The Managing Director of Shanklin Pier, Mr Terry Wood, was fined £10 for putting on unseemly entertainment not suitable for Sunday viewing on this day some 86 years ago.
Mr Wood appeared before the magistrates for 4 alleged breaches of the Sunday Entertainment Act during a performance at Shanklin Pier on 27th June 1937.
The defendant was said to have put on musical entertainment “not of a type suitable for the day”. The concert had been witnessed by Sandown policeman PC Wallace Lewis, who had attended the event with a lady friend.
The stars of the show were the BBC comedians Clapham and Dwyer. A further famous comedian – Tommy Trinder – was also on the bill and was said to have made ‘unseemly jokes’.
PC Lewis gave evidence of the bawdy jokes on the Sabbath, including a sketch about a nudist colony and a drunken man returning home to find his wife in bed with a stranger. The husband got into bed only to count 4 feet sticking out of the end of it.
The constable claimed that his lady companion did not like the jokes. However, under cross-examination, PC Lewis admitted that she had stayed to watch the 2nd half of the performance, hoping that things might improve.
The defendant Mr Wood admitted that he had received a police warning about Sunday shows in April of that year but that the female artistes had only removed their capes and at no point danced on the stage.
A Mrs Dorothea Bishop of London and Shanklin hotelier George Spencer gave evidence for the defence that they had seen nothing objectionable during the concert in question.
Defence lawyer Mr Odgers described the allegations of unseemly behaviour by the concert performers as “a most tremendous storm in a tea cup”.
Odgers went on to say:
“In determining what was an entertainment suitable for the day it should be borne in mind that it should be suitable for the day in modern conditions. They should not impose on a summer holiday in 1937 the strictness which would have been imposed in 1887.
“Is it really to be said that a joke about somebody being drunk is nowadays held to be totally unsuitable on a Sunday?
“If so, a very large number of us would have to guard our conversations weith more care than we usually do. The people who attended this show were not in the least offended by it.
“Surely, you are not going to condemn wholesale the holiday makers who go to Shanklin and say: ‘They are people of very low intellect, and very low morals, but we know better than they as to what is good for them and we are not going to let this sort of thing go on?”
The bench dismissed the complaints about stage costumes but accepted that the entertainment was “not suitable for the day.”
A fine of £10 was imposed with costs of £5 awarded to the prosecution.
Chairman Sir Godfrey Baring said:
“The magistrate appreciated that it was very difficult to keep supervision of entertainments of this kind, but he was sure they would have Terry Wood’s assurance that he would redouble his efforts in this direction.”
It would be great to see a new pier built in Shanklin.
It can be done, Weston-Super-Mare built a new pier.
i was stage hand on the pier in the 50″s those were the days of Dare Devil leslie he use to dive off the pier