Alfie Joey fondly reminisces about days out at the seaside after enjoying a family break to Skegnes
AT Easter we took the kids to Skegness. I had never been to this lovely part of the East Lincolnshire coast line. The sunrises were fantastic and worth getting up for.
Mrs Joey even went for a dip! The town now has a faded seaside glamour about it and I love faded seaside glamour.
Hearing clinic in Manchester is offering free 60-minute hearing testsHidden Hearing | Sponsored
This Is The Wοrst Enemy Of Arthritisjointnutritionboost.com | Sponsored
Could You Afford a £2,000 Hospital Bill Today? Do This Insteadsavemoneymarket.co.uk | Sponsored
READ MORE: Alfie Joey lists his top 10 favourite North East monuments
These resorts are almost cinematic to me and even if I have not been there before they still evoke many memories of other seaside visits in my own childhood.
There are plenty of amusements in Skegness and a few fairground rides remain but I was imagining how busy and bustling it must’ve been back in its heyday before the package holiday boom of the mid 70s.
As a child, I had heard of the brilliance of Butlins and Pontins but they were very fancy to us as a family, as out of reach as Disney resorts. We preferred nipping to the nearest beach with pals or going on day trips.
ADVERTISING
I remember cycling with my mate Donald to Crimdon, which again, in its prime, had a pavilion, dodgems and of course it still has a fantastic coast line plus Crimdon Dene.
My wheel came off my rickety cycle when I hit a caravan park speed bump and a friendly caravaner armed with a spanner, kindly put it back on for me.
Further down the coast, even more exotic to me was Seaton Carew. When I was a lad, to me it was a Tesco Express Blackpool. Arcade games and a wobbley slide were the vivid highlights.
Of course, these days it is more renowned for a cad who conned his family and the police by faking his own death. The story was all the more memorable because Seaton Carew rhymes with canoe, his crackpot means of alleged disappearance!
Robert’s Tours was a bus company in Wingate, County Durham, still operating to this day, that took us to countless seaside venues during the summer holidays.
People from Hutton Henry, Thornley, Wheatley Hill, Trimdon, Easington and beyond will all remember Robert’s Tours buses.
The coaches would snake their way around the pit villages of the North East picking up passengers from colliery streets, welfare halls and social club car parks.
Sandwiches, flasks, towels and trunks all stuffed into a bag and a day on the beach and the slot machines. Interestingly, many of these journeys seemed to head south despite Northumberland providing extraordinary beaches. The only time I recall heading North was to Whitley Bay and South Shields. (I only discovered Tynemouth, Bamburgh, Seahouses and Craster much later in life. )
Most excursions were south to places like Redcar, Scarborough and Bridlington. The big tour was to Blackpool to see the lights. ‘First one to spot the tower’ There and back in a day with a stop off at Kirkby Stephen.
Then there were Mystery Tours. The joy of a Robert’s Tours “mystery tour” was that you really did not know where you were going until the wheels on the bus were going round, round, round and you could guess from the motorway signs where you might be heading.
The secrecy was part theatre, part hilarious. Would you be going somewhere, new, unexplored or was it a bit of an anticlimax and somewhere you had visited last week??
But, hey ho, affordable fun for the working classes and one of the few ways to get a taste of a “holiday” without leaving for a week.
The price of petrol at the moment I am tempted to see if Robert’s Tours are still putting on Mystery Tours!
Facts & Footnotes:
Blackpool gets its name from an old drainage channel that would release dark boggy water into the Irish Sea, literally forming a black pool of water.
The Daily Mirror had a flat capped man who was obscured in a photo in the paper; if you spotted him at a seaside venue, you got a prize.
Writer Anne Brontë passed away in Scarborough in 1849, while visiting for her health. She was only 29 and is buried in a graveyard which overlooks the South Bay and the castle.
Alfie Joey
People
