LITMIR.BIZ

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sort of job where you had to go and find them and make sure that they were having the very best time they could.’

      While working at the hotel, Hilary also became friends with a few other redcoats, and has remained so to this day. Her friends Des and Mair met each other there and, like Hilary and Bill, later got married, and there was Rocky Mason, who also came from Bradford. ‘Perhaps because there were only a few redcoats working in the hotel,’ she says, ‘we formed a really close-knit group, almost a family. We got to know each other so well and I really became close to them all.’

      In the spring of 1962, Bill was promoted again and sent to work at Minehead as assistant manager. Hilary went with him and became assistant chief hostess, but she still kept in close touch with Valerie and her other friends from the hotel in Saltdean. The camp at Minehead was brand new. When they were building it, there had been a lot of objections from the locals, because some of them didn’t want a holiday camp built there at all, but Billy Butlin always seemed to get his way in the end. He even managed to turn the one occasion when councillors defied him to his advantage. Having built the Heads of Ayr hotel in Scotland, Billy applied to the council for a late licence for the bars. His application was refused and when Billy told the councillors that he would rather demolish the hotel than run it without the late licence, they treated it as a bluff – whereupon Billy called in the bulldozers and flattened his newly built hotel. If that seemed to be cutting off his nose to spite his face, it proved to be good business in the long term, because no other councils were brave enough to call his bluff after that. The camps at Bognor and Minehead both went ahead despite vigorous local opposition, though at Minehead Billy used charm instead of bulldozers to win them over. He said to all the objectors: ‘When it’s ready, we’ll invite you all along and you can come and look around.’

      So when the camp was ready to open, they laid on an inspection and an afternoon tea for the local people. Hilary was given the job of meeting some of them at the gate, showing them round the camp and then taking them for afternoon tea. There were a lot of ladies from the Minehead Women’s Institute there and they must have had a nice afternoon, because at the end of it they had a whip-round and tried to give her a tip. She had to tell them, ‘I’m sorry, ladies, but we’re not allowed to accept tips’ – it was yet another of Butlin’s rules. However, a couple of days later, a letter arrived for her, thanking her again and sending her a cheque for the amount they’d raised in their whip-round: £2. 10s (£2.50). Her wages were only about £4 per week then, so it was a very nice bonus, and Hilary was so touched by that gesture that she kept the letter and still has it today.

      As a hostess, Hilary was in charge of the competitions and dealing with all the prizes – ‘and there were so many competitions’, she says with a sigh. A lot of them were sponsored by companies such as Lux Soap and Smiths Clocks, and the prizes for those were the sponsors’ responsibility. Butlin’s provided the rest of the prizes, and Hilary was given an allowance of nine old pence (about four pence today) per camper for the prize fund. In high season, when there might be 10,000 holiday-makers there, it added up to quite a lot of money, but earlier and later in the season it was a lot less. No actual money ever changed hands, because the camps had plenty of shops where she could obtain prizes, so she’d just go around them, choose what she wanted and the shops would then debit the value of what she’d taken against the prize fund.

      There were prizes for all ages: toys for the small children, sports stuff for the older ones, scarves and handbags for the women and free holidays at the end of the season for the winners of the bigger competitions. The day after they’d given out the prizes was always bedlam in the camp offices, because people who’d won a prize would often bring it back and try to swap it for something else, either because they had already won the same thing earlier in the week, or simply because they didn’t like what they’d got.

      The redcoats would always get a bit of stick from the parents of children who hadn’t won prizes, too, especially the parents of the kids in the Bonny Babies competition. ‘Everyone always thought their baby was the most beautiful baby in the world and wanted to win the prize to prove it,’ says Hilary, but dealing with complaints was all just part of the job. There was never any trouble with the competitions that were just a bit of fun, though, like the Knobbly Knees contest, or when they had campers doing stupid things on the sports field, like chariot races and pram races, with grandmothers in the prams instead of babies. There were one or two anxious moments, particularly when one granny was pitched out of a pram during a race and knocked out cold. Nowadays her relatives would probably have been phoning the lawyers before her head touched the ground, but when she opened her eyes a couple of minutes later, all she wanted to know was: ‘Did we win?’

      The redcoats also had campers throwing eggs to each other and trying to catch them. At first, the eggs they were handing out weren’t real, and the campers would be throwing them to each other and stepping back a few paces every time, but of course eventually the redcoats would swap the pretend eggs for real ones, and when they tried to catch them, a succession of campers would be splattered with egg yolk.

      They’d also get campers to take their shoes off for a barefoot race across the field. As soon as they said ‘Go’ and the campers had gone haring off over the grass, the redcoats gathered all their shoes together and then threw them up in the air so they came down again in a heap. When they got back, puffing and blowing from the race, the campers had to spend ages sorting out whose shoes were whose. ‘You couldn’t get away with that stuff now,’ Hilary says, ‘because people would either punch you or sue you for emotional trauma or something, but we got away with it back then!’

      When the redcoats meet up at reunions now, they all talk about those days and say what happy times they were. ‘They certainly were,’ Hilary says, ‘but it was hard, hard work as well. You were so tired sometimes, but then you were working from eight in the morning until midnight, or even later, and the camps were so big.’ The redcoats often found they were at one end of the camp for one event and then had to go right to the far end of the sports field for the next, and they’d only have half an hour’s break in between them. Hilary had a bike for a couple of seasons, so getting around wasn’t so bad, but those who didn’t have a bike couldn’t even take five minutes off, as it would take half an hour to walk across the camp. So there wasn’t much free time, but there was, Hilary says, ‘still a lot of fun and a lot of camaraderie’.

Three

      Hilary and Bill worked at Minehead from when it opened until the end of that season, 1962, and it was to be their last Butlin’s camp. By then they were both thinking it was time to move on. They were ready to start a family. ‘We didn’t really associate that with working at Butlin’s,’ says Hilary. ‘I know people after us did manage to bring up their children while living on the camp, but I didn’t want that for my family.’

      So they both resigned at the end of the season and Bill began working for Top Rank, managing the Hammersmith Palais and then the Empire in Leicester Square, but it all started going downhill for him – and for them – from that point on. In the end, Bill’s problems cost him first his career, and then his marriage. They were still living in London and it was, Hilary says, ‘just an awful, sad time’.

      Luckily, Valerie was in London at the time, too, with her husband Mike, and Hilary used to see her most weekends, so at least she had a friend she could turn to for support. Hilary left Bill for several months in 1963. It was the year that President Kennedy was assassinated and she can remember her dad sitting on the sofa and crying while he was watching the news on the television. She then went back and stayed with Bill for a while, hoping that things would improve. Before long, however, it became obvious that he wasn’t going to change his ways, so in the end she had to leave him for good in 1965. She went home to Bradford and moved back in with her mum and dad.

      Hilary met the man who was to become her second husband, Bernard, on a night out in Bradford the following year. She had actually been at school with him, although she hadn’t really noticed him at the time. He’d also been to Butlin’s in Skegness on holiday when she was a redcoat there, but they only met properly for the first time at a nightclub in Bradford, the Lyceum Rainbow.

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