I've always been a fan of vintage fairs. Well, that's not strictly true: I loved the modern fairs I visited as a child and still do. Like me, they've become vintage over the decades. The classic rides like the Octopus, Speedway, Waltzer and so on are rides of which I'll never tire, but one of my favourites will always be the Skid.
Harry Parrish's Skid at St Ives Michaelmas Fair
many moons ago, when I only took three pictures...
Growing up in St Ives, Cambridgeshire, we had one of the best street fairs going - St Ives Michaelmas Fair. Taking place on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday in October, starting on the nearest Monday to 11th (such was the nature of the Charters under which these fairs were permitted). This always meant that the preceding weekend, from noon on the Saturday onwards, I got to watch everyone hard at work putting these rides together. No hydraulics to unfold floors; no chequerplate to make the job any lighter. The solid wood and steel components were mostly hoicked by hand or unloaded using a jib on the packing truck. The Skid belonged to one Harry Parrish, and was a wonderful sight to behold - classic Fred Fowle artwork, clever lighting and the wonderful air siren that started wailing as the ride reached top speed. It was amusing watching the cars full of "the lads" all standing up and leaning from side-to-side to try and show off their huge swing. You never needed to do that - as long as the brake pedal on your car was working, you could get the car swinging madly with very little effort. I'll be returning to the traditional fairground artwork in a later blog, but it was this ride that first made me interested in the science behind colour perception and relative chromaticity. When the lighting switched from the main yellow/red lamps to the green and blue fluorescent tubes, the cars appeared to change colour too...
These days, the Skid is far too labour-intensive and just plain heavy to tour in competition with the modern rides, but there are a few hardy showmen who keep their rides on the road, usually appearing at vintage steam events. As I first drafted this blog, the Rushden Cavalcade was about to begin for the May Day Bank Holiday weekend, and this prompted me to write about my experience there last year, when I finally got to help pull down a Skid. Probably the best Skid on tour these days, it belongs to Jimmy Bowry whose passion for the ride knows no bounds - the video added here shows Jimmy giving his usual on-ride tutorials to make sure everyone gets a great ride. You might spot me in the video as well... It gives the fastest ride and most vigorous swinging action - you can easily build up enough momentum to bounce off the wire between the fishtrays and lift the wheels off the floor. Strictly an amateur, I am usually in charge of the chain that keeps people off the ride platform when in motion - a simple way to please the health and safety people - and getting the cars loaded. I usually nipped off home mid-afternoon, but this time I stayed until closing and ended up getting roped in with the pull-down.
It was a fairly innocuous start - removing all the filament lamps from the trellis while Ralph (a true restoration hero who started the work on getting Harry Parrish's machine back to it's original glory) was unhooking the cars from the fishtrays. Then off come the two steel ropes that provide the tension that keeps everything in place - and stops the cars from swinging too far!
Trellis sections positioned on the packing truck
Next step - up onto the top of the packing truck as the rounding boards, trellis and then the fibreglass roof panels are taken down - in the correct order, of course! You can't lay all the pieces out on the ground like when you're setting up a tent ("insert locking bracket A..."). This stage involves a good head for heights, as it is all done walking along the rafters, and as more sections get packed away, there is less and less to walk on! The fences, being at ground level, have to be hoicked up onto the upper level of the truck. There is a clever pulley wheel on the lower edge of the upper floor, so once the fence section has been positioned against this wheel, the fence can be pulled up by those on the top of the truck without scraping all the paint off! Doesn't stop them being heavy though...
With the upper level of the packing truck now full, it's time to put the cars onto the lower level. There's a tail-lift to raise the cars from the floor of the ride to the lower level, but it still takes three people to roll the cars onto the lift and into the truck. Next stage is the rafters and the wooden beams between the uprights, before the uprights themselves are removed and packed into the belly boxes either side of the bottom of the truck.
Right - that was the easy part! Now for the fishtrays! These are the not-so-little blighters that connect the cars to the central drive mechanism and house the shock-absorber system. They weigh a blooming ton and have to be removed in the reverse order to which they are put on. There is no power to turn the ride so - you guessed it - we have to push the whole thing round by hand to line up each fishtray with the second truck where, one by one, they are lifted up by crane. By this time, of course, it was raining, making the metal plates very slippery. Shoving several tons of machinery around is hard work at the best of times!
Fishtrays attached to the cog, with slippery sheet metal on
the floor panels. All very heavy!
Next up - and heavier still - the floor. Jimmy spared no expense in his restoration of this ride, and so each floor panel is very solid, very thick wood with a nice, thick metal plate attached to the upper surface. They each need three people to lift them up onto the trolley (think garden centre but much more heavy-duty) and there are forty two of them! Starting at the opposite side of the ride to the truck, for reasons which are, hopefully, quite obvious, they are piled four or five high onto the trolley, then wheeled around to the crane. It's now getting on for 9pm as we start dismantling the spider - the heavy-duty wooden framework that supports the floor panels. These are in turn supported by wooden blocks of various sizes, with thinner and thinner pieces of wood that were inserted to make sure that all those supporting beams were perfectly horizontal. All these wooden beams have to be hoicked up onto the floor plate truck and the blocks have to be stacked in the space between the piles of floor plates.
Just the centre of the ride to go now - but we've saved the heaviest for last - the cog! This is the circular metal behemoth to which the fishtrays are attached. The upper surface has the cog teeth that engage with the drive motor cog, and it rests on solid metal wheels around the outside edge of the raised central platform that supports the paybox and control system. It's dark now, and heading for 11pm as the eight massive sections of the cog are winched up one by one onto the top of the pile of floor panels. The support structure for the cog is then unbolted and folded - Jimmy spent one winter season trailer-mounting the centre of the ride to speed things up a little, so once the paybox is dismantled, there is no more lifting to do - just folding things up and using the hydraulic rams to lift the centre of the ride up to allow the lorry wheels to be fitted ready to take the whole ride away to the next event.
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