Professor Paul Salveson is a historian and writer and lives in Bolton. He is visiting professor in ‘Worktown Studies’ at the University of Bolton and author of several books on Lancashire history.

Boltonians of a certain age will remember fondly the ‘day trip’ to Blackpool, by train. It has a history stretching back to the middle of the 19th century and was known for generations as ‘th’ chep (cheap) trip’.

Allen Clarke, in his novels, poetry and dialect sketches wrote lovingly and realistically about it - an important part of life in Bolton and all of the Lancashire cotton towns.

Day trips to Blackpool continued into the 1980s, though steam gave way to diesel twenty years before. My last steam-hauled trip to Blackpool was in 1967, on a special organized by Westhoughton Labour Club, though my first would have been in the late 1950s.

Like all the other kids, it was a thrilling experience with contests for who could be the first to spot Blackpool Tower from the carriage window.

The railway linking Bolton with Blackpool opened in sections. You could reach Preston by 1838 but Blackpool only got its railway in 1846, after Fleetwood had been connected seven years earlier.

Blackpool was starting to grow as a resort and after the Fleetwood line opened and enterprising hoteliers arranged horse-drawn ‘traps’ to collect guests from the train at Poulton-le-Fylde. The Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway began running excursions to Blackpool from the late 1840s but it took some years for the business to really take off.

The days out to the seaside – Blackpool mainly but also Southport and to a lesser extent Morecambe – were only possible as working hours were reduced, giving the chance of a day out on a Saturday afternoon. Mills and factories began to close at 1.00 in the afternoon following a long dispute between the unions and millowners.

One day which Boltonians kept as special was Whit Friday when the spinning mules and looms stopped for the day. Later in the 19th century Bolton had its own ‘Operatives’ Holiday’ on a Friday in mid- August when a similar exodus to the seaside took place.

The demand on Whit Fridays was so great that special trains – often chartered by the powerful Bolton Co-operative Society - began not from Trinity Street station but Bullfield Siding, which is now the Council Yard on Mayor Street.

In 1891 Bolton Co-op, in its monthly magazine, advertised ‘specials’ to Llandudno, Liverpool and two trains each to Morecambe and Southport with no less than three to Blackpool. All of the Blackpool trains were advertised leaving from Bullfield Siding with a day return fare of 2s 3d and an ‘extension ticket’ costing 3s 6d. This allowed families and couples to stay over for the weekend, using the hundreds of lodging houses which had developed in Blackpool in the second half of the century. There were also day trips to Belle Vue, in Manchester.

Allen Clarke remembered the facilities on the trains being basic:

“The ‘chep trip’ of those days started very early in the morning, and the day fare was half-a-crown. The train accommodation was crude, primitive. Hard cushionless carriages. Indeed, sometimes cattle trucks were cleaned and fitted up with a few seats for cheap excursions.

Despite the hard wooden seats and lack of toilet facilities, the trips were a joyous adventure. The Knobstick, set in Bolton in 1887 during the great Engineers’ Strike and published in 1893, portrays a trip to Blackpool by the novel’s hero Harry Belton and the Banks family, prefacing it with this description of the Whitsun Holidays when “dozens of railway trains rush seawards with thousands of noisy, merry operatives of all sorts and conditions. Ere the sun has risen cheap trips are cleaving through the dawn; and long after the sun has set at night the heavy-laden trains are returning home one by one.”

It’s early morning – 5 a.m. - but the platform is packed and the hero, Belton, meets the Banks family, whose daughter Lizzie is joining mum and dad for a weekend trip.

“He got in the train after much crushing, with the Banks’s, and sat next to Lizzie. Every carriage was packed; and the railway platform was still a dense mass of merry, jostling people, with a noisy sprinkling of squalling babies and chattering children. At last, with a snort and shriek, the heavy train moved off; slowly at first; then, gathering speed, shot out of the grimy town into the sunny meadows, and flew along pleasantly.”

Clarke returns to a more detailed description of a ‘chep (cheap) trip’ from Bolton (‘Spindleton’) to Blackpool in a later novel, Lancashire Lasses and Lads, published in 1906. Once again, two lovers – Dick and Hannah – are the focus of attention, although they are part of a larger family group. The family group is going for a ‘weekend excursion’, setting off after work on Saturday afternoon and returning on Sunday:

“The four met at Spindleton Station a few minutes before two o’clock on the Saturday afternoon, having had to hurry from work and rush through their dinners in order to catch the two o’clock excursion which ran every Saturday, for the half-day, to Ribblesea, Sunsands and Whirlpool, all on the West Lancashire Coast.”

The locomotive whistles as it departs, “puffing under the snappy series of short tunnels leading westward and seawards out of the great manufacturing town.” The train gathers speed and heads towards ‘Crostock’ (Lostock) Junction, passing the large mill (Heaton’s) that once occupied the site to the south of the line, now a housing estate. Clarke brings in a bit of social observation, through ‘Mary Ann’, the younger sister of Hannah:

“Hello, we’n just gone under Lady Bridge, an’ theer’s Giant’s Cheer, see yo’. That bit o’ stone delph just in th’shape of a cheer; an’ here’s Crostock factory, th’ only factory abeaut Spindleton where there’s yet women ‘mindin’’ in th’ spinnin’-reaum. Shame on ‘em, say I; an’ here’s Crostock Junction, an’ we’re not stoppin’, but gooin’ straight through.”

After Lostock Junction the view opens up towards Rivington Pike, part of “a range of mooryhills, one of which, shaped somewhat like the back of an elephant, the resemblance being suggested and strengthened by the fact that a small stone tower (like the elephant and castle in the Spindleton coat of arms) crowned the peak in the centre of the mountain, was greatest and most conspicuous.”

His poem ‘The Idyl of the Cheap Trip’, published in 1895, features different characters on a cheap trip from Bolton to Blackpool, with a young couple as the central figures. The train departs and various people in the carriage ‘open their mouths and have their say’, while:

On flies the train;

It glides through the meadows, it slides by the mills,

It races the brooks that are waiting for rain,

It leaves far behind it the dark old hills:

Through the black tunnel,

Then out into day,

Puffing smoke from its funnel,

On and away

Clarke based several his popular ‘Tum Fowt dialect around railways, featuring the hapless Bill Spriggs and his ferocious wife Bet. ‘A Chep Trip to Blackpool’ features the adventures of the ‘Tum Fowt Debatin’ Menociation’s trip to Blackpool. It was one of the most popular Tum Fowt Sketches and was republished many times.

The tale is about an excursion of the ‘Tum Fowt Debatin’ Menociation’ to Blackpool. It’s a ‘lads’ outing’ the matriarchal Bet Spriggs has been left out, with dire consequences. The tale hangs around Bill having forgotten his ticket. In those days, tickets were sometimes checked en route and in the story there is an inspection at Preston. Bill is told to hide himself or face dire consequences.

“Well, Bill, said Ben, “there’s nowt for it only gerrin’ under t’seeat. If theau doesn’t theau’ll be lockt up. Get under t’form, an let this lad sit deawn i’thy place.” Bill seeks assurance from the author, ‘Teddy Ashton’ that Ben isn’t having him on.

“They’ll noan lock me up, will they?” he axed.

“Yah they will,” I answered him. “It’s a very sayrious crime is ridin’ o’t’railway beaut a ticket. Theau’ll geet transported for life if theau’t copt. Th’best thing theau con do, as Ben says, is for t’get under th’seeat.”

Bill endures ‘fourth class’ for the rest of the journey to Blackpool, including enduring a baby pee’ing on him from the seat above:

“Oh Teddy, Teddy where are we? Are we at t’say? I con feel wayer comin’ on, an’ it’s warm.”

The train pulls in to Blackpool Central and the party alights. Further travails occur as Bet Spriggs appears, not in the best of tempers. She found Bill’s missing ticket at home and decided to pursue him to Blackpool. The party returns home in disgrace, with Bill given the added indignity of having to buy another ticket, as Bet keeps his.

It’s an entertaining tale and plays on popular memories of the ‘chep trip’, which to some was a vulgar day-out to be avoided. In the sketch Bill Spriggs has an argument with a toffee-nosed passenger who insists they are not on a ‘cheap trip’ but a ‘day excursion’, which is much more ‘refined’!

Clarke enjoyed his train journeys. As late as August 1935 he was corresponding with his friend and radio broadcaster Jim Fleetwood, of Bolton, suggesting they meet up to discuss the impending broadcast of some of the ‘Tum Fowt’ sketches on BBC radio. He recommends Jim takes the long-lived ‘2.00 trip train’ if he fancied coming over to Blackpool to visit. The train was still running, still offering ‘cheap rates’! The visit never happened and Clarke was dead by the end of the year, at the age of 72.

Today, Bolton people can still enjoy day trips – or longer – to Blackpool, using modern electric trains taking a fraction of the time it once did. Blackpool trains still depart from the same platform they used back in the early days, though ‘Bullfield Siding’ no longer resounds to excited children’s voices at 5 in the morning, clambering onto their train.

n Details of Paul’s new book Moorlands, Memories and Reflections, featuring aspects of Lancashire’s history, can be found at www.lancashireloominary.co.uk. A new edition of his biography of Allen Clarke will be out in May