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redcoat at all, but I certainly wasn’t a real extrovert, and I never had a great deal of confidence, though it developed over the years.’

      The redcoats’ jackets were laundered for them, but they had to wash the rest of their clothes themselves. Luckily, the white pleated skirts and blouses that Hilary and the other girls wore were drip-dry, so they just had to wash them and hang them up. They were allowed two each, but they’d always try to get an extra one, as it did make life a little easier: one on, one spare and one in the wash. Redcoats always had to be smart – Hilary wore white stilettos all day, apart from when she was on the sports field – and they all had to have a little white handkerchief showing in their top pocket and to wear their Butlin’s badges. They issued a different badge for every camp, every year, and people used to collect them. ‘You’d sometimes see campers coming in’, Hilary says, ‘with what looked like about a hundred badges pinned to their hats or coats.’

      During the week, Radio Butlin’s at Skegness used to wake the campers with ‘Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah’, and there would be similarly jolly music all day, every day, except for Saturday – leaving day – when they were woken to the wistful strains of Mantovani’s ‘Forgotten Dreams’. The solemn music would continue all morning as the campers wandered around looking sad at the thought of going home. Some tried to cheer themselves up by booking for the following year before they left.

      The redcoats would see the same families coming to the camp year after year. Some of the wealthier families ‘hardly ever seemed to be away from the camp at all’, Hilary says. It’s a testament to the strength of the connection many of the campers felt that one woman, who had been to Butlin’s over fifty times, even asked for her ashes to be sprinkled onto a flowerbed at her favourite Butlin’s camp after she died, because, according to her daughter, ‘This is where she called home.’

      Hilary had to learn the rules that the redcoats had to follow, and there were pages and pages of them. ‘You couldn’t go dancing with just the pretty girls or the handsome men, or dance with anyone more than twice, and you had to seek out the reluctant dancers, the shy people and the wallflowers, and get them on the floor as well. You weren’t allowed to have anything in your pockets, because it spoiled the lines of your uniform, and I used to smoke then, so it was a struggle to know where to put your cigarettes. One of the boys, a black guy who had an Afro, used to keep his cigarettes and his lighter hidden in his hair!’

      Hilary fell foul of one of the numerous Butlin’s rules when the local paper sent a photographer along to take a picture of the tug-of-war contest they were holding on the sports field. When the paper came out, right on the front page there was a picture of Hilary standing up and cheering on one of the teams. She was delighted to see herself in the paper, but then her heart sank. She knew she’d be in trouble when she saw that the photograph clearly showed her holding a cigarette, with a rolled-up Butlin’s duty roster sticking out of her jacket pocket. Staff members weren’t allowed to smoke when they were standing up – Hilary could never understand why, but you had to sit down if you wanted a cigarette. Sure enough, when the entertainments manager saw the picture, he called her into his office and gave her a dressing down.

      At Skegness the redcoats put on various sporting events and had to go around the camp often literally dragging people out of the dining room or wherever they were to take part. The campers were divided into ‘houses’, like in public schools – in Skegness’s case, named after the royal households of Kent, Gloucester, Windsor and York – and the redcoats had to persuade them into volunteering for all these competitions. They may have been on holiday, but the redcoats would make them practise every day and then take part in the events themselves. There was one gang of guys at Skegness who were there for two weeks. Hilary got hold of them in the first week and, after a bit of coaxing, got them doing the five-a-side football and a few other events. They actually won the football competition and were presented with their prizes: Wilkinson Sword razors, since the company was sponsoring the event. At the start of the second week she tried to get them to play football again, but they all said, ‘No, we’re on holiday. We were practising and playing all last week, and all we got at the end of it was a lousy razor each.’

      ‘You won’t get them again this week, I promise,’ she said. ‘I’ll make sure they give you a really good prize this time.’

      In the end they agreed to do it, but they warned her: ‘If we get those razors again, you’re going in the pool, fully clothed.’

      So they played and won the five-a-side competition yet again. Everyone was lined up on the sports field at the end of the week when all the prizes were being given out. When their names were called, sure enough the prizes turned out to be more ‘lousy razors’. They didn’t even take them, they just turned round, stared at Hilary and then came running towards her. They picked her up, carted her off and threw her in the pool fully clothed, and of course the other campers absolutely loved that!

      As well as running the competitions, the girl redcoats had to make sashes and rosettes for them as well, which involved going down to the camp stores to get the material and then cutting them out and stitching them together. ‘You had to do all sorts for your team,’ Hilary says, ‘but if they won the overall competition at the end of the week, you got a small bonus. The redcoats were always very popular with the campers, and you would often get them saying, “Come and have a drink with us,” but we hardly had any time to spare. You might have got an odd ten minutes to go and have a quick drink with someone, but that was about it.

      ‘It was hard work, of course,’ Hilary says, ‘but there was always a real buzz and a feeling of excitement in the air. If something good wasn’t happening right now, then you knew that it would be before long. I loved meeting all the different people who passed through the camp, I loved the shows and entertainment and above all, of course, I loved the dancing!’

      The working day normally finished at quarter past eleven with the redcoats singing ‘Good Night Campers’, but after that they still had to fit in rehearsals for the Redcoat Show – a weekly cabaret in which almost all of the redcoats performed sketches or songs. Other entertainment put on for the campers included such timeless favourites as knobbly knee competitions and beauty and talent contests galore. In later years, the Holiday Princess of Great Britain, the Glamorous Grandmother of Great Britain and the Miss She fashion competition were even televised. People came to Butlin’s to be entertained and to have a good time, and the redcoats had to make sure that happened. As another former redcoat recalled: ‘We would organise competitions, whist drives, snooker, football, darts, Glamorous Granny, Holiday Princess, as well as all the children’s competitions. We would act as bouncers in the Rock ’n’ Roll Ballroom, we would dance with campers in the Old Tyme and Modern ballrooms, some would act as lifeguards for both pools (indoor and outdoor), we would sit up till gone midnight doing the late-night bingo and then still be up for first-sitting breakfast at 7.30 a.m., smiling away as if our lives depended on it … and our jobs certainly did!’

      Every night the redcoats were allocated their duties for the next day. If Hilary was down to do darts or some other competition that she found boring, a lot of the other girls would swap with her. They hated having to do the ballroom duties, like the Old Tyme, afternoon tea and morning coffee dances, whereas Hilary absolutely loved those, so the system worked perfectly. ‘I’d be there with my long white gloves on,’ she says, ‘and as long as my partners could dance, I didn’t care what they were like, I just loved it!’

      In the ballroom in the evenings the redcoats would get everyone doing the Chopsticks. They called it that because the music they used was ‘Chopsticks’, but it also described what they did. Four redcoats would kneel down, each holding two long bamboo canes, and they’d begin banging them up and down and moving them in and out in time to the music. The campers – either volunteers or those conscripted by the redcoats – lined up in a long column and took it in turns to hop or dance in between the canes without getting their legs trapped. ‘When Jimmy Tarbuck was working as a redcoat,’ Hilary remembers, ‘he used to lift the canes so high you practically needed a step ladder to get over them! And of course when the campers tried to do it, they’d be falling all over the place. So it was a bit of a giggle for everyone.’

      They’d do a limbo competition,

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