Like so many before and after him, Charles Shanahan had decided to leave London’s congested, polluted streets behind for a day on Kent’s coast.
Yet within just a few hours of arriving, he would have been killed in the most shocking manner at one of Margate’s best-loved tourist spots.
He lived in Camberwell, south London, and by day was an asphalter – laying road surfaces. At just 31, he was described by friends as “strong and healthy”.
Joined by workmates, they’d arrived in Margate on the morning of July 4, 1931 – having a few drinks at a bar in the High Street before enjoying lunch.
Then fate intervened and his party decided to head to Dreamland.
Back then, the park was relatively new on the scene – an ambitious post-Great War project to create a hub of entertainment and tourist attractions. Its famous art deco cinema was still some years from opening, and the site was a blend of rides and gardens, designed to offer an option to day-trippers from the busy beach scene.
At some point, it was decided to ride the Scenic Railway – the park’s showpiece rollercoaster.
The sprawling wooden ride had opened for business in 1920. Dreamland’s then owners had bought the exclusive European rights to construct a design concocted by a pioneering US designer.
Built from local timber, mechanical parts were shipped from across the Atlantic. It dominated the park and proved an irresistible attraction for tourists keen to ride its rails. Today, it is Britain’s oldest rollercoaster.
Witnesses saw him board the ride and sit in the centre of a row of seats. Safety bars or seatbelts were not in use back then, The ride, as today, is controlled by a driver sat behind the first carriage known as the ‘brakeman’ (although today there is an additional automatic braking system should there be an issue).
No one suggested Mr Shanahan was the worst for wear for alcohol. But something dreadful was about to happen.
Shortly after the ride began, the driver of the rollercoaster – sat just a few rows behind Mr Shanahan – noticed him slip from his seat.
Before anyone could comprehend what was happening, his head struck a post beside the track – and then the five which followed. The driver immediately slammed on the brakes of the carriage which, at this point, was travelling some 25 to 30mph. But the asphalter had at this point fallen out of the train altogether – tumbling onto the track before plunging some 24ft onto the ground below.
He had stood no chance.
An inquest into his death heard he had suffered five separate fractures of the skull, three to the lower jaw and a fracture of the spinal column. Death was “due to shock following on the multiple injuries to the head”.
Quite why he had slipped from his seat was never fully explained. But there was the suggestion a large meal and a drink or two could have seen him simply nod off or become drowsy.
Owners of Dreamland, at the time, reported to the coroner that since the rollercoaster had first launched 11 years before the incident, it had carried somewhere between three to four million passengers and the only previous accident had been caused when someone was “skylarking about” and had fallen from the top of the ride.
The jury at the inquest returned a verdict of “death by misadventure” – in other words, an accident.
Concluded the coroner at the hearing at Margate Town Hall: “It was indeed a tragic ending to a holiday party to result as this one did and the only consolation is that the man was killed instantly and experienced little pain.”
That previous incident may have been in reference to Herbert Kedwell on September 1, 1928. A petty officer in the Navy, Mr Kedwell lived in Folkestone, while the vessel on which he served – HMS Walpole – was docked at Chatham Dockyard.
While not clear exactly what happened, he fell from a carriage on the ride to the ground below. Local reports suggest he had suffered serious head injuries.
His predicament saw a crowd quickly gather around him and one woman fainted at the sight.
Taken to the nearby Margate Cottage Hospital in Victoria Street, the 29-year-old was initially in a critical condition, but within days, doctors changed his prognosis to the expectation of a complete recovery.
Just three years after Mr Shanahan’s tragic death, another rider took a tumble.
Jack Doyle, 26, from Enfield, was riding the rollercoaster with a friend when, somehow, he found himself propelled from the carriage and onto the track. Swiftly rescued – the ride was about to end when he fell – he was taken to Margate Hospital suffering from extensive bruising and was kept overnight but lived to fight another day.
Remarkably, during the Second World War, the park – and the Scenic Railway in particular – avoided any serious bomb damage. Some of the menagerie enclosures are believed to have been hit – but the wooden rollercoaster lived to see peace declared.
However, just four years after bombers had stopped dropping their deadly load on Margate and the rest of Kent, the Scenic Railway found itself on life support.
At around 2am on the morning of August 21, 1949, a security guard at Dreamland spotted flames on the wooden ride. He immediately contacted emergency teams who rushed to the scene.
At its peak, the glow of the blaze could be seen for miles around and a column of sparks made the ride look like it was hosting, as one local newspaper at the time put it, “a gigantic firework display”.
By the time the flames were extinguished, a third of the ride had been destroyed. Reports said a 600ft stretch, including the main dip, was turned to ash, along with sideshows sited beneath the wooden structure. Fortunately, animals kept at the park at the time – which included the likes of a lion, bear, monkey and baboons – were not hurt.
Estimates at the time suggested £30,000 worth of damage had been caused. Today, that would be the equivalent of just under £900,000.
Remarkably, the park still opened for business on the Sunday – this was, after all, still the peak summer holiday season – and crowds, while unable to ride the rollercoaster, were at least able to gawp at its burnt-out remains.
The park’s respite from the damaging impact of fire didn’t last long, though. The following year, in August 1950, the wooden building housing the main arcade at the centre of the park, burnt down in a blaze so fierce boarding houses near the park were put on standby to evacuate.
Ironically the building had been constructed in the 1930s to replace a previous building which had also succumbed to flames.
However, the Scenic Railway on this occasion – which had been reopened after timber from the old pier at Lowestoft, in Suffolk, had been shipped in to aid repairs – was undamaged.
In July 1957, it had another close shave when a fire erupted in a building housing an emergency generator beneath the rollercoaster.
It broke out on a busy Sunday while crowds were enjoying the park, with flames spotted leaping out of the building. However, quick-thinking park staff used emergency fire-fighting gear to bring it under control before local fire crews arrived.
Efforts were helped by heavy rain, which had seen many park-goers seek shelter and watch transfixed as plumes of dark smoke drifted across the park.
The generator, however, was destroyed along with a host of prizes used by the sideshows which operated nearby. The Scenic Railway, while stopped briefly, resumed not long after after test runs were made.
It did come at a cost though. Not only did park chiefs admit that had it not been tackled quickly it “could have destroyed the whole Scenic Railway”, but said such was the park’s popularity at the time, every minute power was closed off to the park it cost it “some £400-500 a minute” – the equivalent today of around £10,000 every 60 seconds.
Over the following decades, the Scenic Railway continued to entertain the crowds. But there is another dark chapter connected to it.
In 1970 the Big Dipper at Battersea Park funfair – a wooden ride similar in style to the Scenic Railway – suffered a fire. Bosses at the London attraction reached out to Dreamland to assist in acquiring replacement parts. One of the purchases it made was of one of the carriages used in Margate to ride the rails.
It is believed to have been that carriage which was at the centre of a terrible tragedy that occurred on May 30, 1972.
As the ride started to climb the first slope, it broke away from the rope pulling it along. The brakeman’s efforts failed to stop the carriages from rolling backwards and they crashed through barriers.
Five children were killed in the tragedy and 15 people were injured. It remains the worst rollercoaster disaster in history.
If indeed it was the former Dreamland carriage – and one brakeman at the Margate park was convinced it was – the carriage would have been 50 years old.
Back on the Kent coast, the Scenic Railway stood tall as the park’s popularity started to wane. A shift in holiday habits had hit Margate hard as the 20th century reached its end and the park’s future hung somewhat in the balance.
In 2002, the ride was given Grade II-listed status – effectively making any plans to dismantle it a considerably bigger administrative headache for the site’s owners. By 2005, the park was closed to visitors, the rollercoaster now a relic.
However, its status didn’t offer it any protection against an arsonist’s match in 2008.
The fire, which broke out on the afternoon of April 7, destroyed an estimated 40% of the structure. About 60 firefighters tackled the blaze and crowds of onlookers flocked to witness what they felt would be the grand structure’s final farewell.
The station and the carriages were all destroyed.
Yet, remarkably, it would live to see another day. Three years later, and still in a state of disrepair, its status was upgraded to Grade II*-listed.
By the time plans to reopen the park as a vintage fairground in 2015 came to fruition, the ride had been painstakingly rebuilt, albeit not entirely smoothly. Strong winds in 2014 blew some of the structure over as work was taking place – ultimately delaying its reopening.
It may have been a case, as Only Fools and Horses would say, of ‘Trigger’s broom’ but it emerged once more as the park’s star attraction – a ride almost 100 years old which had ridden the highs and lows of Dreamland’s remarkable history.
There would, however, be one final twist in the tale.
Just this summer, it suffered perhaps its most serious malfunction.
Funseekers were enjoying the ride in August when it is thought a piece of wood caught on the bottom of the carriage and ripped through the wooden rails leaving them splintered.
Fortunately, the ride was immediately stopped and no injuries were reported – but it was caught on film.
The ride has been closed ever since while repairs are conducted.
But, as we know from history, it takes a lot more than that to keep a good ride down.
