Controversial blackface memorabilia to form part of new museum collection

Bought by Blackpool Council as part of a private collection, the new Showtown museum collection includes a photograph and flyer from the 1920s showing the offensive practice of 'blacking up'.

Showtown

First published on 12 September, 2024

A collection of items acquired for Blackpool’s new Showtown museum contains blackface memorabilia, The Blackpool Lead can reveal.

Staff at the museum, which opened in Bank Hey Street in March, have so far found two such examples out of hundreds of historical items bought from an unnamed, private collector.

They are a flyer and a photograph, both from the early to mid-1920s.

More offensive material could be uncovered as curators comb through the “hundreds and hundreds” of newly acquired keepsakes, however.

Rather than going on display at Showtown, which celebrates the resort’s culture and history as an entertainment mecca, the blackface items will go in the History Centre archives at the Central Library in Queen Street, where they will only be available for viewing on request.

More details about the collection as a whole will be revealed in the coming days but it reportedly includes costumes and scripts relating to the Tower Circus.

The decision to buy the items was made by council officers and not debated by councillors at a public meeting.

They were bought at “market value”, documents show, with the local authority spending “a couple of thousand” and the rest of the cash coming from council partners, a town hall source said.

The total sum spent is not yet publicly known.

Not buying the collection would have deprived the museum of a “unique collection”, council papers say.

But they add: “The collection does contain sparse references - in a small number of items - to blackface performance.

“However, the collection team are trained in the current practices of managing this sensitive historical topic.”

Defence of collection purchase - and it won't be on public display

Chief executive of Showtown - Blackpool Heritage & Museum Trust, Elizabeth Moss, said there were no plans for the items to be displayed within the museum. She also defended including them within the purchase of the collection.

She told The Blackpool Lead: "Securing this collection is fantastic news for Blackpool and Showtown. I am delighted that we have received support from national funders to facilitate the purchase of the collection, retaining the items in Blackpool and adding to the existing Tower Company Archive.

“The collection is made up of hundreds of items including programmes, playbills, posters, costumes, props and musical instruments as well including scripts, jokes, contracts and correspondence.  

“Within the collection two items have been identified, a flier and a photograph dated from between 1920 and 1925 which include a representation of a character in blackface.

“Our collection team is trained in the current practices of managing this sensitive historical topic. They follow recommended guidelines to ensure that an ethical and responsible approach is taken to all displays. As a result, these items will not go on display at Showtown. They will be available for research purposes through the Showtown History Centre at Central Library once the centre reopens next year."

What is blackface?

Blackface performances involve someone, usually white, painting their face to resemble a black person, often in the name of supposed comedy and entertainment.

Once commonplace, including on primetime television, it is now widely considered to be offensive.

Dr Kehinde Andrews, the UK’s first black studies professor, told the BBC that blackface performances were a “tradition rooted in racism”.

And Ben Holman from Show Racism The Red Card told the corporation: “The use of blackface is an out-of-date practice which is rarely seen these days, demonstrating that public attitudes have long since moved on and that crude portrayals of black people should be considered unacceptable in modern day Britain.”

Blackpool does have a history of blackface performances, though they were held at a time when they were deemed to be acceptable.

The Black And White Minstrel Show, which ran on the BBC as a "light entertainment show" from 1958 to 1978, was on at the Opera House in 1976, according to a souvenir programme from that time.

So-called minstrels would also perform for crowds on the beach, dancing on a wooden board while wearing straw hats, historical photographs show.

And when the weather was poor, minstrel shows were put on in the Royal Pavilion, which was on the corner of Rigby Road and Tyldesley Road and became the Crazy Scots Bar, the Theatres Trust says on its website.

Inside the Pleasure Beach’s ice drome decades ago, The Blackpool Ice Minstrels performed Sleeping Beauty On Ice one Christmas and Minstrels On Ice With Aladdin another, with proceeds aiding local charities, old flyers show. One picture posted to a Facebook page dedicated to remembering the “greatest ice skating team ever” shows a young girl on the ice alongside a man in blackface and dressed as a golly doll. Another shows a number of skaters, who are not dressed up, posing for a group photo beside four men dressed as golly dolls.

And the Tower Circus’s most famous clown, Charlie Cairoli, an ever-present there from 1946 until his retirement in 1979, had his own history with the practice, The Stage reported in 2019.

It wrote: “At the age of eight, Cairoli joined his parents’ knockabout musical act. Wearing blackface and dressed as a bellboy, he played saxophone, xylophone, banjo and guitar, which he’d learned under his father’s ‘stern and remorseless teaching’.”

In From Mummers To Madness: A Social History Of Popular Music In England, social historian Professor David Taylor said the heyday of “blackface minstrelsy” in England ran from the 1860s to the 1890s.

“Various bands” would wander the country, he cited an 1868 magazine article as saying, and relocate, “during the summer at least, to resorts such as Margate and Ramsgate, Yarmouth, Scarborough and Blackpool”.

Taylor added: “Blackface minstrelsy was an important part of Victorian and Edwardian popular music in its own right and had a wider influence on other forms. It developed an entertainment style and a corpus of songs that remained popular in this country until the 1970s.”

He continued: “More broadly, through its changing stereotypes, it contributed to the way in which English society viewed itself and the world, particularly during the late-19th century years of imperial expansion, in terms of (alleged) racial differences and which left a problematic legacy that was to have a significant impact after the second world war.”

Not the first controversy for town's tourist heritage

Blackpool Council has been forced to censor its past before.

Two years ago, it announced plans to retire its “Wild West” Illumination tableau, which was on the Prom at Bispham and showed a totem pole and six men in headdresses, after a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation told of his “deep concerns” about it.

The panel, which dated back to the 1960s, was rested while it was “reimagined” with “input from representatives of the Native American network”, the local authority said. It has since been reinstalled.