Vintage Surf meet 2019 coming soon !

Vintage Surf meet 2019 coming soon !
Free to take part
We buy interesting old boards 60s/70s/early 80s in good condition. Email alasdairlindsay75@gmail.com . Also wanted - Surfing UK , British Surfer and Surf Insight magazines .
Above photo - copyright Rennie Ellis photographer archive

Saturday, 4 May 2013

Endless Summer

Coming up this Summer at the Royal Cornwall museum in Truro is 'Endless Summer 2', a major exhibtion of British surfing history with a special focus on Cornwall . More than 40 surfboards plus memorabilia and images from many decades of British surfing. Organised by Alex Williams and Rob Longworth , with help from the Museum of British surfing, Roger Mansfield and myself, plus other collectors. It runs from 15th june to April 2014 . If you came to Endless Summer at Plymouth museum last year and enjoyed it come again to Truro; around 80% of the boards etc will be different from those shown at the Plymouth show.
This is the original British poster for Bruce Brown's Endless summer, which hit cinemas across the UK in 1967/8 and caused a huge amount of interest in surfing, causing a boom in sales for surfboards and equipment. Tony Cope kept this poster from the late 60s in his collection. Its very different from the US version, and has nice graphic impact with the block colours and shapes , although Tony wasnt keen on it because the surfer is doing a very unrealistic floater !
Bruce Brown came over for the European premiere at the Odeon Cinema, Leicester square, London , and heres a photo of him arriving at Heathrow in 1967 , and being met by Doug Wilson of Bilbo along with a Rod Sumpter model longboard.

2 comments:

  1. Alan Blowers & Tony Beardsmore ( both had Bilbo`s )queued to see the film in central London . " We were surrounded by posers & wannabee surfers. One guy was saying ` I`m going to hit Newquay this summer with the li-lo ( airbed )`. Everybody was making out they were surfers, talking rubbish, and as there were so few real surfers around others couldn`t argue. This was the first time most of them had ever seen surfing, & they`d gone to see the film because the newspapers had said it`s a cool thing to do ! "

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  2. " A very unrealistic floater " you say ? We couldn`t do a floater at all with 35lb weight Malibu boards. Only started when the 12lb shortboards arrived, then suddenly you could run a board up the waveface, along the top of a breaking section, & slip sideways down it. That led to the invention of the very short fin and the side-slipper board, to explore the idea.

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