Prof. Mark Poulton’s Booth finds a New Home by Martin Reeve

Mark working on the Booth

On a recent trip to a tourist attraction near his home in Devon, Punch Professor Mark Poulton found what he considered an ideal place to display a currently redundant beach booth. He had first used the booth on Goodrigton Sands, but Since Easter 2005 Mark has been using the late Guy Higgins’ semi-permanent booth during his summer seasons at Weymouth. Mark’s booth has been languishing in his garage and more recently in his garden ever since.
The attraction is Dingle’s Fairground Heritage Centre in Lifton on the edge of Dartmoor and it houses a remarkable collection of fairground rides and side show stalls, many in working order. There is a beautiful waltzer, a fully operational dodgems and the world’s only surviving ‘switchback spinning top’ - probably the oldest fairground ride in the country, built originally in 1880.
There is a very powerful sense of nostalgia as you enter the museum; popular music of the fifties and sixties is playing, there is a hugely evocative smell of old wood and new paint, mustiness and varnish, and above all a tremendous blast of colours, brightly painted swirls and swatches of gold and green, pink and brown and yellow. All of the art work is original, and unique, painted onto the wooden rides and stalls, in a lively vernacular, and accomplished style, the style that has come to be synonymous with the old fairground.
There is an abundance of heroic and clown motifs. Bull fighters, gladiators, Roman charioteers, boxers, red Indians and cowboys strut next to silent film comedians, bulging eyed monsters and grotesque fools.
There is a sense of movement, vitality and energy. In one corner, intricately carved fairground horses are herded together, their nostrils flaring as if straining to be ridden. There are carousels for little children with miniature steamboats and fire engines and railway engines. Cluttered along the walls are the paintings which advertise ‘The Boxing Academy’, a saloon bar, slot machines and ‘Jungle Thrills’ and one declaring, enticingly, ‘The French Beauty Show Always on View.’
There are paintings of wild beasts, lions and tigers, monkeys, giraffes and snakes, many in combat with each other.
This is a palace of thrills and excitement, a world of distorting mirrors, of dreams and nightmares realised, where anything might happen; it is the arena of unrestraint, of carnival. Just the place for Mr Punch then.
Mark is very happy for his booth to be in this company, he feels the Victorian flavour of the exhibits chimes well with the traditional feeling of the Punch and Judy show.
I help him set up his booth between the hall of mirrors and the dodgems. Putting the heavy frame together brings back memories for Mark he used this booth for seven seasons performing thousands of shows in it. It has withstood its fair share of wind and rain and vandalism. After he puts the finishing touches to it, adjusting the velvet curtains, brushing away the cobwebs, Mark tells me he thinks the booth will feel at home here, ‘there will be plenty of other rides for it to talk to.’ he says, and although the show is not strictly speaking a ride, I know what he means; it is a kind of transport.

The booth can be seen at the fairground Heritage Centre,
Milford, Lifton, Devon PL16 0AT

Mark can be found performing all summer long, from May to September at Weymouth Beach in Dorset.