MORECAMBEOLOGY 279: Prince’s First Visit

By Peter Wade

Morecambe’s Winter Gardens has long wanted a royal box. Now, ahead of the 125th anniversary of its opening in 1897, it has one thanks to a plaque unveiled by Prince Charles during his visit to Morecambe on Friday 8th July.

Apart from the theatre which carries his great-great-great grandmother’s name at the entrance, Prince Charles also dropped in on Brucciani’s famous ice cream parlour and met participants in the Prince’s Trust programme for young people held at Morecambe Fire Station.

Prince Charles was also introduced to staff and volunteers from Morecambe Foodbank and saw presentations relating to the manufacture of pioneering batteries locally and plans for the Eden Project North.

Over the years Morecambe Winter Gardens has been a grand music hall as home to concerts by classical orchestras, big bands from between the wars and gigs by up-and-coming pop groups in more recent years. It has also staged opera and ballet as well as mainstay summer season shows, variety and pantomime. Even circus was brought in from the cold to grace its stage. Names to conjure with include composer Edward Elgar, minstrel singer Eugene Stratton, Forces’ Sweetheart Vera Lynn alongside Ambrose and his Orchestra, opera star Dame Joan Hammond, comedian Frank Randle and his Summer Scandals, The Rolling Stones and TV Topliner The Black & White Minstrel Show.

Over the past two winters the Winter Gardens has been up-graded for a new generation of artists and performers. Specialist work has been done installing a new heating system, restoring missing or damaged ceiling panels, restoring one of the
missing box fronts and work on the roof and the underside of the cantilevered circles. A team of skilled restorers from Bristol-based firm Hales and Howe have taken on the work over the past two years allowing the ground floor now to be brought fully back to use.Despite these advances, Morecambe’s Winter Gardens remains in the relegation zone of UK theatres. The Theatres at Risk register has given the Winter Gardens a danger rating of 8 out of 9 placed alongside another five theatres. Only one theatre (Brighton Hippodrome) has a worse rating.The register aims to highlight the plight of these theatres, some facing closure, redevelopment or demolition. Forty one theatres are listed, an increase of 10 on last year.

The Winter Gardens has been on the list since 2006 when it was first compiled. With fresh funding and support it is hoped that the Winter Gardens will fare better on next year’s register.

MORECAMBEOLOGY 258: Wings over Morecambe – The RAF and Wartime Morecambe by Peter Wade

Morecambe Heritage’s archives and Morecambe Reference Library include a memoir from 2001 by Trevor Jordan BA entitled Morecambe Wings – The RAF and Morecambe (1940-46). Morecambe Wings was itself the RAF Station Magazine for Morecambe.

The memoir is based around a series of interviews drawing upon the memories of people in Morecambe at the time, including RAF personnel, seaside landladies, a grocer and a housewife recalling everyday life in wartime Morecambe.

The years of the Second World War were a boomtime for the town with RAF personnel stationed there alongside both civil servants and evacuees seeking refuge from the air raids affecting major centres of population and industry.

Larger buildings were requisitioned, with the Midland Hotel becoming a hospital, the Grosvenor Hotel offices, the Clarendon Hotel RAF headquarters and Broadway Hotel offices. Smaller hotels, boarding houses and even private houses were also taken over to provide accommodation.

With the RAF itself supplying beds and blankets for up to 15 airmen per address their new guests represented an all year round source of income. Landladies could claim just over £1 per person billeted per week as well as each person’s rations.

While the men were out marching on the Promenade or behind the Winter Gardens, or attending bayonet practice and self-defence at the former Middleton Towers holiday camp, the landladies were out making the most of the rations (such as 2 ounces of butter or sugar per person), keeping perishable foods in cold stores or supplementing rations with poultry or dairy products brought in by relatives with farms or small-holdings. Landladies also needed a degree of ingenuity to create large meals from limited resources. Generally there were no shortages so rice puddings and pies were filling staples while unusual ingredients such as heart became dishes such as goose spruce with the addition of apple sauce and a certain imagination. Some landladies were providing 3 meals a day plus supper.

Morecambe’s landladies came to be the mothers of the town’s RAF family. Many formed lifelong friendships. Some even married.

RAF recruits fresh from remote rural areas had not seen WCs before. Others were illiterate.

Hot baths were a luxury and, while one bath a week was acceptable to most airmen, it was not so for the WAAFs.

Generally though, wartime was a golden age for Morecambe.

MORECAMBEOLOGY +

Last time – home to TV’s Question Time, The Platform had once been Morecambe’s Promenade Station of 1907.

Next – What was the RAF originally known as?

Morecambeology 53: Dancing Waters by Peter Wade

A Morecambe-based company, Water Sculptures, has been wowing the world with its water, light and sound installation at this summer’s Great Exhibition of the North.

A cross-shaped pontoon, 75 metres long, carries 33 water jets firing up to 25 metres into the air with one central jet firing up to 50 metres. The jets are controlled from Morecambe, performing every hour on the hour from 10am to 11pm. Powered by air rockets, the jets are lit by night and have their own musical accompaniments by Maximo Park, Kate Rusby and Darkstar which can be followed online.

It took 15 months’ work to develop and build the installation whose initial inspiration was the sculpture The Angel of the North.

The apparatus is anchored in the River Tyne between the Tyne and Millennium Bridges alongside the Sage in Gateshead.

Water Sculptures was founded in 1972 and has built installations across the globe including ones for London Fashion Week. Radio City’s Spring Spectacular in New York and a royal wedding in Jordan.

The Water Sculptures’ creation has brought back memories of Morecambe’s Dancing waters. A display at the Gaumont sounds very like the current Water Sculptures installation featuring pumped water systems and coloured lights, choreographed to classical music. At the Clarendon Hotel, a spectacular waterfall display was produced for the Illuminations.

Morecambeology 52: The Naples of the North by Peter Wade

Railway posters were a colourful way of advertising destinations across the country. For seaside towns like Morecambe which wouldn’t have existed but for the railways they were especially important, drawing people in for day trips or longer visits.

There was a vogue for linking places to better known counterparts, a well-known example being Edinburgh as The Athens of the North. Morecambe and its bay were linked in this poster with the Bay of Naples though its mountain backdrop didn’t run to an active volcano like Vesuvius.

Another of these parallels was drawn in 1937 when the Hydro at the Broadway Hotel was opened by the Mayor, Charles Howes who styled Morecambe as The Droitwich of Lancashire (Droitwich being a Midlands spa town). You do wonder whether these parallels ever worked in reverse – was Naples, for instance, ever publicized as The Morecambe of the South?

The main aerial view in the poster shows Morecambe seafront as a single curve with the West End Pier, Stone Jetty and Central Pier jutting out into the sea. Recognisable landmarks along the promenade include the Alhambra, Winter Gardens and Tower. These appear again in some of the views below: the West End promenade with the Stone Jetty beyond, Alhambra, Royalty Theatre and Opera house, Winter Gardens and Tower. The Tower is shown as planned rather than as built, so the date given for the poster as c1905 is about right (the Tower dates from 1909).

The poster also promoted Morecambe as a cycling centre and tourist centre for the Lake District, both shown in the upper middle view.

 

Morecambeology Episode 51: Morecambe’s Music Scene by Peter Wade

Back in the 1960s Morecambe’s music scene was lively to say the least. Big-name stars like The Beatles and Rolling Stones appeared in the town before they were properly famous while other like The Who and The Searchers performed as part of larger tours.

There was great rivalry between venues, especially the Floral Hall and Central Pier. The Troggs; Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich and The Swinging Blue Jeans were all to be heard on the Pier in the mid-1960s with local bands such as MBQ and The Doodlebugs as supporting acts. The Doodlebugs also supported The Who and the Rolling Stones at the Floral Hall.

Other local bands from the 1960s were The Bootlacers and Manuel and the Meteors, the latter supporting Tom Jones on the Central Pier. Bill Clarke of Manuel and the Meteors claims that they were the first to have recorded a song called The Wedding which went on to be a hit for Julie Rogers in 1964.

The Winter Gardens got in on the act too with appearances by Adam Faith, The Shadows, Matt Monroe and Lonnie Donegan. In later years groups like Showaddywaddy appeared there.

The Central Pier has also hosted Northern Soul all-nighters while the Superdome became home to cult performances by The Arctic Monkeys, Blur, Bob Geldof and Pulp.

Local band The Ice Factory shot to fame in the late 1980s, making the leap from playing in Morecambe pubs to supporting the likes of Blur and The Charlatans. Brothers David and John Lewis headed The Ice Factory along with Geoff Dixon, Justin Craddock, Neil Thompson and Mark McKenna. The band split up though before it could record its first single.

Morecambeology Episode 50: Smoke and Fire by Peter Wade

The flawless blue skies of the past week have been marred only by the smoke plumes from the moorland fires well to the south. Smoke from the fire on Saddleworth Moor appeared first on Wednesday as a smudge along the southern horizon only to be joined on Thursday by the nearer plume from Winter Hill. This rose in the south east and was carried westwards to form a background to the offshore wind farm across the bay.

In September 1666 the Great Fire of London followed hot on the heels of the Great Plague. The pall of smoke towered like ghostly sails over the city and was carried westwards by the wind some 50 miles. By night, the sky glowed blood red.

In 1698, Lancaster suffered its own Great Fire when at least 20 houses along Church Street were destroyed. Just as London had its diarists in the form of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn to record events, so Lancaster had the Quaker merchant William Stout who recorded how the fire started at 9am on Monday 2nd February when a spark from some un-quenched ashes jumped into straw roof thatch. Dry weather and an easterly wind carrying further sparks meant a rapid spread from one wooden thatched building to the next until a more substantial stone-built, slated building brought the fire to a halt.

The fire kept to the northern side of Church Street. However the speed of spread was such that the 31 people caught up in the fire had time only to save themselves.

From a distance, the inhabitants of Poulton, Bare and Torrisholme might have seen and smelt the pall of smoke from the fire and possibly heard its crack and roar carried on the wind.

Their houses were though as much at risk as their Lancaster neighbours with the same construction of wooden frames and thatched roofs.

A few though were ahead of the game. Stone-built Park Farm in Poulton Square is Morecambe’s oldest dated building at 1685. Also in the running is Moss House Farm in Morecambe’s West End of 1697 on Regent Park Avenue, a house in Torrisholme Square from 1663 and a farmhouse on Thorpe Avenue from 1687. Several outlying farmhouses or halls also date from the 1690s/1700s and would have been at least in part made of fire resistant materials as would Poulton Hall back in the heart of Morecambe.

Morecambeology Episode 49: Tea-time Treats with Peter Wade

Memories from the 1950s of some of Heysham’s tea gardens (popular with holidaymakers from Morecambe) were passed on earlier this year by Liz Bryan of Grange U3A.

There were three tea gardens facing a row of cottages. My job was with one owned by the Haddath family and, at the time I worked there as a weekend/school holiday waitress, it was run by Mr and Mrs Henderson, the daughter and son-in-law of the Haddaths. A lovely family, excessively busy but gentle with their guests and their employees.

Visitors who walked up the prom from Morecambe for a salad tea and famous custard tart were mainly from the wakes weeks holiday crowds, sometimes from Scotland, more often from the Lancashire cotton mill towns. One week they would be from Nelson, another from Colne, Burnley, or neighbouring towns.

The Haddaths’ garden was nearest the shore, overlooking the rocky beach and the whole of Morecambe Bay. Wooden tables with benches were set outside and there was a large, glass-walled conservatory with indoor seating. My neighbour, Kath, and I arrived on our bikes from 12 noon. We reported to the cottage where the living room was given over to a large wooden table which was filled with empty white pottery plates ready for the orders to come in as people arrived. Huge bowls of salad leaves, tomatoes, shelled boiled eggs, and cooked new potatoes were standing by. Mrs Henderson and her mother-in-law would be in the scullery/kitchen, buttering mountains of brown and white bread. Kettles were simmering and cups and saucers were piled at the ready. We donned aprons and washed our hands, then filled up small milk jugs from a large jug of milk, and salad cream pots from a big jar of Heinz Salad Cream.

As people strolled in, Kath, another friend, Sheila, and I took orders for meals and walked back to the cottage door. The choices of salads were egg, chicken, salmon (from the Lune) and roast ham. It was so soon after the Second World War and food like these meals was never served at home. The sizes of the meat portions were generous to say the least, and more often than not, hard boiled eggs were included with all choices. I have no memory of rubber gloves being used to serve the meat but all was performed in a very hygienic manner.

The Haddaths kept their live chickens in the field around my home garden along with horses that in summer months pulled landaus along Morecambe promenade.

Meals were seven shillings and sixpence, and massive slices of large round home-baked egg custards were extra (but worth every penny). Tea, coffee and lemonade were offered. We took the money (always cash) to, and got change from, a china bowl on a sideboard – which, by the end of each afternoon was piled high with ten shilling and pound notes and lots of ‘silver’.

We were paid fine shillings an afternoon, but were also given a meal the same size for which the visitors had been paying – worth the happy labour if no wages had been paid. We sat and ate outside or in, where the visitors, long gone, had been sitting earlier. We stayed to fill salt, pepper and sugar containers. Other people did all the washing up, by hand, in very hot water, and everything was rinsed. We had tips from customers and, at the end of each day, these were shared out to just the three of us. There was no work on rainy days so each day we had worked, we went home well fed and with our money in our pockets.

I remember one day there was a tragedy out on the Bay, not far from where we were working. A boy had overturned his canoe in the receding tide and he had drowned. He had been in my class at primary school a few years previously.

A busy, young Mrs Henderson with her own little girl of pre-school age at her feet, was rushed and responsible but never raised her voice or got flustered. She worked most efficiently. The overwhelming memory of the tea gardens for me is happiness.

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MORECAMBEOLOGY LIVE IN HEYSHAM A guided walk, Hidden Heysham, will start from the bus turnaround in Heysham Village at 2pm this Saturday June 30. The walk includes rock carvings from the time of the Great War as well as memories of tea gardens, fairy grottoes and puppet superstars. Places on the walk are priced £3 per person. For further details contact the tour guide Peter Wade, telephone 01524 4209045.

Morecambeology Episode 48: 20th Century Building Poll by Peter Wade

The second devastating fire at Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Art Nouveau masterpiece, Glasgow School of Art, reminds me of a time when it and Morecambe’s Midland Hotel found themselves unwitting competitors in a popular poll.

The occasion was the end of the 20th century and a public vote organised by English Heritage and Channel 4 to decide the most popular of that century’s buildings.

Top of the architectural pops was Basil Spence’s 1962 re-working of Coventry Cathedral, followed by Frederick Gibberd’s 1967 Roman Catholic Cathedral in Liverpool and Erich Mendelsohn’s 1933 De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill.

The rest of the top ten was made up of the Tate Gallery at St Ives, Royal Festival Hall, British Library, Castle Drogo in Devon, the Lloyds and Hoover Buildings and Battersea Power Station.

Coming in at joint number 29 was Morecambe’s Midland Hotel alongside the Bluewater Shopping Centre, County Hall in London and London University’s Senate House. This was a remarkable result given that the Midland was then a sad sight well ahead of its restoration and re-opening ten years ago.

A number of notable buildings followed below the Midland: the Trellick Tower, Broadcasting House, Manchester Central Library and the Cenotaph in Whitehall. The most notable of these followers-on was Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s ill-fated 1909 art school. By way of compensation, his Hill House in Helensburgh came in at numer 21 just ahead of Glasgow’s Burrell Collection.

Of local interest too was Lancaster’s Ashton Memorial scraping in at number 50.

A footnote to the list records that over half the top 50 buildings are listed but most were hated when first completed.

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MORECAMBEOLOGY LIVE AT SUNDERLAND POINT

A guided walk, Secrets of Sambo’s Grave, will start from the end of the tidal causeway at Sunderland Point at 2pm this Saturday June 23. The walk will include the now rare opportunity to examine fibres from the famous Cotton Tree as well as hear a graveside reading from the poem Sambo’s Elegy. Places on the walk are priced £3 per person. For further details contact the tour guide Peter Wade, telephone 01524 420905.

Morecambeology Episode 47: Anderton’s Remembered with Peter Wade

A second-hand shop on the corner of Regent Road and Yorkshire Street in the West End of Morecambe began life as a Methodist chapel. However, it was best known as Andertons shoe shop which finally closed its doors just over ten years ago.

From 1901 the shop sold furniture but in 1914 it became Andertons under its new owner Albert Ernest Anderton who had a second shop on The Crescent in central Morecambe. After Albert’s death in 1918 his widow Elizabeth carried on trading.

A series of businesses followed in the premises including local builders Huddlestons and Norvic shoes of Norwich.

In 1970 Dennis Gale bought the business and so began a 38-year association, along with his wife Gill. The customers were a mixture of locals and visitors. The comedian and variety performer Albert Modley was one of their better known local customers but other regulars came from Manchester, Appleby, Barrow and the Cumbrian coast.

Dennis retired aged 72 by which time many shoe shops had become self-service. Dennis enjoyed his time in the West End, a place he felt undeservedly stigmatised. A painted sign on the rear of the shop still preserves the Anderton name.

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MORECAMBEOLOGY LIVE IN LANCASTER A guided walk, Lancaster’s Lost Observatory, will start from the entrance to the Ashton Memorial in Williamson Park this Saturday June 16 at 2pm.The walk goes in search of the remains of an astronomical observatory which once linked Lancaster to a North West cotton empire. Places on the walk are priced £3 per person. For further details contact the tour guide Peter Wade, telephone 01524 420905.

Morecambeology Episode 46: Magic Midland Memories by Peter Wade

This year we celebrate the 10th anniversary of the re-opening of the renovated Midland Hotel – Morecambe’s Masterpiece as it was called in an article in July 2001’s Lancashire Life. The subject was the hotel and some of Morecambe’s other Art Deco buildings as seen through the lens of one of my own Echoes of Art Deco guided walks.

The first of these walks had been put on over the Easter period in 1999 at an awkward time in the Midland’s story. Its owner, Les Whittingham had died suddenly the year before and the hotel was up for sale. Added to this, one of the hotel’s best known works of art by sculptor Eric Gill had been stolen while still crated up on its return from an exhibition in London.

While the hotel was kept open to make a better impression on prospective buyers, Lancaster City Council wanted to do what they could to promote the sale. A Council funded guided walk including a tour inside the hotel seemed just the thing.

The tours rapidly gained a following, proving popular with people who had visited the hotel and Morecambe in the past as well as a younger generation who shared an interest in the period or retro style in general. I had pretty much free rein though there were still paying guests so I had to take care ‘not to frighten the horses’ as a member of staff put it. In the absence of the Gill sculpture, I had to make do with a painted canvas replica.

Eventually the hotel closed its doors to paying guests. However, an arrangement with the building’s caretaker meant I still had access until a buyer was finally found in 2001. One memorable Easter weekend saw a Council advert implying that that would be the last opportunity ever to see inside. People flocked and I was presented with a paper megaphone by the staff in the Visitor Information Centre so I could cope with the crowds.

As well as the public, I was also contacted by a steady stream of groups and individuals who wanted to see inside. Look North West filmed part of the tour, BBC Radio Lancashire recorded and serialised it, and some of it found its way into The Story of Art Deco for Channel 5. The artist Ryan Gander came to take a look as did various students making films or taking photographs.

The Eric Ravilious Appreciation Group came to town to see where an ill-fated mural had been painted, while creative writing groups came in search of inspiration.

The oddest experience happened not in the Midland but at Blackwell, the Arts and Crafts House at Bowness. As I gave my details sp they could claim Gift Aid on my entry fee they asked ‘Oh, are you the Peter Wade’. It turned out I was – the walk and its accompanying booklet had been mentioned in the Tate Magazine.

The pictures in Lancashire Life look like another world: the cluttered hotel lobby and concertinaed partition to the dining room, the discoloured front of the hotel, a small crowd of 32 people plus 2 dogs set for the walk, the same crowd strung out on the spiral staircase, Littlewoods and Woolworths, the Harbour Bandstand and a knickerbocker challenge at Brucciani’s.

To catch up on Morecambe’s Art Deco heyday, join one of this year’s walks on 9th June or 11th August (meet 2pm at The Platform, £3 per person) or take a look at one of my booklets (Echoes of Art deco and Midland Confidential, £2 each) available from the Visitor Information Centre in Morecambe or from our very own Heritage Centre.