Category Archives: Fun Palaces: the history and architecture of the entertainment industry

Pub with no beer

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Former Ossington Coffee Palace, Newark, Nottinghamshire

Former Ossington Coffee Palace, Newark, Nottinghamshire

The temperance movement is one of the aspects of Victorian social history that has strong resonances in the twenty-first century:  powerful moral interests raged against the perils of the demon drink, while much of the population cheerfully imbibed without actually coming to much harm, in much the same way that current political hysteria about illegal substances conflicts with a widespread and partly respectable black market in drugs, some of which appear to be less risky than legal commodities like alcohol and tobacco.

I’ve been reading some research by Andrew Davison into the history of the temperance movement and the buildings that arose from it.  In many British towns the temperance hall was the most comfortable – and often the only – public meeting-place available for hire other than the upstairs room of a pub.  Temperance billiard halls were common:  Rochdale had six in 1916.

The most startling, to modern eyes, were the coffee palaces, the temperance answer to gin palaces, designed to offer the working man everything he’d find in a pub, but without the temptations of alcohol.

One of the most visible of these is the Ossington Coffee Palace in Newark, Nottinghamshire, designed by Ernest George & Peto and opened in 1882, boasted a ground-floor coffee room instead of a bar, a first-floor assembly room with a reading-room, a library and a club-room and, on the second floor, a billiard room and sleeping accommodation.  There was a tea garden, an American bowling alley and stables for fifty horses.

It is now the Newark branch of the Zizzi restaurant chain and – so they say – haunted:  
http://www.zizzi.co.uk/restaurants/newark.

Its original name is a reminder that it was built, at the considerable cost of over £20,000, as a memorial to John Evelyn Denison, Viscount Ossington (1800-1873), Speaker of the House of Commons from 1857 to 1872, by his widow, Charlotte (1805-1889).

She was the third daughter of the 4th ‘Farmer’ Duke of Portland, and sister of the eccentric 5th ‘Burrowing’ Duke [see More country-house railways and Having a ball at Welbeck Abbey] and his political brothers, Lord George and Lord Henry Bentinck.  Another sister married Lord Howard de Walden.

Denison’s forbears were Leeds wool merchants, but he inherited the Ossington Hall estate, near Newark, in 1820:  he was educated at Eton and Oxford and served as an MP from the age of 23.  His brothers were respectively Archdeacon of Taunton, Bishop of Salisbury and Governor successively of Tasmania, New South Wales and Madras.

John Evelyn Denison was not thought sufficiently grand to court Charlotte.  Her father resisted an engagement until she seriously threatened to elope.  (The story is related in a chapter of Charles J Archard, The Portland Peerage Romance (1907) which can be found at http://www.nottshistory.org.uk/portland1907/portland4.htm.)  They married in 1827, but had no children.

Charlotte, Viscountess Ossington’s bequest to the town of Newark appears not to have been a commercial success.  Which is a pity, because some police officers will tell you that they don’t spend their Saturday nights arresting out-of-control cannabis takers – or coffee drinkers.

Andrew Davison’s essay, ‘”Worthy of the cause”: the buildings of the temperance movement’ appears in Geoff Brandwood (ed), Living, Leisure and the Law:  eight building types in England, 1800-1914 (Spire Books/Victorian Society 2010):  see http://www.spirebooks.com/lll.html.  It supplements Mark Girouard’s account in the first part of chapter 8 of Victorian Pubs (Yale University Press 1984), which is out of print.

 

Taking the waters

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Crown Hotel, Harrogate, North Yorkshire

Crown Hotel, Harrogate, North Yorkshire

Selling mineral spring water in times gone by was big business – rather like the present-day trade in bottled water.  The extent of the commercial competitiveness between spa-resorts and indeed within a spa town like Harrogate was vicious.

The Crown Inn, Harrogate, originally built in 1740, made money from its reputation for making bathing convenient and comfortable:  a warm indoor bath with attendance cost 3s 6d, which must have been attractive to those who could afford it, in comparison with the discomforts of the public springs.

In the 1830s an incoming speculator, John Williams, opened the Victoria Baths to provide private bathing facilities.  Joseph Thackwray, proprietor of the Crown Hotel, retaliated by constructing the Montpellier or Crown Baths (1834).  This provoked John Williams to build the Spa Rooms (1835) to exploit the so-called Cheltenham Springs, offering chalybeate water (including the strongest iron-chloride spring in the world) alongside the Old Sulphur Well.

This flurry of competition in commercial bathing led to one of the more famous controversies of Harrogate’s history.  In December 1835 Jonathan Shutt, the proprietor of the Swan Inn, casually discovered that a tenant of Joseph Thackwray was digging a deep well inside his shop on Swan Road.

Shutt hastily consulted the proprietors of the Granby, Dragon, and Queen Hotels and John Williams of the Victoria Baths and Spa Rooms and they concluded that Thackwray was attempting to divert the waters of the Old Sulphur Well to establish a monopoly.  The case eventually came to York Assizes, where Thackwray secured a technical acquittal.

As a result, his rivals joined with the Duchy of Lancaster to promote the Harrogate Improvement Act of 1841, which placed control of public amenities in the town firmly in the hands of twenty-one elected Improvement Commissioners.

Joseph Thackwray could be credited with giving a whole new meaning to the phrase “taking the waters”.

 

Muddle and Get Nowhere

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Melton Constable, Norfolk bus shelter

Melton Constable, Norfolk bus shelter

The holidaymaker’s experience of the Norfolk seaside was, until the late 1950s, bound up with the eccentricities of travelling on the former Midland & Great Northern Joint Railway, one of the less likely networks to emerge from the idiosyncracies of Victorian railway competition.

The East Anglian “main line” network was the Great Eastern Railway, fanning out from London Liverpool Street station to the major towns and cities – King’s Lynn, Hunstanton, Cromer, Norwich, Great Yarmouth, Lowestoft, Ipswich and Southend.

Two of the Great Eastern’s competitors in the national network, the Midland and the Great Northern, recognised that by merging their interests in a string of cross-country lines into and across East Anglia they could reach ports and holiday resorts to capture freight and passenger flows into the Midlands and the North that the Great Eastern simply couldn’t deal with.  They could also provide competing services into London’s King’s Cross, though that route was never as fast as the Great Eastern’s more direct routes.

In 1893 the two companies set up a joint board, with equally shared rights and responsibilities, to manage their East Anglian operations.  Over the following sixty-odd years, the M&GNJR struggled against two particular difficulties – an excess of single-track mileage (over 60%) and heavy gradients across the grain of the landscape.  Normal services were laborious, and holiday specials spent much of their travelling time waiting in loops for approaching trains to clear the route – hence the popular nickname, “Muddle and Get Nowhere”.

The line was distinctive as well as eccentric, and came to be much loved by enthusiasts.  Its locomotives wore a golden ochre livery and its carriages were either built of teak or painted to look as if they were.  Almost the whole of the M&GNJR network, nearly 200 miles, closed down peremptorily in 1959, years before Beeching.

The line from Norwich to Cromer and Sheringham remains operational, and the North Norfolk Railway runs preserved steam and diesel trains between Sheringham and Holt [http://www.nnrailway.co.uk].  Otherwise, much of this extensive railway has completely disappeared – returned to farmland or woodland.

The track between Cromer and Holt is all that remains of the M&GNJR network:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WIYUJd4q80.

Melton Constable, hub of the system with a four-way junction, workshops and workers’ housing, is no longer recognisable as the “Crewe of North Norfolk”.

A couple of summers ago my friend Terry, who knows a thing or two about railways and lives near Holt, spent a baffling morning showing me what little remains of railway archaeology in Melton Constable.

The most impressive relic is the bus shelter – not up to Ukrainian standards [see http://www.brama.com/travel/busstop.html] – but very dignified, with monogrammed ironwork from the station awning, painted in golden ochre.

The monogram in the ironwork clearly has the letters CNR – Central Norfolk Railway – a company that never actually operated:  the spandrels were cast in anticipation and reused by its successor, the Eastern & Midland Railway, itself an amalgamation formed in 1883.

Book early for Christmas

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Thursford Collection, Norfolk

Thursford Collection, Norfolk

I wish I’d had the opportunity to meet George Cushing.  He was the man who made the Thursford Collection of showmen’s engines, fairground rides, mechanical organs and much else.

By all accounts, he had a magical touch that galvanised steam enthusiasts and beguiled ordinary visitors to Laurel Farm, where from the inter-war period onwards he rescued some 45 steam engines.  Numerous descriptions tell how he would buttonhole visitors on their way out, asking “Did yer loik it, then?”

He was the son of a farm labourer, born in 1904 in the village of Thursford, and left school at the age of 12 to work on the land.  In the early 1920s he began driving steamrollers, and eventually bought one of his own with savings of £225.

He clearly had a head for business:  by the end of the 1930s he had a fleet of fifteen steam rollers and a steam lorry – all in practical use – yet realised that steam was on the way out.  This appalled him:  to discard steam was like selling the crown jewels for scrap, so he began to collect redundant steam engines – road rollers, traction engines and showmen’s engines.

Steam enthusiasts made pilgrimages to Laurel Farm, and then ordinary tourists.  He laid a car park, and built a gift shop and café.  He had the combined flair of Fred Dibnah, a generation younger, and Harry Ramsden, a generation older.

After the death of his wife Minnie in 1976 he established the Thursford Trust, to safeguard his life’s work from death duties:  the Collection attracts something like 170,000 people a year, 100,000 of them for the Christmas Spectacular, devised by his son John, featuring a cast of over a hundred including dancing penguins and roller-skating milkmaids.  (There are two shows daily from early November until shortly before Christmas;  next year’s booking opens at the beginning of January – “we are very sorry we cannot accept bookings before this date”:  http://www.thursford.com/christmas-spectacular.aspx.)

There is nothing quite like the Thursford experience.  The crown jewel is the Wurlitzer from the former Paramount Cinema, Leeds (1932), which is played daily by the resident organist, Robert Wolfe.  Alongside the organ is George Cushing’s huge collection of engines, mechanical organs and a Gondola switchback.

His Daily Telegraph obituary [March 22nd 2003] describes him as “a millionaire [who] remained a Norfolk country boy at heart”.  The website http://www.girdwood.co.uk/britorg4.html pins down the greatness of his achievement precisely:

The shows are what theatre organ should be about – entertainment – and there are just as many children sitting spellbound and enchanted as there are senior citizens.  Thursford has got it right.

Thursford is unmissable:  http://www.thursford.com.

Circus maximus

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Great Yarmouth Hippodrome

Great Yarmouth Hippodrome

There are two places in Britain where you can experience circus performed in a purpose-built building with a mechanism to convert the ring into a tank for water displays.  One is, of course, the Blackpool Tower Circus [http://www.theblackpooltower.co.uk/index.php], which is famous for where it is and what it is;  the other, a little less well known, is the Great Yarmouth Hippodrome [http://www.hippodromecircus.co.uk], which is unique in the way it belongs to, and continues to reinterpret circus and show-business traditions in exciting new ways.

The owner of the Great Yarmouth Hippodrome, Peter Jay, is remembered by a certain generation as the leader of Peter Jay & the Jaywalkers, one-time support band to the Rolling Stones.  He is in fact the descendant of one of Great Yarmouth’s showman families, married to Christine, who belongs to the other Great Yarmouth showman family.  Peter told a Daily Telegraph reporter, “When we started going out, everyone thought we were just trying to find out each other’s family business secrets.” [December 6th 2008].

After Peter and his father first bought the Hippodrome building to forestall a rival bingo operator in 1983, they gradually realised the potential to develop creative, innovative circus entertainment within the old traditions of highly skilled, risky physical performance, using lighting, music and dancers alongside the acrobats, trapeze-artistes – and synchronised swimmers.

The swimmers are the most unusual part of the Hippodrome performance:  as the second half of the show winds towards its finale, four pairs of stagehands unlock the bolts that hold the circus ring in place and it gently sinks into the water tank beneath.  Once, you could see this in a number of places – the London Hippodrome on Leicester Square, the Olympia Theatre in the Liverpool suburb of Everton.  Now only Blackpool and Great Yarmouth operate in Britain, and two others – Moscow and Las Vegas – elsewhere.

Several of Peter and Christine’s sons have been directly involved in the present-day show – Ben as the lighting designer, Jack as co-producer and drummer;  Joe, a trained trapeze artist, prefers to work on oil-rigs and other high-building sites.  In fact, one of the joys of working in circus is the way the whole troupe forms a family for the duration of the run.

Watching live circus is an inimitably thrilling experience.  Some people are intimidated by the level of risk that the artistes take on;  for most audiences, that is the sheer wonder of circus.  There are no special effects, though there is certainly a dash of conjuring in the clowning.  The precision, precariousness, athleticism, grace and beauty of the acrobatic acts is unique to this form of entertainment.

Actually, I don’t miss the animals.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on seaside architecture, Away from it all:  the heritage of holiday resorts, Beside the Seaside:  the architecture of British coastal resorts, Blackpool’s Seaside Heritage and Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage, please click here.

Lost Empire

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Empire Theatre, Garston, Liverpool (2000)

Empire Theatre, Garston, Liverpool (2000)

The invaluable newsreel of the current Cinema Theatre Association Bulletin reports that the former Empire Theatre, Garston, in south Liverpool, is threatened with demolition – apparently to make way for a hospital car-park.

That would be a pity.

This modest suburban music hall, with a seating-capacity variously recorded as 876 or 1,040, was built, after several false starts, and opened in 1915.  It lasted as a theatre for barely three years, before becoming a full-time cinema, bravely advertised as “The Scala of the South”, with a local news Gazette and an augmented orchestra.

Ironically, for an enterprise with such shaky financial foundations, it prospered in the absence of any nearby super-cinema in the surrounding suburbs.

It eventually closed as a cinema, with a final double bill of Elvis Presley in Jailhouse Rock and Glenn Ford in The Fastest Guns Alive, on December 8th 1962.  After that it went over to bingo until 2009 – three years of theatre, forty-four years of cinema and forty-seven years of bingo.

When I photographed it in 2000 the auditorium was undivided;  by the following year a suspended ceiling had been inserted between the balcony and the proscenium, presumably to make the place easier to heat.  Nevertheless, the Theatres Trust website http://www.theatrestrust.org.uk/resources/theatres/show/1956-empire-garston
reports that the building is well-maintained and retains many original features.

The existing building, by an unrecorded architect, was designed as a full-scale theatre, with a thirty-foot proscenium, a stage fifteen feet deep and a tower of seven dressing rooms, and because neither cinema nor bingo required any substantial alteration, it survives as a virtually intact Edwardian music-hall/variety theatre.

It’s the classic setting for Mickey Rooney’s line, “Let’s do the show right here.”

It’s hard to estimate – because I’m not a Garston resident – whether there’s any community need for a compact auditorium with everything needed to return it to live performance.

It’s a shame if the car-park can’t go somewhere else.

The Cinema Theatre Association website is at http://www.cinema-theatre.org.uk.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s ‘lectures’ Fun Palaces:  the history and architecture of the entertainment industry and Liverpool’s Heritage please click on the links.

Auditorium for sale

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Former Tower Cinema, Anlaby Road, Hull (1999)

Former Tower Cinema, Anlaby Road, Hull (1999)

Earlier articles in this blog have featured auditoria across the north of England that have been neglected to varying degrees by owners who would like to see them flattened – in Bradford, Manchester and Derby.

The November/December 2010 edition of the Cinema Theatre Association Bulletin featured a cinema building with a more optimistic future – the former Tower Cinema, Hull.

The Tower opened on July 1st 1914, designed by the Hull architect, Horace Percival Binks.  Originally it seated 1,200 – 850 in the stalls and 350 in the balcony – and had a café serving “Morning Coffee, Luncheons, and High-Class Teas”.  Latterly, it was reseated to 523 in the stalls and 230 in the circle.

Its history is entirely conventional – sound in 1929, Cinemascope in the 1950s, closed in 1978.  Since then it has functioned as a night club, and is once again up for sale.

Its appeal, however, lies in the ornate exterior, a riot of cream and green faience, with domes (recently reinstated), obelisks, a belvedere with Ionic columns dripping with swags, topped by a bare-breasted female figure that no-one seems able to identify.

Despite Sir Nikolaus Pevsner’s dismissive 1972 comment “undeniably debased in the extreme, but the young have begun to like this sort of thing”, it was listed Grade II.  (Pevsner’s comment on the sister cinema across the road, the Regent of 1910, is “built in seven weeks and it shows”.)

Images in the Cinema Theatre Association Bulletin indicate that the decorative interior with its domed ceiling and gilded plasterwork is practically intact.  Indeed, David Salmon’s detailed history of the cinema at http://www.davesden.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/tower016new.htm suggests that the plasterwork, woodwork and stained glass were cleaned by a team of volunteers in 1981.

The Cinema Theatre Association Newsletter for September/October 2012 reported that, after a failed attempt to restore it as a cinema, new owners have reopened the Tower as Tokyo nightclub http://www.thisishullandeastriding.co.uk/pictures/Tokyo-nightclub-opens-Hull-s-famous-Tower/pictures-16766642-detail/pictures.html with a commitment “to make the most of the beautiful building”.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Fun Palaces:  the history and architecture of the entertainment industry please click here.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2016 ‘Humber Heritage’ tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Reginald – and Reg

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Blackpool Tower Ballroom

Blackpool Tower Ballroom

U3A in Sheffield has an admirable Lunch & Lecture event twice a year, and I was invited recently to be the “turn” with my lecture Fun Palaces:  the history & architecture of the entertainment industry which, inevitably, includes a segment on Blackpool Tower.

At the end of the lecture a gentleman came over and discreetly pointed out that I should not refer to the Tower’s most famous organist as “Reg” Dixon.  To Blackpool people, he was and is always Reginald Dixon.  In future, I mean to get that right.

As it happens, Reginald Dixon was born and bred in Sheffield.  He learnt to play at the Cemetery Road Congregational Church on the southern edge of town, and worked as a professional organist at, among other cinemas, the Heeley Palace, where he had to keep an eye on the level of the River Sheaf as it flowed past the building, in case it threatened to flood the orchestra pit.

When he applied for the vacant post as organist at the Tower, he bluffed in saying he could play dance music, but his idiosyncratic style proved ideal for the demands of accompanying ballroom dancers, rather than silent movies, on an orchestral organ.  His contract began in March 1930;  he made his first radio broadcast a month later, and by 1933 was able to persuade the Tower Company to install a completely new, three-manual, thirteen-rank Wurlitzer with a carillon and an additional piano.  The original Tower Wurlitzer was transferred to the Empress Ballroom in the Winter Gardens.

Reginald Dixon became one of the most potent of Blackpool’s legends.  He is famed for ‘Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside’, but when he reinaugurated the Wurlitzer after the 1956 fire he began with the first tune he ever played in the Ballroom, ‘Happy days are here again’.  He made a point of accompanying Christmas concerts and performances of Handel’s Messiah on the Wurlitzer.  He switched on the Illuminations in 1956 and was awarded the MBE in 1966:  he played his final concert at the Tower on Easter Sunday 1970.  He died, aged eighty, in 1985.

Actually, there was a Reg Dixon also.  He was born in Coventry in 1915, and died in 1984.  He was a comedian popular in the 1940s and 1950s, the closing years of variety. His catch-phrase was “I’m not well.  I’m proper poorly.”  There is interview-footage of him at http://www.britishpathe.com/record.php?id=78574 and further footage at http://deanocity3.piczo.com/coventrystvandradiopersonalities?cr=5&linkvar=000044.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Fun Palaces:  the history and architecture of the entertainment industry please click here.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on seaside architecture, Away from it all:  the heritage of holiday resorts, Beside the Seaside:  the architecture of British coastal resorts, Blackpool’s Seaside Heritage and Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage, please click here.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2013 Lancashire’s Seaside Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

No additives

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White Wells, Ilkley, West Yorkshire

The White Wells spring on the moorland above Ilkley was never a sophisticated resort.  The facilities are even today rudimentary, and it’s a stiff climb up the hill from the town.

Asses provided transport for patients who were too weak to walk up to the well.  A guidebook of 1829 indicates the rigours involved in seeking a cure:

Patience is a virtue which will every day be called into action here;  the best time for getting a bath soon after going to the wells, is between five and eight in the morning.  It is extremely unpleasant to be at the wells during a storm or heavy shower, as the hill is made so slippery, that in going down a person may think himself extremely fortunate, should he arrive at home, without a fall or two, not to mention the pleasure of riding, ie, sliding half way down the hill.

The White Well is first mentioned c1710, and was actively promoted for the first time by Dr Thomas Short in his Natural, Experimental and Medicinal History of the Mineral Waters of Derbyshire, Lincolnshire and Yorkshire &c (1734).  This was a masterpiece of marketing:

…this water is of the greatest esteem and repute of any of the north of England, in the King’s Evil [scrofula] and other old ulcers;  yet it derives these effects neither from its fixt nor volatile parts, but wholly from the coldness and the purity of the elements, its drying nature from the lime-stone it washes, tho’ a great part of it comes from blue clay.

In other words, this mineral water has nothing in it at all.  That’s why it does you good.

Ingenious.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on spas and holiday resorts, please click here.

Educating Archie

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Old Swan Hotel, Harrogate, North Yorkshire

Old Swan Hotel, Harrogate, North Yorkshire

One of the two finest places to have tea in Harrogate is the Old Swan Hotel http://www.classiclodges.co.uk/The_Old_Swan_Hotel_Harrogate.  (The other is the famous, and famously crowded, Betty’s http://www.bettys.co.uk.)

I took my cousin Cathryn and her family to the Old Swan when she received her Open University degree (thereby absolving me of being the only black sheep – that is, graduate – in the family).  We waded for above two hours through sandwiches, and cake, and scones, and pots of tea, and eventually admitted defeat.  It was wonderful.  I didn’t need to eat again till breakfast.

The Old Swan is also a relevant historic site because, although there was a hotel on the site in the eighteenth century, the present building is a fine example of a Victorian hydro, designed to offer the hugely popular “water cure”.  Built for the Harrogate Hydropathic Company in the late 1870s, the building is a conscious imitation of the even bigger Smedley’s Hydro at Matlock Bank.

Its major claim to fame, however, dates from 1926 when the crime novelist Agatha Christie (1890-1976) holed up at what was by then called the Swan Hotel for eleven days after her husband, Archie, declared he wanted a divorce so he could marry his mistress, Nancy Neele.

After a huge row he left their Berkshire house to spend the weekend with Nancy, and Agatha subsequently left, abandoned her Morris Cowley near Guildford and completely disappeared, as only a writer of murder mysteries can.

The ensuing search had elements of farce – the Home Secretary, William Joynson-Hicks, harassing the police for a “result”, Arthur Conan Doyle having one of Agatha’s gloves examined by a medium and Dorothy L Sayers inspecting the location of the abandoned car, later referenced in her novel Unnatural Death.

Eventually Agatha Christie was found, having an enjoyable time at the Swan, registered under the name Mrs Teresa Neele.

That gave Archie something to think about.

Archie and Agatha Christie divorced in 1928, and two years later she married the archaeologist (Sir) Max Mallowan (1904-1978). He once said that she said, “An archaeologist is the best husband any woman can have;  the older she gets, the more interested he is in her,” but she denied it.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on spas and holiday resorts, please click here.