The late Victorian era saw several piers being constructed in Wales, a consequence of our ancestors’ growing leisure time and love of a day out by the seaside. Although some were built for shipping purposes, others were entirely focused on holidaymakers, while some were a mix of the two. Piers were a vital part of the seaside economy in Wales in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and from the likes of Bangor and Beaumaris in the north, Aberystwyth in the west and Mumbles and Penarth in the south, seaside communities saw piers cater both for locals and visitors. People were needed to work on them and cater to people visiting them – for example as piermasters, hotel operators or entertainers. Others operated the steamers that enabled people to visit these piers and the towns they were located in. Although not all of these piers can be covered in this article, they were all objects of interest – but both tragedies and celebrations took place on and around them.

In North Wales, it was Llandudno, to the east, that was the key tourist resort – and it had been home to a pier since 1858. This was only a short one, however, which was severely damaged within a year and could only be used by ships at high tide, limiting its use. It only lasted for 16 years, and in August 1877 a new pier was opened. This new pier was 700 metres long and is still the longest in Wales. It had two entrances, with a hotel placed between the promenade entrance and the now disused entrance on Happy Valley Road. This hotel was, and is, the Grand Hotel, which in 1911 was managed by husband and wife Hermann and Jessie Eschbacher. The Eschbachers were cosmopolitan; Hermann was from London, the son of a German immigrant, and Jessie from Manchester; their elder daughter had been born in Ireland in 1901, and their younger in London a year later. At the Grand Hotel, they had five assistants and 17 servants taking on a variety of roles; not only the expected ones of cooks, porters, waiters, chambermaids and linen keepers, but also a book-keeper, shorthand typist, clerk and engineer.

These staff were needed to take care of the many residents, and the census shows how popular Llandudno was with tourists not only from across Britain but also beyond – it had Irish, Dutch and Danish visitors, for example. Many people made the easy journey across from Lancashire, but others came from the Midlands and even from Surrey. Concerts were a popular feature of the pier, and when Edward Lloyd Jones, manager of the Pier Company, died in 1926, aged 67, it was noted that he had ‘always taken a deep interest in musical matters, and was a keen discerner of musical talent’. At this time, Malcolm Sargent – who would become one of the best-known conductors in England – had recently been appointed as the musical conductor for the Pier Company, and it was regretted that the Wrexham-born Lloyd Jones had not survived long enough to see him perform for the first time with Rivière’s Orchestra in the pier pavilion.

The Welsh piers were sites of entertainment, particularly music – but they could also be sites of tragedy. In 1901, there was a ‘sensation’ on the Rhyl pier when a performance of Pierrot artistes, members of George Penn’s Pierrot Team, was underway at the Grand Pavilion, which was at the entrance to the pier, and had only been open ten years. These ‘seaside Pierrots’, as they were known, performed songs and dances and told jokes while dressed in conical hats and distinctive costumes. The Grand Pavilion’s theatrical manager, actor George Frederick Gardner, had been watching the Pierrots’ performance with his sister Gertrude when he suddenly collapsed and died. It emerged that despite being only 25 years old, he had been suffering from heart disease for some time (ironically, the papers described him as well known, but still wrongly named him as 28-year-old Cecil Gardner). Given that the theatre could hold 3,000 people, it’s not clear how many of the audience were immediately aware of the tragedy that had taken place during their afternoon’s entertainment. It was not the only bad news for the relatively new theatre and its performers, however, as two months after this death, the whole building burned down (more on the theatre’s unfortunate history can be found here). Rhyl’s pier was demolished in 1973.

Making the headlines
Neighbouring Colwyn Bay’s Victoria Pier also made the headlines for a darker reason. This was in 1920, when 46-year-old local James Threlfall threw himself off the side of it, falling 35 feet onto shingle. The auctioneer’s porter suffered from poor health – he had asthma and bronchitis, had previously had a stroke in addition to a bad heart attack and suffered from insomnia. In addition to this, he appears to have been unemployed and ‘troubled’ about this. He had gone to the pier one evening in September and had been seen swinging on a ledge while smoking a pipe. Passers-by believed that he was ‘playing’, swinging himself for amusement. One of the musicians employed to work at the pier pavilion, William Henry Woodcock, saw Threlfall crouching at the pier, and asked, ‘What are you doing there? You will fall!’ Threlfall replied, but Woodcock couldn’t hear him – and so he returned to the stage door to fetch help. As he returned, he saw Threlfall ‘deliberately let himself go’. James Threlfall died instantly, breaking his neck as he hit the shingle.

Beaumaris, on Anglesey, also had its own pier, which predated both Bangor’s and Llandudno’s. It had originally opened in the 1840s, but was rebuilt in 1872 and further extended in 1895. The aim of the town’s pier was to encourage the pleasure steamers to stop there: they already went from Liverpool to Llandudno and the Isle of Man, but now the piers at Beaumaris and Bangor aimed to attract some of that tourist traffic. Beaumaris Pier featured in a crime story in the early 1890s, when it was reported that a man wanted for a crime in America attempted to get to England to escape justice. He was traced to a boat operating between Liverpool and North Wales, and so a Liverpool detective set off by train for Llandudno. He reached the pier there just as the boat was leaving, and so rushed back to Llandudno Station and bought a ticket to Bangor. Once there, he got a cab from the station down towards Garth Point, only to glimpse the boat in the distance; it would not be stopping until Beaumaris. The detective therefore offered some boatmen who were on a break ten shillings if they would get him to Beaumaris Pier before the boat got there. The men immediately got him into a boat and rowed like mad until they got to the pier just a couple of minutes before the steamer. The detective remembered to pay the boatmen, but then jumped ashore and managed to arrest the American when he disembarked.

In the south of the principality, Penarth, near Cardiff, got its own pier a couple of years after Bangor, in 1898. This, by necessity, had to be quite a short one at 200 metres long, because there was a deep water channel into Cardiff Docks that had to be kept clear. Penarth Pier had two functions: both to enable people to stroll up and down it as a promenade, but also to act as a jetty where ships in the Bristol Channel could come into shore. However, its opening enabled pleasure steamers to start using it to offer cruises to locals and holidaymakers. These late Victorian wooden piers could be quite dangerous, and in Penarth, 800 people had to be rescued when the wooden theatre at the end of the pier burnt down, also destroying part of the pier. Although the pier was rebuilt, the little theatre wasn’t.

These stories, and many more like them, show that although these piers represented lightness and fun for many in or visiting Wales, they had a darker side to them, as do so many seaside towns. Whereas most people saw them as places to stroll or to be amused – a break from everyday stress – for others they were places where their last breaths were taken. Some simply died while enjoying themselves, but others saw them as places where they could end their lives. Because piers jutted out to sea, and many could not swim, they could also be dangerous places if one fell, and because piers and their associated buildings might be timbered, fires were an additional risk. So next time you’re visiting Wales, or if you live there and are heading out to your local pier, enjoy yourselves – but also remember those who have not been so lucky with them. {