Barbara Jones
English roundabouts run deisul, clockwise. The practical result of this gesture to ancient ritual is that one mounts the horses correctly from the near, richly decorated side where the eye is glass instead of painted, and the gilded mane rolls more heavily. The offside is only lightly carved, much of the decoration is put on with paint, and this decline is progressive - the inside of the inmost horse is hardly even painted. But everywhere else the decoration is unbelievable in its thoroughness, and any available space on the wooden construction that might catch the eye is embellished with jungle, flower or film-star, while a banner swings in any aerial space not amply filled with animals, their glittering rods or the organ. On the banners may be more jungles, flowers, fruit, or the price of a ride. You have been informed by the rounding board before mounting that the horses are the fastest in the world but yet the safest, that the gallopers provide "Good Riding for all Classes" and perhaps have been "Patronised by Royalty". The horses may be "Arabian", "Galloping", "Prairie", "Mexican", "Mountain", "Blood", "Canadian", or merely "Race"; some of them on small children's rides retain the names of horses of romance, like "Beucephalus" or "Black Bess", but the no less romantic and surprising names of race-horses are most usual on the full-size roundabouts; "Golden Miller", "Bend Or", "Sun Chariot" or rather Freudianly "Jean's Dream".
The showmen are great connoisseurs of the horses. Indeed, between narrow limits set by the Eclipse pose and the baroque decoration the variety is enormous: some are country cousins, with mouths open in gaping wonder, dull wooden eyes and feet hanging limply as though their brass rods must take all the weight: others prance proudly on outflung sharp hooves, their teeth bared to bite a rival stallion, their glass eyes gleaming arrogantly and their ears pricked sharply forward in cast iron instead of standing up bluntly in wood.
The most realistic horses are rarely the best - elaborate carving of hair round the hooves or neatly painted eyelashes are no help if the pose is weak. A real horsehair tail always looks good, but on the whole the convention has gradually worked so far from reality that looking at the cow-square heads and the flanks carved with roses and thistles one wonders how one is still sure that it is a horse.
On the switchbacks, the animals are replaced by golden gondolas, or the cars may have dragons' heads. Sometime the dragons are used for roundabouts, too.
There are birds as well, but they are not like our little feathered friends. Anyone who has held even a small bird like a sparrow and looked at it closely will agree that though the feathery part may be cuddly, the eyes, beak and claws are terrifyingly hard and cruel. In the nineteenth century when roundabouts were first made (at least on any scale comparable to those we know today) birds tended to appear as little soft muffs with sentimental expressions and, with skill like that used by the old American morticians who gave to a corpse "a look of certitude of heavenly bliss" for an extra four dollars, the men who stuffed birds for glass cases managed quite often to reproduce this effect on small specimens. Most of the big birds, albatrosses, vultures, owls, may be seen in local museums sternly to have overcome these attempts at softening; and the roundabout designers, whether realizing this behaviour, or remaining true to an earlier recognition of the innate grimness of birds, have produced peacocks, turkeys, ostriches and cocks of great ferocity.
It can be seen on the three that I have drawn together that earlier birds have interbred, grafting on to the cock the ostrich's long neck and thick toes. Most of the tails are ostrich too. The turkey's fleshy neck in folds of flamboyant paint must be seen to be believed, and he, like the cock, may be no longer pure-bred but will have acquired a peacock's tail, another magnificent opportunity for "doing flamboyant". This is a recent innovation (like the chromium plating of the old brass twisted rods) which consists of going all over the animal with gold or silver paint and glazing afterwards with transparent colours in a limited range, such as carmine, yellow, viridian and prussian blue, suggestive of the colours that can be used for tinting magic-lantern slides. I have seen one mermaid on a merry-go-round, and she was realistically treated with ordinary paints as the animals used to be.
Neither birds nor dragons are given names, although it is difficult to see why not, as children walk round the gallopers in the morning when all is quiet and choose their horses for the evening threepennyworth, remembering their names and those of previous horses. Another curious ting for which it is hard to find a reason is that when two-seater animals are wanted, the horse, which is large and has a long flat back naturally big enough for two, is rarely used, the birds being the most frequent victims of this elongation, although they are of species which in full display as carved have no backs worth mentioning.
The bat-winged dragons are used either single or double seater (who knows which they should be?) and are made very like horses, same pose, same proportion, but with webbed hooves and devil tails. Their bodies are scaled over and painted a strong dark green. The heads are magnificently carved with such assurance that it is impossible not to feel that the snarling fangs, rolling tongues and folded leathery lips were derived from natural forms, but the most vicious of them cannot rival the nightmare power of the birds' pounding feet and great slashed beaks. No, the birds are not our little feathered friends.
The organ is always on a chassis separate from the main engine, but is drawn up beside it when the machine is built up and fits inside the running board. The utmost elaboration and skill are used on the decoration of the organs even now, when the number or trailers to each motor is strictly limited and road regulations have ended the travels of the old immense roundabout towering with ornament. But as the organ always has its own four wheels, being one trailer complete in itself, its complications remain undiminished. Many of the most highly decorated organs cam from French dance-halls, where they tower in a gallery at one end, taking the place of a band. The organ with life-sized figures in flowing drapery drawn here is one of these; the women are completely gilded and there are nine of them, dancing on olive-coloured rocks.
The little organ pipes are square in section, and the different sizes are arranged in attractive patterns and groups of colour. The blaring music is on stout card, the pieces joined with linen, opening out like a seaside view-postcard; the notes are oblong holes cut in the card by hand, so that the music is expensive and a very new and popular tune may cost as much as £20. The pipes are in an open-fronted box with decorated base and sides, and round the opening, to display the works, goes an elaborate frame of fine rococo curves. At each side of this and sometimes in the middle, often on little semi-circular platforms jutting from the bottom on the frame, may stand automaton figures, anything up to half life-size, with leather-jointed arms, and sticks or flutes in their hands. They stare rigidly before them out of blue eyes set in dusty, porcelain-tinted faces, and beat their monotonous accompaniment to the organ on a little drum or cymbal. They may be man or woman in eighteenth-century costume, or a medieval king and queen, or dressed like the shepherd figures in old-fashioned dairies, or high-breasted women in pantomime principal-boy costume with gold embroidery painted up their tiny feet and ankles to their superb calves. But all the clothes have been seen through a fresh eye, have been a little distorted by someone unskilled in historic costume, and make a new period or place of their own, an unprecedented category. However dressed, no figure looks at the music of the instrument, and all of them, pastel tinted and gay in intention, have the same unconscious faces above their moving hands as belong to the automatons on clocks. And they are further set apart from the rest of the roundabout by their paint, always matt and powdered with a little dust like a church image, while everything else is varnish and shine.
The paintings on the top and bottom centres, on the other hand, are meant to be exciting and to give tremors of delicious fear; but although showing scenes of the bloodiest carnage from the Boer War, terrible tiger hunts, or battles between bear, lion and boa-constrictor in rich green jungles, they are all painted with so much innocent charm that they completely fail to alarm even the smallest child. The best of them are exactly paintings by Rousseau and are done in a fifty-year-old technique: some of them should be preserved, as they are continually painted out and the pleasantest of them may at any time disappear under a wave of portraits of Stalin and General Eisenhower (a kind of Nine Worthies Gallery), and one may see on the machines already bearing pictures of film-stars that the bent of the painters is not to portraiture.
On the top-centres there is usually more carving and rather less painting, maybe only a medallion of it in a heavy surround, the bottom being furnished with droppers - scallops, diamonds, circles, etc. of carvings or mirrors. These may also hang below the rounding board, the glass reflecting the sun or the lights of other machines. Mirrors on roundabouts, bevelled, cut and painted, add finely to the dazzle of the effect, and so do electric lamps, white and coloured, which are used in thousands on a big showground.
If you think carelessly about a fairground, it is easy to remember the steam engine with a chimney coming out at the top of the striped canvas tilt, and clouds of smoke. Naptha flares also leap to the mind though these have long been superseded, and the twisted brass rods are giving way to plain chromium everywhere. Power is now electricity, and the dynamos travel with the machines. Transport is by motor; how long is it since you saw horses pulling the vans? But the mind seems a little surprised at this contemporary equipment, replaces it with something fifty years out of date, and looks with wonder at the sparks flying from the Dodgems, and at packets of Players and American sailor hats as prizes on the shires; though fashions have changed in narrower limits still, and "I'm no Angel" written on the front of the hats has changed to "Get up them Stairs". Red and gold vases are the prizes we are looking for.
Rounding boards are less elaborate than they were before the changes in the road regulations. The big boards rioting against the sky in old photographs have been left behind in sheds at winter quarters and some of them have been lost, with many smaller complications easily left off, but the modern lighter and smaller ones are still very fancy. They usually go up in twelve sections, one between each pair of swifts, and on the flat part of the board which remains on the most closely pruned roundabout, the name of the owner and a description of his stud are painted in heavy, voluptuous lettering. Somewhere under the layers of fat lie the Trajan Column letters, as the lines of the slim Egyptian dogs are hidden in an Old English Sheepdog, or as one can trace an over-stuffed armchair back to Sheraton. The letters are usually in strong relief, richly shadowed and foliaged. Above these flat boards are twelve more, leaning outwards and billowy-edged, supporting lights and flags, while the droppers go all around beneath. The joints between the lettered boards are covered when possible by a carved shield or similar object, and ornaments or horses' heads may be carved out from this on the main boards to enrich the corners round the names and slogans.
On an ordinary roundabout the thirty-six or forty-eight animals and birds give a sufficiently intricate pattern, but on a switchback there will be only four or six cars in one ring and a certain monotony might occur. This is never allowed to happen on the older types of machine (the modern Dodge'Ems are dull enough), as much of the glamour lies in intricacy, so the whole construction is different. A fixed but up-and-down platform goes round the revolving cars; at one of the two dips in the circuit are steps to the ground with fine marbled balustrades sweeping out on to the grass, and space between the platform and the ground is filled in all round with painted scenes in bowers of roses, dirt-track races or jungles. From here to the rounding boards run pilasters, caryatid figures or pillars wreathed in flowers, monkeys and parrots. These cut up the long toothed shapes of the cars. Golden gondolas with high prows were once very popular but dragons seem to have won the day.
Some of the ornament, instead of deriving from Continental Baroque, suggests that here and there a designer may have picked up in some museum, house or book a useful tip for adding variety to the traditional schemes. What other explanation is there for the gold lions' heads under the backs of some of the saddles, so exactly like those found at Ur? The changes in the main trend of decoration are apart from these isolated researches; the showmen must have seen Jazz and Wembley all round them and wanted to be in the fashion (some of them say the horses are doomed), so that these sweeping changes are as inevitable as electricity and chromium; it is only odd to see the Baroque still flourishing at the fairs and in the markets, where on painted carts the men pile vegetables and fruit, afterwards writing the prices on fat shields in very fluent curly figures, perhaps inspired by the undemountable Baroque of tattooing on their own arms.
But one is bound to speculate on the inspiration behind that isolated mermaid, and on the source of an organ automaton I once saw wearing an almost perfect replica of the Crown of the Kings of Kandy.
© 1945 Architectural Review
