BLACKPOOL
By TOM HARRISSON
THERE is one industry in Blackpool : pleasure. Pleasure supports IIo,00o residents, more than in industrial Bury or Wigan. In Bank Holiday week this year 600,000 people from inland towns came to Blackpool of their own free wills. Most baths were used as beds ; the crowds were denser than on Coronation Day in London. And even on an ordinary day I have been unable to get a seat anywhere along the front ; all are full, three deep. Why ?
The sea may seem the obvious answer. But research has shown the sea to be a secondary factor today. A fraction only of the people who come to Blackpool enter the sea. Many day excursionists come straight off their trains, cross the street, and wander through the wonderful Woolworth's until the pubs open, then go there.
• No. The sea, sands, natural things, are only a part of the initial process that made Blackpool what it is. Each year they recede further into the historical background. The millworker at home sees so little of green freshness in 51 weeks, that in his one week's freedom he rarely thinks of seeking non-urban views. There are no trees, and very few flowers, in the heart of Blackpool ; but the buildings grow, and gay lights blossom. Some stronger stimulus than nature is needed to break up the year's routine. It is provided by the most elaborate mechanisms of escape, the most scientific equipment of magic and mysticism so far devised in any culture. The emphasis is on things that cannot occur in Rochdale or Bolton.
The note is struck by the Tower, conspicuous for miles, and adequately orchestrated by the Tower Company and its competitors, who decide what pleasures the holiday makers shall have to choose from. The tempo is set by the most agreeable police force in England, which ignores the hundreds of drunks littered along the front on Saturday and other nights. And a different aspect was shown when a policeman, made of the most durable material possible, was added to the " Auto Scooter," on the magnificent Pleasure Beach (architect Emberton). On the " Auto Scooter " you drive a little car and bump into everyone else. The pseudo-policeman was put in one car. With the utmost dispatch he was totally destroyed, smashed to pulp. Again, the Girl Pat' is a very ordinary little trawler. But she broke laws, and it costs you a penny to look at her through a telescope from the prom. ; scores of people pay their pennies gladly. Cart-horses have been trained to, drag carts through the surf and unload crowds into waiting launches on which they are taken out to her, price Is. All day long the motor- boats are going to and fro.
All along the sea-front, stalls are packed against each other, drawing apparently endless streams of coatless men, hatless women, children with spades. There is a big show labelled " Colonel Barker and his or her bride." There is a horrible- looking, pop-eyed, green-eyed object called " THE MECHANICAL ROBOT " THE SCIENTIFIC MIRACLE OF MECHANISM.
The object lives up to its paradoxical title by telling you, for sixpence, the number of your tram ticket, while produc- ing from one side your horoscope and from the other astro- logical information. On Central Pier a charming man sells cigarette cases with false bottoms, so that you can make the cigarettes disappear when you don't want to give one away. He, too, subscribes to this language of mystic-science. He says : " And the magic word is Esperanto-Saspirilla.' He thinks you're foolin' him with the empty case. But you're not." And then, lest we may feel that this is an instrument altogether too really unreal for ordinary you or me, he brings us back to earth with " Ninepence. It's a real cigarette case. Chrome finished." In this atmosphere it is only reasonable that in the largest lettering on the great poster of " attractions within " outside Lois Tussaud's (apparently Lois is no relation to Madame), standing out amongst the cricketers, royalties, actresses, generals, is the name of Dr. Buck Ruxton. The doctor, says the very right wing catalogue,.is " a true type of the Orient " ; he gets more space than anyone else in the catalogue, second most space being very naturally given to another mystic figure from the east, T. E. Lawrence. In the midst of all this, Revivalist Four-Square Principal Jeffries, holding crowds enthralled each evening in " the Big Tent," miraculously turns sick people into healthy people ; he has on his tea table a jam-pot which, when picked up, turns into a jack-in-the-box. There are fortune-tellers every few yards. Strange Abyssinian sideshows, the Mysterious Dr. ?, the Gilly-Gilly Man, a monstrous Indian Theatre, a vast animated Noah's Ark, the Unique Fairland, the Ghost Train, and herbalists galore with crocodiles in their windows.
Such things are fragrant breaths of the unattainable. There are other experiences, of things that could be done in ordinary life, but only at the risk of probable death. Such are the dangerous speeds of The Great Dipper, The Grand National, The Bug, and The Whip, which whirl you to death's edge, but inevitably return you safe. Then there are the sideshows of more obvious frustration, like " Peeping Tom," which naturally attracts me ; heads come up every few seconds to peer down over a high wall, at a life-size pair of lovers sprawled in amorous unawareness on a rustic seat. It is very usual to aim the first two or three balls at the peepers, and then the rest of your threepennyworth, hurled viciously, at the figures of the lovers, who are so close that you cannot miss. And in this action holidaymakers signify their general attitude to sex in Blackpool. A visitor might judge, from local talk, the great dance halls, the numerous stimuli of Halls of Mirrors, Fun House, Wonderland, and the sugar-sweet objects called " May's Vest " as conspicuous in shop windows, that this was an immoral place. Actually it is one of the most sexually moral towns anywhere. To a surprising degree, love also takes a holiday.
These are the high spots, a few of them. But the savings of a year's industrial work will not permit you to enjoy these glories for more than a short time each day. Each morning the thousands of boarding houses, 4s. 6d. (or less) bed and breakfast, discharge this horde of holiday-makers, who then proceed to perform what we term " the Great Wandering." A typical group of two married couples spent one typical day, morning and afternoon, walking seven miles along the promenades, &c. They were unanimous in one thing— in looking up at every one of the six aeroplanes that pass over. They spent between them is. Iod. on cigarettes (they smoked only ten altogether ; is smoking, like sex, affected by escape from normal routine ?), is. on the pier, Is. on transport, is. on chairs, 8d. on caramels, 6d. on ice-cre_am, 4s. at cinema (evening), 2d. in lavatories, and id. on news- paper. Of these the newspaper gave the longest value. It was treated as follows : Mr. Jones bought it, Mr. Smith read it, and then split it in half : the first half was read by Mrs. Smith, and read again by Mr. Smith ; the second half was read by Mr. Jones, read by Mrs. Jones, read again by Mr. Jones, read again by Mrs. Jones. Mrs. Jones spent one penny out of the total Jos. 3d. The four went home to their inland town with a penny between them. That is how Blackpool likes to speed the parting guest.
There is not space here to speak of the holiday-makers' obsession with time, which dominates conversations (is only fourteenth in importance inland), constant talk about home and getting home, bad temper to children ; nor of the children who mostly get left behind, while to larger families the week's holiday is simply a week of compulsory work- stoppage, a week of dreaded privation, so that those who need holidays most are least likely to get them. Holidays with pay " will change all that," and have many other unex- pected effects. But Blackpool is a key to all of our civilisation, its science, superstition and - sense. It is an immediately obvious field for Mass-Observation (see pamphlet by Charles Madge and myself, publisher Muller). There are times when the observer feels overwhelmed by its strangeness, when he must react from recording into feeling. And if he is a good observer he will feel in nearly the same way as those around him. For what it is worth, I feel that the jazz tune they are crooning along the front just now puts it quite well in its dream-marine title " When my dream boat comes home." This is a sort of industrial sleep ; it is nothing to do with the story of clog, cobble, warp and weft. But though these, my crowded friends, see that Blackpool exists, they can't forget soot and mill-sirens. They can't believe it's true. Yet it is true.
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