IN ADDITION to inspiring the rollercoaster, the age-old thrill of sliding down an icy or muddy bank was adapted into simpler amusement rides such as the toboggan slide and the ever popular helter-skelter.
There were toboggan rides placed at a number of exhibitions in the 1880s but accidents were frequent because the wooden toboggans sometimes gained too much speed on the steep descent and so derailed. In 1897 the Shipley Glen Pleasure Grounds near Bradford acquired the Great Toboggan Run, which consisted of a large wooden downhill slide with cars fixed on to railed tracks (illustrated overleaf). However, it was closed after several people were injured on it on Whit Monday 1900. The ride also proved to be shortlived at Great Yarmouth (in 1899) and Scarborough (at the Kiralphs’ Arcadia, 1903–5), although the Canadian Toboggan Slide at Blackpool Pleasure Beach remained for seventeen years from 1908 to 1925. At the Sunny Vale Pleasure Gardens at Hipperholme, near Halifax, a cable pulley took customers to the top of the Mountain Slide (otherwise known as the Glacier Slide), from where they slid on a mat down a narrow, twisting wooden track. The toboggan slide was resurrected during the 1970s in the form of large steel or aluminium multi-lane slides, often known as ‘Giant Slides’.
The helter-skelter was developed around the turn of the twentieth century and in 1902 one was built on Great Yarmouth’s new Britannia Pier. The majority of helter-skelters resembled a lighthouse in shape and were known as ‘helter-skelter lighthouses’. Customers climbed up stairs inside the tower and slid down on a mat around the outside. Variations on the lighthouse theme included Thomas Warwick’s slide shaped like a castle tower at Cleethorpes and the Manchester White City’s Dragon Slide with its oriental theme.
The Hurry Skurry was a variant on the helter-skelter, with its slide zigzagging down the structure rather than spiralling around it; examples existed at Crystal Palace, and on the Birnbeck Pier at Weston-super-Mare.
The development of the slide ride was taken a stage further with the bowl slide, where customers sat in wooden bowls. One was introduced at Blackpool Pleasure Beach in 1911, and the popularity of the ride endured into the 1920s and 1930s, when further examples appeared at the Whitley Bay Spanish City, the Kursaal at Southend-on-Sea, and Southport Pleasureland.
Two pairs of ladies enjoying a ride on the Canadian Toboggan Slide at Blackpool Pleasure Beach c. 1912. Opened by a concessionaire in 1908, the slide was dismantled in 1925.
The terrifying Great Toboggan Run was added to the amusements at the Shipley Glen Pleasure Grounds, West Yorkshire, in 1897. It was dismantled after a serious accident in 1900.
The cover of a souvenir guide to Blackpool Pleasure Beach in 1912. Rides were first placed on the South Shore sands in the 1890s, and when this guide had become issued the Pleasure Beach had become the foremost amusement park in Britain.
The helter-skelter lighthouse at Blackpool Pleasure Beach was erected in 1905 and survived for thirty years.
The water chute was basically an aquatic toboggan ride on a flat-bottomed boat that slid down a steep slope into a body of water. An upward curve at the bottom of the slide pushed the boat up into the air, so that upon landing on the lake it hopped and skipped for a distance before coming to a stop. A boatman on each boat steered it to a ramp, from where it was winched up by a cable and placed by a turntable into position for its next descent. The first commercial water chute was pioneered by Captain Paul Boyton, and it became the centrepiece of his Sea Lion Park at Coney Island, opened as the world’s first enclosed amusement park in 1895. Water chutes were popularly known in the United States as ‘shooting the chutes’.
On the Hurry Skurry the slide descended in a zigzag direction down the structure, rather than around it as on a helter-skelter. The example on the Birnbeck Pier, Weston-super-Mare, is seen here c. 1905.
On the bowl slide, customers spun down the slide in wooden bowls. The first one in Britain was at Blackpool Pleasure Beach, seen here soon after it was opened in 1911.
The first British chute was seen in 1893 at Earl’s Court Exhibition Centre, London. The ride was an instant success and soon reappeared at other exhibitions, and at the seaside at Southend-on-Sea, Southport, Blackpool, Weston-super-Mare (on the Birnbeck Pier) and Rhyl. The one at the Tower Grounds, New Brighton, was described in a guide from c. 1900:
The Water Chute is a charming aqueous inclined plane, running from the level of the fairground into the lake below, a novelty never seen before outside of London. It carries its joyous patrons, in specially built boats, down an incline of some 130 feet long, and launches them into the lake some seventy-five feet below, and thence to the little landing stage provided; a most exhilarating and pleasant sensation, causing almost as much amusement to the onlookers as to the passengers themselves. On the passengers leaving the boats, these are again hauled into position, ready to again shoot down another party. The whole of the above are worked exclusively by electric power, as indeed is the whole of the machinery connected with this beautiful establishment.
The River Caves ride at Blackpool Pleasure Beach was opened in 1905. For a fee of 6d customers were transported in boats through brightly lit underground caverns decorated with eleven different scenes. It survives as the second oldest attraction at the Pleasure Beach.
One drawback of the ride was that the boats had to be winched up the incline every time after use, but in 1928 Hugo Hasse designed a new version with a continuous circular track for the Munich Festival. This soon appeared at Great Yarmouth. The water chute maintained its popularity until recent times but the last surviving large one in the United Kingdom, at Rhyl, was closed in 2007. However, smaller versions still operate at Scarborough, Hull and Kettering. Modern successors to the water chute include Hydro at Oakwood Park and Tidal Wave at Thorpe Park. Its cousin, the log flume, which normally features a steep drop as part of the ride, has over twenty examples still operating in the United Kingdom.
In 1928 Hugo Hasse designed a water chute with a continuous circular track, an example of which can be seen here next to a rollercoaster at the Pleasurama Amusement Park at Ramsgate in the 1930s.
‘River Caves’ was a dark ride on water where wooden boats travelled through caverns with brightly coloured scenes from around the world, and others with mock stalagmites and stalactites. The ride was developed in the United States as a variation of ‘Ye Olde Mill’, which had been opened at Kennywood Park, Pennsylvania, in 1901. Ye Olde Mill versions of the ride were also constructed in Britain, including at Manchester’s White City and the Spanish City at Whitley Bay.
Designed by Lot Morgan, a renowned creator of amusement rides, the first River Caves ride in the United Kingdom was erected for the 1904 exhibition at Earl’s Court, London. The following year the ride was relocated to Blackpool Pleasure Beach, where it was publicised as ‘River Caves of the World’. The ride is the only one of its type remaining in the United Kingdom and features scenes showing the dinosaur era, Inca civilisation, pirates, the Blue Grotto, African jungle, ancient China, Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, and the Cambodian temples of Angkor Wat.
The carousel (also known as the ‘roundabout’ or ‘merry-go-round’) remains an enduring and popular amusement park and fairground ride to this day. The word ‘carousel’ derives from the medieval tournament, and by 1770 an early merry-go-round was developed consisting of four wooden horses suspended from the ends of two crossed beams. By the middle of the nineteenth century there was a specialist factory for the construction of carousels in Germany. In England, S. G. Soames used steam to power a carousel in 1865, and Frederick Savage was the first to fit jumping horses and introduce the English tradition of clockwise rotation.
A c. 1910 postcard of the River Caves at Southport, opened in 1908. Refreshment stalls and the helter-skelter lighthouse can also be seen. The River Caves was transformed into the ‘Lost Dinosaurs of the Sahara’ ride in 2004, but the Pleasureland park was closed in 2006.
A postcard showing Newsome’s amusements on the beach at Redcar c. 1905, featuring a steam-driven carousel, swing-boat ride and helter-skelter lighthouse. Complaints about the noise of the carousel led the landowner to order it off the beach in 1907.
By the 1890s the carousel was an established attraction at both travelling fairgrounds and static amusement parks. Blackpool became one of the earliest seaside resorts to have a carousel when John Outhwaite placed his on the South Shore sands in 1895.
The Hotchkiss Bicycle Railway was invented by the American Arthur Hotchkiss, who fixed single and tandem bicycles to run on a railway-like track. In September 1892 he opened the Mount Holly and Smithville Bicycle Railroad to convey workers from his home town of Mount Holly, New Jersey, to their place of work in Smithville, 2 miles away. Another was opened in Pennsylvania, and circular tracks were placed in seaside resorts (such as Coney Island in 1894) and amusement parks.
John Outhwaite’s American carousel (note the anticlockwise rotation of the horses) at Blackpool Pleasure Beach c. 1905. The ride was installed in 1895 and remained there until 1911. The Pleasure Beach acquired a new carousel in 1919, which is still in use today.
As a means of serious transport, the Hotchkiss Bicycle Railway was a failure (the Mount Holly and Smithville Bicycle Railroad closed in 1898), but it was more successful as a novelty amusement. It was imported into the British Isles by William Bean, who opened his first, nicknamed the ‘Daisy Belle Bicycle’, at Douglas, Isle of Man, in 1894. The publicity for the ride stated that it was ‘perfectly safe, conducive to good health, has no tendency to demoralisation and gives riders the exhilaration of the most popular sport of the day … all for a fare of just 2d’. The ride consisted of a 250-foot-diameter circle with two tracks upon which six bicycles ran, some of them in tandem. Further rides were opened at Great Yarmouth (where Bean was living), Devil’s Dyke (near Brighton), Cleethorpes, Southport, and on the South Shore sands at Blackpool, where Bean was to develop the Pleasure Beach Amusement Park. On 25 April 1896 Bean set up the Hotchkiss Patent Bicycle Railway Syndicate with his older brother, Charles, but their rides were never particularly profitable, and by 1910 they had been largely replaced by more exciting amusements such as figure-eight railways. However, one of the rides survived at the Honley Hope Bank Pleasure Grounds, near Huddersfield, until the 1930s. A 1909 guide to the White City Amusement Park at Manchester describes an ‘O. I. O. cycle ring’, which appears to have been a variation on the Hotchkiss Bicycle Railway.
The Hotchkiss Bicycle Railway was imported into Britain from the United States by William George Bean of Blackpool Pleasure Beach, who had acquired the British rights to manufacture and operate the ride. This example stood on the North Promenade at Cleethorpes from 1895 until 1908.
The Hotchkiss Bicycle Railway in action at Blackpool Pleasure Beach c. 1904. The ride, which was installed in 1896, consisted of a 250-foot-diameter circle with two tracks, upon which six bicycles ran, some of them in tandem. It made little money and was removed in 1909.
Edwardian amusement parks offered enjoyment of a different kind in the form of fun houses, where the thrills and fear supplied by rollercoasters were replaced by pure laughter. The Katzenjammer Castle and the House of Nonsense were early types of fun houses, featuring moving staircases, cake walks, mazes, halls of mirrors, false doors and walls, and spinning turntables. The Katzenjammer Castle arrived in the United Kingdom in 1907 and was advertised thus:
They all come out laughing, and so will you if you will only pay one short visit to Katzenjammer Castle, where everybody for the moment forgets care and trouble, and laughs, and laughs, and then does some more laughing. It is wonderful just how much fun can be had out of a few short minutes in this house of compelling mirth and fascinating surprises.
There was a Katzenjammer Castle at the White City, Manchester, where the accent was on inducing mirth on a grand scale; it also provided a Fun Factory, Brooklyn Cake Walk and Japanese Puzzle House. Other Katzenjammer Castles were introduced at Morecambe’s West End Park, Great Yarmouth Pleasure Beach, Whitley Bay Spanish City and Blackpool Pleasure Beach. The last also had a House of Nonsense, which included a hall of mirrors. The House of Nonsense proved to be the more durable of the two early fun houses, and others were erected at the White City at Southport (moved to Pleasureland in 1922), the Kursaal at Southend-on-Sea and Margate Dreamland.
The Joy Wheel was a ride that revolved its customers at an ever increasing speed as they sat in the middle of a polished wooden disc until they were all shot off into cushioned walls. There was spectator seating around the ride, and both participants and spectators paid admission; it could be said that the spectators had more fun watching than those who actually had a ride. The ride was based on the Human Roulette Wheel added by George C. Tilyou to Steeplechase Park, Coney Island, in 1907 and was very popular when it appeared at the Brussels Festival. In 1910 Joy Wheels began to appear in the United Kingdom and for a couple of years they were among the most popular of all rides. As well as appearing at amusement parks, Joy Wheels were opened on the piers at Hastings and Ramsgate, the beach at Cleethorpes, and on Douglas Head. However, their popularity proved to be short-lived and by 1914 a number of them had already been dismantled.
The House of Nonsense was another early fun house, featuring moving staircases, mazes, hall of mirrors, false doors and walls, and spinning turntables. This example at Southport survived until the Second World War, when it was destroyed by fire.
The Figure Eight Park (also known as West End Park) was opened at Morecambe on 29 July 1909 with the building of the figure-eight railway. The Katzenjammer Castle fun house next to it was erected in 1910, when this postcard of the two attractions was produced.
The interior of a Joy Wheel, showing the revolving wheel and the spectator seating. This postcard shows the one on Hastings Pier, which was in situ from 1910 to 1913.
The Joy Wheel was a popular attraction for a short time following its introduction into Britain in 1910. This postcard shows the Joy Wheel on the beach at Cleethorpes in 1911.
The giant Ferris wheel at Blackpool had a diameter of 220 feet and could carry up to nine hundred passengers. The wheel was opened in the grounds of the Winter Gardens in 1896 but was demolished 1928.