The Gallopers

[wolfinthewood]

For three days every November the Fair comes to Loughborough. And every year along with the Fair comes the great steam roundabout; not powered by steam any more, but still with its carved gallopers and its organ. The legend round the canopy reads: 'Proud Old Time Riding Horses Rode By All With Joy'. I love that. The person who drafted those words had a good ear for rhythmic prose.

I think that same roundabout used to be one of the two that always came to the Midsummer Fair at Cambridge when I was a student in the seventies. I think I recognise it by the three carved and painted showgirls built into the case of the organ. I think, though, that it was a different set of gallopers that used to come to Pinner Fair in Middlesex when I was a child. But the music and the horses were in much the same style.

I don't always go to Loughborough Fair. Some years I lie low, and curse the traffic problems and the continual noise of the rides, mercifully distant from where I live, but still very audible, especially at night. But if I do pass through the Fair, as I did today, I always take a ride on the gallopers: it connects me to the child I once was, and to generations of riders going back to the the time of my great-grandparents in the High Victorian Age.


Jackanapes was not absolutely free from qualms, but having once mounted the Black Prince he stuck to him as a horseman should. During the first round he waved his hat, and observed with some concern that the Black Prince had lost an ear since last Fair; at the second, he looked a little pale but sat upright, though somewhat unnecessarily rigid; at the third round he shut his eyes. During the fourth his hat fell off, and he clasped his horse's neck. By the fifth he had laid his yellow head against the Black Prince's mane, and so clung anyhow till the hobby-horses stopped, when the proprietor assisted him to alight, and he sat down rather suddenly and said he had enjoyed it very much.

Juliana Horatia Ewing (1841–1885)

from Jackanapes (1883)


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Comments

[claire jordan (from livejournal.com)]

I know this conversation is an old one but I just came across it while trying to get a photograph of the gallopers at Pinner Fair. I don't know when you were a child but I know that in the 1970s Pinner Fair had a very odd set of gallopers like nothing I've seen before or since.

The ride consisted of a fixed circular platform which undulated in big waves, on top of which was a sort of jointed skin of wooden planks attached to a central axis. When the ride was powered up the fixed waves stayed where they were but the flexible wooden skin circled around and undulated down and up over the waves underneath it. The horses were fastened to the jointed wooden skin so that they too went up and down as it rattled over the fixed waves. The whole thing went *extremely* fast - I recall ending up lying sideways with my legs round the body of one horse and my arms round the neck of the one next inside it, because centrifugal force was trying to throw me off in the other direction.

[wolfinthewood.livejournal.com]

I remember the ride you describe, or one that was very much like it. Once, when I was a teenager, I took my little brother on it, sitting in front of me, and he lost his grip and started to slide off sideways. We were next to the outside edge of the ride and I was terrified; I wrapped one arm round the 'neck' of the horse and hung on to him like grim death. I hoped the people in charge of the ride would see that a child was at risk of injury and stop it, but every time we whirled past them (there were two of them, a man and a woman) I could see them just standing there with complacent grins. I couldn't shout for help because the ride was blasting out very loud pop music. I was hugely, hugely relieved when the ride stopped. That would have been some time in the mid-sixties.

During the sixties there was also a big steam roundabout - or converted steam roundabout - that came to Pinner Fair every year. I loved it and always had a ride on it, sometimes several rides. It was always in the same pitch, up near the church.

I can't help with pictures of either of those roundabouts. I do have quite a lot of photos of the Noyce gallopers, taken at Loughborough Fair about four or five years ago.