The history of the Spalding Flower Parade stretches back to the 1920s when the sheer number and variety of tulip bulbs grown throughout the area surrounding the market town became an annual feast of colour. The crowds that came in created many problems for the town and coaches and cars caused chaos on the narrow lanes around the fields and this continued to happen until in 1948, the Growers’ Association became involved in organising a Tulip Week. With the help of the Royal Automobile Club, a twenty-five mile tour through villages and country lanes was planned to show the best fields.
So successful was the attraction that by 1950, Tulip Week had become Tulip Time. A Tulip Queen competition was organised and the crowning of the Queen was performed just before the start of Tulip Time. The Queen and her two attendants had to be employed in the flower bulb industry and were selected at competitions held at village dances.
An influx of visitors created an opportunity and an idea to put on an attraction to publicise the bulb industry. A few experiments with decorated cars showed that the tulip heads could be made into garlands and pinned onto backing materials in colourful designs and would still hold their colour for a few days at that time of year.
To ensure that there would always be tulips on display, even if they might not be in the fields, from the many millions of tulip flower heads removed it was decided that keep some available for decorative purposes, firstly for static displays and some selected carts and vehicles, and these eventually started to drive around the town until, in 1959, the first Spalding Tulip Parade took place.
Building of the floats began with an intricate outline of steel tracery welded on a base carefully measured to fit a tractor underneath it. The initial form and steel skeleton of each float was skillfully constructed into the outline shape of the subject and then the steelwork was covered with a special straw matting to form a base to which the tulip heads could be attached.
Teams of up to two hundred people then worked throughout the two days before the Parade using up to one million tulip heads and pinning each one onto the floats in the colours and patterns required until all the floats were covered with tulips. A single float, which can be as much as fifteen metres in length was decorated by as many as a hundred thousand tulip heads.
The first Parade was described as ‘a floral pageantry a mile long’. There were just eight floats but it became an event not to be missed – twenty special trains came from all over England to the sidings at Spalding station. Temporary caravan villages sprang up and two hundred thousand (sad) people would watch the spectacle. The success of the Tulip Parade, the only display of floral floats in the world using just tulips, brought Spalding and its horticultural industry to the notice of the country. Within only three years, the Parade had become so famous that a quarter of a million people were coming to Spalding on Parade Day to line the four mile route around the town.
History from Andrew Petcher
