THERE’S NO PEOPLE LIKE SHOW PEOPLE
Glimpse of life with families who brought the fair to town
MELVYN Thomas throws open the doors to his shed in the East End of Glasgow with a flourish, revealing a cavernous space that is treasure trove and museum all rolled into one.
Almost every spare surface is covered with curious and colourful objects. There’s bubble gum machines, amusement games and eye-catching neon signs.
Ornate water cans hang from the ceiling, a row of laughing clown’s faces are propped up next to a dainty carousel horse and a painted wooden cowboy.
In pride of place sits a beautiful, old-fashioned caravan and a newly restored pre-war lorry, the rich burgundy and gold paintwork lovingly polished so that it gleams like a new penny.
“It is organised chaos but I know where everything is,” laughs Melvyn. “I like anything to do with the past, especially if it involves the fairground.”
Melvyn, 66, is a proud member of the showpeople community in Glasgow and will be lending items from his collection to a new display at the Riverside Museum.
A Fair Life – which will be unveiled today – charts the traditions and history of showpeople who, for hundreds of years, have travelled around the country.
Scotland is home to as many as 5000 showpeople – a group distinct from gypsies and Irish travellers,
An estimated 80 per cent call Glasgow home, living in around 50 privately owned and leased yards – the largest geographic concentration in Europe.
Yet few outside this tight-knit community know much about the pivotal role that showpeople have played in shaping the Scottish nation.
They were early adopters of entertainment technologies, introducing electricity and moving cinemas as part of their shows and, in turn, helped bring such innovations to the masses.
The display will examine how their travelling lifestyle has evolved, from horse-drawn wagons to steam traction engines and diesel-fuelled lorries.
Among the objects included is a traction engine, two carousel horses and a waltzer car alongside archive footage and oral history commentary.
The fourth generation of his family in the business, Melvyn has lent an antique rotating clown head that was used as a traditional ball toss game.
I’ve had a great life with the fair,” he says. “Our family travelled with a double stall that was a shooting range on one side and darts on the other.
“We had a children’s chair-o-plane ride and a kiosk selling toffee apples and candy floss.”
Alongside the big rides there used to animal menageries, waxworks, peep shows, jugglers, clowns and acrobats among others. “That’s all died out,” he laments. “I can still remember the circus and the side shows.”
His great granny had a stall that was a .22 rifle range built onto the side of her caravan.
“That was live ammunition,” he says. “It went through a tube and hit a target at the back. You then wound a string and it brought your ticket back to display the score.”
A Fair Life at Riverside aims to capture the showpeople’s rich history while addressing the discrimination that they still regularly experience.
“I’m looking forward to being able to share stories about our way of life,” says Melvyn. “There shouldn’t be prejudice, yet it still goes on. It can feel isolating.
“These days I have as many friends outside the business as in it, but there are people who just don’t want to know us.”
It is a sentiment echoed by Natalie Cowie-Kayes, 53, who alongside her brother Colin and eldest son Evan, has helped create the Riverside display.
She says: “I see it as a window to the world to try and change the misconceptions that many people have about us.
“Showpeople have their daily lives like anyone else, where we take the kids to school, do the washing and go to work. We are small businesses that happen to take our homes – although