My love affair with Weston-super-Mare

15th March 2024

Imagine your dad wins a competition in the local newspaper and spends the money on a family holiday to Weston-super-Mare where you get to see The Beatles live!

Sounds like it should be in a book?

Well, it is. It is all in Andy Harper’s Knitted Swimming Trunks book about his tough start in life growing up in 1950s and 60s Birmingham and his much-cherished holidays in Weston-super-Mare – the town he keeps coming back to almost 70 years later.

Andy takes the reader on a brutally honest, but also funny and ultimately inspirational journey through his hard childhood, where his stammer, nits, alopecia and his propensity to suffer with other ailments made him an easy target for playground bullies, as he reveals why Weston is such a massive part of his life.

From never understanding why everyone kept saying hello to his dad on the promenade to seeing a lady undress in a cheeky What The Butler Saw arcade machine on the Grand Pier, to his night with The Beatles, Andy tells it all with a mixture of wit and painful honesty.

We were from Birmingham but everyone on the prom knew my dad

His holidays were the same time every year. Factory Fortnight, the two weeks when the Birmingham car plant his dad worked at would shut down and everyone decamped on their holidays – with most heading to Weston-super-Mare or Weymouth.

He said: “I never could work out why everyone kept saying hello to my dad as we walked down the promenade or why the other kids on the beach were the same ones I went to school with.”

Andy and his family on the promenade

Seeing The Beatles in Weston

There is one childhood holiday to Weston that stands out above all the others though. 1963. His dad won £500 in a Spot the Ball competition and a B&B for the family on Weston’s Locking Road was duly booked. Unbeknown to any of them at the time, the week coincided with The Beatles six-successive nights of concerts at the Odeon in Weston.

Andy said: “I had my own bedroom and not only that I could choose what I had for breakfast. We had to be out of the B&B by 9.30am and stay out until 6pm. They were long days but such good days.”

A full day of sandcastle building and fun on the beach was had before it came to deciding the evening entertainment.

Andy said: “Mum and Dad wanted to go to the Winter Gardens Pavilion for a tea dance and knew I wouldn’t be interested in watching them dancing. All week at the Odeon Cinema they’d been advertising a live Merseybeat music event. I wasn’t bothered about going. I wanted to go onto the Grand Pier and see what kind of What The Butler Saw machine they had, but my mum suggested it, and anything was better than listening to songs of the 1940s and watching my parents waltz around the room.”

Mum took 14-year-old Andy to The Odeon, bought his ticket, and embarrassed him by asking the staff to look after him as she led him to his seat.

He sat through the concert listening to Gerry and The Pacemakers, and other groups before The Beatles came on.

He said: “Four young guys all wearing suits and with the same haircuts came on stage. I was completely blown away. It was a life-changing moment. I was there on my own. The place was full. I was transported into a completely different new world by this band and the atmosphere. I was jumping around and going mad with everyone else. I felt like part of a group. For that moment I was a Beatle on the stage.”

When his mum came to collect him after the show, she could not believe the transformation in her son who had gone from being not bothered to obsessed.

He said: “I was on a different planet. It was fab (the word everyone at the concert was using). I wanted to be a Beatle and look like a Beatle.”

Andy’s love affair with Weston-super-Mare and The Beatles was well and truly cemented. Holidays to Weston were a highlight of the year and, as an underachiever at school, his childhood ambition was to become a deckchair attendant on Weston’s beach.

I love Weston it feels like home

He said: “I loved the place. I loved coming and I still do. It was a long journey on the coach back then, down the A38 because there was no motorway. The excitement used to build whenever we got near Bristol.  I’m the same now. I come back every year, sometimes more than once a year. The road has changed now. The motorway is in place, but I still get that same sense of excitement every time I come down that big hill just past Bristol and know I’m nearly in Weston.

“I love the town and everything about it. I love the walks, the beach, the views, the big wide promenade, the park with Jill’s Garden in it and all the entertainment going on in the hotels and the town.

“Give me Weston over Spain any day. I say it without any hesitation. I love Weston. It feels like home.”

Visit Weston can reveal that Andy did not achieve his childhood dream of becoming a Weston beach deckchair attendant, but you’ll have to read the book to discover what he did achieve.

And the title of the book? Knitted Swimming Trunks? Well, that refers to the home-made trunks mum knitted Andy which became incredibly heavy and hard to keep up around the waist when they got wet!

You can meet Andy when he returns to Weston to promote his book at the Bay Café at the Tropicana on June 29^th from 10am until 4pm.

Knitted Swimming Trunks, published by Brewin Books,  is available on Amazon and from Waterstones.

Andy said:  "I was over the moon when my book was next to the Peaky Blinders one in the Birmingham city centre Waterstones. Imagine that, ordinary me with my book next to the Peaky Blinders!”