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

[artnouveauho.livejournal.com]

I have absolutely the same feeling about merry-go-rounds (the American term, I think.) When I was small there was a proper old-fashioned one with individually-painted wooden horses on the National Mall near all the galleries and monuments. I loved it and always asked to ride it.

[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.