Strip Shows on South Street and Elephants in The Central

St Andrews Memories at the R&A Museum

I entered the Royal and Ancient Museum’s ‘St Andrews Memories’ event with a certain degree of trepidation. After all, this was the place where a friend of mine once got told off by the staff for taking a photo of a potential gift for her mum in its gift shop. Like many, I too have a somewhat guarded attitude toward the whole golf culture in this town.

However, as I was guided to a small room at the side — aglow with the sound of happy conversation — with photos and snacks strewn across the table, it quickly became clear that any fear I had was a misjudgment. The St Andrews Memories exhibition is a warmly inviting monthly fixture which brings residents, many of whom have known each other since their school days more than half a century ago, together to reminisce.

The setup is pretty simple: Headed by Hannah Fleming, the museum’s Learning and Access Curator, each month has a discussion theme — this time, farming — in addition to more general conversations on town history. Large pictures, in line with the theme, as well as scrapbooks of newspaper cuttings from different decades, are provided as talking points by the St Andrews Heritage Museum. Tunnocks Teacakes and tea and coffee were available for all, though there was a constant fear of spillage over valuable collection material.

The crowd was generally older, and many in attendance had lived in St Andrews their entire lives. They ranged from sergeants to former university careers advisers to children’s storytellers.  One thing they had in common was their enthusiasm to speak to me and my friend, the only students in attendance. It seemed as though every image we flicked past in the scrapbooks had a story behind it.

One particularly chatty attendee was Mike Dominiak, one of the lifelong residents whom we sat next to. He made us feel very welcome in an environment where we were afraid to be outsiders. After all, this was a group of friends who Fleming told us meet up almost every day, and have, of course, known one another for many years.

Dominiak was full of stories; particularly humorous to us were those about Prince William’s time in the town. He told us how his sister, once in a rush, was annoyed to be stuck behind someone in a Tesco aisle, only later to discover it was the future King. Another townsperson, unbeknownst to them, asked William where they could ‘buy knickers’. 

Dominiak also told us some memories of his childhood with palpable joy. I knew that the area below the aquarium had once been St Andrews’ fourth beach, but Dominiak illuminated this fact by telling us how, as a child, he would race there early in the morning, come back for lunch, and return as soon as he could. However, as the tide came in, so did the deckchairs en masse. He would even hide toffees from his parents by throwing them to the bottom of the sea, the logic of which escapes me, and then reward himself for swimming with a soggy sweet from the depths. 

Not all of the stories I heard were so sunny. Through the stories of attendees and news clippings, we learnt of a string of plane crashes near Leuchars, a mass sausage poisoning at Regs, and that the ladies’ toilet on The Pends used to be a mortuary. The building now housing Dune used to be a furniture shop — but also a funeral director’s with open coffins in the side room. St Andrews also used to be a frosty place, with residents of University Hall having to find their own coal for the fireplace. 

With a reduced student body, the University experience used to be very different. Back when only a few thousand students studied here, they often ‘bunked’ — stayed — with townsfolk, a great business and town-gown bonding opportunity which is now sadly lost. The relative paucity of the student body also meant that they were allocated numbered bikes so they would never get lost. 

Aside from the personal anecdotes we heard, the news clippings provided were charming. A Market Street business in 1953 aimed to break into the US market with its ‘Pram-Hammock’, “a multiple-purpose device, which protects a child in a pram against cats and birds”. There was a general sense of sweet mundanity to many of the articles. “Fight to save forest — against weevils” went one anti-climactic piece. In another article, an image shows a 1920s student “order[ing] a pack of coffee in the Aikman and Terras grocery shop.” 

One frank headline was reported in 1991. “An end-of-term celebration plunge for Primary Seven pupils from Lawhead.’ it starts happily before changing tack, “— a plunge that left most of them feeling ill and may have led to one girl contracting typhoid.”

Elsewhere, there was an enthusiastic report of a Madras exchange with a group of German students from Kiel, which resulted in multiple marriages, and I even found a sweet clipping of my beloved Madrigal Group performing many years ago at May Dip. 

“Has Mike mentioned the strip show?” one member of the group joked as we were about to leave. Of course, Dominiak had — there used to be one on South Street during the annual Lammas Fair, which was a source of scandal. Another attendee’s father, who used to be the stationmaster, was once tasked during the Fair with leading an elephant off the train and across St Andrews, where it made a valiant attempt to enter the Central. 

Anything my friend and I could offer to the group paled in comparison to the vibrant set of anecdotes so enthusiastically recounted to us. We were warmly welcomed, invited to return, and even given free entry to the Golf Museum afterwards. Although, we had little to add — after all, our experience is less of a ‘memory’ and more of a transient present reality — it was golden to have the opportunity to speak to people with decades’ worth of hugely entertaining stories. If more students came, the Memories exhibition would be a great facilitator of town-gown relations.

Get out of the library and learn some real-life history of this wonderful town we live in from those who really love it best.

Illustration by Isabelle Holloway