Blackpool Before 1967

A hidden history

Until 1967, sex between men was a crime in England, and lesbian lives were barely acknowledged at all. People in Blackpool who loved people of the same sex, or who did not fit the gender they were given, had every reason to keep quiet. Most did not write it down, and the records that survive tend to be the ones made by people who disapproved: police notebooks, court registers, newspaper scandal sheets and showmen's posters.

That means Blackpool's queer history before 1967 is mostly a history of glimpses. Very little has been published about the town's private meeting places or prosecutions in these years. What does survive is mostly about the stage and the seafront, because that is where Blackpool put difference on public display.

The stage as a safe disguise

Blackpool's great gift to queer history in these decades was its entertainment industry. From the 1890s onwards the town was full of performers who played with gender for a living. Vesta Tilley, the most famous male impersonator of her age, was a regular favourite, billed at the Palace Theatre in 1909 as the world's favourite artiste. Pantomime dames, female impersonators and comic drag turns were part of every summer season and Christmas show.

On stage, gender play could be enjoyed as harmless fun. That gave cover to performers whose private lives were less conventional than their audiences might have liked to know, and it gave audiences a safe way to enjoy what they were not supposed to enjoy anywhere else. Many historians see variety and seaside entertainment as one of the few places where queer people could be visible, at least in costume, long before they could be visible as themselves.

Theatrical digs and seaside discretion

Behind the shows stood an army of landladies and guest-house keepers. Summer seasons brought hundreds of performers, dancers and musicians to the town for months at a time, and they needed somewhere to stay where nobody asked too many questions. Basil Newby, who would open Blackpool's first gay nightclub in 1979, grew up in exactly that world. His parents ran theatrical guest houses where stars such as Shirley Bassey and Norman Evans stayed, and he has described a childhood surrounded by showbusiness people.

There is no published study of how many of Blackpool's theatrical digs were quietly welcoming to gay performers. But the pattern of a tolerant, showbusiness-minded guest-house trade is part of why the town's gay hotels flourished so quickly once the law and the times changed.

The Golden Mile and the "curiosity"

The other place where gender difference was put on show was the Golden Mile. Between the wars its booths made money from people the papers had made notorious. In 1930 one showman exhibited a man billed as male on one side and female on the other, until police investigated and decided it was a hoax. In 1937 the showman Luke Gannon put Colonel Victor Barker, who had been raised as a woman and had lived as a man since 1923, on display in an attraction called "On a Strange Honeymoon". Newspapers claimed more than a million people visited that summer.

These were not stories of acceptance. They were spectacles. But they show that Blackpool's holiday crowds were fascinated by gender and sexuality, and that the town's own newspapers often reported such stories in a more matter-of-fact tone than the London press. Our article on Colonel Barker and the Golden Mile sideshows tells that story in full.

Living with the law

For gay men, the threat of prosecution was real. Blackpool was part of Lancashire, and research into the county's court records has found that prosecutions for consensual sex between men were relatively rare from the mid-Victorian period until the First World War, and that more than half of the cases that did reach court were thrown out. The same research found that prosecutions only rose sharply much later, in the 1960s. How many Blackpool men were caught up in those prosecutions has not yet been properly researched.

The 1967 Act did not end the danger. It applied only to men over 21 and in private, and Basil Newby has recalled that in the 1970s anyone who hung a gay flag in Blackpool could expect their windows to be smashed. Police went on using public-order laws against gay men into the 1990s.

Trans lives in the shadows

One remarkable story from before 1967 connects to Blackpool's stage. The ventriloquist and magician Terri Rogers began performing in the 1950s and was one of the first people in Britain to have gender-affirming surgery on the NHS. She had to rebuild her career after transitioning, returned to the stage in 1968, and went on to play the Blackpool Bonanza in 1978 and the Blackpool Magicians' Club convention gala shows until the late 1980s. Her story shows that trans people were part of the town's entertainment world, even when they had to fight to stay in it.

Polari: the secret language

Gay men in Britain's entertainment world once used Polari, a slang drawn from theatre, circus and fairground talk, to speak to each other without outsiders understanding. It grew out of the same world of theatre, circus and fairground that Blackpool was built on, though little has been recorded about how it was used in the town itself. In 2023 a student at the town's further education college set out to interview people about Polari and why it faded, a sign that local people are now trying to recover this part of the past before it is lost.

The first bars

By the time Basil Newby opened the Flamingo in 1979, Blackpool had, by his account, just two places where gay people could reliably drink: Lucy's Bar and the Clifton. Exactly when they became known as gay venues is not recorded. In November 1972 a Blackpool group of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality was set up as an offshoot of the Liverpool group, one of the first signs of organised gay life in the town after the law changed.

Filling the gaps

The honest answer to "what was gay Blackpool like before 1967?" is that we only know a fraction of it. The people who could tell us are now in their eighties and nineties, and their memories are precious. That is one of the main reasons the We're Still Here! project is recording oral histories, and why its planned 2027 exhibitions will mark sixty years since the 1967 Act.

If you, or someone in your family, remember queer life in Blackpool before the 1970s, whether that is a landlady who never asked questions, a friend in the summer-season chorus line or a pub where people knew to go, please share it. Our guide to heritage projects and archives explains how. Lancashire's county archives also hold court and other official records from these years, and they welcome researchers.