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The House of Fun
Inside was fine: cakewalks, wobbly mirrors, big revolving barrel thing inside which you ran around nuts like in a mouse-wheel; anything to make the strawberry Cresta frothing in your tummy come straight back up and out through your nostrils.
But outside, someone-in-charge was trying to put the willies up the kids with two of the most menacing life-sized dancing puppets in glass cases — a ghostly mincing clown (a Martin Clunes lookalike) and a ghastly policeman. After 30 years and supposedly now grown up, I still wake up screaming in the night, covered in all sorts.
Jack's House
Within was another giant mouse-wheel but you could grab the outside edge of this one and it would lift you up and pull you around the circumference (and your arms from their sockets); or if you were taller you could stand inside limbs-outstretched like that drawing by the Da Vinci bloke and become a human wheel (I witnessed a tall lad called Brian try this — but his mates wouldn't stop revolving him for about five minutes, laughing as he squealed).
There was a sort of spinning disc at 45° on which you stood and held on to a central post, before losing not only your balance but several of your teeth. And a small, finely-weighted daft roundabout in the middle of the room — clearly only put there as something else to bash your head on when you fell off one of the other things. The dark tunnel......pitch black with ricketty planks of wood to trip on and twist your ankles, sitting in pain to the occasional "Mu-ha-ha!" from the Ghost Train through the wall. And those wiggly mirrors again.
Right next to Jack's House was an outside tap on the wall beside the slimy Empress toilets, positioned perfectly for the refilling of water pistols (of which more later).
The Dodgems
My favourite. I remember there was a blond guy who worked on various rides (those money-collecting staff always wore white coats didn't they); don't know his name but he looked like the lead singer from Flintlock. Anyway, so the bell goes and the dodgems are off......he's showing off on the back of one with two giggling schoolgirls at the wheel, when he slips, falls off and his arm gets crushed between the bumpers of two cars. I still allow myself a smile when I think back — one minute he thinks he's David Essex in That'll Be The Day and the next he's screaming like a girl. The puff.
The Waltzer
Employed sadistic teddy boy operatives who, in something best described as schadenfreude, would spin you faster by shoving the car round with the soles of their beetle crushers. You'd cling like peaches and for dear life to the metal 'safety' hoop, pressed back into the seat as the G-force sucked out your eyeballs. Just the job when someone was sick and their mates all got covered.
The Skid
Amazing how this was ever allowed, BS Kitemark rejection probably lost in the post. A non-undulating Waltzery type of thing where the car in which you chose to die was controlled (in theory) by a pedal, allowing your car to violently pivot in a 180° arc and slam and lunch-losingly bounce back against a, ahem, 'safety' wire.
The Big Dipper
I remember this from the early '70s, before its no-surprise demise, watching the cars whizz round and up through the little tower and down. But there was an incident or several in which the cars left the rails, hurtling hapless passengers to a final one-way-systemward jam-fest. You weren't supposed to stand up either in case you were flung to kingdom come, but of course there's always one as my nanna used to say. Didn't a roller car once fly right over the road, bounce off fat Alan Geggie and crash through the windows of Taylor's garage? Bye bye Big Dipper.
The Jets
"Hsssssssssss! Sssssssssssss!" Yes, yanking back that joystick till the 'boom' (big metal arm thing) on which your Jet was hopefully fixed was near vertical, and just staying up there till the end of the ride,
with the wind whistling through your curls to Lene Lovich's 'Lucky Number' or 'Some Girls' by Racey booming out from the stacks. Another thrill to be had was to work the joystick forwards and backwards so your Jet would 'bounce' up and down. See that kid with an ice cream down there, standing too close? Okay, next time round...joystick forward and down...... "Ssssssssssssss...SMACK!"
The Twister
Like we did last summer. It was probably more fun to stand as close as you dared to the revolving cars spinning furiously towards you than being on the ride itself. And you certainly had less chance of being killed, unless it was you who just happened to be in the way of whichever poor bloke that week slipped under the — here's that word again — 'safety' bar.
The Grand National
What else but a bunch of wooden horses, saddled with what looked like old motorbike seats, which raced in unison around a surging and dipping track. Now either several Cider Barrel ice lollies were 'kicking in', or else I'm sure that the operator would crank up the last ride late at night to twice the speed. For a laugh. None of today's stick-in-the-mud Health and Safety shite.
“It hides a nasty stain that's lying there...”
Amusements
There were loads of these in and around "The City", and so much better in the days before video games took over. Me, I loved those machines where you would drop in 2p, give it a big shove when the man wasn't looking and loads of coins would fall in the tray below (nowadays a purple ring appears around you if you do that). Archaic Grand National betting thing on which miniature plastic Lester Piggotts and Joe Mercers whizzed around a track. You lost.
The arcades were crap really, but are mostly long gone anyway......The Mint (with Little Johnny in the change kiosk, you know, the small guy with the curly ginger hair who smelled of wee I'm told), Talk of The Town and American Pastimes (Millers).
Other dubious pastimes to Crow about...
...included the grand but spooky Victorian carousel with its snarling horses; the Octopus ride; roundabouts with the old Austin pedal cars and little double decker buses you could go upstairs on; that big bumpy slide in which you sat on a sack and bounced all the way down till your arse was black and blue; and various sideshows where you threw darts at gonks or fired rifles at coconuts. Wasn't there a Big Wheel in the very early '70s or was it in the decade before?
"The Fortune Tellers"
I remember a few of us kids (names withheld) pretending to be Starsky and Hutch at the several "Real Grandaughter of Gypsy Rose Lee" caravan/hut things — one would quickly open the door to the waiting area, and the rest with water pistols would soak the elderly ladies inside before slamming the door shut and legging it. Now that was fun!
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Lack of Images!
Yes, I know. With such a dearth of pics showing
Whitley Bay in the golden '70s, these are what we
have to contend with.
Perhaps the era is still considered
too recent to be 'nostalgic'.
Well, nostalgia ain't what it used
to
be, let me tell you, and,
hopefully before too long, people
will stop pointing at me in the street
and poking fun at the stark chastity
of my otherwise very fine site.
Council Rubbish Tip
Something else which seems
hard to believe now but behind
the old seafront council offices
and the Priory Theatre, there
was a big yard in the corner of
which the binmen would
temporarily dump huge piles of
stinking rubbish. Even in summertime. It must have been
stuff thrown away from the
shops on the Spanish City 'island'
as I remember rummaging in
there in 1975-76 and pinching
discarded shop displays and stuff.
What a stink!
Once we found dozens of spent
flourescent tubes and had a highly
dangerous but a scream of a
'javelin fight' in the library park. |
Disgusting things at the best of times
