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Fat Rascals at Bettys HARROGATE HISTORY
Greetings on a bright clouds day in Harrogate. The Brits have more ways of reporting it's raining than the Eskimos have saying it’s snowing. The Times covers the range of weather with 11 icons. I can't reproduce them here, but they are labeled: Sunny, Sunny intervals, Cloudy, Drizzle, Overcast, Rain, Sunny showers, Sleet, Lightning, Hail, and Snow. There is one icon selected per day. Because the weather is so changing on the island, probably they simply pick what they hope will be an average. Today, the average in Yorkshire is Sunny showers. That's safe.
Yesterday we decided to walk in parts of Harrogate we have not explored and continued to be amazed with what we discover. We started the day at the Pump Room Museum and relived the hey days of the Victorian Era when Harrogate was the place to come for "the waters." The century old sign in the museum said, "For fashionable society, the Harrogate Season came between the end of the London Season and Grouse-Shooting Season in the early autumn in Yorkshire and Scotland." It appears the well-to-do had parties galore in London and then came to Harrogate to slim down by drinking and bathing in the god awful water. There was a prescribed schedule for every day which began at 7:00 a.m. with, "Run and visit Pump Room for first tumbler of water." The morning was filled with walking about, resting, listening to the band, resting, morning paper and letters, resting, and running for several more tumblers of water. Lunch was at noon, and the afternoon was pretty much a repeat of the morning. Evenings were on your own, except for several prescribed tumblers of the water.
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Harrogate, first records about 1100, came into some fame in the 1600s when smelly mineral water wells were discovered. (Smelly Wells was the name of the woman who discovered the waters, but according to the scant records existing, she soon evaporated.) About 80 wells were operating at the peak of the spas in Harrogate. Spa is the name of an ancient mineral water watering place in Belgium (you will now remember that bit of trivia every time you read spa) and the name was picked up by the Harrogate Chamber of Commerce as a means of publicizing the town's main attraction. Harrogate grew in the 1700 and 1800's to a very popular resort area. People came for the water, but stayed for the booze, parties and, one can only assume, sex. It has had its ups and downs but two features kept it pure. One, in the early 1800s the King or one of his delegates set aside 200 acres in Harrogate for the people's use. The land exists as a large lawn today within the town limits of Harrogate and is known as the "Stray” or “Two Hundred Acres". Locals walk and sit on it and, students do their physical education there, and occasionally the wantabe young toughs from neighboring towns play football there. The Stray is such an overwhelming feature of this small town, that it continually reminds people, to the frustration of real estate developers I imagine, not to mess with a good thing.
Some one asked for a description of the merchandise. Imagine standing in front of Bettys, which is located on the corner of Parliament Street (the main drag) and Montpelier Park. The front facade is very busy Victorian featuring display windows on the sidewalks of both streets. The window display feature mostly breads and breakfast pastries and are accessible by the counter women who work in front of them on one side, and behind the inside display shelves (mostly dessert pastry) on the other. I stopped by this morning to take inventory.
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