Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Giving folks who love the seaside a whale of a time for 175 years
Blackgang Chine gets its name from the blue slipper clay the lands rests upon, which can be quite muddy and black in colour. A “gang” means a walk way, while the Chine, a coastal ravine, has long since eroded away.
Alec said of Alexander: “It’s a shame he built the park on blue slipper clay – but I wouldn’t swap it for anywhere.
“The Isle of Wight is the most beautifully varied 144 square miles this country has to offer. We are guilty of one thing, keeping it quiet.”
The vision of Britain’s first theme park began when Alexander bought the carcass of a dead Fin whale that had been stranded off the Needles. He then decide to display the skeleton in Blackgang, formerly landscaped gardens designed to attract the first Victorian visitors. Soon more and more flocked to the park, including Queen Victoria and Albert, who Alec believes drew inspiration from the whale exhibition.
Standing beneath the huge skeleton, Alec says: “This is pure speculation, but Victoria came in 1853 and 20 years later London’s Natural History Museum arrived with a lot of input from them. And what was the first exhibit? A whale. I wonder where they got that idea from! This is a wonder of nature. You could read about a whale and how big it was. But until you physically see it, you wouldn’t know. So that is what we did.”
When Queen Mary visited in the 1920s, she bumped her head on the whale’s jawbone and it knocked her hat off. Within minutes a man appeared and sawed off the offending piece of bone.
Remarkably, Blackgang stayed open during both world wars.
Alec says: “We had quite a lot damage because they’d bomb Southampton and Portsmouth and on the way back to France, get rid of all their bombs.
“My grandmother told me the Luftwaffe came to bomb radar sites in Ventnor. They flew right over Blackgang and she’d tell my father
‘get down and pretend to be a cow pat’ – so they don’t bomb you.”
Blackgang is the third oldest theme park in the world after Bakken in Denmark, open in 1583 and Prater in Austria which dates from 1766. Alec adds: “The other two closed during the war so I’d ar we’re actually the oldest as we’ve b doing it continually for 175 years.” He shows me around its 44 ac from the singing Dodo display Cowboy Town to the Underwa Kingdom, with the enthusiasm o excited eight-year-old. A favourite spot is Restric Area 5, where a 25ft T-rex roar terrified kids.
Alec says: “Blackgang wa much a part of my growing Sometimes it’s difficult to se rate what is normal to me fr what is normal to everyb else. Doesn’t everyone h dinosaurs in their b gardens?”
Back in 1972 original dinosaur mod since replaced with ne ones, were flown in. It filmed for Blue Pe “That was my f helicopter ri