AND ANOTHER THING
The Babylonian luxury of Fawlty Towers with a Blackpool accent
PAUL JOHNSON
It is indicative of Labour's changed per- sona that the New Comrades, rather than the supposedly higher-class Tories, are the first to pull out of Blackpool as a confer- ence centre. For New Labour, Blackpool is just not good enough: hopelessly downmar- ket, naff, off-message, non-U, vulgar, stink- ing of fish and chips and, not least, so terri- bly working-class. Yes, it is all these things. It is also many other things.
I have entertained a love-hate for Black- pool all my life. My widowed mother had a cottage in Lytham, down the coast, when I was a teenager. Lytham was old: old money, old houses, old-fashioned manners, an old windmill, an old 'green' stretching to the sea. But it was also full of old people, and I wanted youth. So I used to go to Blackpool, then crammed to bursting with delicious, scented girls, short of men (it was wartime) and willing to give even a 16-year- old a whirl (my public school ways and accent helped). At the Tower Ballroom and the Empress Ballroom in the Winter Gar- dens, there were hundreds of these divine creatures, in their best frocks and perms, lined up and waiting to be asked to dance. Provided you held them properly, kept your hands free from sweat and avoided tread- ing on their nice suede court shoes, they would move in close and wriggle genteelly. Blackpool was big money at a popular level, so it got the best bands too: Edmun- do Ros and his Latin-American Music, Roy Fox, Harty Roy, Henry Hall and an all- woman outfit exactly like the one in Some Like It Hot. The music excited the girls, and after a visit to Blackpool I always had to go to confession (nothing serious, of course).
Then, from the mid-1950s, I traipsed reg- ularly to Blackpool with the press pack, attending the TU congress as well as the big two party conferences (the Liberals usually went to smaller dumps). The media hated Blackpool, but it's my impression that most delegates enjoyed it, even if they were not prepared to say so. Blackpool is the only resort which has three piers in full working order. It prides itself on having at least seven live shows, so visitors (who usu- ally come for only a week) can go to a dif- ferent one every night. It has the longest, widest and firmest sands in Britain, up to Daytona Beach standard. Its illuminations are unrivalled, its funfairs top-notch, it has countless cavernous pubs and wine bars, trams, lines of patient donkeys and more fortune-tellers than anywhere else. Chil- dren of all ages and classes, old men in belts-and-braces and ladies in curlers from Coronation Street, plus — these days Arabs, all love the place.
But it has, as Kennedy meanly said of Nixon, `no class'. It must be the only resort in the world where the landladies come from a higher social stratum than their guests, and pull rank accordingly. 'Now, then, ladies and gents, once breakfast is cleared, we don't want to see you again till high tea at five o'clock.' And out into the streets they humbly go, to huddle in shel- ters on the front when, as often happens, the rain sweeps in off the Irish Sea or the wind howls down from the Pennines. All the indoor alternatives involve spending money. Blackpool is a carefully co-ordinat- ed machine for separating working-class families from their cash, and most visitors leave at the end of the week to return to Warrington and Burnley, Nelson and Brad- ford, Sunderland and Macclesfield with their pockets empty. They like it that way. They think they have had a good time when they get home skint. And it's probably true. Anyroad, as they say, they come back year after year.
The media and the conference toffs — smartyboots Labour spin-doctors and the like — hate Blackpool, not because it's dear but because it's cheap. There is noth- ing to splurge their expense accounts on. There are no easy-access gambling joints as in Brighton. There are only two grandish hotels, the Imperial (usually the conference HQ and full) and, more recently, the Pem- broke. All the rest are glorified boarding- houses, most of them not even glorified. It says a lot for Blackpool's sense of priorities that my favourite eating joint there is a funny little oyster bar, more like a but real- ly, on the front. Michael Foot always used to lunch there too, and before him Iain Macleod and Reggie Maudling. I once took Enoch Powell there and he said, settling in, `Ah! Elysium!'
For many years Blackpool boasted the worst hotel in Europe. I will call it the Red- brick Spa. It was a vast barracks, several miles out of town, on a windswept desert of sand dunes, where taxis seldom penetrated. No doubt it is right up to Mohamed Fayed standards nowadays, but in those times its motto was: `Doan't you know there's a war on?' It was Fawlty Towers in spades with no jokes. Newspaper managements would arrange accommodation there for journal- ists they hated. I spent one night in this hell-hole and at breakfast the next morn- ing, in an almost empty room containing hundreds of tables, Belsen camp wardress- es, I mean waitresses, herded cowed guests into a little cluster near the serving hatch: `Fill up that table, if you please!' When I insisted on sitting at a table by myself, there were loud sotto votes of: 'Sum folks think they're sumbodies, doan't they?' Criticism was brutally resented. When the never-to- be-forgotten James Cameron wrote an uproariously funny piece about the hotel's iniquities in, I think, the Daily Mirror, he was promptly given the bum's rush.
One of its many minatory notices read: `No room service under any circumstances'. At the end of a tiring conference week, the political editor of a tabloid said to the man- ager, 'Look here, my paper has ten people staying with you and you must be making a fortune out of us. I insist on having my breakfast in bed tomorrow.' The manager pondered this outrageous request for a while, then replied, 'All right, Mr Accring- ton, just this wunce. But don't thee let on, wilt thou?' Next day, the breakfast duly appeared — eggs, bacon, sausages, fried bread, the lot. The waiter bade a cheery goodbye and slammed the door, cutting off all further communication (no phones in the room, naturally). At that point Accring- ton noticed there were no knives, forks or spoons on the tray. Whereupon, as if on cue, the window was flung open by a George Formby window-cleaner, letting in a strong blast of arctic air. The window- cleaner took in this scene of Babylonian luxury at a glance and commented, 'Ee, sum folks have it all right, doan't they?' I dare say I shall never again set foot in Blackpool now, and I shall miss it, in a hor- rible way.
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