Seaside piers and entertainment – they go together like fish and chips. Throughout the Victorian period and well into the 20th century, wherever there was a seaside pier you would find some form of entertainment.
Brass bands, concert parties, jugglers and divers, visiting paddle steamers and ballroom dancing, the seaside or pleasure piers had them all. There were shops and coffee stalls and, in the case of one Welsh pier, there was even an artist at work.
Yet this was no ordinary artist, someone who sketched the coast or drew portraits of the happy visitors. This was a silhouette artist, one of the most famous of the 20th century.
The man in question was Harry Lawrence Oakley and from 1922 until the last years of the 1950s, for several months each year, he operated out of a studio on Llandudno Pier.
Oakley's business lay in creating surprisingly accurate and realistic silhouettes for the tourists and, when time allowed, undertaking design work for companies such as the London and North Eastern Railway Company.
HL Oakley, always known as Lawrence, was not Welsh but his family had connections with Wales, several of them living around the Welshpool and Shropshire area.
He was born on 28 December 1882 and trained as an artist – he was also a more than competent painter and sketcher – at Leeds School of Art and at the Royal College of Art in London.
Oakley had begun to produce silhouettes, figures and designs cut from pieces of black paper at an early age. He was encouraged by his mother and soon became amazingly adept at creating startling images using just a small pair of scissors. He did not draw the design first, simply cut away, moving the paper rather than the scissors to achieve the desired affect.
Lawrence Oakley first began conducting a summer season in the years before the Great War, operating out of places like Harrogate and Scarborough. It was so successful an enterprise that after the war – when he served in the Green Howards – he decided to re-start his business.
His wartime artworks had appeared in magazines such as The Bystander, and two famous government recruitment posters had further enhanced his reputation.
By 1922 Oakley had visited and fallen in love with the north Wales resort of Llandudno. The town had opened its first pleasure pier in 1858 but this had been seriously damaged in the famous Royal Charter Gale of 1859. A new pier, this time 2,295 feet in length, was opened on 1 August 1877. It was the longest pier in Wales, and the fifth longest in the whole of the UK.
When Oakley came to open his studio on the pier in 1922, Llandudno had taken to styling itself "The North Wales Riviera" and the sudden arrival of an eminent artist who could offer tourists something different to take away as a memento of their holiday was a blessing in disguise for the local tourist industry.
To sit for a portrait was both expensive and long-winded – and you could never be sure quite how it would turn out. Oakley could, by the dexterous use of his scissors and a simple piece of black paper, produce a more than passable image in just a few minutes. It was a relatively cheap process and gave visitors something unique to remember their time in Llandudno.
Virtually every year - until war intervened again in 1939 - Lawrence Oakley opened his studio on the pier and thousands of delighted customers went away, happy and contented with a little piece of personal artwork. After the end of the war, he returned to the same old pattern – summer at Llandudno, winter in London or some other large city.
Oakley loved the Llandudno area. He became a member of the local golf club and was often seen striding across the fairways of the Llandudno course. He continued to operate off the pier until 1958. Just a little while after that he suffered a severe stroke and died on 17 January 1960.
Such was Oakley's love of the Llandudno area that his ashes were scattered in the churchyard of St Tudn's Church, high up on the Great Orme, overlooking the town and pier. A memorial in the churchyard commemorates him as an "Artist and Silhouettist".
In a long and prolific career, Lawrence Oakley undoubtedly produced over 100,000 silhouettes – it is difficult to make an exact count as he sold so many of them to paying customers.
The more famous examples of his work, like the wartime portrait he made of the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VIII), have been preserved and there are examples still held by institutions like the Imperial War Museum.
However, for the countless thousands who visited his kiosk studio on Llandudno Pier and sat – or stood – for their individualised portrait, Lawrence Oakley will always be remembered as the people's artist, a silhouette designer par excellence. And so much of his work was done on a Welsh pier.
