Meet the Showmen of Bolton

Prefer to listen? You can hear Ophira telling the story of the Showmen of Bolton with the players below.

In a trading estate just off Bury New Road, a glaring sun makes griddles out of everything: the flat-nosed cars in the Toyota dealership, the carnation-coloured caravans in the residential park, and the various rides — waltzers and carousel horses — on the kerbs of Mill Hill industrial site in Bolton. I thought it might be difficult to find the showmen, but a sign saying ‘WELCOME TO NORTHWEST FUNFAIRS’ gives the game away. Beneath that sign is another, with a picture of a smiling Alsatian and the threat: ‘I can make the gate in 5 seconds. Can you?’

Out from between pink elephants and fire-red trucks Henry Hill comes striding over. He’s the man I want to speak to, or so I’m told, dressed in a smart checked shirt rolled up to reveal a golden bangle. Not too long ago, Henry was the ringleader of Northwest Funfairs, and he personally manned the waltzers and the sizzlers too. These days he’s retired, and lives in a house. “Which is not my culture,” he admits, “but I enjoy it.”

Showmen have lived and worked in Bolton since the community first came to be defined, in 1889, in a large, curved pub in Salford still operating now as the Black Lion Hotel. It was there that the Van Dwellers’ Protection Association was born: an association designed to defend the rights of fairground workers, and that would not long after be renamed The Showmen’s Guild of Britain.

Unlike travellers and Romani communities, Showmen aren’t defined by race or language, but by culture and profession. They’re the people that run the fair at your local park, minding the stalls, operating the rides, making sure the bassline remixes are playing smoothly, and right now there’s estimated to be around 25,000 showmen and women across the UK. The Hill family have run Northwest Funfairs from Mill Hill industrial estate for nearly 50 years — the names being purely coincidental. Recently, talk has been spreading – by word of mouth, on Facebook community groups, in the Bolton News – that the showmen of Bolton might very soon be asked to move along.

“We want to move somewhere where the air’s fresher anyway,” Henry shrugs when I ask about the potential eviction, looking around at the fairground storage yard. “It doesn’t look great around here.” When the Hill family arrived in Mill Hill, they were just Henry’s grandparents Albert and Alice, and five of their eleven children. “Then them five sons had kids, and they had kids,” says Henry, “and now we’ve got five whole yards. We’ve outgrown it.” Henry’s grandfather wasn’t a showman by birth — he lived in a house so close to the estate that we could see it if it weren’t for the trees. In 1901, Albert went to work on the local fair for the summer holidays, and there he met Alice, a year-round fairground worker. “It was a love story,” Henry tells me. When the family expanded, and Albert retired, Henry’s dad took over the business.

Nowadays almost all of the sites on the estate are run by Hills — Henry, Lawrence, Michael, Dean, and Henry’s uncle, Nicholas Hill Sr, the last of the five original sons. Only one site isn’t: the site operated by Henry’s sister, who married a Mr. Cummings. It’s the only site I’m warned against visiting. “Don’t go there,” says Henry, “she’ll throw you off.” Clearly the Hill family are well-entrenched, far more so than the surrounding Japanese and German car dealerships. Henry agrees. “We’re Boltonians through and through.”

Henry isn’t afraid of potential eviction by the council — he reckons it’s just a myth. The Bolton News reported that the council were in talks to relocate the showmen after concerns had been raised over trailers and trucks being parked on double yellow lines across the estate — something I see a great deal of on my visit, and something that Henry says has nothing to do with him. But finding new sites for showmen has always proven difficult. “Round here they’ve known us for 50 years, there’s not an issue with anybody,” he explains. But in other towns, and even in other parts of Bolton, where people aren’t familiar with the culture, residents are often wary of having showmen moving in.

“But don’t just get my side of the story!” Henry insists, directing me to another of the Mill Hill sites. “If you go down there — not the first site, that’s my sister’s — you’ll find Nicholas Hill Sr, he’s my uncle. The last of the brothers to live down here. He can tell you everything.”

I walk for five minutes in the quiet heat, to where broken-down dodgems and haunted houses became neat white chalets and patches of AstroTurf — perfectly square, perfectly green. I don’t meet anyone at all until I come across an old-fashioned hot dog and candy floss van, with a smiling, silver-haired woman inside it, seemingly sheltering from the sun. I tell her that I’m looking for Nicholas Hill. “Which one?” she asks. Senior, I say. I’m in luck — he’s her husband, and she leads me to meet him in their chalet: long, narrow, neat and gleaming, with the Showmen’s Guild rule book ready on the kitchen table.

Nicholas Hill Sr was born in 1950, in Bolton, in a nearby caravan park. His wife, Phyllis Hill, was born in a caravan in Radcliffe, but she has Bolton connections too — her grandmother was the first female taxi driver in the town, she says. The pair crossed paths regularly at fairs. “I had an amusement arcade, slot machines and all that,” says Nicholas, “and she operated a hot-dog-candy-floss-toffy-apple-stall.” They married in 1970, and in ‘79 they moved to the Mill Hill site.

Nicholas tells me that his parents, Henry’s grandparents, the founders of the Hill showman family, led a typical life. He adds layers of detail to the story Henry told me — when they first met, Alice ran a coconut shy, something you don’t see much of anymore, because nowadays everyone would rather catch a duck, he says. Unlike what some articles on showmen suggest online, he claims that marrying outside the culture isn’t unusual — “love’s love, innit?” — and as for having eleven children, he tells me that this was typical in the old days, because there were no televisions.

Now in their seventies, and the last of their family’s generation, Nicholas and Phyllis can speak better than anyone on the changes to the Bolton showman lifestyle. Until the mid ‘60s, showmen set up sites wherever they wanted, but this changed when the council started requiring the fairground workers to have planning permissions, and to make sure their sites had access to proper facilities and schools. But up until the ‘90s, showmen were still typically transient, only allocated to permanent sites in the colder months — ‘winter quarters’, as Nicholas calls them. In fair seasons (in both senses of the word), they’d travel along with the rides in small caravans. “And if your fair was in a park in Manchester, there was no better lifestyle, when the weather was like this,” Nicholas says.

Nowadays, most of the community prefer a slightly cushier set-up. Chalets like Nicholas and Phyllis’s, where they have access to running water and electricity, have massively grown in popularity, and many showmen communities have now settled down. “We’re happy here,” says Phyllis. “We know everybody in the shops and our kids have got friends.” But, she tells me, a few years ago, some new showmen came to Mill Hill, using their address, leaving their vehicles out in the streets, making the site unsafe, and giving the showmen a bad name. Was this a different family? I ask. “It’s not my family,” says Phyllis, looking at Nicholas. “It’s his nephew.”

Nicholas and Phyllis don’t directly name the nephew in question, but they do make reference to a ‘Mr. Cummings’ on more than one occasion. But the couple both believe that there’s method in the nephew’s madness. They explain that the showmen who leave their broken down vans and rides out on the street believe that if they cause enough nuisance, the council will give them a newer, nicer site to live on. “But the council haven’t got any money to give them anything,” says Nicholas. “So they’re barking up the wrong tree.” More importantly perhaps, if the council do give his nephew a new site, Nicholas insists that he will not be going with them. He’s intent on remaining in Mill Hill. “Cause I’m happy here,” he says, tapping the table with his finger. “I want to stay put.”

Perhaps this reflects the views of the older generation of showmen, because even Henry, who doesn’t appear to be involved with the council-exhaustion scheme, thinks it might be right to move on to pastures new. “In my opinion, it’s time to move us out,” he says, telling me he’s been in talks with the council for months about being relocated. Where does he want to go? “Somewhere nice and quiet," he says. Somewhere they can own their own land, too, and most importantly, somewhere not too far. This town is their home, after all, and even if a few of them are keen to leave the industrial site, at the end of the day, the Hill family are proud to be based in Bolton.