LITMIR.BIZ

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touching the floorboards for anyone we thought was taking it too seriously!’

      Hilary and the others also had to go ‘swanning around’ the dining room while the campers were eating their lunch or tea, trying to sell them raffle tickets to win a car. The redcoats were all given targets and had to sell a certain number of tickets each month, and if anyone did really well, they might get a little bonus as a reward; ‘It was really high-pressure stuff.’ The draw was to be made at the end of the season and the first prize really was supposed to be a car, though Hilary doesn’t remember anyone ever winning one. ‘Things are different now,’ she says, ‘but back then there was a bit of an “anything goes” mentality.’

      Butlin’s had been a success from the start, but the camps really boomed in the post-war period, driven on by Billy Butlin’s risk-taking, entrepreneurial spirit and his flair for generating publicity, even if it involved telling a few white lies along the way. Long-serving redcoat and entertainments manager Rocky Mason recalls the time when Billy phoned a journalist on The People and told him that he was buying the Queen Mary to turn it into the largest luxury floating holiday camp in the world.

      The story made headlines throughout the world. A few weeks later, the journalist phoned Billy to ask if there had been any developments. ‘None at all,’ Billy replied. ‘But how else could I get £100,000-worth of publicity for the price of a phone call?’

      However, Billy wasn’t the only one with an eye for a publicity opportunity. In 1949, while he was surreptitiously trying to check out the competition at the Brean Sands camp of his rival Fred Pontin, Billy was unwittingly photographed having a drink at the bar. To his incandescent rage, the picture was then used in a Pontin’s brochure with the slogan: ‘All the best people come to Pontin’s!’

      Billy Butlin had always thought big and was ever willing to gamble money on the newest and most eye-catching attractions. He opened his own airports next to some of the camps, allowing some holiday-makers to arrive by air, but also offering them pleasure and sightseeing trips. There were chairlifts and miniature railways at all his camps, and he also installed the UK’s first commercial monorail at Skegness. Some of the camps had vintage cars and famous old steam railway engines, which kids loved to clamber all over. But one of the greatest attractions at Skegness, both for the campers and for Hilary, was an elephant. Billy had been using animals as attractions since the early 1930s, when his Recreation Shelter in Bognor featured a zoo with bears, hyenas, leopards, pelicans, kangaroos and monkeys, and a snake pit where Togo the Snake King would stage regular shows. And both Filey and Skegness also had ex-circus elephants.

      Hilary had always loved elephants. She had ridden one at Belle Vue Zoo in Manchester when she was a child and had never forgotten it. ‘It was a really big thing for me to see an elephant there at Skegness. And you can just imagine the faces of the children – and the adults – who were staying at the camp when they realised they could actually see a live elephant strolling through the camp with his keeper.’

      Sadly, though, the elephant, called Gertie, came to an unfortunate end during Hilary’s first season. The trainer would lead Gertie up and down the camp every day and Gertie would do tricks, like picking up the trainer’s eight-year-old son with his trunk and putting him on her back. The kids used to love it, and there would always be a little procession of them following Gertie around.

      She also used to go in the shallow end of the swimming pool and blow jets of water out of her trunk, washing herself and drenching anyone within range. She’d been doing this for years without coming to any harm, but one particular day, for no obvious reason, Gertie started walking down the pool, away from the shallow end and towards the deep end. Her trainer kept on shouting at her to stop, but Gertie just kept on going, and when she got out of her depth, she drowned. Even though Gertie hadn’t been at Skegness for long, for the staff, it was like losing a family member. It had happened in full view of the holiday-makers as well, so they were just as upset about it as the redcoats. Some of the kids were inconsolable. They had to drain the water and bring in a crane before they could get the elephant’s lifeless body out of the pool, so it was very traumatic for everyone.

      Soon after she had started working at the camp, Hilary had got chatting to one of the other redcoats, a Londoner called Bill, who did general duties and also ran the sports events and competitions, including the boxing and wrestling matches, as he was a boxer himself. He wasn’t a typical redcoat at all, because he was public-school educated, and with her working-class background in Bradford, Hilary had never met anyone like him before. Redcoats weren’t allowed to socialise with each other during working hours – it was one of Butlin’s strictest rules – but Hilary and Bill would meet up after work and on their days off and they soon started going out together.

      Like some of the other staff, Hilary stayed on for an extra two or three weeks at the end of the season to help out with the Christian Crusades Week (when hordes of religious people descended on the camp to hold their revival meetings) or other special events that some of the camps put on. There was also a Ballroom Week at many of the camps, when competitive ballroom dancers arrived from all over the country. After the last waltz of the evening, as the dancers left the floor and went back to their chalets, one woman still vividly remembers the excitement she felt as a young girl crawling round the ballroom floor on her hands and knees, collecting all the sequins that had fallen from the women’s ball gowns.

      Once the camp had closed down at the end of September, Bill, who had found a job at Selfridge’s, was heading back to London for the winter, so Hilary decided to go with him. She started working as a waitress at the Imperial Hotel in Russell Square, but hated every minute of it. The head housekeeper, who was in charge of the staff, was ‘a real hard case’, she says with a shudder, ‘and so were most of the other women who worked there, so it wasn’t a pleasant place to work at all’.

      After a few weeks of that, Hilary said to Bill: ‘I can’t stand it there and I’m feeling homesick, too, so I’m going back home to Yorkshire.’

      ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll come back with you, then.’

      Bill managed to get a job in Leeds doing credit-enquiry reports, and since Hilary’s parents had already met him and knew they were serious about each other, they let him live with them at their house. ‘Although, of course,’ she says, ‘we were in separate bedrooms and strictly chaperoned, so that nothing untoward went on!’

      A lot of couples at this time had to live with one or other set of parents both before and after they got married, because very few could afford to set up home on their own straight away. After they’d been living with her parents for a few weeks, Bill said to her: ‘If we’re going to be living under the same roof anyway, there’s no point in us not being married, is there? So why don’t we just get married?’

      It wasn’t the most romantically phrased proposal, but it seemed heartfelt, and even though they’d only been going out a few months and really didn’t know each other very well at all, Hilary said yes. She was still only twenty and had not seen much of the world except for Bradford and Skegness, but nonetheless, thrilled and excited, she threw herself into plans to get married a month later, on Christmas Eve.

      Bill then set off back to London for a couple of days to break the news to his father; his parents were separated and he didn’t get on that well with his mother, so he was in no hurry to tell her. He was supposed to be coming back to Yorkshire on a train the following Sunday evening, but he never showed up. They didn’t have a telephone – a lot of people didn’t then – so there was no way that Hilary could get in touch with him or find out what had happened to him, but in any case, she wasn’t too worried at first. As the days went by and there was still no sign of him, however, she began to get increasingly anxious. She didn’t have a clue what had happened to him and before long she was going frantic with worry.

      At last, on the Thursday of the following week, she got a letter from him, though it wasn’t good news. It read: ‘I’m so sorry, I’m so despicable and you must hate me, but I’m not sure if I want to get married.’ It went on in a similar vein for another two pages. It turned out that instead of going to see his father, Bill had gone to Butlin’s for the weekend instead: even though the season had ended,

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