Cleethorpes Day Chalets - An Article by Alan Dowling
Post date: Jan 14, 2017 9:38:18 PM
Thank you to Alan Dowling for his memories and photographs of time spent with his young family at the day chalets at Cleethorpes during the late 1950s. Alan would like to assure everyone that he didn’t have a bouffant hairdo in those days and that there’s a mop head behind him in the picture where he’s sitting on the chalet doorstep!
CLEETHORPES DAY CHALETS, OCTOBER 1959
We were living in a residential caravan at Upper Halliford near Sunbury-on-Thames. We had two children, Michael and Ann, aged respectively 4 and 2. I was on a low wage and, accordingly, our holidays were usually spent with Dorothy’s mother who lived in Newbridge Terrace by the railway line in Cartergate in central Grimsby.
We spent most of the holidays at nearby Cleethorpes. We did not have a car but it was only a short walk from Cartergate to either the Old Market Place or the Grimsby Railway Station. So sometimes we took a bus from the Old Market Place to the Open Air Bathing Pool in Cleethorpes or a train from Grimsby to Cleethorpes Railway Station.
In 1959, we contacted the Cleethorpes Corporation and rented one of the Day Chalets in October of that year – possibly for a week. Dorothy subsequently paid the hiring
charge at the Victorian mansion on Alexandra Road, known as The Knoll. It was used as Council offices in those days.
We decided to hire a chalet because we could store our holiday impedimenta and children’s toys there, to avoid bringing them daily from Grimsby. We wheeled them there on a pushchair.
The chalets pre-dated the brick-built chalets. They were wooden and included a gas ring, kettle, basin, table, four deckchairs and a water supply. There was a public toilet building further along the seafront on the way to Humberston.
The chalet faced the sea wall and the beach – no sea marsh then – and it was possible to walk along the beach as far as the Humberston Fitties – probably coming up on to the sea wall to use the bridge over the Buc Beck outfall. On the beach by the Fitties were donkeys and swing boats – and a nearby café and public toilets.
One advantage to the chalets area was the superb beach which was located far away from the North Promenade’s crowds and costly children’s attractions.
Alan Dowling (pictured right, with mop head hair accessory!)
November 2016
