LITMIR.BIZ

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taken over by the Navy and rechristened HMS Royal Arthur.

      Billy also had to make a wartime alteration of his own. In the late 1930s, the targets on the shooting range at his Bognor amusement park were effigies of Nazi leaders: Hitler, Goebbels, Goering and von Ribbentrop. After the retreat from Dunkirk in 1940, however, with a German invasion now expected at any moment, Billy Butlin hastily arranged for the targets to be removed, lest invading Nazis should catch sight of them and decide to use Butlin himself a target.

      At the instigation of his friend General Bernard ‘Monty’ Montgomery, Billy was also hired to provide entertainment centres for soldiers on leave and to construct new military camps at Ayr in Scotland and Pwllheli in North Wales. Like his existing camps, he negotiated a deal for each one, which allowed him to buy them back at the end of the war at a knockdown price. With a hasty refit and a lick of paint, Butlin’s was ready to accept holiday-makers again almost as soon as the last shot was fired.

      Billy Butlin’s camps proved hugely popular and hundreds of thousands of people flocked to them every year. Although changing times eventually saw them go out of fashion, causing many of the camps to close in the 1980s, the remaining ones have been reinvented and remodelled for twenty-first-century tastes. Three camps – at Bognor, Minehead and Skegness – survive and thrive to this day, and the name Butlin’s still evokes a smile of recognition in almost everyone, whether or not they ever went on holiday there themselves.

      Wish you were here? Many still do.

Hilary

One

      Hilary Cahill was in her late teens when she first heard of Butlin’s in 1957. Born in 1940, she grew up in Bradford in a solid working-class home. Her mum worked in Whitehead’s mill in the city and her dad was a foreman at Croft’s engineering works, so although they were never wealthy and lived in a back-to-back terraced house, with two good wages coming in there was always food on the table.

      Her mum was a dark-haired, attractive and lively character. She absolutely loved to dance. It’s where Hilary got her own love of dancing from, because her mum taught her when she was small. However, her dad couldn’t dance to save his life. ‘He used to claim that it was because he’d never had any shoes when he was young,’ she says, ‘and only had boots, but that sounded like a bit of a lame excuse to me. He was still using the same excuse when I was a teenager! My mother and I tried to teach him over and over again, but whatever we tried, it just didn’t work. He had two left feet and that was the end of it! All the mills used to have these big dances once a year and we used to go to all of them, dressed in our best clothes. The real top bands used to play at them, so they were great. My dad used to hate it, though, when we all went to the works’ dances and my mum would be dancing away with people while he was just sitting there, looking on.’

      Her dad was so strict that Hilary was still forced to wear little white ankle socks even when she’d left school, but she had a strong independent streak, so she used to go out on Tuesday nights wearing the ankle socks, telling her dad that she was going to the Guild of St Agnes at church, like a good Catholic girl, but then sneak off to the dance hall instead. She’d take off her ankle socks and put them in her bag, put on a bit of lipstick and then dance away with her friends until it was time to go home. However, her dad obviously suspected that she wasn’t quite as good a Catholic girl as she was pretending, because one night he followed her. As she was walking along she felt a hand on her shoulder, and there was her dad looking absolutely furious. ‘I want you back in the house, now,’ he said. ‘Get those socks back on your feet and wipe that dirt off your mouth.’ She was more embarrassed than frightened, but she knew that there was no use in arguing and that it was the end of her Tuesday-night excursions to the dance hall.

      Her brother was five years older than her and almost as strict as her dad. He used to go to the same dance hall as Hilary and her friends and, she says, ‘He always kept his beady eye on me!’ She didn’t mind that – she quite liked the idea of her big brother being around. They were good pals, despite the age difference between them – and five years was a lot at that age. He didn’t snitch on her to her dad, but he would certainly let her know if he thought she wasn’t behaving like his little sister was supposed to. After her brother left school, he worked as a wool sorter and then did his National Service. She didn’t see him for almost two years because he was serving out in Cyprus during the troubles there, and she missed him a great deal.

      Hilary went to a Catholic school in Bradford, but, looking back, she couldn’t say it was a very good education, and like the majority of her school year, she left at fifteen with no qualifications. Her first job was at J. L. Tankard’s carpet and rug factory in Bradford. She was employed in the finishing department, doing hand-sewing. It was all piecework and hard graft, but as young girls do, she and her workmates had a few laughs along the way.

      One of her friends, Brenda, was a dab hand at doing hair and used to style theirs for them in the toilets at work. The girls would give her some of their ‘tickets’ – the slips of paper detailing the piecework jobs they’d done – so that she didn’t lose out financially from the time she was taking off work to cut their hair. ‘The Grecian styles were in then,’ Hilary says, ‘so we were all there at work with steel wavers and pin curls in our hair, singing along to the songs on the radio.’ After work they all used to go dancing together. Once she was paying her own way in the household, Hilary’s dad had to ease the restrictions on her, and from then on she and her mates were out every night of the week, either in the Sutton Dance Hall, the Somerset, the Queen’s or the Gaiety. ‘We used to go all over to dance,’ Hilary says.

      Hilary and her workmates used to pay into a kitty to save for all sorts of things, including what they called the ‘Christmas Fuddle’. It took only a penny or twopence a week each, but when Christmas came around, that was enough to buy plenty of drinks, crisps and sausage rolls, and on the last day before the Christmas holidays they would stop work at lunchtime and wolf down the lot! Very few of them drank as a rule, but they certainly made up for that at the Christmas Fuddle. Deaf to parental warnings to ‘never mix your drinks’, they drank bottle after bottle of Babycham, Cherry B, Pony and Snowball – so much so that Hilary was pretty ill one year, and when she got home her parents weren’t impressed by the state she was in. The next morning, suffering her first hangover, Hilary wasn’t very impressed either.

      As well as the kitty for the Fuddle, Hilary and the other girls were also saving for a holiday together, having made up their minds to go to Butlin’s at Skegness the following summer. They saved up all year, putting away whatever they could afford. Hilary used to put five shillings a week (25p) into a little tin towards her holiday, and saved half a crown (12½p) for clothes and shoes. She had to give her mum money for her board as well, and whatever was left after that she’d usually spend on going dancing.

      There were fixed holiday times in all the industrial towns and cities then, when factories and mills would shut down for their annual clean-up and overhaul; an avalanche of, say, West Midlands car workers would descend on the holiday resorts one week, followed by Lancashire mill workers the next and Yorkshire miners the week after. In Lancashire mill towns the annual holidays were called ‘Wakes Weeks’, in other areas they were called ‘Feasts’ and in Bradford the holiday was known as ‘Bowling Tide’ – which was nothing to do with bowls, since Bowling was one of the Bradford districts and ‘tide’ was the local word for a holiday, as in Whitsuntide.

      One woman from Bradford remembers her holidays as always being a bit of a home from home, because everyone from her street went on holiday to the same place at the same time. ‘You knew everyone when you got there, because it was all people from your street. I mean, you weren’t with any strangers, because even if you didn’t know them as such, you knew their faces.’ Since all the mills and factories in an area would shut down for the same week, tens of thousands of people were going on holiday at once, and they had to book far in advance – months or even a year ahead – because popular destinations like Butlin’s became full up very quickly.

      In the 1940s and

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