After the 1933 holiday in Port Erin, when they met the Burtons, Mum’s family decided to share further holidays with that family. She wrote:
“We had two lovely holidays with the Burtons at the Ramsey Hydro in the Isle of Man – I hear that the hotel is still functioning. It was quite an imposing building and had many steps down to the private beach. My sister and I were then getting more grown-up and, along with Michael Burton and anyone who wanted a game of tennis, we went to the public courts. My sister and I were in our tennis gear which we kept for holidays only – cream divided skirts, just like the ones worn today and I had a green shirt with an anchor on the pocket and Sheila had a similar one in blue.”
The accommodation seems to have been a decided step up from “porridge or prunes”. The Ramsey Hydro, with 105 bedrooms, had been described in the Yorkshire Post throughout 1931 as: “Licensed….MOST CHARMING SPOT IN THE BRITISH ISLES. Sea-bathing from the Hotel. Golf, Ballroom Tennis etc. Sun Lounge. Electric L Perfect sanitation. Liberal tables. Buses meet boats, etc.”; the latter perhaps reflecting steamer services direct from Liverpool to the Pier. “Perfect sanitation” reads as an improvement on “potties”! By 6 April 1933 the Belfast Telegraph was advertising “Manxland’s most modern hotel. Entirely Redecorated Refurnished and under New and Experienced Management. H & C Water in practically all bedrooms.”
The Hydro had been a large Victorian house, converted to a hotel in 1897. It stood in its own grounds on a small headland, very much at the Northern end of Ramsey. It did indeed feature steps down to the beach, at the north end of the promenade. The tennis courts will have been those in Mooragh Park, which included a large artificial Lake, enclosed by the Mooragh Promenade, all dating from 1889-90. Mum’s first holiday cannot have been earlier than 1934, when a more modern scheme, including a large wide promenade, new tennis courts, and the Marine Lake, was under way at New Brighton. They will have made their way for half a mile along Mooragh Promenade, a section which remains largely undeveloped, and into the Park.
Ramsey was in the north of the Island, and the Ward Lock guide described it as “Second to Douglas” but “the two places have little in common”. They probably reached it via the main line railway which then ran from Douglas. However Mum’s reference to the “toast rack railway” – the 18 mile long electric railway (really a tramway) from Douglas, suggests that they made use of this too, perhaps to the north end of Douglas, or to Laxey or Snaefell. I did not ask her about this, as I only visited the Isle after her death.
“I hear that the hotel is still functioning”… The Hydro was still open when Mum wrote that, although since the 1960s, when it had been modernised, it was called the Grand Island Hotel. However, despite a further refurbishment in the 1990s, it became rundown, and closed in February 2009, being demolished in 2011. Only very recently has the site been redeveloped, with large detached houses. Whether the steps to the beach are still in place is unclear, but the sentimentalist in me would hope that they might have survived.
Mooragh Promenade was used, oddly, in wartime as an internment camp, and it is curious to read that internees were allowed to use the tennis courts in Mooragh Park.
Much had changed after the war, for Mum and her family, and she did not return to Ramsey. However, she did stop in Douglas for the first time around 1963, when she arrived by air for a Ladies Circle conference.
6 March 2020
Joan Boughey Recalled 