Take a deep dive into the digital image bank at Brighton Museum with this end of the pier story of daredevil Edwardians

Looking at the burned and largely collapsed ruin of Brighton’s West Pier today it’s hard to believe that it was once a bustling hive of entertainment.

Designed by architect Eugenius Birch and opened in 1868, the pier reached its heyday in the early 20th century and was host to a variety of performances – from music, dance and theatre shows to swimming and diving displays.

Throughout the early 1900s, a troupe of professional divers performed Swedish diving, fancy and high diving and other aquatic acts such as synchronised swimming, performing their death-defying feats throughout the day and drawing crowds of Edwardian ladies and gents to the then-bustling pleasure pier.

An expert performer of high, fancy and ‘Swedish diving’ and ornamental swimming, and a decorated lifesaving champion to boot, Walter Tong was one of these daredevil stuntmen who launched themselves from the pier into the chilly sea below in the name of entertainment.

His act featured the ‘Moleberg’ – an eye-watering backwards somersault dive invented by the eccentric Swedish acrobat Anders Fredrik Mollberg.

Performing with Tong, Zoe Brigden was a Brighton-born swimming champ who turned professional in 1913 and was famous for her daring ‘wooden soldier’ dive, during which she plunged headfirst into the sea, with her arms firmly by her side. Happily she survived this perilous routine and retired from diving in 1925 to open a hairdressing salon.

One particularly daring stunt was known as ‘flying the foam’ during which the star of the show would launch themselves from the pier on a bicycle, much to the delight of the Edwardian crowd. It also resulted in some wonderfully surreal postcards.

The most famous performer of this unusual act was Professor Reddish, who was captured on film in 1906 by director James Williamson performing a selection of his other fancy dives.

The exciting footage not only reveals the feat of daring performed by Reddish, but also employs some very early special effects, showing the dives in reverse to appear as if Reddish is rising miraculously from the sea onto his diving board.

There was also Professor Powsey, whose Saturday evening act in the summer of 1905 included a so-called ‘Devil’s Dive’ which he performed by plunging into the channel from a height of 70 feet while enveloped in flames – a feat he achieved by wrapping himself in burlap sacks, dousing them with petrol and employing his son to set him alight.

Professor Powsey went on to entertain at Southport Pier for 18 years, and his daughter Gladys, trained by her father, became a performer on the West Pier as a swimmer and diver, as well as a dancer and contortionist; she is also said to have performed an uncanny impression of a seal.

Sadly, the West Pier entertainers’ daredevil antics were not always without incident, and in 1912 professional diver Professor Cyril, real name Albert Higgins Heppell, was fatally injured during one of his displays.

When preparing to perform one of his bicycle dives from the roof of the West Pier Pavilion, he slipped and fell heavily onto the deck below, badly fracturing his skull.

The entertainments along the pleasure pier weren’t limited to divers, however. Notable band leader Victor Vorzanger occasionally performed with his band at the West Pier’s theatre.

Believed to have one of, if not the first, mixed race bands on record and comprising British and expatriate African American jazz musicians, Vorzanger’s band was famous for using a pistol as part of its percussion.

There was also James Doughty and his performing dogs. Doughty ran away from school at the age of 13 to become a travelling performer, and at 65 joined the circus in Brighton. He entertained generations of children on the West Pier with his performing dogs, and before he died in 1913 at the ripe old age of 95, he was Britain’s oldest clown.

See more photographs and postcards of the West Pier performers and much more from the Museum collection on Brighton Museum’s online Digital Media Bank: https://dams-brightonmuseums.org.uk/