If you are quick you can catch this on BBC Radio 4.
I’m not sure how relevant this is to the direction Rhyl is now taking, as the story is one of all seaside resorts over the last two generations, but might bring back a nostalgic tear or two…
It started as a homage to childhood really, my childhood, growing up on the Reso council estate in the seaside town of Rhyl in the nineteen sixties.
It was a time when my most serious concerns were, in seasonal order, would it snow when forty of my family made their way to the Fun Fair on Easter Monday, would the temperature in Rhyl outdoor baths ever top 55F, would I be picked for the annual Gwynfryn Avenue 150 a side football match against Rhydwen Drive and where was I going to find the two shillings a day needed to feed my autumnal firework habit.
It quickly turned into something else.
In a feat of memory that seems to rival the Rain Man, I seem to have stored forensic detail of my childhood which others have forgotten……
… the starched feel of the antimacassars in our Welsh chapel-going neighbours’ front room where I sat playing with the snow dome bought on a Sunday school visit to Llandudno
… the metallic clunk of the stamping machine in the railway station on which you could print out rude messages of sixteen letter lengths, on which, I, at the age of eight, managed “Bum. titty bum bu” because I miscalculated the spaces and the punctuation
…the intensely warm glow of a family Christmas tea at my Nain’s when twenty of my cousins would gather around the extended table to savour meats and pickles of cosmic variety and Corona lime and dandelion and burdock pop which was as flat as a witches’ tit, all the time sweating from the ship’s boiler room fire that my Nain had stoked up in the grate, inches behind me.
…the wisdom of my mother, who reassured me that the reason we didn’t have chocolate biscuits in our house was because “I’d only eat them…” an explanation that kept me happy until I was thirteen, and began wondering what else you’d do with biscuits!
…the twenty minute rule of my dad, which he reassured us, was more than enough time to have the immersion heater on for our weekly bath (whether we needed it or not!) in advance of watching the Beatles appearing on Sunday Night at the London Palladium
It seemed that my childhood was in fact everyone else’s childhood. Deeply rooted in that sixties decade when, despite the threat of world mutually assured destruction and random violence from the likes of Steve Caroli on the estate, everything seemed possible.
Many lived the same dream, and many today wished they had.
Like most seaside resorts, Rhyl has found the regeneration journey a difficult one in the last decades.
For many years, much was talked abut and little achieved. In recent years, a number of initiatives are at last coming together and the pace of change has turned decisively, I hope.
These pictures show the Promenade of Rhyl at night. This was a scene once dominated by the massive ice cream white dome of the Pavilion Theatre, with coloured lights playing on it as selected for the cover of the Beyond the Reso book.
Now the Promenade is looking spectacular again with coloured lights highlighting all the features from the Foryd Harbour, with the Dragon Bridge all the way through to the Garden of Remembrance in the East End.
The lights are more sophisticated than the illuminations on the characters from Disney that used to stand no more than four foot high on the grassy area near the road in the East End!
Thank you to Rhyl historian Stuart Jones for the heads up about this little gem about a century of Rhyl History.
There are some wonderful contributions from Rhyl residents. Great to see Colin Jones of the Rhyl Blogspot and Dafydd Timothy who was so supportive when the original Reso books were published.
See the film here by clicking on the link below…
Photo from Colin’s blog of a pre war Birmingham family enjoying themselves on Rhyl Beach
I’m not the first to have a lasting affection for my home town that has turned online.
One of my inspirations has been Colin Jones’ blog, which has been a constant source of amusement, memories and enjoyment.
I feature in one of the posts together with the Rhyl Junior High School Rugby team of 1969. My abiding memory of that team was playing on a frozen pitch at Glyndwr (then the Junior High School) and performing what others described as a ‘brave’ blockage of a long kicked ball with a rather sensitive part of my anatomy. I knew I had dome some serious damage, but it was thirty seconds, due to the cold, before the agony kicked in.
The blog is a compendium of key places, events and people that makes up the historical fabric of the town. Strange to think that so much of what was our daily lives as children now forms historical records, of which, without people like Colin, would be lost in faded memories.
I send Colin my thanks and best wishes as he scales down the blog and concentrates on new challenges. Thank you for your research and insights into our great town.
Visit Colin Jones’ Rhyl BlogSpot
