For over four decades, one man built Portrush’s entire summer entertainment programme from scratch — and on one August night in 1946, drew a crowd bigger than the town has ever matched since.
“Tiny” Shutt
Captain William R. Shutt MC arrived in Portrush in 1923 to take up a newly created role: Sports and Entertainments Manager. Born in Staffordshire, educated at Sandhurst, and awarded the Military Cross with the Royal Warwickshire Regiment in the First World War, he was described by the Coleraine Chronicle on his arrival as “6ft 4in in height, 15st 7lb in weight” — earning him the nickname “Tiny.” Within a week of opening his new Recreation Grounds on Ramore Hill — bowling greens, tennis courts, an 18-hole putting green, a running track — takings had already outstripped his weekly salary many times over.
Over the next 42 years, Shutt built an entire summer season from nothing: tennis and bowling tournaments, athletics, swimming and diving displays at the Blue Pool, fancy dress carnivals, military tattoos, and visiting acts as varied as the Harlem Globetrotters, an Australian bowling team, international sheepdog trials, and — in July 1934 — an Irish-versus-German police boxing match, won by Germany. By 1939, a single week of tennis drew 787 entries; 12,000 people watched a 700-person keep-fit display; 5,145 putting tickets sold in one week alone.
The record that’s never been broken
The season’s biggest draw was the fireworks. Displays began with a single show in 1928, growing to five by 1933, with the Urban Council running ten events a year by the early 1930s — the 1932 season alone drew over 65,000 spectators and raised more than £1,800. War brought six “silent seasons,” the planned 1939 Autumn Pageant cancelled the moment Germany invaded Poland.
The tattoos resumed in July 1946, and on 7 August that year, a crowd of 18,326 packed onto Ramore Hill for the biggest display Portrush has ever seen — so tightly packed, in fact, that committee members patrolled the headland to stop anyone falling over the edge into West Bay. Five marching bands played, alongside an Irish Guards drill platoon and a comic “Toy Soldiers” act from Belfast, with firework set-pieces depicting warships and portraits of the King and Queen. Special excursion trains ran from Belfast, Derry and Portadown. It remains, by the Heritage Group’s own account, a record that has never been broken.
The end of an era
Shutt kept the programme running until his retirement in November 1965, aged 70. He’d also served as an ARP Warden before the war, chaired the local British Legion, and was Commodore of Portrush Sailing Club — a genuine civic institution in his own right, later honoured with Shutt Street named for him. He died in 1971, aged 76. Council-run “Season” entertainment on this scale faded through the 1970s as holidaymakers’ tastes shifted toward package holidays abroad — but for over forty summers, one determined ex-soldier had turned a small headland into the biggest free show on the north coast.