While the first mention of skipping on Shrove Tuesday is from 1903, Scarborough has long treated Shrove Tuesday as a special holiday. In the 19th century, and possibly earlier, shopkeepers closed their businesses at noon to give their workers the half day off. This holiday became particularly important to children.
In the Victorian period Scarborians referred to Shrove Tuesday as ‘ball day’, as children played various ball games on the beach, amid other festivities. Newspapers record that ‘large numbers of children amused themselves in various games on the sands’. These games involved football – as is traditional on Shrove Tuesday in a number of towns – and ‘battledore and shuttlecock’, a forerunner of badminton. Sweet sellers set up their stalls and traders erected game stalls in anticipation.
The origins of the tradition of skipping are unclear, but in the early 20th century it became the main attraction in Scarborough, and the day became known as ‘Skipping Day’. The availability of surplus rope from the fishing industry may have helped. Schoolchildren today are often allowed the half-day off school to attend.
In addition to skipping, the old custom of ringing the pancake bell continues in Scarborough. For centuries bells were rung to call people to confession in church before the beginning of Lent, but this came to be seen as a call to housewives to begin making pancakes, in order to use up leftover eggs and butter before fasting for Lent.
The Mayor still rings the bell at the corner of North Street and Newborough at noon to mark the beginning of festivities, which include the annual pancake race. The winner is awarded with the ‘Golden Frying Pan’. Before 1861, a bell on St Thomas’s Hospital on North Street was rung on Shrove Tuesday, before it was moved to the Rotunda Museum, and in 1996 the ceremony returned to North Street.
