Covid lockdowns have finally upended Carters Steam fair
After two generations of touring, the travelling family is selling up, finds Rosa Silverman
‘Try something old today,” suggests a sign on a traditionallooking fairground wagon, decked out in distinctive shades of deep red, yellow and maroon.
Screams ring out from the Lightning Skid ride, which whirls its passengers around at dizzying speed.
But the cries of excitement cannot compete with the honking of oldfashioned organ music; and the heady aromas of candyfloss, doughnuts and hot dogs struggle against the thick steam that pours from the heritage traction machinery.
This is Carters Steam Fair, a travelling vintage funfair that has toured the UK for the past 45 years. In the British Bank Holiday tradition, despite slate-grey skies over Pinkneys Green in Maidenhead, the fair is teeming with people; some are standing around eating chips with their hoods up. Others are enjoying the 13 vintage rides, which date from the 1890s to the 1960s.
But the fair’s future hangs in the balance: this is its final tour. The Carter family, who have run it for two generations, have taken the tough decision to sell up and find it a permanent home.
“For Carters, it’s time to pass the baton and let someone else continue the magic,” read an announcement posted on the fair’s website last week. There is a guide price of £2.5 million.
On Saturday, the Carters annual vintage vehicle parade through Maidenhead drew crowds that Joby Carter, who runs the fair with his wife Georgina, estimates were 10 times the normal size, the news of the funfair’s sale having just broken.
“No one had thought for a minute this wouldn’t be there next year,” he says. “It’s on the calendar like Christmas – you take it for granted and suddenly we’ve announced we’re going to stop doing it and people can’t believe it.”
Emotions ran high, not only in the crowds that lined the streets but also among the Carter family. “On the approach back there was a banner saying, ‘Thank you, Carters, for all the memories,’ and it made my wife start crying,” says Joby. “I had two women walk up and I said, ‘Hello, are you okay?’ and they said, ‘No.’ They were incredibly sad that part of Maidenhead’s history has ended.”
It was Joby’s parents, show promoters John and Anna Carter, who started it all in 1977, when they bought some 1890s Jubilee Steam Gallopers that still form part of the fair today. The couple gradually acquired the rest of the rides, rescuing some from scrapyards and painstakingly restoring them to their original glory.
The Carters had to learn all the necessary skills to keep the heritage fair alive as they toured the country with it, living in a 22ft wagon.
“We’re a family of artists, and our canvas happens to be a funfair,” is how Joby puts it. “I have never known anything different.”
During the 1980s, an agent of Michael Jackson approached John to try and buy the funfair for £1million, to sit in the pop star’s Neverland ranch in California. “My dad laughed it off,” Joby recalls. “He wasn’t interested.”
After John died in 2000, Anna ran the fair without him, before retiring and passing the reins to Joby and Georgina about seven years ago. It remains in pristine condition.
“People love it because there are no plastic lights, and no images of scantily clad women like you see at modern fairs,” Joby says.
Instead of this, there are beautiful hand-painted signs. Having learned the art of signwriting in his youth, Joby has taught it to others for the past 15 years. During lockdown, unable to tour, he started offering Zoom courses. “That took off and in the end I taught 3,000 people from around the world,” he says. He has also written a book – Signwriting Tips, Tricks and Inspiration – which he says has sold almost 7,000 copies.
Inevitably, it was the pandemic that prompted the Carters to reconsider their future. And, they’ve decided that touring a vintage funfair around Southern England is no longer for them. “I’m 47 this year, I can’t keep travelling it,” says Joby.
As someone who was born into the fair and toured with it throughout his boyhood, he speaks of it with pride and a strong sense of attachment. But seven months a year on the road take their toll. Joby has three children, aged 16, nine and eight, who all attend school by the couple’s permanent home in White Waltham near Maidenhead. “I take them to school from wherever the fair is, if it’s commutable,” says Georgina. “If it’s not, I’ll stay in White Waltham with the kids, and Joby will stay at the fair. So we live apart for a few months and I go to the fair with the children at weekends.”
This, she says, brings its challenges. “The kids miss out on birthday parties and play-dates. It’s one of those things, but we’ve got to the point where we don’t want it to be one of those things any more.”
Lockdown opened the couple’s eyes to what life might be like if they spent less time away. During that summer when the rides fell silent and the steam ceased to pour from the lovingly restored funnels of the traction engines, “we enjoyed having more time off ”, admits Joby.
But the difficulty of reconciling family life with an itinerant existence is not the only reason the Carters are seeking a buyer. There’s also another problem, and it’s one that has beset a variety of industries since Covid hit.
“The biggest problem is staff,” says Joby. “It’s long hours and hard graft. Suddenly [after the pandemic] the workforce wasn’t there. I think people quite liked that bit where they weren’t working so hard.”
Joby plans to focus on signwriting when the fair’s final tour ends in
mid-october. He also aims to turn the family’s five vintage fairground living wagons into luxurious Airbnbs. “I just know it will work as a business,” he says.
He’s almost certainly right: the public appetite for traditional funfairs seems to be undiminished by the passage of time. With roots in the Middle Ages, fairs are among very few attractions that have held their appeal more or less throughout a millennium. They occupy a special place in the public imagination. And the instantly recognisable fairground music of the type that blares from the 1909 Mammoth Gavioli Coliseum Organ on Pinkney Green has been absorbed into pop culture, too, with snatches of it used by bands from The Beatles to Blur. It’s an instant hit of nostalgia. As is the fair itself.
“I’ve followed Carters for years,” says steam enthusiast Nigel Barnes, 55, wandering around the fair at the weekend. “The sale is a bit of a shock, but there was a reason showmen stopped touring with these types of rides. It’s massively intensive – hard manual work. It will be interesting to see what happens.”
What Joby hopes is that the fair will stay in this country. He has received enquiries from as far afield as Australia, but he’s determined that it will remain part of the fabric of British life and plans to vet potential buyers. “It doesn’t appeal to me to sell the fair to a multimillionaire,” he says. “We’re only going to sell to someone who can really look after it.”