The publicity machine was cranking along as normal in the run-up to the annual Allendale May Fair, held, typically, on the first weekend of June. It’s intriguing, as always with these promotions, to consider the different enterprises wishing the organisers all the best.
We’d discovered with an early (1932) tourist booklet promoting ‘The Roman Wall District’ in an entry of the eponymous AllendaleDiary.org, that few if any of the businesses advertised at those times are still trading today. But considering the date of this primary source compendium of active businesses, it’s a delight to clock that a good number are still active as we compile this archive, more than a decade later. My count is ten of the twenty 2011 advertisers are still with us in 2023.
Anyway, the theme for the 2011 Fair was to be Noddy and the Toy Town residents, I guess. The Drama Group this year was expecting to perform a major component of the Fair, with shows on all three days featuring Bobby and Big Boots.
In fact, I can’t remember a single thing from the 2011 Fair. Perhaps we were too busy struggling to survive down at Allen Mill, by that time. I hope a careful trawl through the Business Meeting minutes before and after the Fair will yield up some priceless nuggets of information about the actual event; there are no contemporary photographs of the day in Nigel Baynes’ wonderful archive, which is dwindling to an end.