LITMIR.BIZ

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for his stall that he made ten times the profits of his rivals.

      He expanded rapidly, and by the end of the 1920s, he was operating a string of arcades, amusement parks, fairground pitches and zoos all over the country. He was an inveterate gambler, always willing to back his instincts and hunches with serious money, though not all of his gambles succeeded. He lost his pride and joy, a beautiful American limousine, in a card game. He won it back the next night, but then lost it again on a toss of a coin. However, his gamble on holiday camps – he borrowed to the hilt to launch his first at Skegness and nearly went bust before it opened – paid off in style.

      The boarding house keepers with whom Billy was competing were often their own worst enemies. Quite apart from driving their guests out from morning till evening, many charged the holiday-makers extra for anything they used. Having a bath was invariably subject to an extra charge and some boarding house keepers even charged for the use of salt and pepper.

      Billy Butlin had set his prices at a level he believed working people could afford, coining the eye-catching slogan: ‘A week’s holiday for a week’s pay’. That included accommodation, three full meals a day and free entertainment, for an all-in price of from £1. 15s to £3 a week, depending on the time of year, the equivalent of £90–£150 today. The slogan was slightly misleading, since the price was per head, so for a family of four, the breadwinner would have needed almost a month’s wages to pay for a week at Butlin’s.

      The very first Butlin’s holiday camp, at Skegness, opened in 1936. Billy already had a large amusement park in the town and knew the area well. He chose it partly because of its good transport links and closeness to several major urban centres, though the cheapness of the land and the small local population – meaning fewer people to object to his plans – must also have been influential factors.

      After scouting the coastline around the town for weeks, Billy Butlin found what he was seeking: a 200-acre turnip field at Ingoldmells, a couple of miles outside of Skegness. Having bought the field, he set to work. He designed the camp himself, sketching plans and jotting ideas on the back of cigarette packets. His background as a showman was evident in his chosen designs – like a fairground, the camp was to be awash with bright lights, vivid colours, music and noise, but there was to be a kind of glamour, too. The main buildings were arranged deliberately to evoke the great ocean liners of the era, regarded as the height of sophistication. Painted brilliant white with coloured detailing, the buildings formed a line with a tower in the middle, echoing the bridge and funnel of a liner.

      Billy’s original aim had been to create a camp for 1,000 people with 600 chalets, but it proved so successful that before the first season was out, the capacity had to be more than doubled and it eventually accommodated close to 10,000 holiday-makers. Some of the chalets even had bathrooms, but the majority of holiday-makers had to use communal bath houses and toilet blocks (though even those were a step up from the slum housing in which many still lived).

      Campers were made to feel welcome from the moment they arrived. As the buses bringing visitors from the station pulled up inside the camp, a tannoy announced, ‘You have now arrived at Butlin’s holiday camp. We hope you had a pleasant journey and that you will all be very happy here.’

      To help them achieve that happiness, Butlin’s Skegness was lavishly equipped with a theatre, a Viennese dance hall, a beer garden, a fortune teller’s parlour and Ye Olde Pigge and Whistle – a half-timbered mock-up of an Elizabethan inn. The landscaped grounds contained rose gardens, a swimming pool with cascades and a fountain, a boating lake and all sorts of sports facilities.

      Billy was also one of the first to recognise the commercial possibilities of the emerging celebrity culture. He hired the aviator Amy Johnson – a national heroine after making the first ever solo flight from England to Australia – to attend the opening ceremony of the Skegness camp, and when the cricketer Len Hutton scored a record 364 against Australia in 1938, Billy paid him £100 to appear on stage with a bat made from sticks of Skegness rock while Gracie Fields bowled to him. The champion boxer Len Harvey was also paid to spar with a boxing kangaroo.

      However, when the camp first opened, it seemed as if Billy’s grand plan was going to be a failure. People in that era were often quite shy and reserved, and ‘showing off’ or ‘making a spectacle of yourself’ were frowned upon. Almost everybody wore their best clothes when they went to the seaside, and most people didn’t go swimming in the sea at all, though paddling in the shallows with their trousers rolled up or their skirts lifted a decorous few inches was quite acceptable. As one female holiday-maker recalled, ‘Everybody used to point and stare when people came onto the beach in a swimsuit. It was terribly daring to have a swimsuit on at all!’

      As Billy walked around the camp, he noticed that very few of those first campers were using the facilities or taking part in the activities. Most of them were keeping themselves to themselves and many looked bored. Desperate for a way to liven them up, Billy asked Norman Bradford to take on the task of cheering up the campers. A gregarious, outgoing character with a good sense of humour, Norman took to his task with gusto, chivvying the holiday-makers into joining in with the activities, putting on a free drink or two to loosen everyone up and keeping them entertained with a string of corny jokes. Norman also claimed to be the originator of the ‘Hi-de-hi!’ catchphrase, to which his audience would respond ‘Ho-de-ho!’

      Within a very short time of these innovations, the camp was beginning to buzz. With his characteristic willingness to back his hunches, Billy decided that if British holiday-makers couldn’t enjoy themselves without outside help, then he would employ an army of helpers to make sure they did. They needed a uniform to make them instantly identifiable, so Billy bought a job lot of red blazers; the Butlin’s redcoat had been born.

      Despite the hoary old joke that was soon circulating among Butlin’s campers – ‘I’m going to join the escape committee’ – most people seemed to like being told how to enjoy themselves. Many of them had more than enough things to worry about during the rest of the year and actually relished letting someone else take the strain of organising their holiday activities for them. And if they didn’t want to do something, they could always say no, although they needed to be strong-willed, because the redcoats could be very persistent.

      Billy was quick to spot problems or opportunities and even quicker to take advantage of them. ‘Can’t’ was not a word to be found in his vocabulary, as the Butlin’s archivist and former redcoat Roger Billington discovered when Billy decreed that water-skiing should be made available to campers at Minehead, and put Roger in charge of organising it.

      ‘But we’ve never water-skied before,’ Roger said. ‘We’ve never even taken the speedboat out.’

      Billy gave him a withering look. ‘There’s a library in Minehead, isn’t there? Well, get a book on it.’

      None of the activities we now identify with Butlin’s was invented by its founder. All of them – mass catering, resident entertainers, chalet patrols, semi-compulsory jollity and participation enforced by perpetually smiling staff with a ready stream of catchphrases – were features of the smaller holiday camps that had existed since the later years of the previous century, and of those camps owned by Billy’s business rival, Harry Warner. Still, Billy made them seem new by practising them on a scale never seen before and promoting them with all his showman’s chutzpah and razzle-dazzle.

      His formula fitted a ready-made gap in the market, but he also benefited from a piece of very fortunate timing. Until 1938, only two million Britons were able to afford to take an annual holiday and most of them were middle- or upper-class people for whom Butlin’s all-in, all-mates-together style of entertainment was likely to be anathema. However, in that year, the Government passed a bill compelling employers to provide all full-time employees with one week’s paid holiday a year. At a stroke, the number of Britons able to afford a holiday trebled to six million, and many of them, mostly skilled and unskilled working people, began finding their way to Butlin’s.

      Not even the outbreak of war in 1939 – just three years after he had opened that first camp, when his second at Clacton was only a year old and the third, Filey, not even completed – could ruin Billy or derail his ambitions. When

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