Geoffrey Faraway

Imagine living in a castle?  Well the Toll House at the entrance to Clevedon’s famous Victorian pier was just like that. My parents Bernard and Joan Faraway had moved down  from Tilbury where he was employed as a skilled carpenter working on P& O liners. Shortly after arriving in the lovely seaside resort in 1948, the local Urban District Council was looking for a husband and wife team to become the new Pier Master and Pier Mistress. My parents got the job and subsequently turned out to be the longest serving couple that the pier has ever known. Moving into the castle known as the Toll House was for me, their only son, an incredible experience. The previous Pier Master used the stone circular turret staircase to reach his bedroom but my Father put in a staircase from the living area up through the middle of the upper floor and I had to go through the middle bedroom to get to my bedroom which had three windows looking out to the seaward side.  The bathroom was originally an outside toilet built onto the side of the house on the ground floor facing the beach. However it was too cold to use so we washed in the kitchen, which was situated in the middle of the house on the ground floor. The front door was actually an entry into the Toll office with an old fashioned outer turn stile. The pier was open 364 days a year and our meals were constantly interrupted by the bell being rung by promenaders wanting to pay for their breath of fresh air.

Campbells’ White Funnel steamers called at the pier and there were as many as 17 ships a day during busy times. They would take passengers to Weston, Cardiff, Penarth, Barry, Ilfracombe and Lundy Island. The motorway was not built in this era and people used the steamers as a lovely day out. Alcohol was not served in Wales on Sundays in those times so Welsh people would sail over to drink in Clevedon returning on the last boat back at 10 or 11 pm. I remember my father ringing a big brass bell at the pier entrance to warn the drinkers in the nearby pubs that their ship home was about to leave and that must have made him very popular at that time of night.

Clevedon was a busy seaside resort in those times and I can remember looking out of our living room window down onto the beach below and seeing as many as 200 yachts on regatta days. The slipway was so hectic that they would launch and recover their boats off the pebbled beach.

There were two motor launches operating from the slipway taking people out for 30 minute trips either down channel to the end of Wains Hill or up as far as Ladye Bay. As a young boy I spent hours helping out on either of the boats, which were called  the Y-knot and the Blue Merlin and later in life I had my own boat moored in the river off Wains Hill.

In my early years living on the pier, my friends were fascinated with my Toll House home and found it fun playing with me. We spent hours on the beach or sailing our model boats in the rock pools.

My parents were so busy with their sometimes 80-hour working week that I had to make my own pleasures but this was easy because of my fantastic surroundings. It would be nothing for me to join in someone’s picnic on the beach having made friends with their children. We used to get old lorry tyre inner tubes and sit in them while bobbing around on the waters edge. I nearly drowned one day when we were having fun jumping off the rocks and swimming back to the beach. Unfortunately I had not realized that the tide had come in so far that it was longer safe to swim. Fortunately a lady saw me struggling and managed to rescue me. Since then I have become a good swimmer but still don’t like being out of depth.

As a young boy I was never allowed to cycle my tricycle more than the first span along the pier because my parents had received complaints from the fishermen that I was getting too close and making their rod bells ring so that they thought they had caught a fish.

I can remember tragic times when people committed suicide by walking down the slipway and into the water and the day a person drowned and the body was recovered from beside the pier.

In the 60’s I remember my father getting consent from the Council to install a Juke box in the old covered hall which used to stand on the end of the pier.  Young rock and rollers came in their hoards from miles around including coach loads from Bristol and the pier would be humming. I was still fairly young and was never allowed to go down and join in.  It was the first time that I saw Teddy boys in three quarter length coats and winkle picker shoes. My father had to keep quite a control and was forever riding his motorbike down the pier to maintain order.  He often had to break off from having a pint in the pub next door to turf out revelers who had climbed the gates and gone down the pier after it was closed for the night.

Funnier situations come to mind like the time a promenader reported that his false teeth had fallen out while he was leaning over the side of the pier.

You would have imagined that this would have been the end of the matter but months later a fisherman hooked a set of teeth and handed them in.

On another occasion my father was presented with new life saving equipment, namely a sawn off shot gun with a two inch barrel into which a rocket was slid with rope attached and a detinator loaded.  Having taken up a stance, the operator would pull the trigger and off the rocket would go trailing the floating rope behind it.

My father was asked to demonstrate this new equipment to several police forces and took officers part way down the pier. Having rigged everything up, he pulled the trigger but to his surprise he was engulfed in smoke, which singed his eyebrows and left him red faced. 

The equipment got put away only to be used on another embarrassing occasion when the local Police arrived with blue lights flashing. My Father and I carrying the equipment, now damp from its sojourn in a Toll House cupboard, followed in hot pursuit to nearby Little Harp Bay.  Scrambling down to the beach we spotted an upturned boat about 200 yards off shore.  Hastily the rocket and launcher were assembled and the trigger pulled.

The rocket just flopped out of the sawn off shot gun onto the mud in front of us before suddenly developing full power and taking off in the wrong direction back up the beach and into an assembled crowd much to their great amusement.

There was a trap door in the floor of our living room and below it was a cave area, which my father had converted into a carpentry workshop. One day a friend popped in through our side door and promptly fell down into the cellar. He reappeared, surprised but unscathed with my mother expressing her anxious concern that he could have broken his neck.

Originally The Toll House had two four foot high ornate chimneys but my father worried that they were unsafe and might come crashing through the roof so he persuaded the Council to have them taken down. I can remember the side door and windows being boarded up in preparation for toppling the chimneys and a pile of sand being laid to break their fall.  But the force was so great that the tumbling stone went  right through the sand and made a large dent in  the tarmac surface below. I thanked my lucky stars that they never fell inboard as my bedroom was directly below.

We shared our little back yard with the maintenance men’s long shed so the area was only just large enough to keep our coal and dustbin and to hang a washing line. There were two maintenance men called Fred and Bill’ who were ,joined years later by Roy. They carried out all the repairs and painted the pier on a continuing programme and were also on hand to help with ropes when the steamers came in.  I used to watch them welding and would go into their shed and create havoc by painting everything with red oxide or whatever I could put my hands on.

When I was 16, I too helped tie up the ship. One particular day I had received the first heaving line thrown to the jetty and was running along the top of the landing stage with it when the rope got tangled around my feet and tripped me up to sudden cheers and the obvious amusement of those watching from above.

It was a great shock to me when two of the pier’s slender spans suddenly collapsed into the sea during safety weight tests on 17th October 1970.  My family was devastated because the pier provided our home and both my parents with jobs.

However, we stayed on watching over the security of the site until I married and moved out in 1972 and my parents retired to a bungalow in the town having completed a record 25 years service.

They were happy days and I do miss them.

 Visit www.clevedonpier.com for information about the pier.

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