The Silver City with Golden Sands
by - 15:41 on 09 July 2008
I quote accurately. ‘For whatever your tastes.....the stimulating vigour of the sea, or the bizarre stimulations of the town - Aberdeen can cater for them all.’ It’s funny now, looking back on the Aberdeen of my childhood a little later, how I never associated the place with the bizarre or the stimulating. The only curious thing I can remember was a joke shop somewhere up George Street. But then, maybe for grown-ups it was different.
First, get up early to see the fishing boats land their catches - though, admittedly, some tourism literature still unfathomably recommends this. Thereafter, the guide coyly suggests ‘you can eat a small part of the cargo you saw being landed’. (What sort of readership was this intended for - killer whales?) It then says that afterwards, at ten o’clock, you have to make for the beach. “After a swim, let yourself dry in the sun.” In this post-war period of austerity, holidaymakers were too poor to own towels.
But the day is far from over. After golf, tennis or bowls, ‘recalling the great days of Drake…...comes a bus trip through mountains and streams’. Let’s see, under the heading of popular sports, be assured that ‘Riding stables fringe the town’ – no industrial estates in those days. ‘Is there anything more pleasant than a fine horse and a brisk canter over moorland?’ Looking back to those far-off gentle times, was this a fair question to ask ma, pa and the weans from deepest Glasgow?
*adgoeshere* Let’s skip the history chapter, except for admiring Marischal College, ‘a poem in granite....at its most regally splendid by moonlight’. Instead, we can plunge back into the seaside, which gets a whole section to itself. After all, Aberdeen did once proudly promote itself as the largest seaside resort in Scotland, a strategy echoed by the banner of Aberdeen Fun Beach under which it is marketed today.
(Gosh, weren't they thin in those days?)
And there were nine dance halls listed, as well as fifteen cinemas. If you weren’t completely sookit by daytime beach frolics you could also visit the swimming baths in Justice Mill Lane, only ten years old and ‘built on Olympic scale. ’ (Ah, such aspirations of the old Corporation.) As if tiring of the sheer splendour of it all, the guide concludes ‘By night the entertainment vista of Aberdeen is limitless’ - a slogan which I thoroughly commend to today’s city fathers.
There is much more in similar style. What hasn’t changed was the need to offset the printing costs of such a publication by taking advertising. In 1950 you could be sure that ‘If you take your Friends to Dine at Mitchell and Muil’s Quality Restaurants, the Result will be Complete Satisfaction’ (and a tendency to capitalise at random). Certainly, there would be no need to avail yourself of the product on the next page, where Caie & Co proclaim their expertise in gravestones. ‘Whether it be the splitting of the atom, the building of Meteor Aircraft, or the production of Granite Memorials, precision and fine judgment are necessary’, it says as a fine example of the copywriter’s art.
The writer of almost sixty years ago implies that the city could compete with the other Scottish holiday places. Today, the global industry of tourism is infinitely more competitive. In a Scottish city context, Edinburgh is buzzing and has a status as a European destination of choice. For many years, Glasgow has assumed it is ‘miles better’ and is definitely cool. Dundee has gone through a similar process of re-invention. Nearly sixty years ago, Aberdeen was ‘famous as one of Britain’s leading holiday resorts’, or so it was claimed in the guide. So how will 21st century Aberdeen make that claim again? With a Donald Trump golf course?
Comment by Margaret Brown at 22:14 on 14 July 2008.
nostalgia ... the sun always shone in Aberdeen!
Add your comment