OVER the next few days, to celebrate the August Bank Holiday, the daily local history feature is going to be delving into The Northern Echo's magnificent photo-archive to take a tour in old pictures down our coast from the castles of Northumbria to the clifftop abbey of Whitby.
There are some wonderful scenes from yesteryear to come when, it has to be said, the weather seems to have been little better than this sodden year. There are plenty of families in gabardines huddled behind windbreaks desperately trying to enjoy themselves in a rare break between the showers...
Before we move down the east coast, from Northumberland into North Yorkshire, let's set the scene with some railway posters showing how the seaside looks in everyone's dreams: golden sand, blue sky and waves of gently rippling water.
The alluring appeal of the east coast of England in the 1920s
Although the railways advertised their destinations in Victorian times, they did so largely through text-based posters with only words on them. At the start of the 20th Century, the colourful poster began to emerge, but it had lots of images and lots of information on it. It was only in the 1920s that the posters became an artform, with a single glamorised image and a short call-to-action in words.
A classic idealised railway poster showing a young lady in a bathing costume pouring tea from a Thermos flask for her friends, including a man with his golf clubs, who are reclining on the golden sands of North Berwick just up the East Coast Main Line on the Firth of Forth. The poster was designed for the London & North Eastern Railway (LNER) by Frank Newbould (1887-1951), who is regarded as one of the greatest railway poster artists
The 1920s and 1930s were the golden age of railway posters and they helped create the holidaymakers' ideal vision of what a holiday should be like. It would involve going to a defined area like Cornwall, the Lake District, or the East Coast, or visiting a named tourist destination like Whitby, where there would be plenty of beautiful seaside scenery which would also be good for your health as you took in the bracing seaside air in somewhere like "healthful Hartlepool".
Who knew there was so much to do in "healthful Hartlepool", which boasted "the most bracing sea air in the kingdom"?
Really, though, the posters were encouraging people to use the railways off-peak. In those days, the trains were crowded with commuters during the week but needed weekend daytrippers and holidaymakers at other times.
The posters worked, as just before the outbreak of the Second World War, in the days when a cheap flight to Europe's warmer beaches was not an option, 15m Brits visited the seaside a year.
A British Railways poster from after the Second World War featuring Whitby bathed in a golden glow
The poster industry provided good work for artists such as Frank Newbould, John Hassall, Norman Wilkinson and Leonard Cusden – nearly all men, of course. After nationalisation of 1947, British Railways kept them in work even when diesel trains replacing the puffing glory of the steam engine, but by the 1970s, the characterful posterart had been replaced by the modern reality of the photograph.
Was the decline of the British bucket-and-spade seaside holiday to do with travellers' changing tastes for foreign adventure or because the railways stopped selling them the coastal dream with these posters?
A pair of posters produced before the Second World War for LNER promoting the joys of the east coast which, the posters pointed out, had better weather than the wetter west
A wonderful, stylised view of Redcar on a British Railways poster from the early 1970s, featuring lots of beautiful people on the miles of golden beaches leading to the dramatic cliffs at Saltburn in the distance
A pre-Second World War LNER poster promoting the joys of the east coast
A 1936 poster promoting Redcar by well regarded railway artist Leonard Cusden
An Edwardian poster extolling the virtues of Saltburn. The earlier railway posters tended to cram on a lot of images and information. It was in the 1920s and 1930s that they become simpler, with one striking image and motto
A little diesel train from the late 1960s winds its way rather precariously around the Yorkshire coast. It looks fairly cute but doesn't dominate the scene like a steam engine would have done
A later poster showing a rather sturdy young lady doing some serious castle building in Scarborough
A new poster goes up in York station in 1956. A billposter - a person who pastes up a poster on a hoarding - is a lost job along with the cordwainer, bellowfarmer or besom-maker
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