Metadata
WORK ID: NEFA 22297 (Master Record)
| Title | Year | Date |
| TOWN MOOR HOPPINGS AND RACE WEEK | 1936 | 1936-01-01 |
|
Details
Original Format: 16mm Colour: Black & White Sound: Silent Duration: 4 mins 28 secs Credits: S. J. Rosslyn Smith Genre: Amateur Subject: Sport |
| Summary Amateur film of Newcastle upon Tyne's Hoppings fair at the Town Moor and the race meeting at Gosforth Park in June 1936 by Newcastle & District Amateur Cinematographers Association member S. J. Rosslyn Smith. |
|
Description
Amateur film of Newcastle upon Tyne's Hoppings fair at the Town Moor and the race meeting at Gosforth Park in June 1936 by Newcastle & District Amateur Cinematographers Association member S. J. Rosslyn Smith.
At the start of the Hoppings fair, showpeople from the Ling family haul in trucks carrying the ‘Ben Hur’ Ark ride pulled by steam traction engine, the vehicles stuck in the muddy ground of the Town Moor, Newcastle.
A young showgirl smiles as she looks out from the back of her...
Amateur film of Newcastle upon Tyne's Hoppings fair at the Town Moor and the race meeting at Gosforth Park in June 1936 by Newcastle & District Amateur Cinematographers Association member S. J. Rosslyn Smith.
At the start of the Hoppings fair, showpeople from the Ling family haul in trucks carrying the ‘Ben Hur’ Ark ride pulled by steam traction engine, the vehicles stuck in the muddy ground of the Town Moor, Newcastle.
A young showgirl smiles as she looks out from the back of her travelling caravan. An old woman is cooking on a stove outside her own travelling caravan.
A thrilling new dive bomber ride with twin cars on a rotating arm is in action. People enjoy a chair-o-plane while a Collins family truck stands in the background. There are big crowds strolling down the central avenue of the Hoppings. The dive bomber and Ark ride are shown again. A father and son slide down the Helter-Skelter. A black American show woman dances, laughing, enticing in punters to a show. A Wild West show lead by William Shufflebottom, aka Texas Bill, performing under the name Colorado's Troupe are running through a lasso routine to attract people into their show. Visitors ride in the swingboats and on the Corporation Thriller.
A clown emerges from a show and acknowledges the camera. There’s some interest in the Wild West show advertising ‘The Great Indian Torture’. Another side show presents ‘The Bride of Frankenstein’ and ‘Horrors of the Jungle’. A mother hangs on to the hand of her young blonde-haired daughter. A monkey is chained to a miniature car at another sideshow, attempting to chew his way out.
Toddlers are riding on a child’s galloper with a larger galloper ride also attracting visitors. A Micky and Minnie mouse mural decorates a booth. Children are riding in some traditional swingboats and on a carousel with animal models. Adults and children are enjoying the dodgems as the carousel turns faster and faster. Friends at the fairground take a turn on the waltzer, the mechanical swingboats, and the Helter-Skelter.
In the next sequnce, there's a panoramic view of the Gosforth Park races, probably the Northumberland Plate, also known as the Pitmen's Derby. The crowd mills around placing bets. The stands are packed with people. Horses are led out and go for a warm-up ride. A card sharp plies his trade with the punters. The jockeys now line up their horses for the start of a race, and they’re off. Footage follows of the race.
Context
There was a time that every kid dreamed of running away to the circus or escaping with the travelling fairs that stopped by many a town or village green, back in the day. Amateur filmmaker S. J. Rosslyn Smith certainly felt the draw of the endless ballyhoo, crowds, lights, shock and surprise, in the intoxicating mix of thrilling rides and sideshow oddities at the Hoppings, Tyneside’s famous June fair, hosted on Newcastle’s Town Moor since 1882. Here he beautifully captures some of the...
There was a time that every kid dreamed of running away to the circus or escaping with the travelling fairs that stopped by many a town or village green, back in the day. Amateur filmmaker S. J. Rosslyn Smith certainly felt the draw of the endless ballyhoo, crowds, lights, shock and surprise, in the intoxicating mix of thrilling rides and sideshow oddities at the Hoppings, Tyneside’s famous June fair, hosted on Newcastle’s Town Moor since 1882. Here he beautifully captures some of the workaday life of the show people and the exuberance of the annual fair itself in the 1930s. In the words of Henry Morley, writing in the 1850s, travelling fairs are “the unwritten story of the history of the people”.
An early member, and later chairman, of Newcastle & District Amateur Cinematographers Association (ACA), Rosslyn Smith was among cast or crew of several of this long-standing cine club’s productions in its first decades. He produced and directed the strange low-budget comedy thriller It Happened Thus and documented the city of Newcastle and its celebration in films like Looking Back and A City Symphony. The Hoppings was initiated as the North of England Temperance Festival, an alcohol-free counter-attraction to the boozy Race Week. The ‘Hoppings’ name stuck in the 1950s and is thought to derive from the Middle English word “hopping” meaning dance. In the 1930s daily visitors totalled 150,000 on days when the weather was good. In the early years the huge and gaudily painted fairground rides were steam-driven, but took some muscle to move. The elaborate Gallopers and Switchback rides first designed and constructed in 1888, along with their later electrified counterparts, the Scenic Railway, were a highpoint of early fairground imagination, engineering and aesthetics, with carved and decorated cars ranging from dragons to Venetian gondolas and rodeos. Pioneering showman families such as the Farrars, Lings, and the Murphys from South Shields returned to the Hoppings year after year with ever wilder and ingenious constructions. It’s the less than glamorous side to travelling with the fair Rosslyn Smith first introduces as show family the Lings and their helpers have to haul their living wagons and ‘Ben Hur’ themed Ark ride through thick mud to their pitch on the Town Moor. Joe Ling had originally worked with the famous Farrars but started on his own with a coconut shy and then a teddy bear show before World War One, “The Great American Bear Pit”. The ‘teddy bears’ were, of course, live, chained and trained for the audience’s entertainment. The Arks were roundabout rides with animal mounts popular in the inter-war years. Robert J. Lakin introduced the Ben Hur theme to the Ark rides he built, stunningly decorated by Edwin Hall who had been inspired by the scenes of the Circus Maximus in Rome made famous by the 1925 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer silent epic film directed by Fred Niblo. Ling’s was built for him in 1935 and was travelled by the family until the 1980s but sadly it was destroyed by fire in 1996. Another of Lakin’s themed rides can be spotted in this film, the Coronation Speedway, produced in 1937 to celebrate George VI and his wife Elizabeth’s coronation, but retaining the Ben-Hur themed scenery For only the bravest souls, one wild ride, the thrilling Loop-o-Plane, is getting an early outing at the Hoppings, imported by John Collins. “The machine was a strange sight, thin arms and hard angular cars, evoking a fear in the pit of the stomach. Its appearance soon gave rise to the nicknames of 'hammers' or 'clogs'.” The ride was first developed in the United States by Lee Ulrich Eyerly during the Depression era 1920s as a training device for pilots, patented as the Orientator and produced commercially. But, Eyerley soon realised its potential as an amusement park ride when exhibited to the public and re-focused his company towards producing for this market. Perhaps what most conjures strong feelings of nostalgia for travelling fairs of old when watching documentary footage of the Hoppings are the sideshows pedalling oddities, illusions and trickery, the showman’s spiel, dancing girls, and colourful hype of the painted canvas banners (promising more than the act or exhibit could ever deliver) integral to the tradition. These sideshow swindles were somehow part of the fascination and the fun. One sideshow entices with ‘The Bride of Frankenstein’, ‘Horrors of the Jungle’ and an opium den in addition to a titillating ‘glamour’ show, a popular sight at the Hoppings until censorship was relaxed in the liberal 1960s. James Whale’s successful American science-fiction horror film Bride of Frankenstein, released in 1935 and starring the great Boris Karloff as the monster, unsurprisingly seeped into fairground sideshows as a theme and attraction, the anticipation of sex and a scare all too enticing for the naïve punter. Another focus for Rosslyn Smith’s camera are the cowboys and cowgirls promoting the Wild West show of Colorado’s Troupe, actually the extended family of William Shufflebottom, aka Texas Bill, a showman from Yorkshire marketing a myth of the American frontier in popular shows that featured sharpshooting, knife-throwing and snake-charming acts, along with the spectacular Indian Torture routine, a complicated act involving knives, battle-axes and tomahawks. Three generations of the Shufflebottom family performed the show from the 1880s through to the 1960s when their popularity had dramatically declined. The pioneer for the travelling Wild West variety show was Buffalo Bill Cody who toured America and Europe between 1883 and 1913 and laid the foundations for the birth of rodeo. His shows were ‘living ethnographic extravaganza combining the educational and exotic with the spectacle of the circus and theatre’ involving Native Americans, indigenous animals and large scale historical re-enactments. The show’s representation of this mythical America may well have influenced European immigration to the States. In the 1960s and 70s stalls still boasted living novelty acts such as sheep with four horns, the Giant Bee, striptease knife throwing, the Wolf Man, George the Gentle Giant and Peggy the High Diver, whilst booths eight feet square offering Vampyre’s Daughter, The Living Half Woman, Fanny by Lamplight and Midnight Madness also lured in the voyeur. The fairground was always alive with “monsters” and “exotic” animals and magicians, and arguably gave birth to most forms of popular entertainment. Fairgrounds were amongst the first venues to show moving pictures to local audiences in cinematograph booths back in the late 1800s. In December 1896, Randall Williams introduced the cinematograph at travelling fairs which became a major venue for 'living pictures' in the period up to 1914. The famous bioscope proprietor Mamie Paine was a regular at the Hoppings, and in 1907 showman William Murphy of Sunderland presented the largest bioscope show ever seen in Newcastle. Rosslyn Smith includes some footage of the Northumberland Plate horse racing at Gosforth Park. Also known as the Pitmen's Derby, the event took place during “Race Week”, a holiday for miners until 1949. By 1952 it became a Saturday race. The British weekly illustrated newspaper The Graphic was reporting in its column 'The Turf' on 3 July 1886 that the Northumberland Plate was falling in favour year by year, despite an injection of cash. It was once 'the most popular race in the North'. The Plate and the St Leger were in the 1930s still the two big races of the North, the Plate a £1,500 event in 1935. The Plate Day was first established on the Town Moor in 1833 and transferred to its present venue at Newcastle's Gosforth Park in 1882. References: http://circusmania.blogspot.com/2013/05/two-hundred-years-in-circus.html https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/nfca/researchandarticles/fairgroundrides https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/nfca/researchandarticles/fairgroundshow https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/nfca/researchandarticles/showmanship https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/nfca/researchandarticles/newcastlefair https://showmensmuseum.org/wild-west-shows-2/ |
