The one-legged diver of New Brighton
PeggyGadsby
Frank Gadsby lost a leg when he was four. He spent the rest of his life climbing ladders and diving off them, from piers, burning towers and aeroplanes, for whatever the crowd would throw. New Brighton never forgot him.
Scroll to dive
Twelve pennies went to the bottom along the way, and twelve pennies make a shilling. Collect them as you go, from the gold buttons on the cards.
The boy from Basford
Frank Calladine Gadsby was born in Basford, Nottingham, the second of four children. When he was four, an accident dislocated his hip and his leg had to be amputated.
For most children that would have been the end of anything physical. Frank learned to swim at about twelve, taught by Professor Touhy, who also taught King George V.
The water did not care how many legs he had.
Faster than the champion
By his twenties Frank was a fishmonger and a publican, and he played water polo for Nottingham Swimming Club. He raced too. In 1904, the papers later reported, he beat the unbeaten world champion J. A. Jarvis over 440 yards in the King's Cup, with the King and Queen watching.
Afterwards the Queen sent a lady-in-waiting to ask how he had lost his leg. He called it a kindly thought.
From the archive
No money in swimming
There was no money in swimming, so I started sensationalism.Peggy Gadsby, 1953
Around 1911 he started diving for a living. Piers, resorts, exhibition grounds. Anywhere with height, water and a crowd that might pay.
Skegness became a second home. He dived from its pier several thousand times, some of them from a tower 75 feet high.
From the archive · 1928
Don't forget the diver
New Brighton was made for divers like Peggy. Steamers brought Liverpool across the river by the boatload, and at the end of the pier a landing stage rose and fell with the tide. Every passenger walked up the gangway past the diver.
The climb was part of the show. A narrow iron ladder, one leg, two arms, rung by rung, with the whole landing stage watching. Then the dive. Then the net came round.
Don't forget the diver, sir, don't forget the diver. Every penny makes the water warmer!The cry on the landing stage, as Tommy Handley remembered it
Every penny makes the water warmer
It never did. The Mersey is cold, fast and brown. In 1913 Peggy explained that his living depended on two things, the generosity of the crowd and the weather. A good day brought in five pounds. A bad one, ten shillings.
In the town's memory, and on the wall that remembers him today, the pennies fall through the water around him. Three are glinting on the bottom here. Every one you bring up warms the water a little.
Over the Mersey by aeroplane
In September 1919 Peggy went up in an aeroplane over the New Brighton and Waterloo shores, and big crowds turned out to watch. He had wanted to dive from it straight into the sea. The experts talked him into a parachute.
It was only his second time in an aeroplane. He jumped wearing a lifebelt, fell for about four seconds before the parachute opened, and came down in the river, where a boat picked him up.
Much easier than the usual way of diving.Peggy Gadsby, looking back in 1929
And then he added fire
Height was not enough. In October 1927 he dived 80 feet into a tank while on fire. In 1931 it was 75 feet into five feet of water, with fireworks going off behind him. In 1938 he went in with his cloak alight, into water that was burning too.
Fire divers wrapped themselves in sacking and cotton wool soaked in methylated spirits, were set alight at the top, and timed the fall so the water put the flames out.
He worked on around twenty films. On one, in 1926, the net he jumped into gave way above a 300-foot drop, and he held on.
The champion one-legged swimmer and diver of the world.The Leicester Mail, 1927
The last dive from the pier
In 1928 Wallasey Corporation bought the pier and rebuilt it. That January the Liverpool Echo reported that when it reopened at Easter, there would be no more diving. The crowds stopping to watch had been blocking the landing stage.
The diver the Echo named was not Peggy. It was Bernard Pykett, a former footballer who had lost a leg in the First World War and had worked the landing stage for ten years. He told the paper he did not know where he would turn for a living.
New Brighton had more than one one-legged diver, and the town remembers them as one. In 1941 Tommy Handley put the landing stage cry on national radio in ITMA, and the whole country said it back. When Pykett emigrated to Australia in 1952, a Perth paper introduced him as the man behind it.
From the pier to the pool
Four years later the diving came back, in concrete. Lord Leverhulme opened the New Brighton Bathing Pool in front of 12,000 people. It was an Art Deco aquatic stadium filled with sea water, 330 feet long, with a ten-metre diving stage built for international competition and lights under the water for bathing at night.
A million people came in the first season. On the busiest day, 34,560.
By then Peggy's own show, Dare Devil Peggy's Water Circus, was touring the country with Olympic divers on the bill. We have not found a record of him diving here. On this page he gets the dive anyway.
I can come down alright
Peggy retired in the autumn of 1950. Three years later his son Leslie, also a diver, was injured, and at 71 Peggy took his place in Bristol. A 74-foot platform. A tank five and a half feet deep. “In flames, through flames and into flames.”
The hardest part of the act is climbing up all those rungs with one leg. I can come down alright.Peggy Gadsby, Bristol, August 1953
He did it again that December in Carlisle. He died in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, on 7 February 1958, aged 76.
The wall behind him
The ferry stopped calling in 1971. The pier came down in 1978. A storm broke the baths in 1990. For a while the divers lived on in stories, and in the name of the New Brighton Hotel, which spent some years as Peggy Gadfly's.
In 2019 Brezaux painted Peggy on the side of the New Brighton Hotel, commissioned by Rockpoint Leisure. The mural leaves out the pier, the crowd and the ladder. It keeps the fall. One leg, and golden pennies drifting down through the water around him. It is part of our OpenAIR Gallery today.
Southport has him too, diving from a seven-metre cone by its pier. That statue shows the wrong leg missing.
Photographs of the mural: first one of the painted pennies close up, then the whole gable end of the New Brighton Hotel on Mason Street, where Peggy dives head first through blue water and light, with golden pennies falling around him and the artist's signature, Brez 2019, at the foot of the wall.
Don't forget the diver
Peggy's story only works in a town that understood spectacle and built for it. A pier. A ferry. A pool with a ten-metre stage. The wall is what is left, and it is a start.
See the mural. Stand under it. Then step inside.
If your family watched the divers on the landing stage, swam at the baths, or has a photograph of either, we would love to see it. Every penny still makes the water warmer. Everything given to New Brighton Creative Futures goes into art and artists.
Write to us at info@hellonewbrighton.com
What you brought up
Every penny you bring up lands here. Twelve make a shilling. The rest are still on the bottom, where the story left them.