Glasgow And Ships Of The Clyde

Summer nights on South Beach Ardrossan, around 1900

SUMMER NIGHTS ON SOUTH BEACH

Walking across South Beach green in Ardrossan at this time of year, dodging the waves breaking over the promenade, head down against the biting wind, sliding on the frosty flagstones, or with boots slithering on the sodden grass, it is difficult to picture the green packed with Sunday School trips basking in the sun with their buns and milk.

If the grass is used mainly now for car parking, picnics and civic week services, in former years it was the scene of more diverse entertainments.

Before the turn of the century there were generally minstrel troupes on the green, one of the first being Ben Storey and his company. Our reporter of the time wrote that on the whole they provided very poor fare, but as they had no platform and only the flat ground to perform on this was no doubt a drawback to their success. They managed to struggle through a season but their profits were apparently small.

Storey was a singer and the favourite song with his audiences was one beginning ?Oh Annabella come under my umbrella? - perhaps not inappropriate to an Ardrossan summer.

STRONG MAN

Another well know entertainer was a strong man called ?The Mexican Spaniard? who had a perpetual smile on his face. He performed a few gymnastic tricks, but is favourite feat was to grip a rope between his teeth, invite several men to grip the ends of it and pull it from his teeth. They never could.

For a couple of summers before the first war a group of four university students became very popular. They erected a small platform at South Beach and with two singing, the third playing the banjo and the fourth the piano; they always attracted large crowds with their comic songs and banjo selections. Present day students might care to note that their songs and jokes were clean.

Over the years the Burgh Pipe Band have given concerts on the green, but a regular visitor years ago was the Motherwell Mission Silver Band who would march through the town to South Beach where they played selections and their male voice choir sang gospel songs.

Troupes of minstrels also performed on the castle hill in Edwardian summers. The most popular would give a musical concert until darkness fell, then finish their programme with a short cinema exhibition. However they did not get much support, and the hill, which seemed a natural spot for this type of performance has seldom been used by other groups. There were suggestions that the Ardrossan pageant produced on Coronation Day in 1953 might be staged at the castle but the venue was changed to Winton Park.

SERVICES

Without intention to appear irreverent, this may be an appropriate article in which to refer to another form of outdoor entertainment which has held sway on our shores for may years, the religious services conducted by revivalists or evangelists untrammelled by any order of service decreed by a general assembly, and perhaps the most famous of these in Ardrossan was the Albatross Mission.

There were, we believe, a group of young people who voyaged from resort to resort on a private yacht called ?ALBATROSS? in the 1920s and held evangelistic meetings at their ports of call - in Ardrossan mostly on South Beach green.

They had vanished from the scene before the lifetime of the present writer who?s knowledge of them is confined to recalling that his father was addicted to singing one of their hymns while shaving on Sunday mornings:-

I was drifting along on life?s pitiless sea
And the angry waves threatened my ruin to be
When away at my side there I dimly described
A stately old vessel, and loudly I cried
Ship ahoy! Ship ahoy!

Or words to that effect, with due respect, that hymn held more emotional promise than the unlikely chorus of ?Jesus wants me for a sunbeam?, in which we used to join with considerable doubts 30 years ago.

Scribe Tango

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(EArdrossanships)