Looking Back, with Eric Leaver

"BLACKBURN by the sea" is the slogan for the town's forthcoming festival packed with free entertainment with a seaside holiday theme.

But if the idea of the tide coming in so far sounds odd, the flip-side notion of the town moving 20-odd miles to the coast actually isn't so daft.

For, just as a new exhibition recalls in setting the scene for the town's five-day July fiesta, summer was the time when not just Blackburn, but all of East Lancashire took it in turns to pack in work for a week and head for the sands - above all, those of brash and breezy Blackpool.

Yes, it's the now-decimated ritual of the Lancashire Wakes Weeks that is evoked in the exhibition at the Lewis Textile Museum - with old-time holiday snapshots, comic postcards, souvenirs and old folks' memories gathered from interviews.

Two prime factors that began to put paid to the Wakes by the early 1960s were the arrival of cheap foreign package holidays and changing industry and working practices that meant the towns' factories no longer stopped production together during their designated holiday week.

But even though the phenomenon is well within the scope of living memory, it is still sometimes hard to visualise how immense the milltown migrations were. Blackburn holidaymakers had been queueing since 7am outside the town's station for the 23 trains departing that July Saturday morning for Lancashire coastal resorts on the getaway start to the 1945 Wakes holiday.

With victory in Europe in the bag and total triumph for the Allies in the Second World War only a matter of weeks away, the annual holiday rush was back on that year after five long years in wartime limbo.

"It was," reported the Northern Daily Telegraph, "the biggest rush to the seaside since before the war."

Indeed, it was - a record, in fact. For the following week, when it was Accrington's turn to be by the sea, and the NDT calculated that, out of the 2,700 folk, on the 14 trains departing for four coastal holiday spots, 1,250 were destined for Blackpool, the resort's popularity was proven by the fact that the town was braced for an invasion of 250,000 people on that one day alone - "a record invasion since pre-war boom days," the Telegraph said.

And what those crowds were also taking with them apart from their suitcases and buckets was pots of money. Again, the NDT had been doing its sums that year and, based on the "plentiful" pay-outs of the towns' holiday clubs, calculated that their week off work, the people of Accrington and those of Church, Clayton-le-Moors, Rawtenstall, Bacup and Haslingden, who shared the same holiday break, would spend nearly £1million - a mammoth amount in those days. The war effort, of course, had fuelled a jobs boom, especially for women, and the extra income was reflected that year in the increased amounts collected from the savings clubs - such as that at the Broad Oak print works in Accrington where the 1945 pay-out of £8,200 was £800 up on the year before.

But money could not buy everything when the Wakes resorts burst at the seams. For on that record day in Blackpool, there wasn't a boarding house bed to be had.

The police had to cope with the excess hordes who arrived before they could claim their rooms by directing the "homeless" to the Central and South piers where they were admitted free - with a contingency plan for them to doss there in the amusement halls and cafs if the weather became wet. Indeed, 8,000 people had to overnight on the Friday in Blackpool in just such a fashion.

Things were little better for trippers to and from the northern holidaymakers' number two destination, the Isle of Man.

Despite many waiting all night at Fleetwood, 2,000 people were still left at the dockside when the packed steamer for Douglas departed that super Saturday.

And, that day, another 800 returning holidaymakers found themselves stranded in the Manx capital until the following Monday - without a boat home or a room to stay in.

They had all checked out of their digs, but were left behind when each of the day's two boats for Fleetwood sailed with a full complement of 2,000 passengers. And with no steamer sailings on the Sunday, the marooned crowd had an unexpected and unwanted 48-hour extension to their holiday. "There were long queues for cafs and restaurants from an early hour," reported the NDT. That year, even those with a wary eye for such travel problems got caught out by the record rush to the seaside - as with the trainload of Burnley day-trippers who left Blackpool with a beat-the-crowds plan.

Burnley Fair week saw the resort so choked that many decided that later trains home would be too crowded for comfort and that it was wiser to catch the nine-coach train to Accrington that left just before 6 pm - which it did with its carriages "well-filled." But when it came to changing at Accrington to their connection for Burnley, waiting for them they found a train from Manchester with just three coaches. The result, in the words of one perturbed passenger, was "a decimal affair."

Still, as they say: no gain without pain. So what pleasures awaited East Lancashire's holidaymakers when they were sardine-packed into those get-away-from-it-all week-long escapes from routine?

Some of the memories captured in quotes at the Lewis Textile Museum's newly-opened exhibition give an intriguing insight into the all-but-vanished social spectacle of East Lancashire by the sea.

The days of making sandcastles on the beach, dancing on the pier and in the Winter Gardens, free entertainment at the sheet-music peddling singing booths on the front, bring-your-own grub and cruet-rental boarding houses, jugs of tea for the sands and considering yourself posh if you went to Southport instead of Blackpool - all are fascinatingly recalled in the display.

And, those days, it never used to rain, did it?

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.