In my job as Regional Welfare Officer with The Donkey Sanctuary, I used to meet lots of interesting people who have had a wealth of wonderful donkey stories to tell.
One such person was Kevin Carvill who has donkeys on the beach at Bridlington. Kevin, now in his seventies, is the fourth generation of his family to have worked with the beach donkeys at Bridlington. He told me of the time when his grandfather had over a hundred of them working on the sands there at any one time and he was not the only operator. When you compare this with the dozen that work there now, you can see how times have changed.
He also related wonderful tales of how during the off season the beach operators would travel all over the country to meet up and race their donkeys against each other when large amounts of money would change hands in side bets.
But the story that intrigued me most was about the time his father took him to visit Blackpool at the end of the Second World War where he saw his first ever broken coloured donkey. In fact, it was the first time any member of the Carvill family had ever seen a coloured donkey. At that time Kevin’s grandfather was seriously ill and not expected to recover so his father thought it would be wonderful for him to see a coloured donkey before he died. So he tried to buy the donkey from the operator. Even though he offered up to £250 for it (a huge sum in 1946) the operator refused to sell his coloured donkey.
So the question is this. When did coloured donkeys first appear in Britain?
The Carvill family had been in donkeys in a big way for over a hundred years but they had never seen one. I have looked at all the old pictures and postcards that I have of beach donkeys but there is no coloured donkeys on them either. So, is there anyone out there who can come up with a date pre-1946 when donkeys were seen in this country?
Since writing the first article about coloured donkeys and when did they first appear in the UK, I have had a long conversation with John Malone who lives in Blackpool. John is now in his mid-80s and has worked with beach donkeys all his life. He told me that when he first started working on the beaches as a small boy in 1932 at Blackpool, he helped an operator called Dicke Bamber who had a group of coloured donkeys. Mr Bamber had obtained them from an operator/breeder who worked the beaches at Lytham St Annes called Elston. So we now have an earlier date to work with. The Elston family had owned coloured donkeys in the 1920s so can anyone come up with an earlier date than that?
John Malone has probably brought in more donkeys from Ireland than anyone else in the past 60 years. He used to travel all over Ireland buying them for beach operators in England, but he says that he never saw coloured donkeys in Ireland until the 1950s. He also told me that nobody in Ireland would believe him that there were such things as broken coloured donkeys until he took photographs for people to see!