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abroad, so the holiday camps had a vast semi-captive market. The chalets may have been basic, but at a time when many young couples spent their first years of married life under the roof of one of their parents, a chalet at Butlin’s was often their first real taste of domestic privacy.

      Very few families owned a car and the fact that everything you could want was in one place at Butlin’s was another powerful attraction. Once they got there, wives were freed from the toil and drudgery of factory work or housework – or both – for a whole week; few families could afford to stay for a fortnight. An article in Holiday Camp Review in 1939, ‘Holiday Camps and Why We Go There’, even claimed the camps were pioneering women’s rights. ‘At a camp alone a woman gains that pleasing sense of equality. The girl of eight, the maiden of eighteen, the grandma of eighty, rank with the boy, youth and grandpa without any sort of distinction. They are campers, first, last and all the time. Age and sex do not matter.’ It’s hard to think of any other British institution at the time where similar claims could be made with a straight face.

      Unless they were in a self-catering chalet to save money (and they weren’t introduced until the 1960s anyway), there was no cooking, washing or cleaning for the women to do, and even childcare could be handed over to the nursery nurses or the redcoats in their signature red jackets, white shirts and bow ties, white trousers and white shoes. The children were marched off to sports tournaments, swimming galas and the Beaver Club (for small children) or the 913 Club (for nine- to thirteen-year-olds), or, if the weather was wet, to the endless array of rides, games, sports and competitions held in the ballroom and children’s theatre. So while their kids ran wild in safety, parents could swim or play sports if they felt energetic, or put their feet up and relax if they didn’t. They could sunbathe if the weather was fine, doze in an armchair if it wasn’t. They could play bingo or even booze the day away in the bar if they felt like it.

      Even those with smaller children were liberated from their responsibilities to a certain extent. While parents ate at the oilcloth-covered tables in the dining hall, the under-twos were fed their puréed beef and carrots and stewed apple in a separate ‘feeding room’ in the nursery, where rows of babies in highchairs ate their baby food away from the other campers – or at least that was the theory. The babies were supposed to stay there until their parents and older siblings had finished their own meals in the dining hall, but the babies often had other ideas and would howl the place down until their parents collected them. Some put their little children in their prams outside the dining-hall windows, lining them up so that the babies could see their parents through the window. One camper recalled that, even from the other side of the glass, the babies’ screams could be heard above the clatter of cutlery and the noise of conversation.

      Parents were also free to dance in the ballroom, watch a show in the theatre or drink in the bar in the evenings, while ‘chalet patrols’ – nursery staff in their blue uniforms and capes – marched or cycled up and down the lines of chalets, listening for crying babies. Freed from the burdens of childcare and factory or domestic drudgery for a week or two, many couples also rediscovered the pleasure they had taken in each other’s company in the early years of their relationships – although for others, the unusual amount of time spent with their partner could also have the opposite effect!

      In 1957 Hilary and her friends went to Butlin’s at Skegness for the first time. Four of them went, sharing one chalet. Hilary’s brother had a car, a Morris 1000, and he offered to take them there, so they all squashed in with their suitcases piled on the roof rack and set off. They had driven only a few miles down the road when the car broke down. When they should have been driving in through the gates of the camp at Skegness, they were still sitting in the broken-down car, waiting for a tow truck.

      It was pouring with rain all day and by the time they got to the camp they were tired, bedraggled and fed up. Like all the girls, Hilary’s friend Brenda was on her first trip away from home, and her mother had bought her a brand-new suitcase to take on holiday. It was so wet that the handle disintegrated and fell off as she was carrying it through the camp. Despite the trials and tribulations of getting there, however, as soon as they saw Butlin’s, they absolutely fell in love with the place.

      All along the road leading to the camp there were tall flagpoles with different-coloured flags flying, and there was always a row at the front of every Butlin’s camp, too. ‘You could see them flying from about a quarter of a mile away,’ one camper recalled, ‘and as you drove up to the main entrance, the first excitement was seeing all those flags blowing in the wind. When I saw that, I knew that I wouldn’t be seeing much of my parents for a whole, wonderful week.’

      As they turned in through the gates, the girls could see the tropical blue colour of the big outdoor swimming pool, and the theatres, dining halls and other main buildings, all freshly painted in brilliant white with the details picked out in bright primary colours. Rocky Mason, a former redcoat and entertainments manager who spent most of his working life at Butlin’s, can still recall similarly vivid memories of his very first sight of Butlin’s as a boy. He’d grown up in ‘a very dreary city, covered in mill smoke. It was very dull and the sky was always grey. When I got to the camp I felt as if I’d suddenly walked into utopia – it was so colourful, so warm, so friendly. There were lights across the roads, there were banners fluttering in the breeze, there seemed to be music coming from every direction. The swimming pool was the most beautiful, beautiful thing I had ever seen, there were flags all around the pool and it was a stunning colour of blue. I saw rows and rows of chalets, all with different-coloured doors and windows – red, yellows, blues, greens, orange – it was just a gorgeous place to be and there seemed to be laughter coming from every building.’

      Hilary couldn’t have imagined a greater contrast with Bradford, which was a very wealthy city then but also a very drab and grey one. There was a near-permanent pall of smoke hanging over the city, fed by hundreds of mill chimneys, and the golden-coloured sandstone of the buildings was stained ink-black by decades of coal smoke and the sulphurous winter smogs.

      The rest of Britain was just as dreary during the 1940s and 1950s. The last phase of wartime rationing only ended in the mid 1950s, and even though ‘utility’ clothing was no longer the only option, clothes were still invariably made of wool or cotton, in black or muted shades of green, brown or grey. Television – for those families that owned a TV set; it was still a luxury item – was broadcast in black and white. The first colour television broadcast in Britain did not occur until 1967. Radio was still dominated by ‘received pronunciation’ and the Reithian requirement to inform and educate, rather than entertain. And even in the late 1950s or early 1960s, most of the music played on the BBC Light Programme would have been equally familiar to listeners in the 1930s. Given this backdrop, the Butlin’s camps, with their rows of colourful flags, bright-blue swimming pools and dazzling white buildings with vividly painted doors and windows, must have looked positively psychedelic to 1950s eyes.

      Butlin’s was impressive enough by day, but by night it was staggering. You could see the glow from all the lights from miles away – and there were thousands of them. It had the same level of impact then that Las Vegas has today, and Hilary and her friends had simply never seen anything like it. She couldn’t get over how huge the camp was, either (when full, it held something like 12,000 people then), and the lines of chalets seemed to go on forever.

      The individual chalets themselves weren’t quite so impressive. They were tiny, and had a little sink in the corner with a small mirror over it, a curtain across a tiny alcove to serve as a wardrobe, a small table, one chair and four iron, army-surplus bunk beds. That was it. Hilary remembers noticing that the bedspreads matched the curtains – blue with white yachts on them – and that the same motif edged the tiny mirror above the sink. Butlin’s kept these the same for years. Although there wasn’t much spare room, it suited the girls fine. They were only sixteen or seventeen, and until then they’d always been on holiday with their parents, staying in boarding houses or campsites. Hilary doesn’t think any of them had ever even stayed in a hotel, so to be off on their own, with their own separate chalet, tiny though it was, seemed quite sophisticated.

      The redcoats made quite an impression on Hilary, too. The girls all looked very smart and glamorous to her, but they were friendly, too, and seemed to be absolutely everywhere, organising

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