IT is holiday time, and in the past, the first thing you'd do when you arrived at your holiday destination was send a postcard home, a quaint custom that we no longer follow. Margaret Chaplin, in Hurworth, has a collection of cards that were sent to her family in the 1930s back in Darlington. In those days, you didn't go far - this selection from 90 years ago is from friends holidaying in Scarborough and Whitby on the east coast.
The Scarbrough sea front on a postcard posted in 1932
Motor buses drop off passengers at North Bay in Scarborough on this card postmarked 1933
The North Bay miniature railway in Scarborough soon after it opened in 1931
Paddle steamers used to be a major part of the British seaside experience, and this is PS Bilsdale which was built in 1900 to run trips between Yarmouth and Lowestoft. It came to the North East after the First World War to work in a shipyard at Haverton Hill on Teesside, and in 1925, it was sold to work the Scarborough coast north to Hayburn Wyke. It was scrapped in 1934 after a newer steam drove it out of business
The iconic seafront Spa at Scarborough on a card postmarked 1938. There has been a spa since the early 17th Century, but the Victorian one was built after a fire on September 8, 1876, destroyed the existing spa building
A busy beach in North Bay, Scarborough, on card posted in 1925
St Nicholas' Gardens in Scarborough were laid out for tourists in 1900
Scarborough had five miles of electric trams operating between 1904 and 1931. This postcard was sent on September 3, 1924, by Gladys on the seafront to her friend, Miss M Hauxwell at Blackwell Hall in Darlington - presumably she was a domestic servant. The tram on the front of the card is No 21, and almost exactly a year after the card was posted, on September 16, 1925, No 21 ran out of control and smashed through the glass roof of the Scarborough Aquarium, crashing 30ft onto the ballroom floor. The driver, George Darley Smith, escaped with only minor injuries
West Cliff in Whitby on a 1930s postcard with a car attempting to make it up Khyber Pass, a road up the cliff which George "the Railway King" Hudson opened out in the 1850s
The "new pier extension", says the front of this Whitby postcard - the piers were extended in 1912
A rolling sea beneath West Cliff in Whitby, with George Hudson's Royal Hotel on the clifftop
A postcard sent from Bridlington in 1903 back to Gibson Terrace, on Haughton Road, Darlington
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