Daring exploits of pier divers

Margaret Brecknell explores the long lost world of acrobatic divers at Lincolnshire’s popular coastal resorts.

Back in the early 20th-century heyday of the British seaside holiday, thousands of visitors arrived at resorts like Skegness and Cleethorpes each summer ready to be entertained.

Among the most popular acts were the professional high divers, who performed daring acrobatic stunts from the pierhead each day.

Performers like father-and-son duo, Frank and Leslie Gadsby, “Dreadnought” Stanley Gorton, and Billy Thomason, the “One-Legged Diver”, became huge hits in Skegness, but sadly not all emerged unscathed from their death-defying acts.

One particular favourite performance with the crowds was the “death dive”, which involved diving from a great height into a tank of water set alight with petrol.

Not long after Skegness Pier opened in June 1881, the local press began to refer to a “bold” unnamed high diver who was entertaining the crowds there. This was the first of a long line of “Professors” who plied their trade in the resort. Although now confined to high-ranking academics, the title of “Professor” was once more widely used by tutors in a wide range of activities, including swimming and diving.

By 1887, “Professor” James Connell was thrilling audiences with his dives at a height of 90 feet from the pierhead into the sea. Jimmy, as he was affectionately known, performed on Skegness Pier for nearly two decades and became a popular figure in the resort.

Pier diving was not a lucrative profession, though, and seasonal to boot, meaning that the father-of-nine faced a constant uphill battle to make ends meet.

In 1904, Connell moved to Nottingham in search of new work, but his high diving performances continued, albeit on a more impromptu basis.

On one Bank Holiday Monday, he was arrested and charged with obstruction after attracting a large crowd to witness a spectacular diving stunt from the city’s famous Trent Bridge. When he appeared before the Nottingham magistrates, he claimed, in defence, that he was out of work and was merely trying to earn money to feed his large family, but his plea fell on deaf ears and he was fined five shillings.

Connell proved to be a survivor, though, living to the relatively advanced age of 70. His children also appear to have largely flourished despite their uncertain early upbringing, with one joining the merchant navy, another enjoying a career in horse racing and a third even following him into pier diving.

Open-air attraction
His successor on Skegness Pier was Northamptonshire-born Billy Thomason, who was dubbed the “best open-air attraction in Skegness”. Unlike his predecessor, Thomason had a more sedate profession to which he returned at the end of each summer.

As a young man, he was apprenticed to a tailor and subsequently specialised in making riding breeches.

Thomason’s daring feats were made all the more extraordinary by the fact that his left leg had been amputated at the age of seven following a serious childhood illness. This did not deter the courageous Professor from including a spectacular fire dive in his act.

For this stunt, Thomason was wrapped in sacking and cotton wool, which was then covered in methylated spirits and set alight just as he was about to make his dive. Even though the stunt was carefully timed so that the flames were extinguished in the nick of time when the diver hit the water, it wasn’t unusual for practitioners to suffer minor burns.

Thomason continued to entertain Skegness holidaymakers even after the outbreak of war, although he was compelled to halt performances of the fire dive because of wartime lighting restrictions.

He made his final appearance at the resort in 1920, but, sadly, having risked life and limb for so many years, died of pneumonia, aged 39, only 18 months or so later.

High diving sensation
The experienced Frank “Peggy” Gadsby became the next regular diver to grace the pier at Skegness. As the slightly unkind nickname suggests, he shared a remarkable distinction with his predecessor, Billy Thomason, in that he too was an amputee, having lost a leg after a childhood accident. Like so many of the great pier divers, Gadsby began life as a swimmer, only to turn to high diving, because, to quote his own words from a 1953 press interview, “There was no money in swimming, so I started sensationalism”.

Born in December 1881, Gadsby enjoyed great early success as a competitive swimmer, both at home and abroad, but only turned to professional diving in his late twenties after running up considerable debts as a pub landlord in his native Nottingham.

Having been declared bankrupt in 1913, he spent the next few years eking out a living as a pier diver at seaside resorts across the country before eventually arriving in Skegness during the early 1920s.

Gadsby’s repertoire included the now prerequisite fire dive, but sometimes he found it necessary to stage even riskier stunts.

In July 1924, he was fined five shillings after pleading guilty to a charge of riding a bicycle without a light.

The following month a special aero-aquatic carnival was organised in Skegness as a benefit for Gadsby.

The highlight of the event was intended to be his parachute dive into the water from a plane travelling at high speed, but, on the day, the plane arrived without the necessary parachute and the stunt was abandoned, much to the disappointment of the large crowd.

Another family member did, however, wow the spectators that day and that was Gadsby’s young teenage son, Leslie, who, according to newspaper reports, put on “a very clever exhibition of diving”.

By the following summer, “Daredevil” Leslie was regularly appearing alongside Gadsby Senior on the pier and, in time, began to deputise for his father, who was now finding more lucrative work as a film stuntman.

Leslie, too, made his film debut as a stunt double in 1928. Unsurprisingly, this occupation proved to be no less hazardous than his summer job at Skegness Pier.

For one early role he was required to film a particularly dramatic scene in which he dived off a breakwater into the sea during a raging storm. In an interview he described how after hitting the water, such was the strength of the waves that he was flung in all directions.

For days afterwards he was so badly bruised that he was barely able to walk, but, he remarked, “the producer was immensely pleased with all that I did, and that is the only thing that counts in film work”.

In 1931, the father-and-son duo swapped the Lincolnshire coast for the Somerset resort of Weston-super-Mare and this was where Leslie’s luck eventually ran out in the most bizarre of circumstances.

He was firing a military-style rocket from the pier into the air as a signal that the performance was about to start when it unexpectedly hit an overhead obstruction.

The 20-year-old diver bravely caught the rocket in his left hand as it began to plummet towards the deck. As he did so, the rocket exploded and his fingers were shattered, following which his hand had to be amputated.

Living up to the billing
As the Gadsby duo’s commitments elsewhere increased, their appearances at Skegness became more spasmodic and “Dreadnought” Stanley Gorton became a regular fixture on the pier. Gorton really does appear to have lived up to his billing and not to have feared anything, carrying on the tradition of the fire dive and other daring stunts such as the one when he fell backwards from the diving board, whilst strapped to a chair, into a large tank of water.

He hit the headlines in 1931 when he married a local Skegness girl named Mercia and, in a classic example of the performer’s “the show must go on” mentality, then changed into his diving gear and proceeded with his usual show at the pier.

Sadly, the marriage proved all too short-lived. In December 1938, Gorton was taken seriously ill with acute stomach pains whilst on a visit to his native Liverpool. He was rushed to hospital and, despite an emergency operation, died a matter of days later at the age of just 30. It has been suggested that his stomach condition may have been caused by infected water in the tank used for his stunt dives.

Frank Gadsby fared rather better and carried on diving regularly until his late 60s. He even then subsequently came out of retirement for one last fire dive at the age of 71, replacing his son on the bill at a Bristol gala after Leslie was compelled to pull out because of injury.

He eventually passed away peacefully at his Nottinghamshire home five years later. His son continued to perform for several more years, but, in truth, the heyday of the diving “Professors” was already long gone and in interviews he was accustomed to referring to himself as the last of his kind.

When Leslie Gadsby died, aged 70, in 1980, it truly represented the end of an era, not least in Skegness where the pier divers had once so royally entertained the throngs of holidaymakers who flocked to the resort each summer.

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