The Jolly Fisherman rides again – and is saved for Skegness!
ON the same day that Skegness Town Council decided to save the Jolly Fisherman – one of the world’s most iconic examples of holiday resort advertising – the original Great Northern Railway headboard was carried by a train again.
The plight of the Jolly Fisherman, a creation of GNR artist John Hassall in 1908 which became instantly recognisable by generations of seasiders ever since, made the national media in the weeks leading to the council’s debate.
A council report generated fears that the defining symbol of the Lincolnshire coast could disappear if funding was not forthcoming to support the mascot.
Uproar
Lincolnshire Coastal BID (Business Improvement District) Board had returned the costume to the council offices, and stopped offering the Jolly Fisherman for events, claiming that the outfit had become‘unhygienic’and there had been difficulty finding suitable volunteers to wear it.
The move prompted uproar in the town, which along with neighbouring coastal communities attracts 4.5 million visitors each year. Tourism experts credit the publicity generated by the Jolly Fisherman since his creation as one of the factors in the continuing growth in people taking holidays in the locality, renowned for being ‘So Bracing.’
Good Morning Britain host Piers Morgan also called for the character to be saved on the ITV show.
However, at its meeting on March 4, the council formally agreed to accept responsibility for the icon.
By coincidence, the original headboard from ‘The Jolly Fisherman’ train service, which ran from the Derby area to Skegness in the years before privatisation, was earlier that day being handed over by a volunteer on the Lincolnshire Coast Light Railway (LCLR), on behalf of the owner of this priceless relic, to Mike Fowler, one of the organisers of the East Lincolnshire Railway 50 Exhibition, to be staged at Bateman’s Brewery Visitor Centre in Wainfleet in August, September and October.
The event, sponsored by Heritage Railway publisher Mortons Media Group, will, as previously reported, commemorate the closure of the East Lincolnshire Line from Grimsby via Louth and Boston to Peterborough in 1970. The exhibition will also help to raise funds for the extension of the Lincolnshire Wolds Railway from Ludborough into Louth, running on part of the trackbed of the main line which closed.
On the front
It was too good an opportunity to miss to place it on one of the LCLR’S trains in the Skegness Water Leisure Park, where it was carried along the line on Motor Rail Simplex No. 8622 of 1941 No.5 Major J E Robins R.E. on a test train to the terminus at South Loop, beside Skegness Airfield.
When the Jolly Fisherman character visited the LCLR in July 2019 to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the reopening of the line (the world’s first heritage railway to be built by enthusiasts on a green field site back in 1960), crowds turned out to see the mascot and watch the mayor of Skegness, Coun Mark Dannatt, wave the green flag to send the anniversary train on its way, hauled by Peckett 0-6-0ST No. 1008 of 1903 Jurassic. The photographs were carried by media around the world, generating further international publicity for the resort.
An LCLR spokesman commented on March 4: “One onlooker watching the headboard being carried on today’s train was overheard to observe that there are only two seaside icons instantly recognised by everyone in the UK: one is Blackpool Tower, the other is Skegness’s Jolly Fisherman. ‘Would Blackpool get rid of its tower?’ he asked the train crew.”
After the council decision, Coun Tony Tye, who spent several years masquerading as the Jolly Fisherman mascot and denied that the costume was in poor shape, said: “He’ll be around a lot longer than you or me!
“A lot of kids really think there is a Jolly Fisherman. It means a lot to the town, and I’ve had three-year-olds staring up at me amazed when I’ve been in the costume.”