Manchester is a right place to start from. And the vastness of Victoria
Station--more like London than any other phenomenon in Manchester--with
its score of platforms, and its subways romantically lighted by red
lamps and beckoning pale hands, and its crowds eternally surging up
and down granitic flights of stairs---the vastness of this roaring spot
prepares you better than anything else could for the dimensions and
the loudness of your destination. The Blackpool excursionists fill
the twelfth platform from end to end, waiting with bags and baskets: a
multitude of well-marked types, some of the men rather violently smart
as to their socks and neckties, but for the most part showing that
defiant disregard of appearances which is perhaps the worst trait of
the Midland character. The women seem particularly unattractive in their
mack-intoshed blousiness--so much so that the mere continuance of the
race is a proof that they must possess secret qualities which render
them irresistible; they evidently consult their oculists to the neglect
of their dentists: which is singular, and would be dangerous to the
social success of any other type of woman.
“I never _did_ see such a coal-cellar, not in all my days!” exclaims one
lady, apparently outraged by sights seen in house-hunting.
And a middle-aged tradesman (or possibly he was an insurance agent)
remarks: “What I say is--the man who doesn’t appreciate sterling
generosity--is no man!”
Such fragments of conversation illustrate the fine out-and-out
idiosyncrasy of the Midlands.
The train comes forward like a victim, and in an instant is captured,
and in another instant is gone, leaving an empty platform. These people
ruthlessly know what they want. And for miles and many miles the train
skims over canals, and tram-cars, and yards, and back-streets, and at
intervals you glimpse a young woman with her hair in pins kneeling in
sack-cloth to wash a grimy doorstep. And you feel convinced that in
an hour or two, when she has “done,” that young woman, too, will be in
Blackpool; or, if not she, at any rate her sister. *****
The station of arrival is enormous; and it is as though all the
passenger rolling-stock of the entire country had had an important
rendezvous there. And there are about three cabs. This is not the town
of cabs. On every horizon you see floating terrific tramcars which seat
ninety people and which ought to be baptised Lusitania and Baltic.
You wander with your fellow men down a long street of cookshops with
calligraphic and undecipherable menus, and at every shopdoor is a
loud-tongued man to persuade you that his is the gate of paradise and
the entrance to the finest shilling dinner in Blackpool. But you have
not the courage of his convictions; though you would like to partake of
the finest shilling dinner, you dare not, with your southern stomach in
rebellion against you. You slip miserably into the Hotel Majestic,
and glide through many Lincrusta-Walton passages to an immense, empty
smoking-room, where there is one barmaid and one waiter. You dare not
even face the bar.... In the end the waiter chooses your _apéritif_ for
you, and you might be in London. The waiter, agreeably embittered by
existence, tells you all about everything.
“This hotel used to be smaller,” he says. “A hundred and twenty. A nice
select party, you know. Now it’s all changed. Our better-class clients
have taken houses at St. Anne’s.. . . Jews! I should say so! Two hundred
and fifty out of three hundred in August. Some of ‘em all right, of
course, but they try to own the place. They come in for tea, or it may
be a small ginger with plenty of lemon and ice, and when they’ve had
that they’ve had their principal drink for the day.. . . The lift is
altered from hydraulic to electricity. . . years ago. . .”
Meanwhile a client who obviously knows his way about has taken
possession of the bar and the barmaid.
“I’ve changed my frock, you see,” says she.
“Changed it down here?” he demands.
“Yes. Well, I’ve been ironing. . . Oh! You monkey!”
In a mirror you catch her delicately chucking him under the chin. And,
feeling that this kind of thing is not special to Blackpool, that it
in fact might happen anywhere, you decide that it is time to lunch and
leave the oasis of the Majestic and confront Blackpool once more.
*****
The Fair Ground is several miles off, and on the way are three piers,
loaded with toothless young women flirting, and with middle-aged
women diligently crocheting or knitting. Millions of stitches must
be accomplished to every waltz that the bands play; and perhaps every
second a sock is finished. But you may not linger on any pier. There
is the longest sea-promenade in Europe to be stepped. As you leave the
shopping quarter and undertake the vista of ten thousand boarding-house
windows (in each of which is a white table full of knives and forks and
sauce-bottles) you are enheartened by a banneret curving in the breeze
with these words: “Flor de Higginbotham. The cigar that you come back
for. 2d.” You know that you will, indeed, come back for it.. . . At
last, footsore, amid a maze of gliding trams, your vision dizzy with the
passing and re-passing of trams, you arrive at the Fair Ground. And the
first thing you see is a woman knitting on a campstool as she guards
the booth of a spiritualistic medium. The next is a procession of people
each carrying a doormat and climbing up the central staircase of a huge
lighthouse, and another procession of people, each sitting on a doormat
and sliding down a corkscrew shoot that encircles the lighthouse. Why
a lighthouse? A gigantic simulation of a bottle of Bass would have been
better.
The scenic railway and the switchback surpass all previous dimensions in
their kind. Some other method of locomotion is described as “half a mile
of jolly fun.” And the bowl-slide is “a riot of joy.”
“Joy” is the key-word of the Fair Ground. You travel on planks over
loose, unkempt sand, and under tethered circling Maxim aeroplanes, from
one joy to the next. In the House of Nonsense, “joy reigns supreme.”
Giggling also reigns supreme. The “human spider,” with a young woman’s
face, is a source of joy, and guaranteed by a stentorian sailor to be
alive. Another genuine source of joy is “‘Dante’s Inferno’ up to date.”
Another enormous booth, made mysterious, is announced as “the home of
superior enjoyments.” Near by is the abode of the two-headed giant, as
to whom it is shouted upon oath that “he had a brother which lived
to the height of twelve foot seven.” Then you come to the destructive
section, offering joy still more vivid. Here by kicking a football
you may destroy images of your fellow men. Or--exquisitely democratic
invention--you can throw deadly missiles at life-sized dolls that fly
round and round in life-sized motor-cars: genius is, in fact, abroad on
the Fair Ground.
All this is nothing compared to the joy-wheel, certainly the sublimest
device for getting money and giving value for it that a student of human
nature ever hit upon. You pay threepence for admittance into the booth
of the joy-wheel, and upon entering you are specially informed that you
need not practise the joy-wheel unless you like; it is your privilege to
sit and watch. Having sat down, there is no reason why you should ever
get up again, so diverting is the spectacle of a crowd of young men and
boys clinging to each other on a large revolving floor and endeavouring
to defy the centrifugal force. Every time a youth is flung against the
cushions at the side you grin, and if a thousand youths were thrown off,
your thousandth grin would be as hearty as the first. The secret thought
of every spectator is that a mixture of men and maidens would be even
more amusing. A bell rings, and the floor is cleared, and you anticipate
hopefully, but the word is for children only, and you are somewhat
dashed, though still inordinately amused. Then another bell, and you
hope again, and the word is for ladies only. The ladies rush on to
the floor with a fearful alacrity, and are flung rudely off it by an
unrespecting centrifugal force (which alone the attendant, acrobatic
and stately, can dominate); they slide away in all postures, head over
heels, shrieking, but the angel of decency seems to watch over their
skirts.. . . And at length the word is for ladies and gentlemen
together, and the onslaught is frantic. The ladies and gentlemen, to
the number of a score or so, clutch at each other, making a bouquet
of trousers and petticoats in the centre of the floor. The revolutions
commence, and gain in rapidity, and couple after couple is shot off,
yelling, to the periphery. They enjoy it. Oh! They enjoy it! The ladies,
abandoning themselves to dynamic law, slither away with closed eyes and
muscles relaxed in a voluptuous languor. And then the attendant, braving
the peril of the wheel, leaps to the middle, and taking a lady in his
arms, exhibits to the swains how it is possible to keep oneself in the
centre and keep one’s damsel there too. And then, with a bow, he hands
the lady back to her lawful possessor. Nothing could be more English, or
more agreeable, than the curious contradiction of frank abandonment and
chaste simplicity which characterises this extraordinary exhibition.
It is a perfect revelation of the Anglo-Saxon temperament, and would
absolutely baffle any one of Latin race.. . . You leave here because you
must; you tear yourself away and return to the limitless beach, where
the sea is going nonchalantly about its business just as if human
progress had not got as far as the joy-wheel.
*****
After you have gone back for the cigar, and faced the question of the
man on the kerb, “Who says Blackpool rock?” and eaten high tea in a
restaurant more gilded than the Trocadero, and visited the menagerie,
and ascended to the top of the Tower in order to be badgered by rather
nice girl-touts with a living to make and a powerful determination to
make it, and seen the blue turn to deep purple over the sea, you reach
at length the dancing-halls, which are the justification of Blackpool’s
existence. Blackpool is an ugly town, mean in its vastness, but its
dancing-halls present a beautiful spectacle. You push your way up
crowded stairs into crowded galleries, where the attendants are
persuasive as with children--“_Please_ don’t smoke here”--and you see
the throng from Victoria Station and a thousand other stations in
its evening glory of drooping millinery and fragile blouses, though
toothless as ever. You see it in a palatial and enormous setting of
crystal and gold under a ceiling like the firmament. And you struggle to
the edge and look over, and see, beneath, the glittering floor covered
with couples in a strange array of straw hats and caps, and knickers,
and tennis shoes, and scarcely a glove among the five hundred of them.
Only the serio-comic M.C., with a delicately waved wand, conforms to the
fashion of London. He has his hands full, has that M.C., as he trips
to and fro, calling, with a curious stress and pause: “One--more couple
please! One--more couple please!” And then the music pulsates--does
really pulsate--and releases the multitude.. . . It is a sight to
stir emotion. The waltz is even better. And then beings perched in the
loftiest corners of the roof shoot coloured rays upon the floor, and
paper snow begins to fall, and confetti to fly about, and eyes to soften
and allure.. . .
And all around are subsidiary halls, equally resplendent, where people
are drinking, or lounging, or flirting, or gloating over acrobats,
monkeys and ballerinas. The tiger roars, the fountain tinkles, the corks
go pop, the air is alive with music and giggling, the photographer cries
his invitation, and everywhere there is the patter of animated feet and
the contagion of a barbaric and honest gaiety.
Brains and imagination are behind this colossal phenomenon. For sixpence
you can form part of it; for sixpence you can have delight, if you are
young and simple and lusty enough. This is the huge flower that
springs from the horrid bed of the factory system. Human creatures are
half-timers for this; they are knocked up at 5.30 a.m. in winter for
this; they go on strike for this; they endure for eleven months and
three weeks for this. They all earn their living by hard and repulsive
work, and here they are in splendour! They will work hard at joy till
they drop from exhaustion. You can see men and women fast asleep on the
plush, supporting each other’s heads in the attitudes of affection. The
railway stations and the night-trains are waiting for these.