Halcyon Days in a true beach city

June 2010

by Eric Crockhart

Aberdeen Beach is hot. It is the summer of 1966. I am 13 years old, and I have just cycled to the beach with a small gang of younger kids from the Midstocket neighbourhood. We have come to cool off in the sea.

Near the Beach Boulevard the sand heaves with people. We find space for our towels and snacks on a less-crowded stretch beside the Beach Ballroom. The soundtrack for that day is The Beatles. Their new Revolver album plays endlessly to the sweltering crowds over the speaker system strung along the Esplanade… Taxman, Eleanor Rigby, Got To Get You Into My Life. We savour the humour of Yellow Submarine… local boys and girls get into the spirit of the song by amending the lyrics… the Beatles’ subaqueous chorus becomes “We All Live in a Hoose in Aiberdeen”.

Aberdeen is a true beach city, not just a city with a beach somewhere nearby. March east on a sunny day from the end of Union Street down the Beach Boulevard, and the truth is obvious – the Silver City with the Golden Sands…

…except when a leaden north-east sky dimly illuminates the North Sea foaming restlessly against sands now turned sodden, dull and reddish-brown. For a beach is an ever-changing beast. Sand and shingle pile up landward one day, only to be sucked out to sea again by current, tide and storm.

Groynes designed to hold the wandering sands in place march in regular timber sections for two miles from the mouth of the river Don, almost to Fittie. These groynes are absent from a picture taken in the early 1900s of work on the North Breakwater pier at Aberdeen harbour. In the background is the beach almost as nature intended – a wide curve of inviting sand backed by dunes, much as you can still find today just north of the Don. In the middle distance, an indistinct huddle of buildings at the spot now occupied by the present beach cafés and amusement park.

By the 1990s the groynes from the first half of the 20th century, and the later beach defences fronting the Esplanade, were showing their age in places. There was growing concern that the sea would soon breach the defences south of the Beach Ballroom, threatening more than 400 houses and businesses along the seafront.

So in recent years a £3m project has been carried out. This involved bringing tens of thousands of tons of sand from Montrose to augment the parts of Aberdeen Beach that were beginning to disappear. Thousands of tons of rock armour were also placed in special configurations across the ends of the groynes opposite the built up areas of the beach front, to absorb and blunt the power of the waves. This work has halted the most pressing erosion problems, though further protective measures will inevitably be needed in future.

On the beach in 1966, local accents compete with the patois of the West of Scotland. It is the Glasgow Fair fortnight. Many of those enjoying the sun are Glaswegians taking their annual family break in Aberdeen. You can see them with beach bags trudging the Boulevard every day – Pa, Ma and the weans making their way to or from their holiday boarding house. Within a few more years the advent of the cheap Mediterranean package holiday will leave Aberdeen beach bereft of these friendly annual visitors.

There is no hint of beach recreational use in Parson Gordon’s 17th century map of Aberdeen. It simply marks ‘The Sandys betwixt The River mouths of Done & Dee’. But by the 19th century the beach area was definitely a spot for recreation.

In July 1862, a crowd estimated at 30,000 descended on the beach links for the first Wapinschaw. This was named for the ancient ‘wapenschaws’, or musters for military exercises, referred to by Sir Walter Scott in his novel Old Mortality.

Kilts and bearskins at the Broad Hill

A contemporary painting by Henry Pont, a local theatrical scene-painter, shows those crowds surrounding a huge grassy square beside the Broad Hill. In the square are some 2,500 regulars, militia and volunteers. In the foreground, marching ranks of soldiers wearing kilts and bearskins; behind, officers in cockaded hats dashing gallantly about on horseback.

So popular did this prove, that wapinschaws became an annual event. Nowadays they have dwindled to much more modest shooting contests, held a few miles north on the Black Dog ranges.

For those in pursuit of less militaristic pleasures, the Victorian fascination with the seaside lent a new elegance to Aberdeen beach, with the creation of the Esplanade and Promenade in the late 19th century. Pierrot shows were then a popular seaside entertainment, the clowns performing in the open or under bandstands. But the shows lost audiences – and money – when it rained, or when the haar rolled in.

The solution for Aberdeen came in 1905. Sheltered entertainment was now possible with the opening on the Esplanade of the first Beach Pavilion – a building that soon become indelibly associated with a young, home-grown entertainer. Harry Gordon was to run successful, family-orientated shows at the Pavilion and its bigger successor, the New Beach Pavilion, till the start of the second world war. After the war, changing public tastes meant the Pavilion ceased to be a theatre. In 1961 it became instead the Gaiety restaurant – and the building continues that culinary second life today as a Jimmy Chung’s restaurant.

But a legacy of the Pavilion and Harry Gordon remains. One of his most popular theatrical creations was the laird of the fictional village of Inversnecky. Harry was friendly with Peter Vicca, who owned a business nearby – and who changed its name to the one it bears to this day, the Inversnecky Café.

Of course, a beach implies the sea, and the sea is at least a temptation to bathing. Now there are those hardy souls calling themselves Nippy Dippers who brave the sea for charity every Boxing Day at Aberdeen beach.

The Beach Baths

But even on a hot summer day, the North Sea is not to be entered lightly. On stage, Glasgow comedian Billy Connolly has hilariously recalled summer visits as a child with his family to Aberdeen, in which he noted the direct connection between the North Sea and the Arctic Ocean, and the resulting effects upon the anatomy of male bathers.

Nowadays, less hardy souls can bathe more snugly in the heated waters of the Beach Leisure Centre, just north of the Beach Ballroom. But there used to be an alternative.

The Beach Baths once stood opposite the end of the Beach Boulevard. Before they closed in 1972, after 74 years in operation, their somewhat incongruous and isolated red-brick building, with its towering chimney, provided a pool with heated sea water. But the Beach Baths also had a reputation for being a bit insanitary. This explains a story I have been told of one father who liked swimming in their salty water, so warned his small daughter that if asked, she had to tell mum he had taken her to the Uptown Baths!

Traditional seaside amusements including roller coasters, whirling fairground rides, and candy floss have long been part of the experience of Aberdeen Beach, with the Codona family playing a prominent role in providing seaside entertainment. But a walk along the Prom will soon reveal that those traditional elements have been joined over the years by more modern developments involving things like video games and laser guns, as well as chain restaurants and a multiplex cinema. Sadly, the big red weighing machines that used to dot the Prom have been consigned to history.

Every November, the Queens Links are now the venue for Aberdeen Winter Festival fireworks night. This may bring to mind for older spectators a much earlier bonfire on this site. In 1958 the last of the trams which had once been such a feature of city transport were publicly burned there; on reflection, a somewhat curious disposal solution.

Close by is unquestionably Aberdeen’s finest dance hall – the Beach Ballroom – its famously sprung Canadian maple floor recently lifted and replaced, giving it reinvigorated spring.

But dancing is not the Beach Ballroom’s only claim to fame. This August the city council plans to celebrate with a tribute band the 50th anniversary of a particular act first playing the main ballroom. Not that The Beatles were headliners back in 1960. A reproduction of a ticket from that night on the council’s website reveals the Sunday night entertainment was billed as The Johnny Scott Band Show featuring The Beatles, tickets price 3/-. But when The Beatles returned to play the Beach Ballroom just three years later, they were already on the road to becoming the most famous pop band in the world.

Three years more, and Aberdeen Beach rings to the fantastic sounds and loping, hypnotic rhythm of Tomorrow Never Knows, the final track on the Revolver album. It’s the wildest musical shore The Beatles ever reached.

And now it is time for my friends and me to leave that long-remembered shore, to cycle home to parents and to tea, the hot sun of 1966 forever westering over Aberdeen Beach.

Eric Crockart is an award-winning broadcaster, freelance journalist and media consultant. He spent 33 years as a news reporter in his native city of Aberdeen, mostly for BBC radio and television. His interests now include music, song-writing, and sound recording.

This is an article from the June 2010 edition of Leopard Magazine. To read much more like this every month, subscribe to Leopard Magazine.