we would cope. I'm all over the place for work, Fran works shifts and we have two house cats who get very nervous when there are strangers or noise in the house.

First day the old suite came out, then floor tiles came up and the green tiles came off the wall. The skip outside the house started to fill up.

Then there were a few days whilst pipes were put under floorboards, conferences about how to deal with the waste - as the sink was being moved away from the window and the shower floor would be lower than the bath drain, we needed a way of having sufficient fall on the pipe to ensure the waste water flowed down.

The shower space was defined and pipes hidden behind a new plasterboard wall that would ensure the shower cabinet didn't leave a tiny gap for a cat to get stuck behind!

Then the new ceiling cover went in and modern lighting installed. We had a massive spotlight thing dangling down previously which heated as well as lit the bathroom. I've never really liked it - it was impossible to put any kind of shade around it so it remained an ugly intrusion down from the ceiling. The new lights look smart and are bright. The shower space started to look impressive once the tiling was done. The new black tiles went down on the floor.

Then a bit of a disaster. Dan, who had been beavering cheerfully away, broke his leg playing football. Martin stepped in to the rescue and picked up from where Dan had left off.

First the shower unit and glass front went in. This meant that whilst we were waiting for the sink and the rest of the room to be tiled we could at least have a shower!

Then the tiling was finished and the sink unit was installed as we went back to the showroom to pick some accessories such as mirrors and towel rails.

This is the finished result. Pretty spiffing! The shower provides constant water at just the right temperature and I no longer need to howl when Fran turns the tap on downstairs!

The shaving mirror is great for me but Fran seems to think it should be covered over with a towel when she's doing her face... The shelves on the large mirror are full of bottles of paint, polyfilla, swamp muck and all the other paraphernalia she uses (plus 3 small rubber ducks) whilst my razor and deoderant are confined in the cupboard below.

They are nice people at Norbreck Bathroom Design Centre and I'd recommend them without hesitation. In fact... I just have!

Central Pier Maintenance

This was a spot of good luck. As I was on the Central Pier yesterday, taking photos of grown men making ultra-large sand pies, a separate gang of workmen were at work on the supporting structure of the pier itself.

Because of the shape of the decking (narrow bit, gets wider, goes narrow again, gets wider again) I was able to get a good view of them.

Unfortunately no great sprays of welding sparks but a few here if you look closely!

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Workers in Uniform

Well, no one seems to have been able to find any photos of workers in uniform from the 40s-60s as yet (see Treasure Hunt Update) and I must admit I'm scarce in that department also!

However the North Pier still had attendants in uniform in the early 1980s as can be seen here, in a photo of an attendant keeping visitors happy simply by passing the time.

There has to be some photos out there - what have you got? Factory workers, lift attendants, doormen, hotel pageboys, petrol station attendants (remember when they used to put petrol in for you???)

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