The best of Dorset in words and pictures

The Naples of England

Andy Christopher Miller recalls his mid-1950s Weymouth childhood

Published in November ’18

Andy Miller (far left) on Weymouth beach in the 1950s

The people of Weymouth, attentive to the horizon like predators weakened through a long winter, would muster their depleted energies during the first stirrings of spring.
Shutters and awnings rattled, dust was beaten out, accumulated pockets of sand were swept from doorways, as lorryloads of deckchairs out of winter storage were built into stacks on the beach. Canoes nestling like sardines, huge floating craft across the backs of youths, their arms splayed as if in crucifixion, were carried down to the water’s edge. From rooftops, balconies and empty, stale interiors, the broken orchestration of hammer and saw, fresh resin and the heady musk of tar and paint. All in preparation for the silver shoals, the herds stopping to graze.
My father would be out shopping in the town centre on summer Saturday mornings as early as he could: ‘If you’re not done and home before ten, you might as well forget it,’ he would say.
We took in summer visitors, factory worker families from the West Midlands, women and children from South Wales with their huge men who hewed the coal there. This was the only way we could afford a holiday, my mother said, ‘by working my ruddy fingers to the bone’.

Andy Christopher Miller today

Fried breakfasts were carried every morning on a tray into our best front room. Sleeping arrangements were in weekly flux, my boxroom the first to be requisitioned. Once I shared the pull-out sofa bed with my mother, the only time it was ever used. And on another occasion my father and I were in the kitchen on camp beds that had to be dismantled and packed away by 7.15.
Sometimes families were split between neighbouring houses along Purbeck Road. Others occasionally arrived unannounced; their cases were brought discreetly inside our privet hedge as my mother worked her way along the neighbouring doors in emergency negotiations. Whoever was found a bed, whatever their pairings or combinations, they were to be without trace on Tuesday mornings when the council rent collector made his rounds.
Weymouth was at the meeting point of two huge tracts of water that curved in from opposite directions. To the east, the direction that our seafront hotels and esplanade faced, was Weymouth Bay, a perfect arc of golden sand leading first northwards and then round towards deserted, inaccessible cliffs and headlands that on fine days – and most were fine days – we could make out dipping and rising all the way to exotic destinations such as Durdle Door and Lulworth Cove. At the southern end of the town’s beach, where the gently shelving sands dipped into a sea that seemed especially warmed in the bowl of the bay, was the Pleasure Pier which formed one of the two arms protecting the entrance to Weymouth Harbour.

Weymouth port in the 1950s Credit: www.barriepictures.co.uk

And in the harbour, the ferry boats, passengers embarking to the Channel Islands, huge crates of tomatoes obscuring the sun as they were swung by cranes from the decks of cargo ships down towards us watchers on the dock. On still summer nights, lying in bed a mile away in Purbeck Road, I could hear the boat train clanking along tracks down the centre of Commercial Road.
Across the harbour, towering above the Stone Pier, was the Nothe Fort. From the ornamental gardens beside the fort, one could look in one direction down into the harbour and on towards the Pleasure Pier, sands and seafront. In the opposite direction was Portland Harbour: battle-grey ships, breakwaters with tiny lighthouse buoys, gates and railings and padlocks, access restricted to naval personnel, and then, throwing it all into scale, the huge bulk of Portland squatting in the sea some five miles away.
Along the Pleasure Pier, a huge platform with pontoons sunk into a dark and sunless sea, holidaymakers paraded in their numbers. My parents had met in their youth through the Swimming Club out at the end of this pier. I could just pick them out among the smiling young people, some tentative, others more defiant and self-assured, staring out from the old photograph.

Holidaymakers pack out the beaches and indeed the sea at Weymouth in the 1950s
Credit:www.barriepictures.co.uk

As the sands curled around to meet the Pleasure Pier, about a quarter of a mile from the Nothe gardens, there were the donkeys. When I was young, there was no greater treat than to ride in procession down the sea’s edge on one of their backs. The warm, sweet smell from the dung dropped outrageously onto the sand, the creak and resinous scent from the saddle as I shifted position, the hardened bony back beneath the sparse wiry hair – all gave rare textures to being alive.
Right beside the donkeys was the sand modeller’s enclosure. Frank Dinnington sculpted huge versions of Salisbury Cathedral, every transept, spire and window precisely fashioned. Or the tableau of the Last Supper, Jesus and the disciples, rounded shoulders and compassionate foreheads, their bodies leaning in towards each other. ‘All made entirely from local sand and water,’ said the scrawl on the board, and the pennies, threepenny and sixpenny bits trickled down from the promenade into the collecting buckets. Every so often the local paper would carry a photograph of a collapsed cathedral wing and a story headlined something like ‘Smashed by vandals’. Then the coins would flow in a heavy torrent.
A further one hundred yards or so along the sands, you would reach a pair of semi-detached white-painted wooden huts with an enclosure formed by a white picket fence. These, the First Aid and the Lost Children huts, dispensed disinfectant, ointments and a sense of protection.
Most summers we holidayed at home, my brother and I running between the thousands grouped in deckchair communities, squeezing between their encampments, in and out of the warm shallows with a whip of bladder wrack, if one could be found, lassoing the air. ‘Be careful what you’re doing with that around people’s faces,’ my mother might warn. ‘Look out for that yellow dinghy,’ or something similar she would explain so that we could eventually find our way back to her deck chair. ‘And if all else fails, go to the Lost Children’s Hut’.
Another visitor attraction was the tall, thin box painted in red, white and pale blue stripes, Frank Edmunds’ Punch and Judy stall. Taking my penny for the collecting box as often as I could afford, I would ease my way in amongst all the visiting children who chanted when required or instructed. Singing through reeds or his huge curving nose, mad-eyed Mr Punch, with his stick to his shoulder, surveyed all below him seeing with a long, lingering look into each of our deceitful hearts.
‘Judy, where’s the baby?’
‘Downstairs’
‘Bring it up, bring it up.’
‘OK, here’s the baby’.
Thwack, thwack, thwack.
‘That’s the way to treat the old lady’.
One set of guests registered more than most with me when I was nine years old. A young couple, Paul and his fiancée, Marion, stayed one summer with his parents, occupying all three of our bedrooms A red-haired, tubby and boundlessly enthusiastic young man, Paul asked my parents if I could accompany Marion and him on a fishing trip so that they could benefit from my knowledge of the choice locations. They also took me with them to the fair. As much as the fishing, the fair, the ice creams and the candy floss, I especially enjoyed evenings in our front room, which my parents had designated the ‘visitors’ lounge’.
Just the three of us, Paul, Marion and myself
while his parents went out, with me enlivening their stay with animated tales of local life. ‘You can’t keep going in that front room,’ my mother said, oblivious to the camaraderie we shared. ‘They’ve got to be allowed to have a bit of time
to themselves.’
The next spring I was delighted when Paul wrote to my mother, asking if they could again book a week’s stay in August. But her manner clearly showed that she did not share my sense of joy: ‘That Paul from Wolverhampton wants to come again, in August, peak season, with that fiancée of his,’ my mother told my father when he arrived home from work that evening. ‘Just the two of them.’
‘Great!’ I replied before my father could answer. ‘They can, can’t they?’
My mother waved the letter in an erratic fashion as if she was trying to shake it from her own grip. ‘Says they just want the one room…,’.
‘I told you this sort of thing would happen when you started all this,’ my father snapped. ‘You’ll have to write and tell them you’re fully booked.’
‘But we’re not,’ I said. ‘Mum said so.’
My mother held my father’s gaze, ignoring me.
‘But why can’t they come?’ I persisted.
‘They can’t and that’s that!’
‘But why?’ I asked one more time, although I knew that by now the outcome was firmly settled.