A spin back in time
FAIRGROUND ATTRACTION: David Littleboy’s childhood fascination with funfairs has grown into the country’s only company restoring vintage rides. Andrew Vine reports.
HE middle-aged woman got off the speedway ride that had whirled her round at a dizzying pace with her eyes shining, and gasped: “My God, that’s as much fun as you can have with your clothes on.”
David Littleboy roars with laughter as he recalls her reaction, because he’s in the business of fun with a scary edge. The sounds of delighted screams from one of the rides he has rescued from decay is music to his ears. He’s loved funfairs all his life, the brightly-painted rides that take customers to the exhilarating edge of fear that they’re going to be thrown off.
And that passion has grown into a unique business – Britain’s only company that restores vintage fairground rides, found rotting away in showmen’s yards or farmers’ barns and bringing them back to pristine working order.
David and his business partner Roger Sibley have just played a key role in the reopening of Britain’s oldest funfair, Dreamland, at Margate, in Kent, where their rides from the 1930s are proving a huge draw for crowds discovering the sheer hands-on pleasure of hanging on for what feels like dear life. For these old rides retain a potent kick from an age before health and safety put caution before all else.
“If you don’t hold on, you’re coming off,” said David. “There are no seatbelts, this is the real thing. People think that because of health and safety you can’t have fun. Yes, you can, because these machines have proved for 70 years that they’re safe to operate, but it’s back to using your common sense and your own gumption in knowing that you’ve got to hold on, and that’s the thrill.”
The legacy of the great age of travelling funfairs is all around at the workshop at Kinsley, near Wakefield, where David and Roger are based. It is dominated by a giant waltzer from 1938 built for WH Marshall and Sons of Bradford, the only one of its kind in existence. A full restoration awaits, but the brightly painted woodwork featuring portraits of elegantly-gowned women has been brought back to its original glory.
Close by is a caterpillar ride bound for Margate, its tangle of rusty ironwork and cat’s cradle of struts and fittings destined to come together once more as thrillingly as when it was new. Soon, these rides will be joined by a ghost train scheduled to be restored and taken to Dreamland in time for Halloween, hauled there by David and Roger’s vintage lorry with gold-leaf lettering on its panels.
It was rides like these that captivated David, 50, who owns a successful IT business in Wakefield, as a child.
He said: “The local funfair used to roll up in the villages just down the road from here, Ryhill and Havercroft, and it was a typical fairground with a waltzer and a speedway and I was always fascinated how it appeared overnight, went together, and was gone. It was wonderful how it could just appear and before you could blink, it’s gone. I just had a fascination with it from being small.”
But he was in his 30s before the restoration bug bit him when he