Part 3. Blackpool - Seasons End
If you haven’t read or listened to the first two episodes, the links are here for you in their full horror!
Part 1. Escape from Glasgow
Part 2. A Summer Season But A Winters Tale
Part 3. After May’s OAPs (Old age pensioners), we had couples, (only marrieds of course, this is the sixties remember!), and families with young children. There were no cots or highchairs, and I can’t remember how people managed with their little one’s eating and sleeping arrangements. June wasn’t as full as May, which was a relief, because those we did have were more demanding than the OAPs, and I realised after a few more weeks that the OAP’s had been no trouble at all, apart from full potties every morning. They had been grateful for three meals a day and a comfy bed.
Couples though, frustrated Mrs Braddock. She never knew if they were going to make it down to breakfast or not, especially if they were on honeymoon. She would send Gillian or me up to bang on their door, (I tapped timidly), and ask them (in an embarrassed squeak) if they wanted breakfast. There would be silence, followed by rustling and giggling, and a voice saying ”No, thanks, we are having a lie in”. Reporting back to the kitchen would be met with exasperated ‘tuts’, and ‘what about this bacon I’ve cooked?’ I was delighted because I was hungry all the time I worked there. I don’t know if it was the sea air or the physical work, but I was always hoping for more, and didn’t dare ask. Except once - Monday was Christmas pudding day. In January, they had stocked up on cut-price Christmas puds, and served them every Monday through the season. There were always refusals, one or two at least, and I looked forward to a reject most Mondays. The one time I asked if there were any spare, I was told off for being greedy; I never asked again.
The beginning of July was a new shock to the system as families with older kids began to arrive and we were full. This was before the days of penalties for taking kids out of school, so we had all ages. However, the second half of July was even more disconcerting as it was Glasgow Fair Fortnight and having left Glasgow only two months previously, it was surreal to be besieged by Glaswegians descending on Blackpool for the ‘Fair’.
Glasgow Fair is a very old holiday dating back to the 12th century, but by the 20th century, it had expanded to an industry close-down for a fortnight when Glasgow’s inhabitants went ‘doon the watter’ for the Fair, which meant to Troon, Ayr, Largs and other seaside towns on Scotland’s west coast. What I hadn’t realised was that by the 1960s, Glaswegians were coming in large numbers to Blackpool by coach and train.
We were not only full, but we also had a few extra ‘guests’. Bedrooms were being sublet or shared with extended family sharing beds, or at least it was attempted, but not much got past the gimlet eye and years of experience of Mrs B. I found it difficult to count them in at night. All sorts of excuses were given, “This is my brother and he’s just brought some tablets for my mum. They’re staying next door, so he’ll only be a minute.” Or the family would come in in dribs and drabs and I would think I’d seen one of them already go in, and they would say no, they were all together. My nights on duty became a free for all because I couldn’t tell people to leave, especially big burly blokes. After a few nights of inadequacy with interlopers and drunks, Mrs Braddock came and sat with me, and I had a checklist of guests, matched with their room numbers.
Happily, the Glaswegians were a cheery, friendly set of guests, very noisy, fond of singing in the lounge of a night when you were hoping that they’d all go to bed. Some came with an extra child,
“Ma sister’s no very well, so we’ve brought Senga wi’ us. She’ll be nae bother; she’ll sleep in wi’ the weans.”
So then Senga would have to be catered for, which threw out the table settings and upset the landlady. She charged them extra of course. The Glaswegians were very fond of bringing in a few drinks, but the landlady was having none of it. She would confiscate the clanking bags and give them back in the morning, telling them to drink it somewhere else. It was one of the rules.
The list of rules for the guests was on the backs of their bedroom doors, which included
No washing of feet in the wash handbasin,
No alcohol in the rooms,
No noise after 11 pm,
No guests in rooms,
No animals to be brought in,
No food in the rooms,
Meals will be taken promptly in the dining room.
Ironically smoking was allowed anywhere and everywhere in the house.
One of my afternoon jobs after the washing up, toilets and scullery floor cleaning, and after (usually) managing an hour off, was to shop for the cold meats for tea. I was sent out at 4pm every day with cash and an exhortation to “make sure it’s fresh, not off the top of the pile”, to get either boiled ham, jellied veal, tongue or brawn, and it had to be exactly the number of slices to match the number of people in the house, not one more. It seems a strange ritual now but then there were butchers and bakers on every corner who were expecting the influx of maids from every boarding and guest house on the street, and who had, at 4pm, mountains of cooked meat, cut and ready to be counted out. Those traders must have been able to tell which establishments were doing well and which were failing, better than any expensive survey could today.
Dining, although it was only a boarding house, was a formal affair. Some landladies charged extra for ‘use of cruet’; this one didn’t, another of her proud boasts. Meals were honest English fare, none of your pasta, rice or ‘foreign muck’ here. Fish and chips on Friday, sausage and mash on Tuesdays, roast on Sundays. The landlady prided herself on a decorous dining room, and so it really upset her when the Glaswegian women came to tea with rollers in their hair, in preparation for the night out ahead of them. High tea, as she termed it was always a salad with bread and butter and a piece of slab cake. If a woman came down in rollers, she instructed Gillian to serve that table last. No one seemed to notice, but honour was satisfied.
No lunch was served on Saturdays as it was changeover day, so even those staying for a second week had to fend for themselves, as we doubled down on sheet-changing and cleaning. Even Gillian had to tear herself away from her women’s magazines and wedding talk to help. I’m not sure what she ever did except titivate a bit after the hard graft was done. In the high season we had a lady to help in the mornings. I liked her a lot. She was Betty from Blackburn, now living in Blackpool and the alliteration appealed to me even before I met her. She was a warm, sympathetic person who knew the landlady’s foibles and compensated for them. She made life bearable for me, and I remember confiding in her that I’d like to find another job. Her advice was that I might be jumping from the frying pan into the fire, and there were a lot worse than Mrs Braddock. I found that hard to believe as she gave me no quarter and I was made to feel inadequate most days.
Credit was never given and none expected. Landladies and traders dealt in cash. “You know where you are with pounds, shillings and pence”, was a frequent mantra in the house. Mrs Braddock made it clear when she took a booking that “I don’t accept cheques, cash only. On arrival please”.
In September we had another month of OAPs, this time mixed with honeymooners, but not as many, it was slackening off. That was a strange combination, with some of the OAPs, (mainly elderly ladies), eyeing the young couples suspiciously. I expected marriage certificates to be demanded at any second.
Blackpool illuminations started in September and so a different pattern emerged until the end of November. We had ‘weekenders’ staying from Fridays to Sundays, and during the weekdays we did a deep clean of all the rooms including the public rooms. Mrs Braddock and Gillian took part and the grandmother provided us with meals. Gillian’s sole topic of conversation was her wedding the following year. All summer we had been treated to her fiancé dropping round in the evening, a long skinny drip of a lad with no conversation, couldn’t see the attraction myself, but Gillian was turning into her mother and talked of nothing else but saving for a bungalow in St Annes.
Needs must, I stayed until the end of November leaving elated with my share of the season’s tips. I had secured a Mother’s Help job in London and couldn’t wait to get there, just a quick trip to Glasgow to get some winter clothes and another dose of disapproval from my mother, then I’d be off again. King’s Road, here I come, I thought. But that’s another story!
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I’ve read
Cry of the Heart: Heartbreak and Hope in Occupied France by Martin Lake. WW2 Based on the true story of a woman in the South of France who takes in a young Jewish boy from a desperate mother, and passes him off as a gentile. Life is made difficult for her not just by the subsequent occupation of the area by German soldiers, but also by her own family’s hostility. I’m particularly interested in that period as I’m writing a pilot TV episode set in the same time during Jersey’s German occupation, and I felt this story moved at a good pace, and gave a sense of the desperation people must have felt in those circumstances. Some of the characters worked better than others, but all in all I enjoyed it and would recommend it to anyone with an interest in WW2 stories.
Jezebel by Megan Barnard. I looked forward to this as a book club choice but found it wanting. The main character was very unlikeable, the ending had a daft twist, the story was yawn-inducingly repetitive, and the grammar was sloppy, (do we refer to people as ‘gaunter’ or say ‘She dove in’ rather than ‘She dived in’? Maybe it’s the difference between GB vs USA spelling and grammar …
I’ve watched
Mr Bates vs the Post Office ITV and had steam coming out of my ears long before the end. I’d heard of the scandal over the years and vaguely thought how unfair it all was, but assumed it had all been put right. To see so much injustice unravel and so many lives ruined over four episodes was unbelievable. I still find it hard to believe that 700+ postmasters and mistresses were prosecuted, some jailed, all fined with a loss of livelihood, some lost their houses, marriages and some took their own lives. All because Fujitsu wouldn’t admit there was a problem with their software and the Post Office was determined to preserve its reputation. I earnestly hope those poor people will get justice soon and that the perpetrators are prosecuted and jailed because common sense must have told them that there couldn’t possibly be so many either corrupt or inept staff, and that the problems had only arisen since the installation of the new Horizon system.
The Crown Netflix. I don’t care which bits are true or if any of it is, it’s glossy, silly in places and OTT in others. Love it!
I’ve listened to
Or at least tried to listen to The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka. I can’t engage with it. I’m about 3 hours in and I can’t remember who’s who, what they’re doing or why they’re there. Is it me?