Author Archives: Mike Higginbottom

Train through Middle Earth

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KiwiRail Overlander train at National Park, North Island, New Zealand (2011)

KiwiRail Overlander train at National Park, North Island, New Zealand (2011)

When I did a lecture-tour for the New Zealand Decorative & Fine Arts Societies [http://www.nadfas.org.uk/default.asp?section=209&page=1179] their travel co-ordinator Jenny offered me the option of travelling from Hamilton to Wellington (that is, much of the length of the North Island) by air or by rail.

For me that’s a no-brainer.  There’s no finer way to see a land than through the window of a railway carriage.

Until 2012 [see below] the Overlander took twelve hours for the full journey from Auckland to Wellington, 9½ hours from Hamilton southwards.  It’s a comfortable, leisurely trip, at the time using rolling stock very similar to the TranzAlpine.

Mark Smith, the Man in Seat 61, points out that this is the journey that inspired the film producer Peter Jackson, who first read J R R Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings on a train on the North Island Main Trunk Railway and returned to the region to shoot his film trilogy Lord of the Rings (2001-3).

The journey is an unmissable opportunity to sense the scale of the North Island.  The line climbs into the volcanic centre of the island, and then drops into the precipitous Rangitikei gorge.  Towards evening it finds its way to the west coast, where on fine summer evenings there’s a grandstand view of the sunset.

Driving a railway through the heart of the island took nearly a quarter of a century:  construction started in 1885 and the last spike was driven in 1908.

The engineering is spectacular.  The most memorable feature of all is the Raurimu Spiral, which lifts the line 132 metres within a distance of two kilometres, by twists and a spiral over 6.8 kilometres of track.  It’s one of those stretches of railway where the train nearly meets itself coming back:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raurimu_Spiral.

Some of the viaducts on the final 1908 section are as impressive as those on the TranzAlpine line.  The Makatote Viaduct [http://trains.wellington.net.nz/misc2/makatote_1983.jpg] is an original steel structure, 258 feet above the river-bed;  the curved Hapuawhenua Viaduct is a modern concrete replacement, 167 feet high, built on a diversion from which the earlier steel viaduct is visible to the east of the line – http://www.ohakunecoachroad.co.nz/pages/hapuawhenua-viaduct.html and http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&sll=-43.221299,171.928037&sspn=0.002533,0.004967&ie=UTF8&ll=-39.385256,175.399566&spn=0.002687,0.004967&t=h&z=18.

The most endearing and surprising landmark on the journey south is at Mangaweka, where a DC3 aircraft rests beside the Hub Café:  http://www.mangaweka.co.nz/dc3-aeroplane.html

New Zealanders customarily disparage their railways, which were built with difficulty and have been managed half-heartedly over the years.  It’s as if the nation can’t decide whether rail is essential or superfluous to the task of transportation across the two mountainous land-masses.

The North Island Main Trunk Railway has been improved over the years by building deviations before and after the Second World War, and by a piecemeal electrification.  The Wellington-Paekakariki section was electrified at 1,500V DC in 1940, and 255 miles between Palmerston North and Hamilton were electrified to 25 kV 50 Hz AC in the 1980s.

This means that the Overlander leaves Auckland behind a diesel locomotive, changes to electric power at Hamilton and back to diesel haulage at Palmerston North, running under electric wires it does not use from Waikanae through the Wellington suburbs to its terminus:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Northisland_NZ_NIMT.png.

In 2006 there was a strong likelihood that the Overlander, the only remaining train between the North Island’s two biggest cities, would close completely:  the service was reprieved three days before the closing date, and both the line and the rolling-stock were refurbished.  As a result, passenger numbers rose significantly, and the length of the trains and the number of days’ service have repeatedly increased.

If you don’t use it, you lose it.

Update:  In June 2012 the Overlander was rebranded, speeded up but reduced in frequency as the Northern Explorer:  http://www.stuff.co.nz/manawatu-standard/news/7164511/Dash-to-catch-the-last-train.  The route and the scenery are just the same but the rolling stock is improved.

An excellent description and a practical guide to booking trips on the Northern Explorer is at http://www.seat61.com/Overlander.htm.

 

Nabob’s retreat

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Aston Hall, South Yorkshire

Aston Hall, South Yorkshire

There’s a setting for a novel around Aston Hall, in the south-east corner of South Yorkshire – a sort of Alan Hollinghurst meets Jane Austen, with more than a dash of Anthony Trollope.

The key character, probably the narrator like Mr Lockwood in Wuthering Heights, is the poet Rev William Mason (1724–1797), the Rector of Aston, whose Musaeus (1747), a monody on the death of Alexander Pope, and his historical tragedies Elfrida (1752) and Caractacus (1759) have hardly stood the test of time.

He’s better known as the editor of the poems of his friend Thomas Gray, whose ‘Elegy written in a country churchyard’ is one of the best-loved eighteenth-century poems in English.

Mason and Gray shared friendship with Horace Walpole, whose catty observations are so vivid you can almost hear his voice.  Walpole’s residence, Strawberry Hill was a gathering ground for some of the brightest and most sophisticated wits of the day.  Mason’s rectory was similarly a centre for creativity, conversation and cyncism.

He was rector of Aston from 1754 to 1797, and though he didn’t live there continually, he must have watched from the rectory the rebuilding of Aston Hall on the opposite side of the church after a fire in the 1760s. 

The owner, the fourth Earl of Holderness, had it rebuilt in the Palladian style by the ubiquitous, versatile and highly respected architect John Carr of York.

Once it was finished in 1772, Lord Holderness declined to move in:  Walpole declared this was “because it is too near the ducal seat at Kiveton”;  in other words, the earl didn’t want to be overshadowed by the Duke of Leeds at Kiveton Park.

After all, Robert Darcy, 4th Earl had been ambassador to Venice and The Hague, Secretary of State (then one of the great offices of state) and later became tutor to two of George III’s sons, in which capacity Walpole described him as “a solemn phantom”.

Lord Holderness let the house to Harry Verelst (1734-1785), whom Walpole described as “the Nabob” – the term for an opportunist who had made money in India.  He was Governor of Bengal from 1767 to 1769.

Verelst purchased Aston Hall in 1774-5 and employed the local architect John Platt to install a finer staircase and the west wing.  His descendants lived there until 1928.

Mason was distantly related to both Lord Holderness and Harry Verelst.  One may imagine the twitching of curtains at the rectory, and the comments of Rev Mason and his wife about the nabob’s taste. 

Sitting in the bar and lounge of the Aston Hall Hotel [http://www.tomahawkhotels.co.uk/home.aspx?h=1], it’s possible to see Lord Holderness’ viewpoint.   Even though Carr’s rooms have been much carved about by institutional use it’s clear that they would hardly have been grand enough for an earl to entertain.

It’s more than comfortable for modern visitors, set in a quiet village literally within two minutes of Junction 31 of the M1.  It’s an interesting alternative to a comfort stop at Woodhall Services.

The 56-page, A4 handbook for the 2014 tour Country Houses of South Yorkshire, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £7.50 including postage and packing.  It includes chapters on Aston Hall, Brodsworth Hall, Cannon Hall, Cusworth Hall, Hickleton Hall, Renishaw Hall, Wentworth Castle, Wentworth Woodhouse and Wortley Hall.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Losing a landmark

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St Hilda's Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield (December 2011)

St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen, Sheffield (December 2011)

I learned from that fountain of useful information and news, the Ancient Monuments Society Newsletter, that the only historic building I can see from my office window is about to disappear.

St Hilda’s Parish Church, Shiregreen is an interesting inter-war brick church on a literally outstanding site.  It stands on an abrupt cliff-edge alongside the Flower Estate, itself a notable landmark of early-twentieth century municipal housing [see Ruth Harman & John Minnis, Sheffield (Pevsner Architectural Guides 2004), pp 185-8, http://www.lookingatbuildings.org.uk/cities/sheffield/the-flower-estate.html and http://www.lookingatbuildings.org.uk/cities/sheffield/the-flower-estate/tour-part-2.html].

The church was designed by Leslie Moore (1883-1957) in 1935-8, presumably to serve the council estate and the slightly earlier community down the hill.  Moore made clever use of an extremely steep site, building his nave above a community room, accessible by steep steps built into the hillside.

The interior was high quality:  the white-and-gold classical gallery by the York architect George Pace (1915-1975) supported an eighteenth-century organ case with pipes brought from the blitzed city-centre church of St James.

St Hilda’s was closed, no doubt surplus to requirements, in 2007.

The Newsletter tells the regrettable tale of three arson attacks and some spectacularly energetic vandalism (which I suspect was an attempt at theft of lead organ-pipes).  The only way intruders could penetrate the secured building was to climb on to the roof ridge and then drop down through an access door behind the bell turret.  This is 35 metres above the sloping ground level.

I can’t help thinking that the athleticism and ingenuity behind such burglary would command a healthy wage in a healthy legitimate economy.

Apparently, the Church Commissioners and the Diocese of Sheffield have given up any attempt to save the building and intend it to be demolished.

This is a pity.  The local community is not blessed with public spaces, or indeed social opportunities.  The precipitous plot on which the church stands won’t be easy to redevelop.  The views from the site are magnificent, but any replacement structure will need high-quality design to deserve a place in the landscape.

There’s an obvious argument for mothballing St Hilda’s in the hope of better economic times, sometime in the indefinable future.  But it’s only practical if there’s some guarantee that the local villains won’t keep trashing the place, and possibly killing themselves, in the process.

The saddest fact of all, of course, is that it’s a fine building nobody wants.  It’s not the first time that Sheffield has lost a useful historic building because no-one – owners, city planners, local amenity groups, interested individuals like me – took sufficient notice to appreciate its value [See Rue Britannia].

I can’t imagine why St Hilda’s isn’t listed.  And if you don’t use it, you lose it.

A detailed examination of the challenges facing the Anglican Church in north Sheffield is posted at http://sheffield.anglican.org/attachments/275_Final%20Report.pdf.

The Ancient Monuments Society can be contacted at http://www.ancientmonumentssociety.org.uk.  The Twentieth Century Society, which has a brief to support and conserve buildings dating from after 1914, is at http://www.c20society.org.uk.

One less twentieth-century suburban church makes the others that remain marginally more valuable.

The failed campaign to save St Hilda’s Church, Shiregreen is featured in Demolished Sheffield, a 112-page full colour A4 publication by Mike Higginbottom.

For details please click here.

Trouser town

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Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire

Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire

The steep downhill walk from Heptonstall into the Calder valley gives spectacular views of the town of Hebden Bridge which stands at the confluence of the River Calder and the Hebden Water.   Glaciers formed these valleys, so they have hanging tributaries which maximise the head of water available to mill engineers.

As the textile industry became mechanised from the late eighteenth century onwards, the old domestic industry of gave way to the first generation of water mills.  Then, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, steam-powered mills, no longer dependent on a rapid flow of water, moved out into the flatter land of the valley-floor.

Transport became industrialised too.   The packhorse system was replaced by turnpikes from 1771-2, the Rochdale Canal, built 1794-8, and the railway (1840-1).

Often known as “Trouser Town”, Hebden Bridge prospered until the post-war period, and then its economy crashed.

Between 1955 and 1965 thirty-three mills closed around Hebden Bridge, and 60% of the local shops went out of business.  The Hebden Bridge Co-operative Society went bankrupt when one of its officials defaulted with its reserves.  Cottages changed hands for as little as a penny, and the local planning authorities initially despaired of attracting new industry to the district.

Within a few years, however, the cheap housing, attractive surroundings and easy rail links to Manchester and Leeds brought a variety of incomers – dormitory commuters, home-workers such as writers and artists and a well-assimilated lesbian community [see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16962898].

Houses that couldn’t be given away in the early sixties traded for £300 in 1975 and twenty-five years later were worth £65,000.  Even in the current static market, you can’t find two-bedroomed accommodation in the town for much less than £120,000.

Hebden Bridge now boasts nearly two hundred retailers, including a wide range of antique-dealers, booksellers and music-stores.  It’s also a minor capital of culture.

From the early 1970s it was the one of the homes of the Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes (1930-1998), who was born down the valley at Mytholmroyd.  His house at Lumb Bank is now one of the writing centres of the Arvon Foundation [http://www.arvonfoundation.org/course.php?genre=&tutor=&month=&centre=2], founded by two of Hughes’ friends, John Fairfax and John Moat.

The Blackburn-born sculptor Edward Cronshaw (born 1959), best known for his statue ‘The Great Escape’, a popular Liverpool meeting-place often referred to as “The Horse’s Balls” [http://www.liverpoolmonuments.co.uk/equestrian/great01.html], lived in Hebden Bridge until he moved up the valley to Todmorden.

And Margaret Thatcher’s famed press secretary, Bernard Ingham, began his career on the Hebden Bridge Times.

Take a look at what’s on in Hebden Bridge – http://www.hebdenbridge.co.uk/events/index.html:  it’s a hive of activity.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2012 Yorkshire Mills & Mill Towns tour, with text, photographs and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here.  Please send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Poets and coiners

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Old Church of St Thomas à Becket, viewed from the porch of the new Church of St Thomas the Apostle, Heptonstall, West Yorkshire

Old Church of St Thomas à Becket, viewed from the porch of the new Church of St Thomas the Apostle, Heptonstall, West Yorkshire

Drive up the steep tortuous hill from the A6033 from Hebden Bridge, or better still catch the bus so you can enjoy the view as you climb, to Heptonstall at the top of the hill, where you find yourself in West Yorkshire at the end of the eighteenth century.

There has been a settlement at since before Domesday, straddling the packhorse route, the “causey”, from Lancashire at the point where it drops steeply down to cross the brook at “Hepton Brig”.

This was a place so bleak that farming was at best an uncertain living, and the inhabitants boosted their income with hand-loom weaving.

The rugged gritstone houses with their mullioned windows, clustered round the medieval church, have changed relatively little since canal transport and water-power, followed by steam-power and railways, altered the scale of local industry and moved the centre of population into the Calder valley below.

The last handloom weaver in Heptonstall worked till the end of the nineteenth century and died in 1902.

Heptonstall churchyard contains two churches.  The Old Church, dedicated to St Thomas à Becket, dates from the mid-thirteenth century.  Repeatedly extended, it has two naves as well as two aisles.  John Wesley described it as “the Ugliest Church I know”.  It was damaged by a gale in 1847 and patched up only until its replacement opened in 1854.  Afterwards it was allowed to fall into ruin.

The New Church, dedicated to St Thomas the Apostle, contains the thirteenth-century font, the 1809 clock, and the Royal Arms of King George III from the Old Church.  The New Church was modernised and extended in 1963-4 by a legacy of Mr Abraham Gibson (d 1956).

Buried in the churchyard is David Hartley, ‘King’ of the Cragg Coiners, hanged for “unlawfully stamping and clipping a public coin” on May 1st 1770.

The poet and novelist Sylvia Plath (1937-1963) is buried in the new churchyard.  Her admirers don’t take kindly to the fact that her stone bears the name of her estranged husband, the poet Ted Hughes.

Another, less well-known poet, Asa Benveniste (1925-1990), who latterly ran a bookshop in Hebden Bridge, is also buried here.  Roy Fuller wryly describes how the locals automatically assume any stranger in the graveyard must be looking for Plath:  http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=1520.

The other significant place of worship in Heptonstall is the Octagon Chapel.

Heptonstall is an oddly mordant place, full of Yorkshire ambiguities, best visited on a sunny day.  To find the real warmth, you need to step inside either of the pubs, the White Lion [http://www.whitelionheptonstall.com] or the Cross Inn [http://heptonstall.org/mambo/index.php?option=com_content&task=category&sectionid=26&id=54&Itemid=83] or the Towngate Tea Room & Deli [http://heptonstall.org/mambo/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=128&Itemid=102].

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2012 Yorkshire Mills & Mill Towns tour, with text, photographs and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here.  Please send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Gothic New York: The Cloisters

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The Cloisters, New York City

The Cloisters, New York City

Catch a Madison Avenue bus from lower Manhattan uptown.  As you pass through midtown, fashionable ladies with designer handbags and designer dogs trip on and off.  When you reach Harlem, more substantial ladies get on with bags of shopping.  Eventually, you reach a turning-circle, and the driver expects you to leave the vehicle.

You walk through an archway to a turnstile, and after the customary museum formalities you’re in The Cloisters, an American version of the Middle Ages – complete with Gregorian chant on the PA system.

At a time when European scholars lagged far behind their American counterparts in appreciating the value and significance of early medieval art, John D Rockefeller Jnr (1874-1960) and the sculptor George Grey Barnard (1863-1938) took the opportunity to dismantle and transport across the Atlantic a wealth of artefacts and works of art, including four complete cloisters which are reconstructed in Fort Tryon Park near the northern tip of Manhattan.

Somehow, this strange collection casts a spell over its visitors.  Put together in 1938 with a reproduction tower based on a twelfth-century French original, it is a most beguiling place.

As well as the four cloisters, the exhibits include the complete apse of the chapel of San Martin de Fuentiduevña from Segovia, the chapter house of the abbey at Pontaut in Gascony and a wealth of tapestries, manuscripts, reliquaries and glass.

The Cloisters is administered as a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  See http://www.metmuseum.org/cloisters.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture The Big Apple:  the architecture of New York City, please click here.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Survivals & Revivals:  past views of English architecture, please click here.

 

Gothic New York: Woolworth Building

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Woolworth Building, New York City

Woolworth Building, New York City

Cass Gilbert’s Woolworth Building (1913) in downtown New York, not far from Wall Street, is an unusual creation – a Gothic Revival skyscraper.

This cathedral of commerce was financed solely by the proceeds of the original five-and-dime stores, its entire cost, $13 million, paid for in cash.

Frank W Woolworth’s design brief was for something like the Houses of Parliament but higher than the Metropolitan Life Tower, which is exactly what Cass Gilbert provided.

It reaches sixty storeys, 793 feet, and remained the world’s tallest building until the completion of the Chrysler Building in 1930.

It epitomises the technological advances of its period – curtain-wall construction on a load-bearing steel frame and an inevitable reliance on elevators for circulation.  Its three-storey lobby, of gold marble and glass mosaic, is breathtaking, and tinged with an endearing humour:  among the carvings can be found Cass Gilbert holding a model of the building and Frank Woolworth counting out the nickels and dimes that paid for it.

It was sold in 1998 for $126 million to the Witkoff Group:  its tenant is the New York University School of Continuing and Professional Studies.

There is a rich collection of illustrations and a brief description of the Woolworth Building at http://www.nyc-architecture.com/SCC/SCC019.htm.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture ‘The Big Apple:  the architecture of New York City’, please click here.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Survivals & Revivals:  past views of English architecture, please click here.

 

Gothic New York: St John the Divine Cathedral

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St John the Divine Cathedral, New York City (1989)

St John the Divine Cathedral, New York City (1989)

The Cathedral of St John the Divine, New York City, is a game of two halves.  It was begun to the Romanesque/Byzantine style designs of Heins & LaFarge, in 1892, and grew so slowly that the rumour circulated it was being built by an old man and his son.  In fact it was nineteen years before the choir and crossing could be consecrated.

The problem of roofing the vault until the central tower could be built was resolved by inserting a Guastavino tile dome (similar to the Registry Building at Ellis Island and the concourse of Grand Central Terminal) at a cost of $8,500:  this temporary expedient, completed in only fifteen weeks, is still in place.  The Guastavino family were also responsible for the vaulting of the whole church, and of the crypt which supports the nave, crossing and choir floors.

Oddly, the Heins & LaFarge design was summarily abandoned in 1909 in favour of a longer French Gothic plan by Ralph Adams Cram, so that the nave and west front are being continued to the designs of his firm, Cram & Ferguson.  The junction between the two is abrupt, and can never be wholly successful.

By the autumn of 1941 the entire length of the nave was complete.  Construction was stopped when the United States entered World War II, and by the time work resumed in 1982 it proved necessary to import stonemasons from England to apprentice unemployed Harlem youths in the traditional skills.

When it’s finally completed, the Cathedral of St John the Divine, centre of the Episcopal archdiocese of New York, will be the largest (but not the longest) Gothic church in the world – 601 feet long, 320 feet wide across the transepts, with a nave vault 124 feet high.

But it can never be an entirely Gothic church without destroying and rebuilding the whole of the east end.

The Cathedral of St John the Divine website is at http://www.stjohndivine.org.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture ‘The Big Apple:  the architecture of New York City’, please click here.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Survivals & Revivals:  past views of English architecture, please click here.

 

Not yet Swindon or Cricklade

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Blunsdon Station, Swindon & Cricklade Railway, Wiltshire

Blunsdon Station, Swindon & Cricklade Railway, Wiltshire

The Swindon & Cricklade Railway is one of the smaller volunteer efforts to preserve the age of steam.  It boasts that it’s the only standard-gauge preserved railway in Wiltshire and occupies, not part of Brunel’s former broad-gauge Great Western, but a stretch of the little-known Midland & South Western Railway, a late-comer which allowed the trains of the Midland Railway and its allies to penetrate Great Western territory to reach Southampton.  The section from Swindon through Cricklade to Cheltenham was opened in 1881.

When the Swindon & Cricklade volunteers came here there was nothing but trackbed.  Every sleeper and rail, every stick and sheet of metal has been brought here since 1978.  This is a railway that hasn’t been blessed with lottery money or large donations.

Volunteers have built two stations, Blunsdon (which last saw a passenger train in 1924), and a temporary terminus with loco- and carriage-sheds at Hayes Knoll, where additional land was available short of the ultimate destination at Cricklade.

The long-term plan is to extend southwards, diverging from the M&SWR line to a new station at Mouldon Hill Country Park and then eventually to an interchange station with the Great Western main line at Sparcells.  A northward extension to Cricklade is also planned.  The current round-trip ride is around four miles.

There is an excellent Whistlestop Café, housed in two Norwegian railway carriages, from which you can birdwatch as well as train-watch, and a rolling programme of entertaining events through the year – not only the customary Wartime Weekend and Santa Specials, but Murder Mystery Evenings and a Halloween Ghost Train.  On-board dining is provided on two beautifully spruced-up blue-and-cream Moonraker carriages.

Details of this year’s and next year’s programmes are at http://www.swindon-cricklade-railway.org.

Every cup of tea bought, and every fiver pushed into the green donations pillar-box, takes this enjoyable little railway nearer to its termini.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2012 Waterways and Railways between Thames and Severn tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here. To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Camp as a row of tents

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Cunningham's Holiday Camp Escalator, Douglas, Isle of Man (2009)

Cunningham’s Holiday Camp Escalator, Douglas, Isle of Man (2009)

Margaret, one of the guests on the 2011 Liverpool’s Heritage tour, asked me out of the blue what I knew about Dodd’s holiday camp at Caister, Norfolk.  Absolutely nothing, I had to admit.

I promised to check it out, and found that I’d missed an important landmark in the history of twentieth-century British holidays.

John Fletcher Dodd was a 44-year-old grocer and magistrate and a founder-member of the Independent Labour Party who bought a couple of acres of land on the Norfolk coast to set up the Caister Socialist Holiday Camp in 1906.

This was by any standards a spartan affair – teetotal, segregated and entirely tented (though wooden chalets appeared from 1912, and a later picture shows fifteen Great Yarmouth tram bodies lined up on the cliffs, open-toppers which must have been ideal for sunbathing).

The entertainment consisted of camp-fire sing-songs and lectures from such figures as Keir Hardie and George Bernard Shaw.  There were blanket bans on alcohol, mixed bathing, swearing and children under two.

Over the years, the regime softened and the socialist ethic was moderated.  John Fletcher Dodd stayed firmly in charge until he died, aged ninety, in 1952, the year after the camp reopened post-war.  It’s still in business as Caister Caravan Holiday Park:  http://www.haven.com/parks/norfolk/caister/index.aspx.

Its centenary produced a plethora of celebratory news features in the Daily Express [http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/395/CARRYING-ON-CAMPINGCARRYING-ON-CAMPINGCARRYING-ON-CAMPINGCARRYING-ON-CAMPINGCARRYING-ON-CAMPINGCARRYING-ON-CAMPINGCARRYING-ON-CAMPINGCARRYING-ON-CAMPING], the Daily Mail [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1200465/Torremolinos-aint-Holiday-snaps-bygone-age-bonny-babies-knobbly-knees-holiday-camps-Fifties-Britain.html], the Daily Mirror [http://www.mirror.co.uk/advice/travel/2006/01/07/hi-de-hi-comrades-115875-16556808], The Sun [http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/travel/38427/Tons-up-for-holiday-camps.html?print=yes] and the Black Country Bugle [http://www.blackcountrybugle.co.uk/News/Happy-Campers-who-caught-the-holiday-bug-2.htm], among others.

Though Dodd claimed to be the founder of the British holiday camp, there was an earlier pioneer in the Isle of Man.  Joseph Cunningham was a Presbyterian baker from Liverpool who established a tented camp for single men only at Howstrake, on the newly-opened electric railway line, in 1894.

After a devastating storm in 1903 Joseph Cunningham relocated to a five-acre site in Little Switzerland, in Upper Douglas, where he provided 1,500 eight-man tents and a dining pavilion.  The regime was teetotal and the camp was largely self-sufficient, growing its own fruit and vegetables and maintaining its own herds of cows and pigs.

To the annoyance of Douglas hotel and boarding-house proprietors, the tented camp was rated as agricultural land, so the entire property was valued at only one-seventh the value of a forty-room boarding house.  Joseph Cunningham justified this by arguing that his thousands of visitors could not otherwise afford to visit the island and yet contributed significantly to the summer-season economy.

Cunningham himself could afford to fly his own monoplane between the wars, taking off and landing at a field near the camp.

Cunningham’s Camp survived into the post-war period, but the site is now redeveloped.

A long-lasting relic and curiosity of this piece of holiday history is the Cunningham’s Douglas Holiday Camp Escalator, installed in 1920, duplicated in 1938, and abandoned in 1968.  To practical purposes a sedentary paternoster, this noisy device to give campers a lift from the promenade operated free of charge until 1963.  It remained in position, and is illustrated in Charles Guard’s video/DVD, More Curiosities of the Isle of Man (Manx Heritage Foundation 2004) [http://www.dukevideo.com/General-Interest/DVD/Isle-of-Man/More-Curiosities-of-Isle-of-Man-DVD.aspx].

Update:  A press-release in February 2013 announced the imminent demolition of the chairlift:  http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/cunningham-s-holiday-camp-chairlift-to-be-scrapped-1-5375099.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2014 Manx Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on seaside architecture, Away from it all:  the heritage of holiday resorts, Beside the Seaside:  the architecture of British coastal resorts, Blackpool’s Seaside Heritage and Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage, please click here.