No matter how well something is planned, and how many backup plans you put in place, there is one thing you just cannot beat, Mother Nature. The other day I set off from West Yorkshire to travel to Gateshead, a distance of 98 miles, usually taking me a shade over 2 hours in a HGV. This time round, after almost three hours, I had just reached Wetherby, a distance of about 25 miles. The reason for this was an articulated vehicle on its side across two of the three carriageway's of the A1 motorway. As I finally reached the accident scene and inched past I expected to speed up. I hadn't however allowed for the fact that about 3 miles further on a second artic was laid on its side. In fact with the high winds there were a total of 6 rollovers along the A1, I passed a couple more which had ended up in farmers fields before coming to my second blockage of the A1 pictured below.



After passing this second accident, Sally traffic on radio 2 announced the closure of the A1 a bit further on. As I reached the closure I swung off the A1 on to the A19, only to find that was nose to tail as well. Deciding to give up at that point I took the next turning off the main road with the intention of heading home. Unfortunately I wasn't paying attention and picked a turnoff that didn't have access to the A19 South. Before I knew it I was in the middle of a small market town center which has a 7.5 tonne weight limit, not so much for the weight the roads can carry, but because the route through the town was very tight and not really made to carry long vehicles.

Eventually I extricated myself from the situation and managed to get myself back on the right road.

On a happier note I have managed to find time to add the new pdf brochure to our sidestall website. The brochure is pictured below, click on it to download the pdf file.




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Clearing some old photos out, I came across the one pictured below which was the first side stall I had built on a vehicle. In this case a Ford Cargo seven and a half tonner, which gave sterling service for about 6 years before finally expiring with a bang on its very last journey. A con rod came through the side of the engine on the A1 about 3 miles from our depot. At the time I had lost my mobile phone and had to walk a mile to the nearest call box to ask my Father in Law to tow me in. On the way back to the vehicle I stopped and picked up the offending con rod from out of the middle of the carriageway.



I remember 2 incidents associated with this particular stall. The first was whilst I was in the middle of constructing it. At the time the stalls in the UK hadn't begun to take on the continental format of being built on trailers or lorries and being built big. Most stalls were still constructed from wood and stood about 7 feet tall. I designed and built this stall and it stood about 16 feet tall at its highest point. Whilst I was stood back looking at the height and planning the lighting system, another showman, an old timer, came sauntering up and casually remarked, "have you got your feet and inches mixed up son, that's far too tall for what its supposed to be".
Well, within about three years, that particular stall went from being the biggest on most grounds to being distinctly average, with some 40ft long, 22 feet high examples appearing at the major fairs.

The second incident happened at the Leeds Asian Mela which was held in Roundhay Park. A member of the Showmen's Guild committee walked up as I was erecting the stall and told me that he wanted the artwork covering up. If you look at it you can just see that it contains scenes from the history of the Special Air Services Regiment. This gentleman claimed that the Asians at the event would be offended by it, jso it seems that political correctness isn't really a modern invention. Anyway I refused point black to cover it up and he said "On your head be it". In the event, not a single asian visitor mentioned the artwork, so it just goes to show that it's actually the liberal busybodies that are creating most of the tension in this country and everyone would be happier if we were left alone a little bit more just to get on with life.


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I've finally found a spare half hour to update our annual wall planner (our bookings are all computerised, but I like them replicated on the planner as it gives an instant overview). Totting up the corporate bookings I've realised that we have an almost equal number of events booked as last year, not equal to this point in time last year, but equal to the whole of last year! If the pattern of enquiries follow last year then February and March tend to be the months we receive the most bookings, so this is shaping up to be another big leap forwards for us. The most satisfying part of this is the fact that most of the bookings we already have are repeat clients. We are always on the look out for new business obviously, but its the repeat business that is giving us a really solid foundation to build upon.

The new sidestalls website is paying dividends with a number of bookings from it already, although in fairness we have spent a lot of time on S.E.O. for that particular site. The experience we have gained from promoting our other sites has really helped push this one up the rankings on Google really quickly. Hopefully by the end of February we should have our new pdf brochures designed and ready for uploading. It was something that we had intended to produce last year, but just couldn't seem to find the time to do it due to the amount of work coming in.

Fairground Side Stall Hire

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During the winter month's I have made a re start on refurbishing the helter skelter. My first job is to get all of the brakes working 100%, something they have never seemed to do since we took delivery of it. I suppose the previous owner leaving it stood in the corner of his yard for some five or six years didn't really help, with part of the linkages and cylinders pretty much seizing up whenever the ride was sat for more than a few days.

I have virtually all of the system freed off, well greased and working OK. On the final wheel I came to the small cylinder that actuates the brake shoes was absolutely seized solid. I spent all morning hitting it with a hammer to try and force the piston out of the cylinder to no avail. My problem is that I tend to hit something with no luck for a while, then hit it harder and break it. I was worried about doing this as the axles come from an Austin FG lorry which went out of production around 1968! On a hunch I typed the part number into Ebay, and promptly found out that new cylinders are available for the princely sum of £25, not worth spending all day trying to knock one apart to repair.

We are in the process of adding a new feature to our websites, the Google button below enables you to subscribe to our network of sites, with the idea that once subscribed you can type a search term relating to the fairground into Google and as part of the listings information from our site will appear. At the moment I am still playing around with the system but click on the button to subscribe, then type funfair games into Google search and look at listing number 4, it should contain a link to our side stall website along with an image of one of our games units. We will eventually expand this system so that it will not only lead you to the correct part of one of our sites for whatever you are looking for, but it will also lead you to information sources so if you type in funfair history, it will take you to a page with a brief history of the funfair industry.






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Our workload seems to be all southern based at the minute. No sooner had we arrived home from our trip to London for New Year than we were off back in a Southern direction for an event at a private house. Whilst checking the address on Google to make sure of our destination, I came across an advert for the house in question. It was up for sale with offers over £6,500,000 invited!




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A couple of years ago we had a new house built. It was officially a conversion from a little chef restaurant, but in actuality there isn't much left of the original building. When it came to having the utilities connected, I expected it to be a simple and relatively inexpensive job, as we already had gas, water and electric supplies to the building. Boy was I wrong, the site surveyor from British Gas turned up, took one look and began sucking air through his teeth, "Gonna cost you a fortune for a gas connection mate, seeing as there is no gas here"
"Yes there is" I replied, that nice big 2 inch pipe is full of it",
"No its a dead pipe", was his expert reply. I promptly disproved this theory by glibly walking over too it, turning the valve on and listening to the high pressure rush of escaping gas with a triumphant smile on my face!
"Still can't use it" says he.
"Why the hell not" I demanded
"Because it isn't on my plan, so officially it doesn't exist", oh great, so anything not on his plan is living in the twilight zone. After a seconds thought, I came up with a cunning plan straight out of Blackadder. "I don't need your services any longer Mr surveyor man, I am going to have a friend of mine connect us up to directly to the pipe, ha!"
"That's theft son, call the police, you'll get locked up", which was a moot point, how could I steal something that officially didn't exist?

I was all for taking that line, but my significant other wouldn't hear of it, so in the end we agreed to let British Gas rip us off. They told us that we would have to arrange the digging of the trench from our property to the roadside, so the surveyor marked out the line of the trench and fixed a date for the connections team to turn up. Next day we hired a digger and dug the regulation depth trench straight across the property.

The big day turned up and the connections team arrived. After a full day digging exploratory holes around the end of the trench they still hadn't found the gas main. "Were gonna have to send someone else out tomorrow mate, we can't find it"
The next day a new team of monkeys turned up. They decided to go all technical and use an electronic system that sensed the existing metal pipe connection so they could trace its route. Unfortunately they didn't connect the transmitter part of the system to the pipe, so instead of a nice detectable pulse being transmitted along the length of the pipe for them to sense, they walked aimlessly around in circles until suddenly the receiver they were holding began to beep. "Found it", monkey number one stated with absolute certainty and began to dig. This certainty lasted about ten minutes until he hit the electricity cable he had just detected. After four more similar misadventures they too decided they couldn't find it and we would have to wait a week or so until crew number three turned up.

Super crew duly turned up. After another half a day of fruitless digging (by now our front drive resembled the Somme after a particularly heavy bombardment), they announced that in fact, the gas main wasn't where the surveyor had told us, it was in fact in a completely different direction, running along a road on another side of our property. After a heated discussion and a call back to base he announced that British Gas would take responsibility for digging the next trench.

A couple of weeks went by before crew number four arrived, complete with a mini digger. They ripped another trench through our property and actually succeeded in finding and connecting us to the gas mains! As they finished and prepared to leave, the head monkey on the crew told me that in a couple of days a crew would turn up to fill in and retarmac the 70 feet long trench they had left. Sure enough withing two days a tarmacking team arrived, filled in almost three foot of trench and left the other 67 feet untouched.

What followed was another farce out of a Basil Fawlty comedy. I would ring up at the start of the week and complain about the trench. I would be assured that it would be filled in before the end of the week. The week would end and the trench would remain untouched. I would then ring up and the cycle would be repeated. This went on for three months before I finally availed myself of the services of a solicitor and managed to threaten BG into finishing the job.

A peaceful twelve months went by until a team turned up and announced that they were here to remove the existing pipe that didn't exist as it could be dangerous. They proceeded to begin digging holes where they thought the pipe would be and we ended up with a number of holes dotted about our drive yet again. The situation now is that after eight weeks the holes still haven't been sorted, so now I am about to begin a new tactic. On Monday morning I am going to ring up the emergency gas leak line and report a leak. When the British Gas monkeys turn up I am going to point the holes out and ask for them to be filled in. The next day I am going to repeat the process. I am going to do this everyday until either I die of old age or British Gas actually manage to finish a job they have begun.


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I am slowly recovering this morning from our first event of the year. It was only a small event but nevertheless an enjoyable one. We provided a couple of Victorian style games units to a nightclub venue in London which makes it the earliest event of the year for us. They went down well and I think we could see some repeat bookings from the venue. We finished at two am and by the time we had dismantled and packed everything it was about two thirty. It must have taken us an hour to get through the traffic and out of London, the place was really buzzing. One thing I did notice was the catering supplier who operated at the side of us selling Thai food. They had NO washing facilities whatsoever, NO aprons or uniforms, NO electrical safety systems for their lighting and a bunch of gas cylinders all grouped together at the side of their open flame burner. Any of these failings is enough to send a health and safety officer into cardiac arrest whilst visiting a funfair, swiftly followed by an instruction to cease trading until everything is put right. If anyone from a local authority health department reads this could they explain to me why the funfair industry is so severely monitored, when every other Tom Dick and Harry can pretty much make their own rules up?

On the way in we spotted the new signs announcing the Low Emissions Zone (LEZ) Ken Livingstones latest attempt to extort money from everyone. Some of the fairground vehicles have managed to obtain an exemption from the charge for a period, but anyone who's vehicles don't qualify are looking at something like £200 plus PER DAY for using their vehicles in the capital, if Ken keeps it up he will single handedly be able to destroy the funfair industry in the capital.

Funfair Games For Hire, Indoor And Outdoor Events

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