Your Letters

February 2008

Hi,

I was delighted to discover your website & wanted to add my memories of Bellevue as a young lad in early 1960s Middleton.

My dad used to take me on the weekends & when school, was out, I can’t ever remember going with my mother. The large animal enclosure always smelled strongly of urine, I guess that’s why my mum stayed away! However I was fascinated by the elephants, rhinos & camels. I clearly recall one exhibit was in a glass case on a wall maybe by the entrance to the large animal part of the zoo. This was a rhino skull with a bullet hole. I can even remember the way it faced, to the left, the horn still attached.

Perhaps the strongest memory I have was a little joke shop, it was octagonal & possibly blue, quite small & all on its own. Inside there were all sorts of tricks, jokes & trinkets such as X-Ray glasses, card tricks, magic tricks & so on. The most popular with me & my dad were small bangers for putting in cigarettes, called “Little Devils”. We used many of these over the years & the best had to be when I put 2 of them into one of my grandmother’s cigarette with explosive results! This joke shop would always be the first place I could drag my dad too if I got the chance & my 6d (sixpence) for half a dozen Little Devils would soon be on the joke shop counter.

Mum & dad used to go to the Granada Bowling lanes & I must have driven them crazy asking again & again to take me. I’d seen “bowling” on the Flintstone’s TV cartoon so I had the general idea what was involved & wanted to try it myself.

Some of the rides were too scary for me, The Bobs included & the roar of the Bellevue Speedway art once exciting & terrifying! The scariest bit for me wasn’t the roar of the bikes but the relative silence at the end when the race was over, my tiny mind working overtime to come up with what horror must be unfolding to end such a huge noise so quickly. The image of the Bellevue Aces “Clubs” trefoil has always stayed with me. My parents wouldn’t watch ITV so it was only on the occasions when I visited my grandmother I got to watch Granada’s coverage of the races & cheer on the Bellevue Aces as well as finding out what was the cause of that bellowing roar.

Perhaps Bellevue was tacky & somewhat care worn by the time I first passed its threshold in the early 1960s, but it was always a magic place for me. I was saddened many years later when I attended some amateur radio & custom car show in the late 1970s & early 80s at how decrepit the place had become & eventually witnessed the sad demolition. Despite being disgracefully scruffy right at the end I was dismayed that all those happy times were now gone & that the ground was cleared for housing & such boring stuff.

Mike Stollov.

Now in Sunny Seattle, Washington Sate, USA.

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