Filey

I recently had the pleasure of spending a few days in Filey, which is a place very dear to my heart. My grandparents spent their retirement living in Filey, so growing up I spent a lot of time there, many happy days spent playing on the beach and dropping coins into the arcade machines in Corrigan’s amusements.

It’s remarkable how little Filey has changed in the intervening decades - it’s still a wonderful slice of traditional British life. Most of the shops are still there, and even the old Fish and Chip restaurant still exists, run by the grandchildren of my grandparent’s friends who opened it up in the 1950s.

I always thought that it was inevitable that since York has been discovered and made even more popular than it once was, the same thing was about to happen to Filey. I made that prediction years ago but it hasn’t happened yet. It’s surprising really because Filey is unsurpassed in many important ways. It has the best beach that I know of in Northern England, for starters.

On our recent visit we stayed at a holiday park called “The Bay” which is actually built on the land that was once occupied by a Butlins holiday camp. That’s another family connection as my parents both worked there briefly after their wedding in 1960. My grandfather also worked there part-time and I can remember visiting as a small child in the early 1970s.

It’s interesting to consider that none other than J.R.R. Tolkien himself used to visit Filey in the 1920s, during the time he worked as a school inspector as a bit of a side gig. He famously hated the place but I think we can all forgive him that.

What is not widely known is that Tolkien actually wrote his “first completed work of children’s fiction”, Roverandom, inspired by events that occurred in September 1925 when he was staying in a cottage overlooking the sea at Filey.

“Early in the holiday, his son Michael, then nearly five, lost a beloved toy dog while playing on the beach with his father and elder brother John and was heartbroken. Shortly afterward, a fierce storm struck the coast, shaking the Tolkien’s cottage so much that they were kept awake late into the night. According to John Tolkien, it was on this occasion, to keep his elder sons calm during the storm and explain Michael’s loss, that Tolkien first told a story about a dog named Rover who was turned into a toy, bought for a young boy very like Michael and similarly lost on a beach.”

Source

As a Tolkien obsessed child, I picked up this tidbit from a second hand biography and when I realised that the great man himself had walked on the very same beach that I often played on, I was completely bewitched. For those interested, there are quite a lot of Tolkien connections around Yorkshire, mostly because he spent time (1920-1925) at Leeds University, first as a reader and then as a professor of English.

Up until the accursed Local Government Act of 1972, Filey had always been in the traditional East Riding of Yorkshire, with the boundary between the East and North Ridings running up the ravine, but after the act it moved to the new county of North Yorkshire. The old folk were most displeased with the change. Previously the only part of Filey in the North Riding was the church and the cemetery. In Filey speak, ‘going to the north riding’ was a euphemism for dying.

Nowadays I live in the Pennine West Riding and Filey is actually quite a long way from here, but it will always be my favourite seaside town.