The Tale Of William Roache's Great Grandfather

The famous Ken Barlow from Coronation Street. had a great grandfather who made his fortune in the holiday resort of Blackpool.

Shortly after the 1891 census James relocated from Darwen, an industrial quarry town in Lancashire, to Blackpool.

The town was the fastest growing seaside resort in Britain and the 1890s were a thriving time because the expansion of the railways in the 1840s meant that it was accessible to many of the working class people in the outlying industrial areas and, by the 1880s, it had turned from a seaside village into a flourishing town.

With investments in all sorts of street entertainments including the Tower and the Pleasure Beach amusement park which was completed in 1905, it was providing everything the day tripping or weekending Briton could imagine for excitement. The famous Blackpool Illuminations began as early as 1879 when Blackpool became the first seaside town to have permanent electric street lamps.

Because James was something of an entrepreneur, he set up shop in a stall on the seafront where he was a phrenologist and medical electrician. Although electricity was fairly new, doctors liked to use it to trat forms of hysteria; the patient would have volts of electricity pass through their body

James would get the patient to hold onto two metal handles while he turned a crank to generate electricity. Many people paid for the excitement and pleasure of experiencing electricity running through their bodies, whilst witnessing the power of it in the nearby Illuminations.

Phrenology was the assessment of bumps on the head, which were meant to correspond to various personality traits.

It was not long before the Council put phrenology and palmistry at the top of its list of unsavoury occupations that would no longer be allowed to be peddled on the foreshore.

So leaving his son to sell temperance herbal (also known as temperance) beer and ice creams from the shop, James bought 4 or 5 properties in close proximity in which he let rooms. With the town becoming more and more popular there was a big demand for rented rooms which meant that it was possible to make a lot of money in a very short time.

When he died he was worth nearly £5k - almost £500k in today's money. And this money allowed Zillah, James' daughter-in-law and William Roache's grandmother, to set up her own catering business at Alton Towers, where a young William enjoyed many happy days visiting his grandmother.


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