by Bill Bryson
Ironbridge is an unexpectedly serene and pretty village standing on the side of a steep, wooded ravine facing the bridge above the River Severn. Though it clearly exists these days to serve tourists, it does so rather more stylishly than it has any need to. The shops are interesting and attractive, and the cafés and guesthouses looked pretty good, too. I had an excellent cup of coffee (with a free small biscuit – always much appreciated), then strode around the shops and looked in a few windows. I might well have bought a sofa cushion or lap rug were it not that Mrs Bryson already has very substantial collections of each. I have on occasion been astonished to discover in our house that if you dig through piles of cushions and blankets you sometimes find a sofa or bed underneath. At the bottom of the village was a pub called the White Hart Inn, which had a signboard out front stating that you could come in and use the toilets without buying anything – a statement so kind and agreeable and unique that I instantly made it my favourite pub in Shropshire and Ironbridge my favourite community.
A mile or so along the valley from the bridge is the spot where the Darby furnaces formerly blazed – where the industrial revolution began really. This district, once a permanently glowing hellhole, is now a picturesque cluster of preserved buildings, dominated by a large brick factory that is now a museum. Entrance was £9.25, but I got a pound off, to my quiet satisfaction, for being a qualified elderly person. I was further gratified to discover that the ticket also included admission to the ‘Darby homes’, whatever exactly they were. The ticket man suggested that I should start there because the museum had just admitted three coachloads of schoolchildren who would spend the next twenty or thirty minutes racing everywhere before being rounded up by harried teachers, and guided into a special area where they would eat their packed lunches.
I thanked the man for this consideration and strolled across the grounds to the Darby homes a couple of hundred yards away. These proved to be a pair of eighteenth-century houses built by the Darby family so that they could keep an eye on the factories outside the windows. The houses were pleasantly furnished and gave a reasonable idea of what life must have been like for the original inhabitants, minus the smoke and soot and earth-shaking vibrations that they must have lived with when this was a factory site. On a table in a parlour, left for the perusal of visitors, was a book by Arthur Raistrick called Quakers in Science and Industry and I glanced through it for a few minutes, then carried it to a nearby chair and sat reading for about half an hour, so unexpectedly absorbed did I become. I hadn’t realized it, but Quakers in the Darbys’ day were a bullied and downtrodden minority. Excluded from conventional pursuits like politics and academia, they became big in industry and commerce, particularly, for some reason, in banking and the manufacture of chocolate. The Barclays and Lloyds banking families and the Cadburys, Frys and Rowntrees of chocolate renown were all Quakers. They and many others made Britain a more dynamic and wealthy place entirely as a consequence of being treated shabbily by it. It had never occurred to me to be unkind to a Quaker, but if that’s what it takes to get the country back on its feet again, I am prepared to consider it.
Between the Darby houses and the museum stands the Old Furnace, as it is known – the spot where the very first spark of the industrial revolution was struck. As recently as the 1950s, the importance of the Darby works was almost forgotten. The Old Furnace lay hidden under decades of accumulated soil and rubble, and had to be excavated, with brush and trowel, like a Roman villa. Today things couldn’t be more different. The furnace is sheltered from the elements inside a smart glass-fronted structure. Inside, a guide was conducting a party of a dozen or so people around. It has become a treasured shrine, though I have to say to me it just looked like any old furnace. I eavesdropped on the guide’s lecture as closely as I could while of course pretending not to – I affected a close interest in some loose pointing just beside him – but the talk was way too technical for me.
Realizing I required more knowledge if I was ever going to appreciate the steel industry, I went across to the museum proper, and there I learned a great deal about wet puddling, dry puddling, smelting and Bessemer processes, all of which went into my head and straight out again, like water through a pipe, so that although I learned nothing at all from the experience I felt strangely cleansed by it. The museum also contained a large collection of cast-iron objects – dining chairs, garden furniture, decorative tables, stoves, kitchen equipment, even serving bowls. Much of it was really quite splendid.
Content with what I had seen, I went off to the men’s room to do a little puddling of my own. Then I walked to the bus stop and waited for a bus to take me back to the twenty-first century.
Chapter 18
It’s So Bracing!
I
EVERYONE KNOWS one thing about Skegness, and that is that it is bracing. That understanding dates back to a 1908 poster by the illustrator John Hassall, which shows a cheerful and portly fisherman skipping along the beach above the caption ‘Skegness is SO bracing’. Called the Jolly Fisherman, it is a splendid illustration, but what is especially interesting, I think, is that it gives no hint of sunshine, frolicking swimmers, donkey rides, deckchairs or any other traditional seaside amusements. The man is dressed for foul weather and is quite alone, yet that one image and four simple words have made Skegness famous – indeed, have persuaded hundreds of thousands of people to go there. Hassall was paid twelve guineas for the work. The original hangs in Skegness Town Hall. I would love to have seen it, but the building was closed as it was the weekend.
It was the most miserably rainy weekend of the summer. I drove to Skegness from Hampshire on lightly puddled roads, tyres swishing, to the steady metronome of the windscreen wipers flapping until I was so half mad with boredom that I began to fantasize about trying to jump the car over the roadside ditch and see if I could land upright in a potato field. I figured the worst possible outcome was death, which didn’t seem so bad compared with continuing on to Skegness. Lincolnshire is a long way from everywhere, and Skegness is about as far into Lincolnshire as you can get.
When at last I got there, I checked into a B&B, dropped my bags and went out. Hunched beneath the drumming rain, I had a look around. As far as I could see, there was nothing wrong with Skegness that moving it eight hundred miles south wouldn’t fix. It was the most traditional of any English seaside resort I had encountered. There was lots of bright neon and noisily chiming arcades and a sickly smell of spun sugar which even the rain could not suppress. The seafront was dominated by a handsome clock tower, with a good-looking park called the Tower Gardens nearby. People everywhere were standing in doorways or under awnings. A few were eating fish and chips, but most just stood staring at the bleak, wet world. It wasn’t in the least bit bracing.
I walked up and down the high street, Lumley Road. At one end was an old-fashioned store called Allison’s, where you could buy the kinds of clothes your grandparents used to wear, and beyond it was a selection of charity shops selling the actual clothes your grandparents used to wear. Further along was a pub, the Stumble Inn. Outside it was a man who looked as if he had spent the last twenty-five years doing little else. Beyond this, downtown Skegness was just a couple of streets bearing the usual mix of pound shops, mobile phone dispensaries, betting shops and cafés. An establishment called Hydro Health and Beauty advertised an impressive array of treatments, most of which I didn’t know were desirable or even necessarily legal: glycolic peels, thread vein removal, Botox injections, dermal fillers, colonic hydrotherapy and more. Skegness was clearly a fullservice community. Call me fussy, but if I ever decide to turn my colon over to someone for sluicing, it won’t be at a beautician’s in Skegness, but in this, as in so much in life, I seemed to be in the minority because the shop was clearly prospering, unlike many of its neighbours.
And that pretty largely exhausted central Skegness. My initial reconnoitre completed, I turned north along the seafront and followed a sign pointing to Butlin’s holiday camp – a place I
had been quietly longing to see since my first summer in England a million years ago. It was all to do with several large boxes of Woman’s Own magazine.
When I started work at Holloway Sanatorium, you see, I was assigned to a place called Tuke Ward, high up in the garret level of the main building. It was there that I enjoyed the view across the cricket pitch that I mentioned earlier. The patients on Tuke Ward were a pleasant and tractable bunch and practised insanity with a certain elan. They existed in a permanent medicated serenity, requiring only the lightest supervision. They dressed themselves, by and large in the right clothes, were well mannered and obedient, and never late for a meal. They even made their own beds after a fashion.
Every morning after breakfast a charge nurse named Mr Jolly would blow through the ward like a north wind, rousing the inmates from chairs and toilet stalls, and dispatch them to their duties on gardening detail or to pass a few hours in light occupational therapy. Then he would clear off himself, to points unknown, not to return until teatime. ‘Don’t let anyone back on anything less than a stretcher,’ he would call to me upon departing, leaving me in sole charge for the next six or seven hours.
I had never been put in charge of anything in the adult world before, and I took the responsibility seriously, and spent the first morning marching around the ward like Captain Bligh patrolling the deck of the Bounty. But gradually it dawned on me that there wasn’t actually a great deal of prestige or reward in being in charge of forty empty beds and a communal bathroom, so I began to look for diversions. Tuke offered precious little. The day room contained a small selection of games and jigsaw puzzles, but the puzzles were either mixed up or conspicuously incomplete and the games required a second player. The ward’s numerous cupboards yielded nothing but cleaning materials, a stepladder, and an artificial Christmas tree with several branches missing. But then at the very back of one cupboard I found five or six boxes of Woman’s Own, a weekly magazine full of cheerful advice and enlightenment for the homemaker, representing a more or less complete set of issues from about 1950 to nearly the present, and these I hauled out one box at a time and carried to the ward office.
And so began my education into the life and culture of Great Britain. For the rest of that long and tranquil late summer and early autumn, I sat at Mr Jolly’s desk, feet perched on an open drawer, reaching from time to time into a box of Woman’s Owns, as if into a box of very special chocolates, for instruction into the ways of British life. I read every word with interest and profit. I read profiles of Hattie Jacques, Adam Faith, Douglas Bader, Tommy Steele and Alma Cogan, among many other people I had never heard of. I learned about the tears behind the smiles for Princess Margaret and how we were all going to have to knuckle down and get to grips with the vexing new decimal currency. I learned how Cheddar cheese could be made into an exciting treat by cutting it into cubes and sticking toothpicks into them. (From subsequent issues I learned that nearly all foods could be made exciting by sticking them with toothpicks.) I learned how to make my own swimming jacket and to build a garden pond. I learned that there wasn’t any edible substance that the British wouldn’t put into a jacket potato. I learned that it was possible to conquer the world and still bring home just one salad dressing.
Every single thing was new to me, every turned page a revelation. Here was a car with three wheels. How splendid! How wondrously ill advised! Here was a town where once a year the people chased a rolling cheese down a hill. Well, why not! Here was something you could eat called blancmange, a pastime called morris dancing, a drink called barley water. I learned more in that one summer than in all my previous summers put together.
It was while wallowing in this endless sea of fascination that I first heard the names Skegness and Billy Butlin and of the rise of the British holiday camp. Butlin grew up in Canada, but came to Britain as a young man and grew wealthy as the European agent for Dodgem cars. Through the Dodgem business, he met Harry Warner, a retired army captain, who owned an amusement park and restaurant at Hayling Island, on the Hampshire coast (not far from Bognor Regis). Butlin took over the running of the amusement park in 1928, then got the idea of the holiday camp – a place where people could come and spend a week in a giant compound beside the sea for an affordable all-inclusive price. On the site of a former turnip field just outside Skegness, he opened the first Butlin’s Holiday Camp in 1936. It had six hundred tiny chalets, and was a success from the start. Soon Butlin was opening camps across the country and others were following. Church groups, youth clubs and trade unions all opened camps. The British Union of Fascists had two. Butlin’s old associate Captain Warner opened several camps of his own, as did a businessman named Fred Pontin.
I can’t tell you how much this fascinated me. It seemed extraordinary to me – barely within the limits of credibility – that people paid to go to them. Campers were awakened by a loudspeaker in their room, which they could neither turn off nor turn down, summoned to meals in communal dining halls, harried into taking part in humiliating daily competitions, and ordered back to the chalets to be locked in for the night at 11 pm. Butlin had invented the prisoner-of-war camp as holiday, and, this being Britain, people loved it.
The chalets were tiny but had carpet, an electric light, running water and maid service. These were luxuries most customers had never before enjoyed, often even in their own homes. Outside there was one bathroom for every four campers. For an all-inclusive price of £3 a week, patrons got three meals a day, evening entertainment, which could range from ballroom dancing to plays by Shakespeare, and activities like swimming, archery, bowls and pony rides. It sounded pleasant enough, but I didn’t altogether understand the appeal until, just before this present trip, I read Holiday Camps in Twentieth-Century Britain by Sandra Trudgen Dawson, a historian at Northern Illinois University, where I learned that mostly what the patrons of holiday camps got was sex. ‘Many of the waitresses,’ she writes, ‘were prostitutes’ – giving new meaning to the slogan ‘Butlin’s – where you will meet the kind of people you’d like to meet’. Sex of a non-fiduciary nature was equally rampant. Employees bonked other employees and as many of the guests as they could. At some camps, Dawson reports, employees had a secret scoring system: five points for sleeping with a female guest, ten for a beauty contest winner, fifteen for the camp manager’s wife. Groups of unchaperoned teenagers came purely for the prospect of sex with other unchaperoned teenagers.
The post-war years were a golden age for the camps. At Skegness, Butlin’s boasted a monorail and its own small airport. By the early 1960s, two and a half million people a year were staying at holiday camps. Conventional seaside hotels and guesthouses watched helplessly as their business dwindled. In a somewhat desperate attempt to compete, a hotel proprietor named J. E. Cracknell came up with the idea of ‘Sel-Tels’ – short for self-service hotels, where there would be no staff to provide services, but guests would have free run of the facilities, provided they brought their own provisions. Mum could cook an evening meal in the hotel kitchen, then carry the food through to her waiting family in the dining room, and wash up afterwards, at no extra charge to the family. Not surprisingly, Sel-Tels never caught on. Neither did anything else independent hoteliers tried.
The holiday camp phenomenon seemed set to go on for ever. But just as it reached its peak it all began to fall apart. The advent of cheap package holidays meant people could go to the sunny Mediterranean for less than they paid to shiver for a week at Butlin’s. For older people and those with families, the teenage clientele became a disincentive because of their tendency to fight and vomit copiously. Under pressure to keep costs down, the holiday camps skimped on maintenance and grew increasingly threadbare. At one camp on the Isle of Wight – not a Butlin’s, it must be said – conditions were so appalling that four hundred holidaymakers revolted and refused to pay their bills. But all the camps got pretty shabby. Many years ago, when I was away working, my wife took our children to the Butlin’s at Pwllheli, in Wales. They were booked to s
tay for four nights, but by the second afternoon the children were begging to be taken somewhere where the sheets weren’t sticky and they weren’t mugged for their sweets by feral children wedged into a bend on the helter-skelter. One of my children swore that if you sat quietly in the bathroom, you could hear the fungus breeding.
Through the seventies and eighties the three main holiday companies, Butlin’s, Warner’s and Pontin’s, were sold over and over, to companies that should have known better. The Rank Organisation, Scottish and Newcastle Breweries, Coral Leisure and Grand Metropolitan Hotels all bought into the business in the belief that they could turn it around. They were all wrong. Most of the camps were shut. Just when it seemed that all the camps were doomed, a family firm called Bourne Leisure in Hemel Hempstead bought up what was left, smartened up and modernized three camps – in Skegness, Bognor Regis and Minehead – and appears to be doing pretty well out of it.