HOW FALMOUTH ROCKED ON ‘SUPER SATURDAY’ . . . AND SPINNING MY WAY THROUGH CROWDS AND BEER
I don’t suppose we’ll ever see anything resembling a reliable estimate of the crowds in Falmouth last Saturday – it being notoriously difficult to judge such things, after all - but there surely can’t have been many days in the town’s history when it has hosted so many people.
And that’s saying quite something when you think peak Tall Ships, total eclipse of the sun, Red Arrows, solo sailors’ epic homecomings etc etc.
But a bumper triple win was assured with the biggest day in the International Sea Shanty Festival plus the Falmouth Classics Regatta and, for good measure, the cruiseship Ambition (1,200 guests capacity) in port.
For many – businesses, imbibers, party-goers, racers, starry-eyed youngsters - it all added up to “Super Saturday.”
And good for Falmouth – it certainly knows how to “rock” these days.
But the huge crowds weren’t everyone’s cup of tea, of course, as was made clear by some of the comments on social media.
And I for one am not a crowd person, except – perversely – for big football matches!
For me, last Saturday was a reminder of the days when I PR-d for Skinners Brewery during their sponsorship of the shanty festival.
Any self-respecting spin doctor, of course, can switch on the passion for any subject that may not necessarily reflect his/her private preferences.
Sure enough, I would do my Skinners stuff each year in the build-up to the big event.
So people used to be surprised when, with Falmouth’s Events Square just around the corner from my home, I would answer “no” when they asked me if I had joined in with the singing and the crowds. Honest, to this day I never have!
(The last public singing I did, I might point out, was as an angelic, nay cherubic, little boy in Penryn’s St Gluvias Church Choir in the 1950s – Vicars Gilbert and Perry-Gore.)
By definition, of course, I also had to wax lyrical about Skinners’ beers in my regular press releases for the company.
Boss Steve clearly thought I was doing a cracking good job, because every Christmas a complimentary crateload of his beers would find its way to my front doorstep.
Eventually, I had to come clean and confess that I, er, wasn’t actually a beer drinker. . . and that his seasonal gifts would always be redistributed to more appreciative drinkers.
The next Christmas, would you believe, I found several bottles of WINE on that doorstep!
THE LONG AND THE SHORT OF IT
Scene One. Gorgeous Gylly start to a day last week. Sea swim (cold) with daughter Lisa, including non-stop natter. Duration: 11 minutes.
Scene Two. Late Friday evening. Treliske A&E, treatment for Lisa’s cut hand (cooking). Told must keep it dry at all costs for X number of days.
Scene Three. Another gorgeous Gylly start to a day this week. Sea swim (still cold) on own, i.e. with zero natter. Duration: THREE minutes!
FLAT-OUT BUSY DOCKS
In passing (last weekend, see above), I couldn’t help also noticing just how busy Falmouth Docks looked.
Compared with the “good old days” of the 1950s and ‘60s, that may seem a strange sentiment when you consider I have chiefly just five vessels in mind.
But times change and the Saturday line-up of three MoD vessels and a cruiseship all in for substantial work plus a cruise call – respectively the Cardigan Bay, Mounts Bay, HMS Scott, Spirit of Discovery and Balmoral – made for an undeniably “bustling” appearance.
Together with a few smaller ‘uns making up the numbers, and bearing in mind the loss of wharfage in recent times, that scene was probably about as busy as it ever gets these days.
SCINTILLATING STUFF
I mentioned last week the business of hoarding and the inability of myself and my current book subject, Andy Street, to part company with just about anything of sentimental/personal value from way back when.
Another of my own most treasured little mementoes goes all the way back to 1969 when I was a raw trainee reporter on the Falmouth Packet.
I used to turn out for the Packet All Stars football team. In one of those Sunday morning matches, I managed to score all six of our goals in a 6-3 win over Falmouth Technical College at the Dracaena Avenue playing fields.
The match report in that newspaper’s next edition kicked off with: Mike Truscott was in scintillating form on Sunday when he scored all six goals for Falmouth Packet All Stars . . .
Unfortunately, the report was too small for a by-line and so I’m afraid I cannot for the life of me now recall who would have written it . . .
QUOTE OF THE WEEK, SURELY
President Trump, on whether he would join Israeli strikes on Iran: “I may do it, I may not do it. I mean, nobody knows what I am going to do.”
Did he really not add: “Including myself?”
From The Archive
This is one of my favourites, first published in March, 2017, touching as it does on so many aspects of Falmouth life that are now long gone.
Occasionally, I introduce you to some of the people I see on my daily walk around Pendennis headland and along Falmouth seafront. By way of a change, let’s wind the clock back half a century or more and get a glimpse of the people, and things, that would have caught our eye back then.
The headland actually wouldn’t have changed much, apart from the absence of the big new regional Coastguard centre, opened in 1981 by HRH Prince Charles.
Instead, you would find a little “hut” – for it was barely any more than that – just below the southern end of the car park, housing all of a couple of coastguard officers on watch.
In the bay, at any one time, you could expect to see a Shell tanker or a BP tanker or a Federal or New Zealand Shipping Company cargo ship – or maybe all four.
These, along with a goodly number of others, were the household shipping names that regularly sent their vessels to Falmouth for repair and refit.
That was the time when the Docks would be accommodating up to 15 or 20 ships at once, employing over 2,000 people and regularly calling on the “magnificent seven”* harbour tugs to undertake three, four or more shipping movements in a single day.
Along the seafront, the whole character was different, chiefly on account of the hotel bias over apartments. (I think we were still calling them “flats” in those days.)
You’d walk past the likes of the imposing Bay Hotel, the Gwendra, the Carthion and the Pentargan, all now no more. Oh, and not forgetting the recently-departed Madeira. The Pentargan was reinvented as the Falmouth Beach, but that, too, disappeared – destroyed by fire five years ago.
As Gyllyngvase Beach came into view – back to half a century or so ago now – you would see a raft bobbing about either close in or well out, depending on the state of the tide. In all except the worst weather, crowds of swimmers young and old would be having great fun on and around it, like bees attracted to a honey pot.
There were no lifeguards on Gylly in those days, but there was, for a number of years, a stern-faced St John Ambulance lady on hand to help if needs be. Someone might even remember her name?
On a Sunday morning, just by the entrance to Gylly (albeit, admittedly, not quite as long as 50 years ago), you would find a lovely cheery fellow by the name of Nelson Gower selling that day’s newspapers from the boot of his car.
He had a key to a nearby hut and he let me have a copy so I could use that hut for changing before and after my daily lunchtime swim – all year round, that is, for six years!
In August of 1967, you might have witnessed a new spectacle with the first-ever waitresses’ race along the seafront.
This proved a tad controversial, with at least two competitors disqualified, according to the Falmouth Packet, “for running with their glasses, bottles and trays clutched tightly to their bosoms.”
And a Packet reader’s letter from M Winter, of the Green Lawns Hotel, complained: “As far as Falmouth is concerned, we would be better to save the expense, rather than waste time bending over backwards to make ourselves and the town a laughing stock.
“It was not advertised as an open race . . . only one waitress walked the quarter of a mile with a bottle, glass and tray carried in the manner one would expect in such a race.”
Fortunately, it wasn’t all aggro. The race was part of Falmouth Carnival Week, which was opened by Westward Television personality Ken Macleod. He described Cherry Pritchardas “the most beautiful carnival queen I have ever seen.”
In that same era, on around half a dozen evenings every summer, you might even have caught some echoes wafting across town from the Custom House Quay basin and signalling another hugely popular event.
With outdoor entertainment still well ahead of the indoor or screen equivalent, up to a thousand spectators would line the quayside for water galas.
As well as the races and diving events, there would be fiercely-contested water polo matches. Then Miller and Sweep would arrive in their little boats and send soot flying everywhere.
Back at Gylly, meanwhile, you could be amused by something else now long since departed – the Punch and Judy shows.
Let’s finish for now by winding the clock back even further – a few more decades. Browse through any book of really old Falmouth photos and you’re likely to see some quaint sights in the form of men and women dressed in their old-fashioned Sunday best taking a seafront stroll.
Long dresses, elaborate hats and dark suits and ties were the order of the (Sun)day, as opposed to today’s anything-goes culture.
Something not so well chronicled is the set of rules, or rather old by-laws, governing bathing and changing on Gyllyngvase Beach, and which in all probability still apply to this day!
In 1902 Falmouth Borough Council introduced by-laws stating that “a person of the female sex shall not, while bathing, approach within 20 yards of any place at which any member of the male sex, above the age of seven years, may be set down for the purpose of bathing.” And vice versa.
Eric Dawkins, Falmouth Town Clerk back in the 1980s, once told me that bathers were “set down” from gypsy-like caravans that were horse-drawn to the water’s edge at the start of each day. With the exception of males swimming before 8 am, all bathers had to use these “bathing machines”, as they were known, for the purpose of changing.
As Eric said: “It’s an accepted practice now, of course, for people to change on the beach just by putting a towel around themselves, and to do so wherever they like.” Reassuringly, he added that a present-day prosecution for such blatant by-law breaching was realistically not very likely!
A further insight into our ways of old is contained in Eric’s copy of the 1910-11 Falmouth Guide. This states that the western portion of Gyllyngvase is reserved for gentlemen and the eastern section for woman and children.
So now you know!
