It is true that a postwar northern seaside landlady could be direct, insist on full-board guests being back for tea at 5pm or get nothing, and have no plug sockets in case someone had the wild idea of using a hairdryer.
But were they the unflinching, arms-folded battleaxes often depicted in popular culture? “They generally weren’t,” said the local historian David Evans. “They were firm with their rules but they were fair, they were kind and the important thing for them was that someone enjoyed their holiday and would come back again.”
Evans has led a project titled The Landladies of Morecambe exploring the lives and stories of the women who ran bed and breakfasts in the town when it was a magnet for working-class families on their holidays.
It aims to unpick the reputation perpetuated in films and postcards, that northern seaside landladies were “an army of Ena Sharpleses” (Coronation Street’s sharp-tongued busybody of yore).
The project has been funded by a £10,000 grant from Historic England and has 12 filmed interviews with 20 people about their memories of Morecambe. Interviewees include former landladies themselves, family members and paying guests, whether they were fun seekers, students or workers.
Evans said he had heard stories of what might be seen as penny pinching – no plug sockets in rooms, for example. “But margins were tight,” he said. “In those days electricity would have been, relatively, more expensive.”
Many were strict about rules, including meal times, but that was understandable also.
“In the main, landladies expected the guests to have their breakfast and then clear off and then come back for tea at 5pm. In quite a few of the interviews you hear of people saying they were booted out and not allowed back.”
What came over, time and again, was just how hard work it was, Evans said. “A lot did it for five years or 10 years but very few did it more than that because they said it was hard graft. Most would have a winter job too, working in Marks & Spencer or somewhere like it.”
In the decades after the second world war people expected a lot less from their holiday than they do today, he said. “In the 1940s and 50s the impression I got from interviews is that it was an opportunity for someone else to cook for a week.”
Often people were advised by their doctors to go away to escape the smog of the city.
One interviewee said she was told by her GP to go to Morecambe rather than Scarborough. “He said don’t bother with the east coast, it’s too foggy. The west coast has a fresher breeze, which is true,” said Evans.
The interviews have mainly been carried out by local young people, with Evans firm in the belief that “heritage, particularly personal memories, connects us all, even across a chasm of six or seven decades”. The videos have been made available on the Morecambe Heritage website.
The project is part of Historic England’s Everyday Heritage grant programme which launched in 2022 to explore working-class histories.
Catherine Dewar, Historic England’s north-west regional director, said: “This project – driven by the local community in Morecambe – has brilliantly captured personal memories of people with a deep connection to the town, either now or through family ties.
“I hope they all enjoy these new glimpses of our shared seaside history.”
It is the third Morecambe oral history project organised by Evans with previous ones focusing on entertainment and holidaying.
The latter included something of a coup in the shape of Alan Bennett who remembered his family getting the train from Leeds to Morecambe for long weekends.
“My mum always thought that Morecambe was that bit more genteel than Blackpool,” Bennett said. If they ever went to Blackpool they stayed in Cleveleys because it was “less common”.
Bennett also believes that he and his older brother may have an even closer connection to Morecambe as they were both born on 9 May.
“Counting back … I assume we were conceived in a boarding house. Whether it was in Morecambe or Filey or Scarborough I don’t know. I didn’t like to think about it.”
