Larry Grayson and the end of the pier show

Once, 91 pleasure piers protruded from Britain’s coasts, with three within 10 miles of each other extending into the North Sea from the railway resorts of east Cleveland.

Today, only 55 piers survive, and many are in a shortened form. Two have gone from Cleveland, leaving only Saltburn still standing – and it is only 621ft long, compared to its 1,400ft full majesty when steamships puffed to its pierhead.

The grand original entrance pavilions to Redcar pier

Redcar, to the north of Saltburn, is really two resorts: Coatham, an old fishing village, and Redcar, a brash new town that grew up when the railway arrived from Middlesbrough in 1846, bringing with it working class daytrippers.

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In 1866, Redcar got Parliamentary permission to build a pier but, perhaps because of the expense, it didn’t pursue the project until 1870 when Coatham began planning a pier of its own.

For a while the two towns contemplated collaboration, but they couldn't agree and so in 1871 Head Wrightson started work on Redcar's solo effort, which was to be 1,300ft long.

A postcard view of Redcar pier after the ballroom was added in 1907

So Coatham began constructing its pier which, heading due north out onto the notorious Saltscar rocks, was going to be anything up to 2,250ft long. It even got a short stretch of it open for July 1872.

But Redcar’s pier was nearing completion and, at a cost of £6,250, it opened 150 years ago this summer, as Memories 631 told, on June 2, 1873. It reached out from Clarendon Street, at the southern end of the Esplanade, to its pierhead where there was a horseshoe of 600 seats screened from the worst of the elements and from where steamers could take pleasureseekers into Middlesbrough or down to Saltburn and Whitby.

But not to Coatham. In fact, Coatham was bypassed.

An Edwardian postcard showing the full length of Redcar pier

Nevermind the pier pressure, Coatham was still pressing on with its own construction – now down to 2,000ft but still significantly longer than Redcar’s.

But disaster struck in a storm in December 1874 when Griffin, a brig carrying heavy oak timber from Southampton, smashed broadside into the pier. The crew of seven claimed they hadn’t seen it – although they used it to make their escape as their stricken vessel was driven onto Coatham Sands.

Hours later, Corrymbus, a schooner from Dundee, also piled through the pier so that it was left standing in three distinct sections.

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Such was the cost of the repairs that when Coatham was finally opened, it was only 1,800ft long – yet still it stuck out further than Redcar’s, which was the main thing. It featured two brick pavilions at its landing and a large, covered rollerskating rink, and halfway along was a glass bandstand. Here, the posh people of Coatham put on orchestral concerts and snobbishly sniggered as Redcar pier hosted brass band performances for its working class audiences.

Redcar beach on July 27, 1967, with the remains of the decaying pier in the background

Because they were so exposed, blasted by the weather and bashed by boats, neither pier lasted especially long. Redcar suffered a long, lingering decline which began in 1940 when its central portion was removed to prevent the Germans from launching a pier-based invasion. It then fell into decay until, condemned as unsafe, in 1980 it was sold for scrap for £250 when it was only 87ft long – it was more of a pimple than a pier.

Coatham’s pier had also been sold for scrap for £250, but that had been in 1898 after a much more dramatic final chapter…

The remains of Redcar pier on December 19, 1962, when the tide has washed away all the sand from the beach

The Northern Echo, of October 19, 1898 

ON October 15, 1898, the Birger, a 757-ton barque (a sailing ship with three or more masts) from Rauma in Finland, was nearing the Norwegian coast with a cargo of salt she was carrying from San Carlo in Spain to Abo in Finland, when a hurricane-strength gale blew her back towards Britain.

Fatefully, rather than put in at Grimsby, Captain KO Nordlink decided to press northwards to South Shields – to delight of the gods of the gales.

For three days, they toyed with her, tearing her topsails to tatters and holing her beneath the waterline.

Then they blew her northwards, just out of reach of the rockets fired from the Scarborough shoreline and, in mountainous seas, beyond the reach of the Robin Hood’s Bay lifeboat.

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To prevent Whitby’s rescuers reaching her, the storm blew her four miles out to sea and then flung her underneath Saltburn’s glowering Huntcliff where she became trapped by towering breakers and her timbers became waterlogged.

Just as she was about to break up, the storm turned on her with the most vicious fury in living memory and sent her crazily careering up the coast. She missed the spindly legs of Saltburn’s pier and was whisked around the matchsticks of Redcar’s only to finally, at 2pm on October 22, to be wrecked on the rocks of Saltscar beside Coatham pier.

The hole in the Coatham pier left by the Birger

The force of the impact caused the Birger’s mainmast to crash down onto the deck, killing the chief officer and the captain.

“The captain was taking a cradle home for his wife,” said The Northern Echo.

Redcar’s two lifeboats - Emma and The Brothers – tried in vain to reach the stranded crewmen and at 2.30pm, the Birger began to break apart. The wheelhouse was ripped from the hull and, with three sailors lashed to it, was flung at the pier, on which hundreds of people stood, trying to save the men.

“When they got near, lines were thrown towards them, but they were apparently benumbed by the cold through being in the water so long, and only one of them was able to retain his hold,” said the Echo. “He was hauled onto the pier.”

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A second poor soul was seen to perish, and the Darlington & Stockton Times said: “The third held on for some minutes, but he was too exhausted to maintain his grip of the rope when he was hauled out of the water, and with a despairing cry of “oh, dear!” he fell back into the sea and was carried away.

The crowd could see they were in immediate danger, and they rushed from the pier, taking survivor Emile Nordstrom with them.

Birger wreckage at Redcar

Just as well, because the next wave “dashed the deckhouse with terrible force against the supports, and about 60 yards of pier was broken”. The section where the rescuers had been standing only moments earlier toppled into the water.

Continued the Echo: “Another man – Johann Nestor Makila – was seen floating towards the shore and a rush was made to get hold of him.

“He was rescued at great risk, several of the rescuers being knocked down in the water.” Indeed, a chap from South Bank broke a leg when he was struck by wreckage.

So the final death toll was 13 – and one pier. It never reopened.

The Birger had smashed a 300ft hole in the structure and its owner, the Coatham Pier Company, demolished the stranded seaward section before itself collapsing into debt.

In 1875, the remains of the pier were sold for £250 for scrap, although its entrance pavilions and the rollerskating rink survived until 1910 when they were replaced by a shelter called the Glasshouse. It, too, was replaced, in 1928 by an art deco cinema and theatre called the New Pavilion.

In its heyday, the New Pavilion (above) must have been a classic end of the pier theatre. A 17-year-old called Roy Castle tapdanced there in 1949 in one of his first live performances, and in the 1950s, a young comedian called Billy Breen (real name: Billy White) appeared there on a breezy day.

It was so breezy that the entrance from the beach kept blowing open and the distracted comedian cried out: “Ooo, shut that door!” This got a laugh, so he repeated it. A few years later, Billy Breen changed his name to Larry Grayson, and “shut that door” became his catchphrase, most regularly heard on television in the 1970s as he presented The Generation Game.

Larry Grayson in his dressing room in the London Palladium with Joyce Dowding, who befriended him when, as Billy Breen, he first played at the New Pavilion. Joyce is presenting hims with a painting of the Redcar theatre where his door-related catchphrase was reputedly born 

The New Pavilion Theatre also changed its name: in 1964, it became the Regent Cinema, and when it was being done up in 2019, a beachside door with a dodgy mechanism was rediscovered and is now on display where it is hailed as the door which inspired a catchphrase.

Cinema manager Neil Bates and Redcar resident Joyce Dowding, who befriended Larry Grayson when he appeared at the New Pavilion, with the door that reputedly inspired Grayson's famous catchphrase "shut that door"

The Birger's anchor on display outside the Zetland Lifeboat Museum in Redcar

Another relic from the past of Coatham pier that can still be seen is the anchor of the Birger. Crab fishermen discovered it in 1983 when it snagged their pots off Saltscar, and it was raised from the seabed in 1998 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the wreck. In 2013, it was placed on the seafront outside the lifeboat museum.

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The revamped Regent Cinema, on the entrance to Coatham pier, in 2022