Eric Brown
A steady current of robust if debased Baroque design in the form of fairground decoration has flowed undiverted through fifty years of Victorian and Edwardian architectural vicissitudes. Curiously enough, it remained unnoticed by the architectural observer. An extremely limited bibliography exists on the subject and we must depend upon descriptions, memory, and faded paper-negatived contemporary photographs for our information on the earlier fairground. The drawings and photographs which illustrate this article form part of the very small amount of serious recording of this extravagant form of public entertainment. It is strange, also, that the valuable lessons of quick demountability and the remarkable achievements in unit construction, worked out forty or fifty years ago by the showmen, have escaped notice in a period of architecture with its eye on the problems of prefabrication.
Against a background mixture of hard-boiled materialism and sentimental superstition which goes to make up the behaviour regarded as sober, respectable suburban good taste, the ephemeral fantasy of the holiday funfair comes and goes. It is shudderingly avoided by the patrons of the conventional entertainments and suffered by them as a regrettably noisy, but inevitable accompaniment to the full-blooded vulgarity of the holiday mood of what the nineteenth century would have preferred to call the lower classes. Not that this is a well-founded attitude, for the exuberance of the fairground is an obviously fitting expression of the reactions of the wage-slave barely raised to the brink of education and still essentially primitive in emotion. It is a symbolic expression of his rare liberation from industrial confinement, an unrealised survival of the feat day, or the renewing of a bargain. Whatever it signifies, to the poor man the modest orgy of the fairground brings unfamiliar and intoxicating colour, sound and movement. Above all, its greatest thrill is that it is an outdoor pleasure, along with the day at the races or the seaside, the river steamer or rowing boat, and the street market (with which it is often combined) and its sustained popularity is undoubtedly really due to the physical satisfaction it brings to the industrial worker.
To the readers of this journal, however, its most interesting features are probably the evidences the fairground contains of the survival of an important popular art in forms of decoration inherited and conservatively followed from Victorian precedents, redolent of a Calvacade-like flavour of enthusiastic and respectful monarchism, of nobler and more benign royalty, and of a complacent imperialism of wider still and wider empire, bringing with them stranger and stranger natural and mechanical wonders, encouraging a one-day snobbism which elevated and restored to the worker a proper esteem and self-respect.
The fairground owes this survival of its robust spirit and decoration to the genteel self-consciousness of the middle and upper classes which has restricted to the most expressive of the social classes. Imaging, if you can, a fairground designed to the taste of the decorous residents of Surbiton or Winchester. What efforts have been made in this direction seem to have produced only an emasculate but serviceable mediocrity which one does not wish to see repeated if the fairground is to continue its particular function in public entertainment. Changes in manufacturing methods and convenience of transport make their mark, as they should, on the character of the newer machines, but the essential quality of unashamed heartiness remains, an the flabby hand of the gentlemanly designer has not yet been loosed in the field of fairground design. May that same quality which gives us the writing on the coster's barrow, on the cut-price store labels, and on the windows of the cheap "Dining Rooms" continue on the decorating of the fair machines and may the slick American industrial designer be restricted to static streamlining and the architectural re-styler to his pale blue and gilt church furnishings.
Not only is the patron responsible for the maintenance of this standard of glitter and colour, but the showmen themselves retain a personal interest and gusto for their trade, rare in these days of the limited liability company. The own journal World's Fair must be unique in the emphatic and enthusiastic character of its contents. A world of travellers, without fixed environment, with a trade language of their own, and their livings earned by their own property, is a unique thing today, and it is proper that change should be slower in this self-comntained community.
The attractions of the English fair have always been many and sometimes unexpected in their variety. Performers, human and animal, freaks and pugilists were common in the seventeenth century; the eighteenth produced the "musick house" - at Bartholemew Fair "the musick houses stood thick by one another" - and their entertainment varied from indifferent musical performances to the rendering of ballets, operas and tableaux by star London performers - Gay's Beggar's Opera being performed at Bartholemew Fair in 1740. Dancing and refreshment booths, wild beast shows, and stalls peddling gingerbread, toys, garters, trinkets, baskets, cheap prints and all the other fripperies which it is still the delight of the public to bear away from the fairground were plentiful. But here the pleasures ended and except for real horse and pony rides and an early form of swing boat riding entertainments were unknown.
Fairground entertainments divide into two classes - rides and gaffs. Gaffs are the widely assorted entertainments ranging from "Walls of Death" to houplas. The gaffs are usually small and consist of a front only, with a canvas top, sides and back, and are not architecturally so interesting in their decoration as the free-standing and three-dimensional rides whose siting, construction and general complication gave much more scope to the decorator - opportunity rarely neglected.
The layout of the fairground is planned with great care, and showmen are very critical of their own and their competitors' planning. In the centre of the "tober" are sited the great moving attractions - the gallopers, switchbacks, and the other spectacular rides, with plenty of room around them for the crowds to circulate. A helter-skelter, or slip, stands vertically off centre, contrasting with the general horizontality of the fairground like the campanile of the Lombardic church. Bordering the ground and turning inward to enclose the fair is the "side stuff", cokernut shies, shooting galleries, freak shows, haunted houses, dart-throwing stands and swings, and scattered about the open space between the big rides and the side stuff is the "round stuff" - small circular stands with mysterious names, "Roll'emIns, Juveniles and Houplas". Behind the side stuff are the living vans of the showmen, and the steam traction engines provide the current for the machines and the peace-time lighting.
For over fifty years the principal rides were horse roundabouts, familiar to anyone who has ever visited a fair. The idea of the hobby horse is quite old; examples of it can be found in early nineteenth century lithographs. The fundamental mechanical principle remains the same today, but then the ride was without decoration and the horses themselves were mere lumps of wood, and of course without the galloping motion. Perhaps the reason for the early and continued popularity of the horse ride lies partly in the social elevation which comes from the riding of a horse, and the delight of the town-dweller temporarily raised to the status of a cavalier is not difficult to imagine, particularly in the grimmer industrial periods of the last century.
Various developments of this primitive ride were produced during the middle of the century, the motive power in all cases being manual, though there were Continental instances of living ponies being used to rotate the machine, but the real thrill of the galloper had to await the successful results of the patient toil of the steam engineers before it could be realized. S.G.Soames, of Marsham, about 1865, first applied steam power by means of a stationery engine and belt drive to a roundabout which was called a steam circus and consisted of assorted animals, but it remained for the agricultural machinery manufacturer, Savage, of King's Lynn, to develop and perfect this innovation. Once again the triumphant results of Victorian industry and intelligence placed further blessings at the service of mankind, and the era began of large and swift machines, of three, four and even five abreast horses with a galloping movement, and, following the fashion of the period, a lavish application in every possible position of carved, painted, and gilded decoration of debased Baroque form, of prodigious exuberance and vitality.
These gallopers continued without competitors for more than thirty years. Many of them built in that period exist today, but few are in their original condition. Like sailing boats and merchant shipping, periodically they change hands and the latest owner makes alterations and additions. Organs, animals, even rounding boards and centres, as well as the mechanical movements are varied and only a showman can say with certainty how a ride began. The war has brought out many of these old rides (just as bombing and fires have destroyed many) discarded years ago as old-fashioned and not sufficiently exciting for a generation hardened to the perils of the arterial road, the dirt track and the aeroplane, and they are to be seen again on the fairgrounds, restored to much of their original condition, though the end of the war will also see their end, for they will go back to the yard to be broken up or destroyed.
Though the principle of the galloper remained fundamentally that of the earliest roundabout, there was one important difference in that the horses were no longer supported by a framework or platform at ground level, but were suspended from an overhead ring carried by the centre, from which the moving platform was also hung.
The erection of a set of gallopers forms an interesting study for the architect or engineer, displaying as it does in the showman a talent for simple improvisation equal in resource to military field engineering and contrasting favourably with the static complication of building erection methods. The truck carrying the engine and the centre (in the case of the steam-driven galloper) is first sited and blocked up solidly off its wheels. The organ truck - a complete and self-contained unit - follows at one side. On the centre truck the top frame is next erected, heavy parts being manhandled to the roof of another van which is then backed up to a point where it will form a convenient working platform. The radiating swifts and the wire or bar guys of the top frame are then similarly assembled and the structural section is complete. At this point the canvas tilt is rigged and the remainder of the work can take place under cover, the organ, enclosed in its own canvas casing, remaining undisturbed until everything else is in place. The vertical rods carrying the animals follow, and others carrying the platform, and the platform itself, built in sectional units, is completed and temporarily blocked from the ground. At this point the ride presents a thin and unsubstantial appearance, very different from the encrusted ornamental heaviness with which the fairgoer is accustomed. Many of the structural elements, through constant assembly, must necessarily be shabby and worn, so that the decorated centre and rounding boards serve a dual purpose in covering the structure and in adding the magnificence and solidity the occasion demands. The final stages consist of the fixing of the centre boards and rounding boards, a final polishing of the twisted brass coverings of the vertical rods, the fixing of banners, flags and notices, and a preliminary run. Demounting or "pulling-down" is naturally a quicker operation, and men starting early in the morning can usually get a steam roundabout on the road by midday. It is remarkable that a temporary construction of this kind, assembled from parts light enough to be handled without mechanical aid, fixed by means of hooks and metal wedges only, can withstand eccentric loadings and centrifugal forces which would make the architect shudder, if confronted by similar structural problems.
About the beginning of this century, the demand for novelty produced newer, more impressive, more gorgeous and more exciting rides - the switchback, the Venetian gondola, and the dragon. More complicated, more bulky, with vehicles in place of horse, the field for decoration opened wider. The galloper kept in step with grander, more fiery and spirited horses, towering rounding boards and formidable centres. And at the same time a newcomer added its attractions to the traditional variety of gaffs. The Bioscope Show, a grandiose front with organ, top-hatted or be-spangled paraders, and clanging brass bells, showing now lost and forgotten French and English experiments in cinematography, added its spectacular elevation to the temporary city. Commencing as a modest "walk-up" show, with a centre stairway, flanked on one side by the organ and on the other by an ornate and immaculate traction engine, and concealing behind its front a canvas booth, the later versions had an overwhelming central organ designed and built by the organ makers, commonly French or Belgian. Of these makers, the names still common amongst showmen are Marenghi, Gavioli, Gaudin and Limonaire of France, Devos and Verbeck of Belgium, and Bruda of Germany. After the short but illustrious lifetime of these fronts, for the Cinematograph Acts and the construction of the "Electric Palaces" and "Cinemas de Luxe" around 1910 put an end to the travelling show, the fronts disappeared, but the organs and very often the ornamental figures which decorated them passed into the hands of owners and rides, to be adapted and fitted to their machines. In surviving roundabouts, which were so much improved, such additions can be identified by the freer Continental form of the decoration, contrasting withthe tighter and more compact English patterns. "National Academy of Living Pictures", "Electric Coliseum", "Palace of Light", and "Royal Electric Bioscope" are samples of the resounding titles attached to these shows by their proud owners. Forgotten by most, at best a childhood memory in a confusion of naptha flares, the taste of sticky-sweet brandy snap, mingling organ music, tooting engines and clanging brass bells, muddled by the excited sleepiness of an unaccustomed late night, here in the Bioscope shows we had a glittering and demountable Baroque derived at the fancy of the designers from a variety of sources - Italian and French Rococo, German, Dutch and English Early Renaissance, even from contemporary sources such as L'Art Nouveau and Horta - no hang-over from the dull and pompous architecture of the late nineteenth century here, but a lively and virile adaptation of Music Hall Baroque which continues today. The showman, being of the people, displayed a surer feeling in his work for a human need than the architectural specialist working in his genteel semi-vacuum, pre-occupied with the respectability that the following of a professional career exacts today, with a concern with current foibles and, occasionally, an anxiety towards the artistic education of the public.
Besides the favourite ride - the galloper - another, the switchback, a tremendous and amost unbelievable erection, came tot he fairground, developed though the facile competence of Savages' and the increasing competition betwen showmen. Their vast carriages in the form of scaly and proud-headed dragons, Venetian gondolas, brass railinged and plush seated, swirled and reared themselves over a switchback track surround by a walkway approached by a monumental, if temporary, flight of marbled and balustraded steps. Inside, a Gavioli or Marenghi organ, attended by moving military or fete-champetre figures, roared the music of the day, cut on card with infallible accuracy, embellished with grace-notes and obligatos, dazing the delirious riders whise excited screams, rising and falling with the movement of the cars, rose to a crescendo as the gondolas dipped over the summits of the track. At night, arc lamps poured a fluttering pink light over the fantastic scene, and hundreds of incandescent carbon lamps glowed steadily outlining the structure, fed by current generated by the hissing and steaming engine bedded in the midst of this Victorian saturnalia, blackened demons creeping amidst its entrails, whilst other creatures, less blackened, but still black, swung aerially from plunging car to car, extracting the riders share of the bargain prominently declared in ornate Tuscan lettering "3d. all classes - free list entirely suspended".
Few of these machines are to be seen today, most having been replaced by simpler and faster versions built between the two wars, and it is doubtful if these costly delights were ever profitable to the showman, though the prestige they added to his reputation more than compensated for his heavy costs, heavy as the spectacle of the sweating erectors, toiling hour after hour, almost day after day, proves. But they gave the ambitious designer his greatest opportunity and for the student of fair decoration they provide a field full of perplexities and surprises.
In the 1920s an import from Germany, simpler in erection, faster and thus more thrilling, threatened the supremacy of the switchback and thrust the galloper further into the background. Aided by the power and convenience of the electric motor, fed from a bast and ornamental traction engine bearing swan-like on its bosom a humming generator and squatting aloofly at a distance from the ride, this new machine - the Noah's Ark - though too late in date to possess carbed and gilded ornament, had decorative features which continued the tradition of coarse splendour. It carried for the riders varied and obscurely derived animals, cut out of hardwood slabs siz inched thick, and later, as the idea was taken up by the English manufacturers, motor-cycles and characters from the Walt Disney mythology. Paint and plated embossed metal helped to give relief to the flat sides of these solid silhouettes. The centre was usually simple and consisted principally of little more than a pay-box, and music was uninterestingly provided by records and loudspeaker.
Also from Germany, about the same time, the idea of the Chair-o-Plane added to the fairground scene a rival in size and shape to the familiar helter-skelter. The Chair-o-Plane, consisting of a wide-spreading centre from which seats hung by chain, whilst providing small opportunity for elaborate decoration, gives incidentally in motion, particularly after dark when the machine is outlined by small electric lights, Moholy Nagy's virtual volume, an aesthetic form of which the public is unfortunately unaware. Being, like Noah's Ark, a recent introduction, any decoration the Chair-o-Plane carries is painted and usually without particular interest.
Of the remaining rides, the Dodgem and the SPeedway, consisting of an oval track and a number of small moro-cars, have little of interest beyond the fascia around the tilt, sometimes supported by trellis, but more usually by plain wooden posts. They are dreary and lugubrious affairs, conducted in half-darkness under the wide cover, accompanied by a raucous loudspeaker which does not succeed in drowning the crashed and grinding of the cars. Even the owners seem unusually ashamed of these unprepossessing objects and beyond stringing up a few dingy pennants, retire into the centre of the machines, from where they contemplate the hilarious patrons with somewhat hang-dog expressions.
Sideshows - "gaffs" are of two principal types; either stands or stalls offering prizes for various forms of skill and being either circular or polygonal, standing detached at the sides of the rides, or the traditional type with posts and canvas backs and sides, lining the margins of the fairground, all being made of extremely light spars and plywood panels.
Of the latter, the cokernut shy and shooting gallery are the oldest and best known, and continue today accompanied by a host of similar "attractions". The fronts of these stands are usually flat and, being repainted nearly every season, often by the owners, have generally uncomplicated and contemporary designs, as a rule floral or pictorial, copied from many sources, frequently from coloured picture postcards.
Little attempt was made to maintain the galloper against the competition of newer rides. Showmen laid up their sets and invested in new scenics, Noah’s Arks and Chair-o-Planes. Manufacturers were busy and the inter-war period produced a large addition to the numbers of fairground rides. The galloper continued to be seen, but only at the country fairs and on inconspicuous sites in the towns.
The elaborate decoration of the horse roundabout was inevitable if it was to be in accord with the magnificent horses. The casing of the centre, the rounding boards and the organ fronts were obvious opportunities and the enthusiasm of the decorators and showmen exploited any surface, however small, for additional ornament. Structural elements such as the swifts, the risers and sometimes even the treads of the platform steps all carried their scroll decoration, and shield-shaped banners depended from the top frame declaring the value of the amusement in emphatic terms. The rounding boards announced their owners and the character of the rides in deliriously Tuscan lettering, margined top and bottom with scroll work and debased classical enrichments – “Royal Premier Racers and Hunters – the Finest and most up-to-date English Exercise and Sport”, “Mrs. Wm. Thomas’ Stud of Electric Galloping Horses, Dragons and Mermaids”, “Searles’ Royal Famous Hunters – the Greatest of Modern Riding Machines Noted Throughout England for Ease and Comfort”. Even the little hand-turned “juvenile” rides made justifiable claims, “Thomas Manning’s Up-to-date Riding Devices of Golden Peacocks and Horses for the Rising Generation”, “Silcock’s Latest British Riding Machine – the Pride and Joy of the Young People”, “Lee’s Juvenile Arena De Luxe of Mountain Ponies, Southern Peacocks, and De Luxe Coaches”. The horses themselves exulted in forgotten and corrupted names of racehorses – Maxtor, Hardnail, Asterus, Weissdurin, Black terry, Bendigo, Nicator, Set Fare, or some which are frankly unidentifiable, Recicles, Diblish and Aigburth.
Much greater opportunities were presented by the scenic railway; the balustrade of the walkway, the spandrels beneath, the towering front above the entrance; all these were covered with elaborate painting, closely resembling theatrical scenic work. Late scenics describe themselves as Ben Hurs from the chariot form of the cars and from the vast and stirring Roman chariot races depicted in every dramatic detail on their fronts. The columns supporting this front usually carry carved figures, often originally from the old bioscope fronts, in their voluptuous repose scarcely appropriate to the grim struggle depicted above.
Applied decoration played an important part both in the moving roundabout and in the stalls and shows. For the latter there was the strong architectural tradition descending from the fronts of the eighteenth century Musick Houses, through the booths and shows of the great fairs such as Bartholemew’s, reaching its zenith in the great menageries and finally in the stupendous bioscope fronts, tailing out now in the modest cock-shies and shooting galleries. In the roundabout, less architectural a subject in the first place and only sufficiently important to deserve decoration since the ‘seventies and the arrival of steam, the ornament applied was that in vogue on the fairground at the moment.
Most of this decoration was a development of the meaningless scroll pattern common in the embellishment of many utilitarian objects of the mid- and late-Victorian periods. It is still to be seen today, to give a ready example, in gold on the black body of certain sewing machines, and is remembered by many as ornament on telephone instruments still in use not twenty-five years ago. This scroll, combined with isolated ornaments like mirrors, masks, horses’ and dragons’ heads, shields, cartouches, forms the basis of this boldly carved and tightly knit pattern decoration which covers rounding boards, centres and pay-boxes of the roundabouts built between 1870 and 1920 like a rich embroidery.
Paintings in the panels of the top and bottom sections of the centres are either of romantic rural scenery, often with a melancholy Germanic flavour of moonlit Lorelei Rocks and Rhine Castles, possibly fashions imported originally at the time of the Prince Consort; portraits of forgotten and usually unrecognisable European royalty and chivalry, or savage hunting and jungle scenes inspired by the wonder of earlier fairs, the wild beast show, and always taken dramatically at the moment of death.
Brilliant bevelled and cut mirrors set into these surfaces must have sparkled and flashed back the thousand blazing lamps of the roundabout, whilst on the whirling rounding boards similar mirrors winked and glittered in the sunlight. Rounding boards, made in sections with their joints masked by elaborated ornament, carried crestings of eagles and flags, and droppers similarly carved, gilded and mirrored, the horizontal lines of the boards being moulded and clumsily enriched. Almost any ornament may be expected and found on the horses of the galloper. The very best specimens had glass eyes, real horse-hair tails, jingling stirrups, leather reins and plush saddles, but, whatever their quality – and the inner rings of horses being less prominent, whether carved or merely painted, were often progressively simpler in decoration – their fronts, sides and flanks will be found to bear intricate decoration – grotesque masks, medallions, tasselled cords, eagles, draped flags and even Mickey Mouse. Sometimes their tongues loll exhaustedly, sometimes their teeth are bared fiercely, sometimes their ears are laid back wickedly, but each one bears its name painted daintily on an undulating ribbon on the neck. Most inventive of their carvers was Anderson, of Bristol, whose name can often be found prominently cut into the side of an animal.
Throughout all fair decoration there is a consistency about the lettering. Rounding boards, gaff fronts, stands of all descriptions bear their messages in a curious block serif letter, shadowed, changing halfway down into a floral version ornamented at th ejunction by a painted leaf or flower, linked to our everyday life by the Edwardian grocer's or haberdasher's gilded and painted glass fascias still to be seen about our streets. A feature of the sideshows are the ornamented and lettered cloths which form the sides and back of the gaff. Blue or red, with white applique lettering and borders, decorated with crowns and stars, they are also to be seen in other colours and patterned designs in place of wording. Tilts, awnings and weather canvases are rarely the plain Willesden green of the farm implement, but are in sections of alternating colours or with dyed stripes, scalloped and fringed.
But the carved and gilded decoration being difficult to pack and bulky to accomodate, was doomed by the introduction of the speedy and light-weight Noah's Ark and Chari-o-Plane. The fewer loads a ride made up the more economical the transport, and after 1920 carved and gilded work gave place to flat wooden surfaces, elaborately painted, but still carrying on the characteristic ornament of the carved work, though the influence of the 1925 Paris exhibition has made itself felt in many directions. A kind of floral floridness, continental in design, a White-City-like aberration, has also shown itself, particularly in the dodgems and the smaller gaffs.
Of the makers, Savages, the oldest firm, no longer primarily concerned with the showman, were principally responsible for the mechanical development and improvements; Orton, Sons & Spooner, of Burton-on-Trent, originally roundabout decorators and makers of most of the carved work produced in England but now makers of complete rides; Walker's of Tewkesbury, and Lakin's of Streatham, a newer firm specialising in modern forms of rides, are the best known of the English manufacturers. Of the individual designers of detail and decoration, the manufacturers remain unhelpfully reticent.
© 1945 Architectural Review
