A Visit to Great Yarmouth

Seaside towns have long been the place for unusual or eccentric attractions. The types of exhibits and collections that were also part of the travelling fairground. Take for example, the infamous Rector of Stiffkey – the defrocked clergyman who ended up being mauled by a lion in a sideshow at Skegness.

Madame Tussauds at Blackpool has kept up to date for its holidaymakers by including likenesses of Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift. The Louis Tussauds Waxworks at Great Yarmouth, however, was looking more than tired by the time of its closure in 2013, with its replicas of Kojak, Mr Blobby and Samantha Fox.

The House of Wax, Great Yarmouth before it closed

 

The House of Wax in 2016 - now closed

If you are visiting Great Yarmouth then I would highly recommend visiting the Time and Tide Museum. Converted from an old herring smoke house, this place has a reconstruction of an old Yarmouth row (a narrow pedestrian lane with houses and shops), a seaside gallery, and information on the area's fishing industry.

The Hippodrome Museum is also open to visitors after performances at the circus.

Before you leave Great Yarmouth, you must make sure that you pay a visit to The David Howkins Museum of Memories. Admissions here go to charity, and at the time of my visit (2016) only cost £3 for an adult, and £1 for children. The contents of the museum are eclectic. Some its exhibits look like small personal collections – such as the cluster of Murano Glass clowns (familiar tourist souvenirs from the latter half of the twentieth century), and some Royal memorabilia. There are also some dolls houses (not antiques), and rooms full of teddies and dolls.

A fairground Aunt Sally - see if you can knock the clay pipe from her face...

Of particular interest however, are the Stamp Room and the Joseph Merrick display. The latter includes a bust of Merrick, which is a replica of a plaster cast taken of his head, kept in the London Hospital where he spent the last few years of his life. Visitors can buy a booklet about the ‘Elephant Man’ at the museum. The curator is keen to point out that the ‘true’ story of the Elephant Man is that the showman Tom Norman was Merrick’s colleague and friend, and that, contrary to the David Lynch feature film, Merrick tired of the medical inspections instigated by the film’s ‘hero’, Frederick Treve. Joseph Merrick’s skeleton has still not been buried, and it has recently been mooted that his remains should be returned to his original birthplace, Leicester (in a similar vein to Richard III’s).

The member of staff on duty at the Museum of Memories was very eager for me to go to the first floor to see the Stamp Room. This is a room with furniture and artifacts completely covered in postage stamps. This display was created by Albert Schafer who spent over 30 years fulfilling this self-imposed challenge.

The museum is housed in an impressive building that used to be the local gas showroom. You can walk a grand staircase – lit by a huge stained glass window – leading up to the former gas offices on the first floor, which now house the Stamp Room and toys. As you leave, you can buy a genuine seaside postcard from the 1950s as a souvenir.

The Museum of Memories is memorably eccentric and unique.

For more information on the museum look here

The Phantom Ride: Then and Now

The phantom ride was a popular genre or filming technique of silent cinema. For the production of these films a camera was attached to the front of a train or other vehicle in order to capture the excitement of speed and motion. These early films usually only ran for a minute or less and often appeared as a fairground or theatrical attraction. For example, the early film pioneer R. W. Paul made a film entitled On a Runaway Motor Car Through Piccadilly Circus (1899) ‘which showed the view from a car ‘speeding’ through the streets’, probably created by ‘under-cranking’ the camera during filming (Chanan, 1980: 286).

Of perhaps more interest here, however, is Paul’s film from the previous year, A Switchback Railway (1898), for which a camera was attached to the front of a rollercoaster. Barnes (1983) comments that ‘audiences in those days were not accustomed to such cinematic view-points [sic] and would have found the film much more thrilling than we do today’ (Barnes, 1983: 17-18). He goes on to say that it is ‘an interesting film and still entertains, but its appeal today is far different from that which was originally intended’ (Barnes, 1993: 18). It is a valid comment, but it could be argued that Barnes is considering the film in the context of it being a novelty and a contrast to the ‘complexities of modern-day cinema’ (Barnes, 1983: 18). What should be considered is that although the phantom ride disappeared as a subject matter in its own right, due to the ‘narrativization of cinema’ and longer running times, it became incorporated into the narrative as a momentary ‘attraction’ (Elsaesser, 1990: 60; 56).

As Charles Musser suggests, as early as 1899 phantom rides ‘became incorporated into the travel narrative, enabling the showman to literalize the traveller’s movement through time and space…G. A. Smith made a one-shot film of a couple kissing in a railway carriage – a gag which had comic-strip antecedents. He suggested that showmen insert Kiss in the Tunnel into the middle of a phantom ride, after the train had entered the tunnel’ (Elsaesser, 1990: 128).

In an echo of R. W. Paul’s ‘switchback’ film, an exciting rollercoaster ride scene appears in the Blackpool Pleasure Beach sequence in Hindle Wakes (1927). The camera shots cut between point of view (POV) shots from the front of the rollercoaster, and shots of the main protagonists Fanny Hawthorn (Estelle Brody) and Allan Jeffcote (John Stuart) reacting to the thrill of the ride. Other Pleasure Beach ride POV shots appear in Sing As We Go (1934) and the documentary Holiday (1957), again combined with reaction shots from the holidaymakers in order to construct a thrilled reaction from the cinema-going audience. 

 

 The Big Dipper sequence from Hindle Wakes (1927)

In later years, the phantom ride also reappeared elsewhere in a different guise. One such example was the ‘Cine 2000’ at Alton Towers theme park which attracted visitors between 1980 – 1992. This was a large dome-shaped cinema which the audience stood inside, immersed in POV shots being projected on the concave ceiling of the dome. As the author of the Alton Towers Almanac website comments:

The Cine 2000 was a must have attraction in the early eighties, with many other parks around the country also installing them at about the same time… The movie itself was made up of specially filmed scenes on roller coasters, racing cars, and such like. The idea worked well, and many times I can remember people falling over, as they completely lost their sense of balance while watching (Alton Towers Almanac).

Today, phantom rides also appear as a marketing tool on the Blackpool Pleasure Beach website and on the Pleasure Beach YouTube channel, which features POV videos from the front of the Pepsi Max Big One, Infusion, and Revolution rollercoaster rides, for instance. Similarly, there are numerous amateur videos uploaded on YouTube by thrill-seeking holidaymakers who have either filmed their POV of the rides, or else, turned their cameras onto themselves to capture their faces as they scream. The phantom ride may have faded as a cinema genre or subject, but these examples prove that it still lives on today in some form, with marketing teams and amateur filmmakers considering the POV shots from these rides as worthwhile content for sharing on the internet.

POVs from 'The Big One' from the Pleasure Beach YouTube channel

Bibliography & External Links:

Barnes, John, 1983, Pioneers of the British Film, London: Bishopsgate Press

Chanan, Michael, The Dream That Kicks, The Prehistory and Early Years of Cinema in Britain, 1980, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul

Elsaesser, Thomas, (eds) Early Cinema, Space, Frame, Narrative, (1990), London: BFI

www.towersalmanac.com/areas/rides.php?id=47

www.blackpoolpleasurebeach.com