Page:History of the Fylde of Lancashire (IA historyoffyldeof00portiala).pdf/253

 of firm, unbroken sands. True, a carriage-drive and foot-way of some pretensions to beauty had been constructed along the north shore in 1845, but the storms we have described, and other heavy seas, had torn breaches in its wall, and made sad havoc amongst its light sandy material, completely ruining the fair appearance of the shoreward grass-plat, and threatening the road with that very destruction which has since overtaken it through the continued negligence of the residents or governing powers. There was no public hall, such as that once contemplated, where a feeling of fellowship might be engendered amongst the visitors. The regattas instituted for the interest and amusement it was hoped they would excite amongst the spectators were, as previously stated, conducted in a desultory manner for a few years, and then abandoned; whilst the land sports during the week of high festival were discontinued as the Whit-week excursion trains found other outlets more attractive than Fleetwood for their pleasure-seeking thousands; but it was not until the North Euston Hotel was opened for military purposes, that all hope of reviving the fading reputation of the town as a summer resort was finally relinquished. For some little time after the foregoing transfer, the bathing vans, as if to keep up the fiction of the season, re-appeared with uninterrupted regularity each year upon the beach, but even that last connecting link between the deserted town, as far as visitors were concerned, and its former popularity, was doomed shortly to be broken, for the ancient machines, never renewed, and seldom repaired, were at length unequal to the rough journey over the cobble stones, and crumbled to pieces on the way, expiring miserably in the cause of duty, from old age and unmerited neglect.

In the early part of 1859, a lifeboat, thirty feet in length, was stationed here by the National Lifeboat Institution, and in the month of September in the same year, a neat and substantial house was built for it on the beach opposite the North Euston Hotel. After doing good service along the coast, in rescuing several crews whose vessels had stranded amidst the breakers on the outlying sand-banks, this boat was superseded, in 1862, by one of larger dimensions. In January, 1863, the erection on the beach was swept away by the billows during a heavy gale, and in the course of a few months the present structure in Pharos Street,