836142

research-article2019
MCU0010.1177/1359183519836142Journal of Material CultureTrowell

Journal of

MATERIAL
Article CULTURE
Journal of Material Culture
2019, Vol. 24(3) 313­–333
‘Anything off the bottom © The Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
shelf’: Ephemeral fairgrounds sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1359183519836142
https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183519836142
and material swag journals.sagepub.com/home/mcu

Ian Trowell
School of Architecture, University of Sheffield, UK

Abstract
Travelling fairgrounds embody the ephemeral. They arrive from elsewhere to occupy an
everyday space, momentarily wrenching it from regular purpose and bringing in a bombardment
of shimmering surfaces, magical spaces, affects, illusions, fleeting peaks of sensory excess. Utilizing
historical resources, interviews with showpeople and gathered testimony, this article examines
the material encounter of the British fairground through the prize, what might be considered
as a making material of the ephemeral. The prize provides material reminders of the fairground
when it has departed, to counterintuitively persist through time as meaningful keepsakes and
souvenirs. The fairground prize is tracked as both object and concept, utilizing detailed ‘back-
stage’ and ‘front-stage’ flows, Dant’s work around ‘objects in time’, spatial practices and complex
crossovers to other cultural trends. Taking his research to the contemporary period, the author
proposes a significant shift in the fairground prize that has a wider impact on the aesthetic
engagement with the fair.

Keywords
branding, fairgrounds, material culture, popular culture

Introduction
Although the British travelling fairground emerged with a strong association to trade,
coinciding with harvest festivals, hiring ceremonies and the specific selling of nominated
goods or livestock (see Cameron, 1998), it now resides as an ephemeral, transient and
travelling spectacle endowed with thrill, excess and a polysensory assault of sound,
smell, light and taste. As Walden (1997: 126) suggests, fairgrounds and expositions ‘car-
ried expectations of spectacle’, and the lasting material transaction was phased out in
favour of affect and emotion, pangs of anticipation, short bursts of dizzying release, a

Corresponding author:
Ian Trowell, School of Architecture, University of Sheffield, Arts Tower, Sheffield S10 2TN, UK.
Email: imtrowell@outlook.com
314 Journal of Material Culture 24(3)

heightened social milieu and relaxing of rules, and a bombardment of subcultural strands
and popular culture iconography. Even the potential to dwell upon the material encounter
of food is quashed, with culinary offerings oriented towards sweet and sickly mixtures
alongside hot-dog and burger savouries, handed over in polyurethane trays and con-
sumed ‘on the hoof’, to be tempted back out a few minutes later in the encounter with
spinning and inverting contraptions. Within this ephemeral palace, a shard of the mate-
rial exists with the fairground prize – hard-won on the darts stall or hoopla, ceremoni-
ously clutched while finishing the circuit of the fairground and returning home, and
strangely treasured well beyond its apparent shelf-life, much like urban-myth stories of
fairground goldfish that unfeasibly live on for years.
Focusing on Britain, this article addresses the material encounter of the ephemeral
fairground through the fairground prize, proposing a model for the flow of material cul-
ture on the fairground that includes the points where prizes and small gift type objects
can be attained, aspects of display, and the actions and rituals attached to these acquisi-
tions. The work emphasizes the context-specific spatial aspects of the fairground prize,
proposing a back-stage (the objects in production and movement) and front-stage (the
objects on display) and associated distinctions of affordance. Fairground display culture
is documented and I develop parallels to modes of presentation in art, utilizing theories
from art history to develop my arguments. Drawing on the work of Dant (1999), I track
these objects through time, developing a narrative for both the shape and scope of the
fairground prize in general (what I call the phylogenetic, or evolutionary tree, model) and
the trajectory of a specific object (the ontogenetic, or lifecycle, model). Within Dant’s
temporal schema, I emphasize the roles of novelty and ceremony of acquisition integral
to the fairground prize. With these models in place, I propose a significant shift that has
a wider impact on the aesthetic engagement with the fair.
The fairground prize is a slippery object that shares some common ground of outlet
with seaside stalls and temporary shops that occupy vacant spaces on the high street dur-
ing Christmas holidays, spaces and moments where, according to Cross and Walton
(2005: 5), we are at leisure to ‘gaze and listen, to move and mingle’. These outlet realms
are often overlooked but are of importance to researchers of material culture, although
the fairground has persisted as mysterious and hard to approach. Goods for sale, often
branded to ephemeral cultural themes from film and television, are known as ‘swag’ to
the retailers, offering connotations of piracy and plundering. Whilst such a label might
be applicable to the colonial narrative of the exhibition culture referred to by Walden
(1997), the origins of the word in fairground and market-trading culture is less certain.
Swag implies ill-gotten gains, perhaps won rather than earned, and this manner of acqui-
sition is central to the fairground prize. Furthermore, the concept of winning rather than
purchasing (with legitimate funds) introduces a more sensorial engagement with the
object, demarcating it from a similar object purchased from a retail point.
The article embraces current research in the material culture of the seemingly trivial,
overlooked, and taken-for-granted, investigating complex biographies in coming to be,
circulation, and resilient meaningfulness. Examples include Gregson and Crewe (2003)
and their investigation of second-hand cultures and Balthazar (2016), and the complex
flows of charity shop objects donning character and affecting nostalgic impulses. From
a distanced position, the fairground prize could be considered in the realm of gubbins or
Trowell 315

detritus, material that is lowly, belittled or downgraded and operating in a grey economy,
thus making the investigation of its lifecycle an undertaking of minor importance.
However, as Miller (2008) shows, such objects cannot be ignored, and his work in trans-
forming a Perequian heteroclite of everyday possessions such as happy meal toys (p.
129) into a new ontological substrate asks questions about what matters as stuff. Turkle
(2007) circumscribes a similar terrain of ‘evocative objects’, acquiring deeper meanings
through their acquisition during ‘times of transition’ (p. 8), exemplifying what Dudley
(2010: 2) describes as ‘the embeddedness of material objects in human social life and the
meanings and values objects thereby acquire’.

Aims and research methods

The first aim of this article is to explore how the fairground prize arises, flows and func-
tions as an example of material culture. This is undertaken with an initial review of writ-
ten research on the fairground prize, identifying the sporadic discursive areas where
fairground writing occurs and how discourse is structured. Whilst other testimonies of
the fairground prize may lie intermittently in the corpus of ‘from below’ local and per-
sonal histories, it was felt that excavating such work was beyond the scope of the
research. Instead, I move on to my own research undertaken at various British fair-
grounds (observation and general public interviews), specific interviews with tradespeo-
ple and showpeople, and further interviews conducted with self-identifying fairground
fans on an internet forum. Archival and contemporary photographs are used to illustrate
testimonies and points made in the research, with nuances on elaborate modes of display
(positioning, grouping and arranging).
The second aim is to investigate the fairground prize as a dynamic and responsive
cultural object, combining further testimony with evidence from the World’s Fair news-
paper, an ongoing weekly publication established in 1904 that serves key functions:
reporting on fairgrounds, facilitating the organization of the industry, and acting as a
communication vessel for a transient community. The newspaper incorporates a dedi-
cated section of sales advertisements where swag wholesalers offer bulk purchases to
showpeople, and this section is utilized as a primary resource or isometric mapping of
the swag on the fairground at the time since all swag was purchased through this channel.
I have taken samples from the years 1955, 1965, 1975 and 1985 as a spread to indicate a
dynamic. There are two points to make here: firstly, it is very likely that key changes in
the nature and cultural resonance of the prizes take place rapidly between the markers
chosen at the middle of each decade; and secondly, the article is not a full history of the
fairground prize. I am indicating the nature of the prize, its changing state, and its levels
of embedded ephemerality as it is chained to fleeting cultural reference points.
The third aim is to support a persistence of meaningfulness of these objects, particu-
larly their mnemonic function, by drawing on the testimonies. The overwhelming
ephemerality of the fairground and the throwaway nature of the prize are resisted as
objects are storied as being retained or recalled as important memories or conduits to a
wider experience of the fairground. The article concludes by returning to the dynamic of
change and bringing things into the current era. Two epiphenomenal observations are
noted: firstly, the gradual erosion of the material object specific to the fairground and its
316 Journal of Material Culture 24(3)

replacement by franchised toys drawn from films and television that can be purchased in
other places; secondly, the implications of the fairground prize linking itself wholly to
cultural icons of alarming fleetingness.

Literature
As an academic or sociological enquiry, the fairground often remains off-limits, with
connotations of the mysterious, secretive, disingenuous and shabby. In its place, the pop-
ular history and enthusiast-oriented market dominates the published output of fairground
literature, producing books on specialist domains of named fairs, show-families, specific
ride types and makes or types of transport. However, even within this body of work, the
fairground prize and its methods of attainment evade description and reflection. The
round stall and side stall, the principal modes of access to the prize, are covered in
Braithwaite’s (1968) study of the architecture of the fairground, registered as ‘booths and
joints that are called side and middle stuff’ (p. 28) as part of the wider architectural struc-
ture, and then given a short chapter (pp. 67–76) that concentrates primarily on the fair-
ground show (a declining feature of the side-ground). Braithwaite is concerned with the
topography of the attractions both within the wider fairground and within the attraction
itself as a closed-off and functioning object. The topography of each stall is dependent
upon the nature of the enclosed game, and the rudimentary features of decoration such as
lettered prosceniums, striped awnings and embroidered side linings form the bulk of
Braithwaite’s interest. He offers an important affinity with the market traders, and briefly
documents a rationale as ‘more than just the garish display of swag (prizes), it is this
quality of jostling for space, of being smarter than one’s neighbour’. Starsmore (1975:
33) echoes Braithwaite, stating that ‘the ‘joints’ and ‘hoop-las’ are the colourful and
decorative fabric of the fair’, but not expanding upon their assumed minor role in a struc-
tural whole. He makes a single reference to the content of the stalls, suggesting ‘the
adornments of ceramics, glass and toys which catch the eye with their allure can seem
like treasure to the lucky winners’ (p. 34). Dallas (1971: 163) recognizes in the (then)
contemporary fair, stalls as ‘poor relations on the fairground … in forlorn avenues mark-
ing the boundary of the fair, or clusters round the rides hoping for pickings’. However,
his journalistic and human-interest approach to the subject leads him to query the fair-
ground prize, and I expand upon his observations below, as I set out my own enquiry.
Finally, of the major books covering the history of the British fairground, Weedon and
Ward (1981) offer dedicated chapters to both the round stall and side stall, but are more
concerned with decorative aspects and the interior workings of games and target systems
such as the evocative lines of tinplate black alley-cat figures with a pock-marked patina
of repeated shooting. The prize is described as an aspect of the visual lure of the stall,
‘the centre filled out with a mountain of “swag”, an assortment of frequently gaudy
prizes, although amongst their number were more practical items such as carpet sweep-
ers and alarm clocks’ (p. 221). Whilst this offers a brief insight into the distinct material
culture of the prize, it serves Weedon and Ward as part of a greater gesamtkunstwerk
where the material lure of prizes and consumer durables blends with lettered rounding
boards listing the more prestigious prizes on offer, and interior gag-boards painted with
phrases of joy and anticipation.
Trowell 317

Ketchell (1999), in what is the first and only dedicated study of a fairground stall,
documents a multitude of deep and precise memories of ‘Chicken Joe’, a character who
operated a complex spinner style game, where three dials indicated random numbers that
were matched by the punters. Whilst Ketchell’s work on Chicken Joe is useful in under-
standing the nature of the game within the fairground, his prize system (upon which he
was named) veers away from the unique material object with a special attachment to the
fairground. Chicken Joe offered food as prizes and in the depression years of the 1930s
the winning of fancy groceries was both a thrill and a practicality. Ketchell gathers
detailed memories of the seemingly slowed-down moment of winning the prize. For
example, a respondent typically recalls:

In 1933 when my dad had been out of work about four years we went to the fair. My mother
bought a 2d ticket at Chicken Joe’s. I remember standing there watching the numbers go up and
down. Suddenly it stopped and my mother had the winning ticket. It was wonderful: we thought
we had won a fortune. There was a larger carrier bag full of groceries and a large plucked
chicken complete with head and feet. I remember it so well because this was the first chicken
we had ever had and we didn’t have another until some time during the war. (p. 11)

Alongside the novelty of chickens, Chicken Joe also offered household goods, and other
respondents recall these glamorous prizes, topped off with a star prize such as a three-
piece suite. This indicates another level of prize, the proliferation of household goods in
terms of objects that are both practical and everyday, offering people a chance to win
what they might not be able to afford in the normal shops. These prizes do not fall under
the definition of fairground swag that I explore below, but it is interesting that they still
evoke memories and responses relating to the longevity of use. For example, in my con-
temporary research, a respondent at Loughborough in her 60s recalled fairground prizes
as ‘proper things like casserole dishes on the hoopla stall – we used ours for 20 years’.
As Figure 1 shows, the domination of ceramics (practical items) was to the fore in the
1960s, and modes of display such as plinths and intricate doilies were regularly employed.

Encountering and attaining the prizes

Material swag forms part of the allure of the fairground, brought in as some kind of
strange booty by the showpeople and arranged in intricate displays for the benefit of the
punters, to be either purchased or offered as prizes in fairground games. This is an
instance as we see it, a juncture in its object flow forming the anticipation of its departure
from the fairground (and custody of the showperson) into the ownership of the punter.
Swag pervades the fairground as either prizes (larger items) from stalls, small items from
‘Autogift’ vending machines, toys and games as winnable from various unstaffed devices
such as cranes and grabs, and a multitude of items sold from vendors who circumambu-
late the fair or strategically line the entrance and exit interstices of the larger events.
There is a topographical logic to the arrangement, with round stalls forming short ave-
nues within the body of the fairground, side stalls lining the edge of the fairground, vend-
ing machines filling in any available spaces, and vendors floating around. It is an
evocative and impressionable environment, and minor details such as the vending
machines are recalled by respondent Mike:
318 Journal of Material Culture 24(3)

Figure 1.  1960s prizes on fairground stall. Photograph David Braithwaite/National Fairground
and Circus Archive.

You also used to see a sort of slot machine scattered through the fair, usually against the shutters
of a ride, a bit like you see the punch bags now. These slot machines used to intrigue my sister.
It was 6d a go, they were filled with small blue/grey boxes which contained a ‘mystery’ gift.
This usually turned out to be a bracelet of plastic beads, which was why my sister liked them
so much.

Whilst the mystery gift vending machines hid their booty, the modern-day grab games
expose their prizes temptingly. Grabbing devices have a cavernous, mirror-backed and
dazzlingly illuminated glass vitrine with a base of packing substance (polystyrene nug-
gets) and toys scattered, awaiting a lucky trier. Variations exist, but the basic system
involves hastily positioning an open set of mechanical jaws using a joystick or button,
watching the grabber descend, retract and hopefully grasp a prize rather than clasp at
nothing or scattering nuggets. It then ascends and makes its way to the exit chute where
it opens to dispense the prize. The customer is never certain that the prize is secure as the
jaws seem to stutter and judder, often relinquishing its prey, making the winning of an
object a tense occasion. A different version of this game, one that is more corybantic but
less controllable, takes the form of a large rotating disc of swag and a steel stylus that is
activated to move from the circumference to the centre where a void is positioned allow-
ing prizes to descend into the dispenser. This game looks simple to profit from, and the
stylus briefly seems to gather numerous objects in its momentum sweep, but these are
then dislocated from its clutches as it nears the centre. These games are designed to
attract a crowd of onlookers, giving a brief moment of excitement and optimism but
ultimately proving fruitless. The mode of display of prizes matches arcade culture, where
highly mirrored and brightly lit mechanical devices allow coins to be fed through chutes
and launching platforms in an attempt to dislodge coins from a dense bed of loot.
Trowell 319

Figure 2.  Balloon seller, Hull fair 2016. © Photograph: Ian Trowell.

Swag vendors are strategically bedecked in items that occupy various horizontal
strata, with helium-inflated branded-balloons uppermost in huge clusters, stick toys and
light sticks protruding at body level, and whistles, oversized dummies and felt animals
limply hanging from waist belts. As Figure 2 illustrates, these resemble totemic or talis-
manic tribesmen, their bodies are totally submitted to swag by bearing its density and
weight, and maximizing its exposure.
Round and side stalls offer games where larger prizes can be won, although here the
customer needs to be careful. Toys, figures and plush animals proliferate at all sizes,
exhibiting what Orvell (1989: 43) calls polyisomorphism. Figure 3 shows a range of
sizes of plush big cat prizes on display, and there are always even smaller examples
stashed in boxes and hidden from immediate display. These smaller prizes, known as the
‘bottom shelf’, are most commonly won, giving rise to the phrase ‘anything off the bot-
tom shelf’ and its connotations of disappointment. The scale of size maps to a scale of
desire, with huge examples most sought after, and these are most prominently displayed
in innovative stacks and arrangements hung from radial beams, pinned to uprights, and
piled into a mountain in the centre (Figures 4a, b, c, d). Trowell (2016) suggests a coun-
ter-reading to formative British pop art with an unacknowledged debt to the fairground,
320 Journal of Material Culture 24(3)

Figure 3.  Plush animal prizes, Knutsford fair 2015. © Photograph: Ian Trowell.

Figures 4a, b, c, d.  Stacked toys, Hull fair 2016. © Photograph: Ian Trowell.

and this continues into neo art through its utilization of fierce duplication and symmetry
of lurid objects as championed by Jeff Koons in his Banality series (1988) and perfor-
mance artist Paul McCarthy through his use of discount illusions and shoddy remnants
of popular culture. Whilst these artists of the canon play with the seemingly kitsch ready-
made, creating a cultural enclave for an art-savvy audience to experience the common
object, the real vernacular flourishes on the fairground where common objects are the
building blocks of a craft of display. Showpeople take great pride in their arrangements
of swag, assembling them as careful structures and often posing for photographs with the
suspended toys proudly framing them as a mise-en-scène (see Trowell, 2017).
These stalls have evolved as a hybrid of skill and chance games with modern-day
forms that include rifles, darts, pick (lottery), bingo, roll-ups and tubes, and a multitude
of throwing and projectile games involving rings, balls, bean-bag toys launched using a
Trowell 321

mallet and catapult. Each game type then develops syntagmatically, slightly changing
conditions such as darts thrown at standard dart boards, specialist dart boards and play-
ing cards, with rules for winning based upon a myriad of combinations of high, low,
matching and non-duplication, and small-print rules stipulating how fallen darts count as
scoring so-and-so (to make winning by achieving the desired figure very difficult). A
litany of fanciful mythology has accrued around the fairground game; air rifles with
crooked sights, blunted darts unable to spear stiff playing cards, too-small-hoops, glued
down shooting targets, diaphanous but tensile ping-pong balls skittering across cellular
arrangement of goldfish bowls. Competing and winning becomes a monumental experi-
ence, drawing in spectators, and forming a memorable occasion. This can be a bonding
experience for families such as recalled by Anne Watson, quoted in Toulmin (2003: 34):

I remember the first bingo stalls. I won and my prize was 20 Senior Service cigarettes and a pair
of pink hand towels. Two different men came to ask my father to sell them the cigarettes as
good brands were hard to come by, but I wanted my father to have them. The towels my mother
saved for my bottom drawer and gave them to me when I got married.

A respondent at Loughborough (female, 70s) fondly recalled her father as a sure-fire way
to win prizes:

Dad always did the darts for a coconut – he was a brilliant player.

The coconut remains a fairground favourite although this is not an item of swag that
persists beyond its almost immediate eating. It did, however, have a persisting cachet
due to its exotic nature and originally unique association with the fairground, as recalled
by Clare:

As a young girl we won a coconut at the fairground. I remember it well; we were transfixed as
my mother tried to attack it for whatever was inside. We sat watching as the milk was drained
out. We drank that. Then we ate some of the fleshy inside. We had never seen or tasted anything
like it, and you could only win them at the fairground.

Other edible prizes are offered as alternatives to material goods, although these also take
on a surreal fairground character. Cork shooter stalls or throwing games are stacked with
cheap sweets and drinks, urging the punter to dislodge them; their bright packaging made
more striking by their assemblage into temptingly precarious structures resembling the
1950s British shop-fronts photographed by John Bulmer and Nigel Henderson (see
Harrison, 1998).
Finally, as shown in Figure 5, there is a ritual of carrying home big prizes, celebrating
being seen as a winner. As the fairground prize evolved towards the end of the last cen-
tury, sizing of toys took on steroid proportions, and the sight of children or their parents
grappling with huge snakes and tigers became a fairground spectacle in itself. Here the
fairground prize momentarily takes on a new role between the bulk ‘stuff’ of the showp-
erson and singularized object of the punter, acting as both an oversized trophy to indicate
a successful achievement and an advertisement for the fairground prize.
322 Journal of Material Culture 24(3)

Figure 5.  Carrying large tiger toy, Goose fair 2015. © Photograph: Ian Trowell.

Backstage
The flow of prizes extends prior to their display on stalls, although their production and
possible further chains of trading – an extension of the ‘cultural biography’ (Kopytoff,
1986) – is not something that is either visible to, or considered by, punters. Dallas (1971:
168) sets this out in his consideration of the front and backstage of the fairground, stating
that:

The need for an instant and plentiful supply of swag has spawned a race of swagmen. These are
the wholesale dealers, who at a moment’s notice are ready to produce a gross of anything, from
vinyl snakes to crucifixes … It is difficult for him to predict when he will need it and where, as
he might have a run of bad luck, meeting champion sharp-shooters or darts-throwers in one
town.

Swagmen will arrive at a fairground well before it is open to the public to allow show-
people to stock up on prizes and see new lines, indicating the increasingly influential role
they have in determining the fairground prize. Prizes are purchased in bulk, squashed
into polythene bags such that, if glimpsed by the public, their appeal and worth may be
challenged. As Figure 6 shows, they are grouped on the pavement and hastily transferred
Trowell 323

Figure 6.  Bagged toys prior to opening, Kings Lynn Mart fair 2016. © Photograph: Ian Trowell.

from bagged bulk to desirable prize in the hours prior to the fair opening. At larger fairs
such as Newcastle (June), Hull (October) or Nottingham (October), the swagmen will
spend the duration of the fair in situ behind the scenes alongside the lorries and living
wagons associated with the fairground. Swagmen set up selling points with other back-
stage service providers such as lighting suppliers, signage equipment and electrical
goods in an impromptu area known as ‘swag alley’. As can be seen in Figure 7, this is
both out of sight for the public (behind the enclosed perimeter of the fairground), and
also out of bounds to the public (behind a makeshift fence in cases where the public
wander beyond the perimeter of the fairground). Increasingly there is a layer of produc-
tion beyond the swagmen, as goods (or parts for goods), flow across the globe to exploit
cheapest niches of production and operation. As the swagman at Newcastle explained
when I enquired about the multitude of stuffed toys and their origins: ‘Skins come from
China, we stuff them here, they are sold to fairs and markets.’ Distinctions and affordances
of objects in this chain of selling are barely discernible; there is a trust from manufac-
turer, to wholesaler, to showperson that the product will come alive on the fairground,
become part of the fabric and entice the punter. The risk of something proving unpopular
dissipates throughout the chain.
Swagmen and wholesalers also offer goods through the pages of World’s Fair news-
paper. The publication is principally distributed over the fairgrounds, with copies also
available in high street newsagents. The inclusion within the newspaper of advertise-
ments for services such as swag provision might well break the magic of the fair and its
prize, as the newspaper hides in plain sight on the newsagent’s shelf, although it is
unlikely that the public would ever venture backstage to read the newspaper, effectively
making the content and knowledge a sectioned-off domain matching the physical swag-
man at the fairground.
Sample advertisements from this newspaper provide an insight into the changing
nature of fairground swag in the post-war years, as it moved from the household goods
324 Journal of Material Culture 24(3)

Figure 7.  ‘Swag Alley’, Newcastle Hoppings fair 2015. © Photograph: Ian Trowell.

depicted in Figure 1 towards strange novelties and cheap goods branded to fleeting cul-
tural icons and fashions. An early advertisement from 1955 sets the scene offering:

Charlie the Spiv – rubber novelty – squeeze him and watch his eyes and tongue pop out, rolls
of gun-caps, books, pencils, giant giraffe novelty, plastic trumpets, Japanese coffee sets, alarm
clocks, luncheon cruet sets, linen, American type comics.

Charlie the Spiv is a typical cheap and throwaway fairground gimmick that can cause a
minor sensation, as such odd novelties and crazes do from time to time. This is followed
by more mundane things such as gun-cap rolls and pencils, things sufficient to fulfil the
role of bottom-shelf prizes to keep trade ticking over. A giant giraffe novelty may well be
a more expensive prize, with the size of the item affording a higher status of winning (or,
ideally, the need to have repeat attempts and collect win tickets). The advertisement then
lists four household items in ‘Japanese coffee sets, alarm clocks, luncheon cruet sets and
linen’, indicating the continuing role of the fairground prize in furnishing the house,
before listing the curious item of an ‘American type comic’. This gives a useful insight on
two levels: firstly, it shows the fascination with American culture that set the alarm bells
ringing for Richard Hoggart and his 1957 landmark work The Uses of Literacy; and sec-
ondly, it indicates how the fairground prize is often made to appear as something other
than the authentic item.
January 1965 contains an advertisement for goldfish, a stalwart fairground prize being
offered in quantities of 50, 100 or 1000. There is a continuation of the household prize
with ‘wholesale glass and china, electric blanket craze’ listed, indicating how the tactic
of attributing a craze to a novelty toy also applied to the more practical prizes. An adver-
tisement from Novelties Wholesale (Bristol) offers a plethora of cheap goods including
‘crazy aerosol sprays, rubber rattlesnakes, blinking specs, squirting specs, plastic dis-
guise sets, Okito magic coin box, real fur mice with corn’, whilst a rival swagman – Syd
Trowell 325

Cross of Hampstead – lists ‘fur monkeys, twin dolls, marshal and cavalry badges, large
bubble pipes, teddy boy rings’. These items capture a real slice of time and vivid sense
of the fairground prize directed at younger boys and girls, and aspirational teenagers. The
‘teddy boy ring’ is interesting as a kind of subcultural wilderness object, with Knee
(2015: 87) suggesting that the original movement had died out by 1959, and the first
revival was not until 1968 with Bill Haley returning to tour the UK. It is either a case of
the subculture stubbornly persisting in the geographical provinces to which styles are
trickled down, or more likely a typical example of a cheap, pseudo-subversive fairground
object that a teenager-to-be would relish as part of their time at the fairground.
By 1975 there is evidence of popular music and television influences, with an adver-
tisement for ‘pop and tv stickers, screen-printed tee-shirts, wobbly wombles, toy compo-
nents eyes and noses, jolly roger funny face balloons’. The ‘wobbly womble’ is,
presumably, a fairground novelty that hybridizes the popularity of the Wombles (origi-
nally a book character from 1968, they were made into a British television series in 1973,
and had a string of record hits produced by Mike Batt) and the popular wobbling weeble
(an egg-shaped toy based upon a 1971 children’s television character), typifying surreal-
ist exploration and improvisation transplanted onto the fairground. Equally important is
the inclusion of toy components, indicating the tradition for showpeople to construct
their own prizes in the form of ‘gonk’ figures, vaguely anthropomorphized shapes made
from fur fabric and plastic eyes.
In 1985 the culturally branded concept was starting to dominate, although the fairground
still presented a unique take on this through the prize. An advertisement for ‘balloons –
Roland Rat, A-Team, Super Ted, Masters of the Universe, posters – Wham, Boy George, A
Team, Michael Jackson dollar bills’ is a useful cultural barometer of the year, but the inclu-
sion of the branded dollar bill (alongside the more ubiquitous balloon and poster) shows
how the fairground offered something different and apparently banal. These dollar bills were
super-sized, akin to a ceremonial cheque handed over at a televised charity function, and
featured figures such as pop-stars and cartoon characters from the Muppets series.

Resilient meaningfulness
The examples above taken between 1955–1985 track a flow of time, of how a functional
object changes and mirrors concurrent popular culture; however, these objects also gain
traction when attained by punters and acquire a resilient meaningfulness to enter into a
different flow of time. This resilience of a seemingly cheap item of swag emerges from
a combination of the novelty status of the object and the mode of its acquisition on the
fairground. Miller (1998: 131) argues for inalienability as outflanking the economic
deterministic readings of Marxist consumption theories, occupying contiguous ground to
the wider notions of objects embodying a contested agency (Appadurai, 1986; Latour,
1993). This turn is further supported by Potts (2018) and his study of the souvenir, situat-
ing it as a ‘museum of the personal’ (p. 41) and a way of recording ‘my own way of
looking at, being in, and making sense of the world’ (p. 44).
Although both Harcup (2000) and Stallybrass and White (1986) urge caution in adopt-
ing a deterministic Bakhtinian reading of the fairground, there is something of a double
articulation that gives the fairground a liminal edge, both an impetus and resistance to
326 Journal of Material Culture 24(3)

making sense in Potts’ schema of the souvenir. The fairground is often encountered during
our teenage years, and thus the transitional nature of the self, combined with the polysen-
sory fantasy space of the fairground – a world of nascent subcultures and furtive excursions
into new sociability – imbibes the fairground experience with a magical essence.
Meaningfulness is initiated with memorabilia intimately associated with a unique event
(attaining the prize) and wider unique experience (the visit to the fairground). In addition
to this, as the latter examples in the previous section support, there are indications above of
the fairground prize being a novelty that is seemingly only available on the fairground,
needing to be won through the fairground stalls. The testimonies below support this, relat-
ing how modes of acquisition are vividly remembered, and prizes that have dropped out of
keeping are fondly recalled, alongside other seemingly trivial or shoddy items (an LP that
is admitted as being not very good, a chalk cat and glass goldfish ornament):

Round ball on a piece of elastic, if you pulled them apart they were full of saw dust,
and Gonks. (John)
Plastic combs with pictures of stars on them i.e. Elvis. (Adam)
I remember winning a sort of pot dog ornament. It was made of a sort of chalky pot-
tery and quite disappointing, and not at all like the fancy china stuff that was piled up
as prizes on the bingo stalls. (Mark)
Clackers, two heavy plastic balls on string joined at the top with a ring, you had to try
and get the balls the smash together at the top of the swing and again at the bottom of
the swing, breaking your knuckles in the process, lasted about a year before they got
banned due to them disintegrating. I won a pair of bright orange clackers on a darts
joint in about ’71–72. (Darren)
Records, still got one LP by Rosetta Stone, all Egyptian graphics on the cover, still not
that good I know, it’s over thirty years old. (Peter)
Brother Dave got given a large chalk cat once as part of his pay package for pulling
down a shooter, noticed when he got back one of its ears had been shot off. (Colin)
I won several chalk figures on Proctors rifles at Stamford fair. I also remember the
plastic bows, complete with arrows that had suckers on the ends. (Keith)
Late 1970s, plastic heads on a spring and sucker that you pressed down and they
popped up, Indian face balloons with a feather on top, and the plastic snakes that you
wiggled side to side. (Frank)
I still have two black chalk cats and two or three glass fish ornaments which I won on
Basil and Elsie Jones beat the clock game at Barnstaple fair in the late 60s and early
70s. (Martin)

Dant (1999: 130–152) provides a way of conceptualizing the object bifurcating into par-
allel flows of time, drawing on Baudrillard’s System of Objects (2005[1968]) in which
personal possession instigates singularization and a diachronic tension between use and
collecting, and Benjamin’s study of cultural commodities moving to the height of display
and instilling dialectics at a standstill. There are further complexities with the fairground
Trowell 327

prize, between the general concept of the type of object that evolves through fashions,
models and versions, and an object singularized twice; as a thing on a stall and then as a
treasured possession. Fairground swag sits in the overlap of two diachronic flows that
can be understood as a symbiosis of the ontogenetic and phylogenetic. An item of swag
has an ontogenetic lifecycle, moving from a ‘birth’ split between a skin constructed in
China and stuffed in a UK warehouse, to a bulk bagged environment, to display on a
stall, to ownership (and singularization) accrued through its winning. There is a contin-
gent aspect, and an object may dwell longer than required at any point in the chain. In
parallel with this, the shape and theme of the swag objects evolves through time in a
phylogenetic model, increasingly drawing from other cultural phylogenetic themes that
have strong iconographic components. The relationship between these flows becomes
turbulent in the current era of accelerated culture, which is now investigated.

Accelerated culture
The uniqueness of the fairground swag object is integral to its character and function, and
this is emphasized by some longer testimony gathered below. Firstly, a showman reflects
on generations of the family operating side stalls in the Eastern counties. His memories
connect with the 1975 advertisement for toy components, as something truly unique was
manufactured by showpeople, as opposed to something manufactured elsewhere but
uniquely available on the fairground:

Things were made for the fairground, chalk figures, black cats used as targets to shoot the ears
off. Kitchenware and cut-glass decanters and tea sets. My father carried 20 chests between fairs
… you can see how it’s easier with a bag of soft toys.

Crazy cans with exploded foam that has been hardened, bendy bottles, my father made his own
with a blow torch in the back of the van, he trawled the pubs getting empties. Giant dollar bills
with comedy figures. Gonks and spider soft toys, these were all home-made, my mother used
to sit gluing and sewing them.

This corresponds with a detailed memory by fairground punter Luke who recalls these
types of prizes:

I remember in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s seeing lots of framed picture mirrors of
pop stars of the time and fluffy owls type toys that had a card tube middle wrapped in fluffy
fabric with a card face on the front. I had one of these as a prize along with some empty fizzy
drinks can of coke that had hard yellow foam set on top and over flowing down one side, it
looked realistic too, I think I won it on a darts stall back in the early 1980s and you could choose
any style drink can you wanted, early recycling and an ingenious showman. Think I sold the old
card tube owl and the foam can at car boot sale, wish I had it on the shelf now at home.

Another showperson testimony supports this proto-recycling ingenuity, creating some-

thing unique out of dwindling opportunities and shrinking circumstances:

Immediately after the war, swag of any sort was hard to come by. My parents had swag games,
and I can remember my Dad coming home one day with several sacks of army gaiters, they
328 Journal of Material Culture 24(3)

Figure 8.  Branded goods composites, Ilkeston fair 2010. © Photograph: Ian Trowell.

were made of heavy canvas, and laced up round your ankles, we also had lots of ex-army mess
tins and bootlaces. My mother had a pull-a-string stall, a bundle of strings out the front, went
up over a pole and down the back of the stall, these were tied to a prize, which was hidden from
view, you paid sixpence, and pulled a string of your choice and won whatever came up on your
string. Needless to say, whatever swag you had a lot of was tied to most of the strings! I
remember as a child the first time I heard my mother swear, when she shouted to my Dad ‘Tim,
you’ve got to get more swag, they are sick of these bloody gaiters!’

It is evident here that the conceived and constructed fairground prize holds a distinctive-
ness to the showperson above and beyond an object that resides in a bulk of purchased
swag, creating a bond of shared embeddedness with the victorious and thrilled punter.
However, the unique fairground prize or the home-made swag object has gradually dis-
appeared over the past two decades. Two new realms of prizes have taken over. Firstly,
there is the small branded goods item for the increasingly digital and electronic world we
inhabit. These prizes are driven by the strength of their brand in terms of a name and
logo, and such branding has started to transfer itself into the fairground art that advertises
the stall. Whilst this might be considered as a retrospective step back to the prizes of
everyday, quasi-luxury goods such as tea-sets and wireless radios, there is a preoccupa-
tion here with the power of the brand and sign. The objects are not just offered as prizes,
but incorporate themselves in the actual game as hoopla targets that brazenly expose
their semiotic status and prowess. As Figure 8 shows, with hoopla targets made from
lashed together i-pods, fivers and fizzy drinks bottles, these resemble critical practice
post-conceptualist art constructions akin to Josephine Meckseper’s work. The fleeting
uniqueness of the composite object is not cherished but hastily deconstructed; the drink
quickly imbibed, the fiver spent for a spin on the Waltzer, and the i-pod put to use. The
notion of the combinatorial-surreal, as I propose with the wobbly womble, is relegated to
the once-been, enforcing the suggestion by Clemens and Pettman (2004: 182) that such
surrealist encounters are now underwhelming for the ‘post-spam generation’.
Trowell 329

Figure 9.  Minions game, 2016. © Photograph: Ian Trowell.

The second popular prize is the franchised plush toy, seen most alarmingly with the
rapidity of Minions totally monopolizing the fairground from 2015 onwards following the
successful franchise of the film Minions (dir. Pierre Coffin and Kyle Balda, 2015). Figure 9
shows how stalls became homogeneously themed to this prize, here showing Minions as
both theme (replacing the hook-a-duck) and prize. The post-1950s fairground, in terms of its
visual decoration and prize theming, embraced the immediacy of cultural plundering (bor-
rowing iconography from popular culture) and the anthropomorphized blobs of Minions
creates an ideal prize, easy to manufacture and instantly recognizable. However, unlike the
wobbly-womble, such toys are no longer unique to the fairground and can be purchased
across toy shops and cheap gift shops in the high street or peppered across seaside resorts.
The swagman must have a finger on the pulse of incoming cartoons and films, occasionally
trying something out-of-the-blue and unconnected such as the ‘rasta-banana’ figures. A
series of chronological short quotes from interviews conducted with swagmen give some
insight, in answer to the question ‘what is popular?’:

Branded franchises, one-offs (rasta-banana and noggin birds) and ‘real life’ animals – popular
from around 2003. (swagman, Newcastle, June 2015)

Nothing will ever compare to Minions – no one sure what will be next – Angry Birds, Paws
Patrol, Secret Life of Pets, Ghostbusters – you need an intimate knowledge of films to come.
(swagman, Kings Lynn, February 2016)

Shopkins, Star Wars, Angry Birds, some Minion variations, but out of the blue, emoji – the turd
is the best seller. (swagman, Newcastle, June 2016)

As the last quote states, the emoji figure as a plush toy prize took off in 2016 to chal-
lenge the Minions monopoly. These figures were part of the syntax of modern youth,
330 Journal of Material Culture 24(3)

Figure 10a.  Branded stall as Minions, Whitby regatta 2015. © Photograph: Ian Trowell.

Figure 10b.  Branded stall as emojis, Whitby Regatta 2016.

replacements for speech segments that express feelings and opinions. As a final (visu-
ally prompted) thought, I include Figures 10a and b, exterior branding for the same stall
in the years 2015 and 2016 to synchronize with the prizes. This indicates two important
constructs: firstly, that the brand of the prize overpowers and hijacks the actual nature
of the fairground game such that decoration totally submits to this brand and it loses
parlance as (say) the hoopla stall and becomes the Minions stall, and secondly, the fleet-
ing nature of the brand means that the stall must be effectively re-themed each year. The
fairground responds to popular cultural pressures, with rides and stalls being re-themed
Trowell 331

every decade or so, indicated by Walker (2015: 325) with his study of the Waltzer. This
re-theming is traditionally completed using a fairground artist, applying brushwork or
airbrush work to build a new ‘skin’ on the ride; however, the new frequency of change
of cultural cartoon icons necessitates a different strategy, and here digitally-printed
vinyl skirting is produced and clipped onto the front of the stall.

Conclusion
This article examines the historical trajectory of the fairground prize, or swag, situating
it within the discipline of material culture. Studying, or rescuing, such objects from
within a critical wilderness is not a new venture, as the previously referenced works by
Miller (1998, 2008) and Turkle (2007), along with Candlin and Guins (2009), amply
demonstrate. Furthermore, in the contemporary era, the fairground prize forges a rela-
tionship with visual and material output of popular culture, and I offer here an extrica-
tion of this material as against a more default critical position as expressed by Stallabrass
(1996: 231) who castigates such an environment as ‘hypertrophic commerce’. My argu-
ment is that this somewhat debased and déclassé family of objects has a wealth of bio-
graphical detail, and an ability to resiliently maintain meaningfulness and identity,
setting it apart from King’s (2008) sombre Collections of Nothing comprising ‘objets
refusés’ (p. 44). This resilient meaningfulness stems from its origin on the fairground:
both the ritualized and festival-centred nature of its acquisition, and the slippery and
grey nature of its coming-to-be. The early fairground swag object was both unique and
invested with a meaning attached to its origin site, the uniqueness stemming from either
a supply line that dealt obscure goods solely to the fairground, or the ingenuity and
skills of showpeople creating obscure objects that emerge from the application of a
blowtorch to a glass receptacle of a popular branded drink.
Employing Dant’s (1999) temporal schema of the material culture object, I propose
phylogenetic and ontogenetic flows impacting upon each other. Under the pressure of a
phylogenetic shift in the increasingly restless and relentless world of cultural branding, a
manufactured fairground prize object will go into decline if it has not progressed along its
own ontogenetic path towards ownership and is still sitting in a warehouse or on a showp-
erson’s stall, migrating towards a ‘bottom shelf’ category. Testimony supports that an item
of swag having progressed into unique ownership has been proofed against the pressure of
redundancy of the flow of the general fairground swag object, although it is a question of
how much this is associated with the ritual of winning or the unique fairground nature of
the prize. The fairground prize is undergoing a radical change, a process underway over the
past two decades and now beholden to the increasingly rapid fluctuations of popular cul-
ture. The fairground prize has become unmoored from its unique environment of concep-
tion and production, and is now subject to the rapid cycles of obsolescence associated with
culturally branded goods. This proffers uncertainty, with the erosion of the special status of
the fairground prize as either unique or resiliently treasured.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors and there is no conflict of interest.
332 Journal of Material Culture 24(3)

ORCID iD
Ian Trowell https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6039-7765

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Author biography
Ian Trowell is a PhD candidate researching the heritage and design of the travelling fairground.
Recent publications include work for the journal Photographies and research into the connections
between pop art and the fairground for the journal Visual Culture in Britain. In addition, he has
produced articles on the punk and post-punk music scenes.