Background
Mendip Vale Carnival Club is the oldest of four carnival clubs based in Wells (and one of the oldest in the whole of mid-Somerset). The club first entered as Mendip Vale in 1965 with a tableau entry ‘Madame Guillotine’. Original members included Bill Baker (now in Globe Carnival Club), Peter Slade, Mike Masters, Lynn Baker and Gwilym Harris (who remains in the club in 2005!). The club had actually entered as the YMCA Carnival Club in 1964 (based at the YMCA in Wells), with the entry ‘Mystery out of Space’, before changing to Mendip Vale. The club competes in the seven Somerset Guy Fawkes County Carnivals in the open feature class (Bridgwater, North Petherton, Burnham-on-Sea and Weston-super-Mare) and local feature class (Shepton Mallet, Wells and Glastonbury). Additionally the club attended the non-affiliated Midsomer Norton carnival up to and including 1986 when the float became too big to transport there easily. The club also went to the Bristol Carnival twice in the early 1980s. The club today builds to the limits of 100’ long, 11’ wide and 17’ 6” high. Mendip Vale Carnival Club remains one of the most well-known clubs on the Somerset county circuit.

The floats
Originally a tableau club, the first float, ‘Madame Guillotine’ was built on a farm trailer measuring 7’ 6” by 12’. It boasted 100 lamps and was powered by a 7.5 KVA generator, a sizeable entry for those days. The first float was largely made of cardboard, wood battens and sacking. From that less-than-technical first float in 1965, the entries have increased in size and complexity over the years. The 1975 entry ‘Cobra Kingdom’ cost just £4.50 to build! Mendip Vale grew to be one of the largest clubs on the circuit by the late 1970s. The club’s most successful entry was in 1979 when the spectacular ‘Crown Jewels’ was runner-up in the county cup competition, beaten by Regimental Glory by Hinkley Point Carnival Club (later Bohemian Carnival Club) of Bridgwater. The float featured 700 60 watt lamps spaced 18’’ apart. A smaller version of the float was entered at Cheddar Christmas Carnival as ‘Royal Pageantry’. The club won 9 prizes in the tableau class in 1983 with the entry ‘Ride of the Valkyries’. The float attended the Lord Mayor’s Easter Parade at Battersea Park in London for the first time in 1984 on a low-loader with no roof or lamps.

All but two of the entries until the mid-1980s were tableau floats, but the club then changed direction by moving permanently from the tableau to feature class, a trend followed by many other clubs at this time, as this was popular with the younger members in particular. The club’s last tableau in 1985, ‘Manhunt’, depicted a futuristic fantasy where females dominate men. The first feature entry was ‘Tropicana’, with music from Wham! By the late 1980s, modern materials such as fibreglass were more widely used. In 1987, the space fantasy ‘Ultimate Warlord’ had grown to consist of a 60’ long, 11’ wide float trailer with over 3000 lamps and a hired 200 KVA generator, along with a machine banging out plenty of smoke effects! The undecorated hire tractor remained, and the generator was still being carried on a lorry. In the late 1980s the club invested in its own tractor (a Fordson Major) which was first decorated in 1988, the first club in mid-Somerset to do so. 1988 saw many new members joining the club, doubling the membership, which helped the club achieve success with ‘Voodoo Magic’. The entry won 8 cups including 2nd place in the open feature class at Bridgwater, the only year to date that Mendip Vale has beaten the mighty Masqueraders Carnival Club, who presented Living in America. Designer Mike Andrews made his only float appearance on this entry, as the voodoo witch doctor on the front of the tractor. To complement the decorated tractor, the club moved away from using a back-up lorry to a purpose-built generator float trailer in 1989, which was constructed on land next to the Slab House Inn outside of Wells. In addition, the club hired its first more powerful generator from Finnings Rentals in 1989 and the generator trailer was decorated, albeit basically, for the first time, six years after Gremlins Carnival Club set off the trend.

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