Turned Out Nice Again
The hotel I stayed in when visiting St Annes-on-the-Sea, was a place I knew well as, not only did my mother work there for many years, I also worked there whilst I was in Sixth Form. I remembered the owners of the hotel, well, to be more precise, the daughter of the owners, because she is the one who now runs the place. What’s more, she remembered my mother and gave me the suite at the top of the building with a balcony overlooking the sand dunes and St Annes pier. Of course, after nearly thirty years away, I had to have a look around.
St Annes has changed but it hasn’t changed much. It still seemed like the genteel little town I remembered. The bakers and the milliners were still there and so were the flats we’d lived in on Fairhaven Road and York Road and St David’s Road. The last of those had changed, though. It used to be a draper’s shop with our flat above but now it’s been converted into a house, the buzzers by the door suggest that it’s still split into flats, though.
People who don’t really know the area talk about Lytham St Annes but they are two separate places and they are separated by Ansdell, where my old school was, and Fairhaven, which gave its name to the lake where my mate Dave hired a boat.
George Formby
You could easily miss Ansdell and Fairhaven unless you came into the railway station bearing both names. Calling it a station is a bit of an overstatement, really, it is a platform and some steps. Ansdell is the few streets on the inland side of the railway line and Fairhaven gets everything the coastal side of the railway. That’s not a huge amount but it does include 199 Inner Promenade, Fairhaven, the former home of George Formby; the ukulele wielding movie star. He lived here for much of the last decade of his life, having bought the 1930s red-brick house from the tenor, Joseph Locke in 1953.
Formby had been married to his first wife, Beryl, since 1924 and they were together until her death on Christmas Eve 1960 but things had not been rosy in the Formby household. Beryl, who had helped to push George to stardom and had been involved in every single aspect of his life, had begun drinking heavily and they had, apparently, not lived properly as man and wife for the fifteen years before her death.
Soon afterwards, on Valentine’s Day 1961, Formby announced that he was to marry a young schoolteacher from Preston called Pat Howson. She was twenty years younger than George. Unfortunately, just eight days later, he had a heart attack and was taken into hospital. He died there on 6th March 1961, aged just fifty-six. His films and songs had given, and still do give, a great deal of pleasure to a large number of people. I hope that Pat brought happiness to his final weeks on earth. Weeks he chose to spend in Fairhaven, next to St Annes-on-Sea.
St Annes is the Hyacinth Bucket of the Fylde coast, it looks down on its big, brassy, working-class, show-off neighbour, Blackpool, and considers itself a better place. I can’t say it’s wrong. Of the two, I know where I’d rather be, but it’s not quite as posh as it would like to be. It might have made a few quid; it might have a decent, middle of the range, car; it might have a nice bungalow; it might have golf courses to fill its days but it’s not as posh as it wants to be, and it knows it. It didn’t exist at all until 31st March 1875 when the foundation stone of the St Anne’s Hotel was laid. Today you can still clearly feel that it’s a planned development, a housing estate for the nouveau riche, albeit the nouveau riche of the late Victorian age. It was planned out by Maxwell and Tuke, the Bury firm of architects who would later go on to construct Blackpool Tower. It would like to be posh but, when all’s said and done, St Annes is still a fan of former resident Les Dawson.
Lytham
Lytham is what St Annes wants to be and it has nowhere to compare itself to when it comes to having a posher neighbour. Lytham can only look down the coast at St Annes and Blackpool; like John Cleese in the famous “I know my place” sketch. I hope that it has the good sense not to compare itself with anyone because, in life, that gets you nowhere. Looking down on someone never makes you bigger or better. As the old saying goes, the only time that you should look down on someone is when you’re helping them up. Looking up to someone is often just as fruitless, it’s useful if it gives you a way to live that works better for you or those around you. Too often, though, comparing yourself to the posher neighbours with a better house and a better car and a better job will only serve to make your life that little bit worse. We forget that when we compare ourselves to others we are comparing the outside of them to the inside of us. We don’t really ever know what’s going on in the lives of others. Much more worthwhile to just get on with being ourselves, no-one will ever do that better than we do.
Lytham is a lot older than St Annes, it is recorded in the Domesday Book and had probably been home to people for several centuries by then. Saxons and Vikings had settled here before the Normans ever arrived. By the end of the twelfth century, the landowner was Richard FitzRoger who gave his land here to the Benedictine monks from Durham. They built a priory dedicated to St Cuthbert, who had been an Anglo-Saxon Northumbrian monk. The church in Lytham by the cricket club is still St Cuthbert’s today. After the dissolution of the monasteries, there were several tenants and landowners until the arrival of the Clifton family in 1606. They built Lytham Hall on the site of the old priory and their name has hung around ever since.
Gershwin’s
The main road to St Annes is Clifton Drive; the main shopping square is Clifton Square and the Clifton Arms Hotel sits on the seafront. There used to be a piano bar, called Gershwin’s, which was part of the hotel. Me and my mate Dave used to go into there when we were eighteen and nineteen and knew all the songs of Sinatra and Dean Martin and Sammy Davis. We’d sing and have bottles of champagne and strange cocktails bought for us by older people amazed that we knew the lyrics. We were both in the Royal Air Force by this time and the pianist would play Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines when we walked in. It was the closest thing to famous that I’ve ever been. I wouldn’t be surprised if my mate Dave still has a bar where the pianist plays his tune when he walks in and his favourite drink is lined up on the bar. I’ve got a farm café where they know I’m partial to a cheese scone, but that’s not quite the same.
Gershwin’s has gone now, as has the pub that we used to drink in before we made our way there. It was called The Talbot but now it’s a boutique, a Caffe Nero and a place that offers “Beautiful Gifts and Interiors”. It sits on Clifton Street, the wide, tree-lined avenue that is Lytham’s main shopping street. There are a few chain stores but still plenty of independent shops and the odd pavement café. It would have been unfair of me to have expected Lytham not to have changed in the thirty years since I’d left but it’s done its best not to alter too much. It still has red telephone boxes in the shopping square and they still had telephones in them when I visited. On a warm, early spring evening with sunshine and a Simpsons sky and all the kids on their Easter holidays playing on the wide seafront green by the windmill. I was struggling to remember why I’d left. Lytham, with its bistros and pavement cafes and tapas bars, their pastel clad and gilet wearing patrons chatting and laughing in the sun, does without a thought what St Annes just can’t quite manage even with a lot of effort. Poor old St Annes.
More than anywhere else that I visited, the trips to Blackpool and St Annes and Lytham were about reminiscence. I only lived there for a little under six years but they were important years and there’s always a little bit of that area that will feel like home to me. I left and headed home to Suffolk. The following day was the day of my mother’s funeral.
Originally published at https://adrianbleese.substack.com.
