Billy Butlin spared no expense to give the people what they wanted in the hope that they would return again and again. He laid on top-class entertainment, and my parents went to the on-site theatres in the evening to see shows and performers ranging from the popular entertainers of the day such as Gracie Fields and Maurice Fogel to opera, ballet and Shakespeare. Butlin also arranged for top-class sports stars to coach the campers. One year when I was there, the cricket coach for the season was none other than Maurice Tate, the former Sussex fast bowler who had played in thirty-nine Test matches for England.
There was something special about a holiday at Butlin’s as for just one week of the year you could let your hair down in austerity-hit Britain and really let yourself go and forget the worries of everyday life.
We travelled by coach rather than train as it was easier for us. Also, we were able to introduce a bit of variety into this by catching a different coach each year. These included Grey Green, Classique, Fallowfield and Britten and one year a coach sadly misnamed Orange Luxury, which was probably the most uncomfortable ride we ever had the misfortune to suffer in an old boneshaker of a coach. We had to go in the school holidays, firstly because of John and later because of me as well, so it was very busy on the roads going down there and we always spent a good deal of our travelling time stuck in a mammoth traffic jam at the infamous Marks Tey roundabout. At that time, the A12 only contained one small piece of dual carriageway somewhere near Chelmsford. It was very wide and had trees growing in the middle. Now, of course, the whole of the A12 is dual carriageway from the Blackwall Tunnel in London to Great Yarmouth and the Marks Tey roundabout has been relegated to a fairly minor role.
When we arrived at the camp, we were greeted by the jolly redcoats – ‘Hi-de-hi!’ – and given our chalet key and badge at reception. The redcoats were mostly young hopeful entertainers, a number of whom went on to become very famous. I can remember seeing the young comedian Jack Douglas and the singer Michael Holliday there before they went on to bigger and better things.
You had to wear the badge to let you back into the camp past the gate security guard if you’d been out for the day. We were also allocated to one of the ‘houses’ of which there were two, Gloucester and Kent. The idea of being in a house was that every time you entered any of the laid-on sports and games, whether it was a team sport like football or cricket, or an individual event such as table tennis or snooker, you could win points for your house and at the end of the week the captain of the house with the most points would go up and receive the trophy for that week in a special ceremony on the last evening. But it wasn’t just sports that could win you points because this was also the era of the knobbly knees, glamorous grandmother, Tarzan lookalike and spaghetti-eating competitions. Often we would go and watch these events, though we didn’t ever take part. Dad wasn’t one for exerting any effort on holiday and used his week away for relaxing as much as possible. But he did like watching what he called ‘all-for-its’. These were the people who went in for absolutely everything: the football team, the cricket team, the swimming, the knobbly knees, the spaghetti eating. You name it, they were in it! They knew how to enjoy a holiday.
In the last year we were there, at breakfast on our final day, the waitress said to John, ‘Well done, you were very unlucky last night.’ Apparently, he had lost in the final of the table tennis competition. He was fifteen at the time but had said nothing about it to any of us. This was the first we knew he had even been in the competition, let alone reached the final.
I used to enjoy going in the free funfair, where my favourite ride was the ‘Peter Pan’ railway with its little engines wending their way round a twisty track. There was also a miniature railway that went all the way round the camp, which was another very enjoyable ride. I also have fond memories of the swimming pool with its sparkling blue, white and cream-coloured fountain, so cool on a hot sunny day as, of course, every day was in everyone’s childhood. It was at Butlin’s that I finally learnt to swim. I can remember one day I walked out to the middle of the pool at the shallow end and announced with great confidence that I would swim the half a width back. For what seemed like ages, I swam and swam with my arms and legs flailing about, getting absolutely nowhere. Although I had managed to stay afloat I had actually only moved forward about an inch.
Although our holidays at Butlin’s were normally very enjoyable, I did have one very bad day the last year we were there. I was eight at the time and Mum and Dad thought I should join the Beaver Club. This was a club that laid on many activities for young children during the day and gave the parents some peace and quiet, as well as time to themselves. On this particular morning, the Beaver Club had arranged a nature walk around the camp and in the immediate vicinity outside. My parents left me with the group and went off. I started out on the walk but I wasn’t very interested and really wanted to be with Mum and Dad, so I sneaked away and went looking for them on the beach. I walked all along the prom up to the main centre of Clacton, a distance of about one mile, looking down at the beach to see if I could see them, but I couldn’t so I walked all the way back again. By the time I returned to the camp, I was in tears because I thought I’d lost them. However, when I got back to the chalet they were there. Was I pleased to see them! They could both see how upset I was and Dad took a quick look at the day’s programme (Butlin’s used to issue a weekly programme with all the events for each day on it) and saw there was an ‘Indian Pow Wow’ just starting on the Playing Fields. This was another event aimed mainly at children, though this time parents could stay with them, so he said, ‘Come on, let’s go and see what this is all about.’ While walking there, I got stung by a wasp. More tears – it just wasn’t my day.
As well as the camp itself, there was Clacton as a town. It was a relatively new town, having been founded only eighty years previously by a man called Peter Bruff, whose sole intention had been to create a seaside resort on the Essex coast. Clacton therefore put everything into enticing visitors so that plenty of amusements and entertainments grew up over the years. Its closeness to London made it an ideal destination for holidaymakers, particularly from the East End of London, and in the 1950s, before the advent of cheap package holidays abroad, it was still one of the country’s leading seaside resorts.
The first attraction we came across after leaving the camp was the donkeys. There was a little grass enclosure where they took children for a ride round an elliptical course. My favourite donkey was Daisy and I always tried to get a ride on her whenever we went there. She wasn’t there one year and so I had to ride on Doris instead – it just wasn’t the same.
We often went and sat out on the beach, where Dad’s attempts at opening up the deck chairs would usually cause Mum and me great amusement as he never could get the hang of it. But once this ordeal (for him) was over, he’d sit back and relax with his knotted handkerchief on his head to keep off the sun. I loved making sandcastles and paddling in the sea, usually with Mum, who might even go in for a bit of swimming. I once asked Dad how sand was made and he replied over thousands of years the stones would be worn down by the sea into little grains of sand. Every time we went onto the beach after that, I kept picking up stones and asking him how long it would be before this particular stone became a grain of sand. Looking back, I expect this must have been very irritating but he bore it with good humour and always gave me an answer, ‘20,000 years’, ‘5,000 years’ or whatever he thought might be appropriate.
One thing he didn’t bear with good humour, though, was the time we decided to walk into town rather than go onto the beach. The way into the centre of Clacton along Marine Parade passed an old entertainment complex built in 1906 called ‘The Palace’. By the 1950s, it had been reduced to just an amusement arcade. Standing at its entrance was a machine called ‘Sidney Knows’, the upper half consisting of a typical ventriloquist’s dummy behind a glass case with a tray underneath on which you placed a penny and pushed it into the machine. On receiving the penny, Sidney wo
uld speak and the machine would cough out a card with his words printed on it, usually some trite little aphorism dressed up as a mystical prediction for the future.
One day I decided to try this out and placed my penny in the slot. Nothing. Not a dicky bird came from Sidney’s mouth and no card issued forth. I told Dad and he gave the machine a good shaking. Still no luck, so he decided to give it a good kicking. But this didn’t work either. And what was worse was that the penny was not returned. He then took hold of the tray and bent it upwards so it was unusable. Satisfied with that, he looked at me and said, ‘Well, at least no one else will be rooked by Sidney.’ He could, of course, have told someone in the arcade but Dad was a man of action and I think he got far more pleasure out of duffing up the machine than he would have done by just reporting it and getting his penny back.
The Pier was situated at the town end. Almost as good as Butlin’s itself, there were plenty of rides to go on, my favourite being the Steel Stella roller coaster, which was very exciting, especially the first drop when my heart leapt into my mouth and the breath seemed to be wrenched out of me. Looking at old footage of it now, it seems very tame compared to what you might find these days at places like Alton Towers or Thorpe Park. Another favourite ride was the Helter Skelter, known as the Cresta Run. The Pier was also the place to buy candy floss. It was an amazing experience to see the sugar being thrown into the machine and watch its transformation into the pink delicacy as the man wound it round and round a stick, then handed it over when it was finished. That candy floss sometimes seemed as big as me and was just about the most exquisite food a young boy could ever put into his mouth, where it would melt away, leaving its sticky remains all over my face.
Next to the Pier were three pleasure boats, The Viking Saga, Nemo II and The Jill, plying their trade sailing up and down just off the coast. We always went on at least one during our holiday. Nemo II was the best, as partway through the journey the captain would allow children to have a go on the wheel and steer the boat. One year I was doing this and I thought we were drifting perilously close to the land so I turned the wheel hard to get us back out to sea. When I explained what I’d done to Mum and Dad, Dad said with a straight face, ‘It was a good job you were there, we might have crashed otherwise.’ I felt very proud.
If we went into the centre of Clacton itself, my favourite place to go was one of the amusement arcades. The best game there was the horse racing game. Up to eighteen players could take part. On the wall in front was a large board displaying the racecourse with the eighteen horses. Each player had one of the numbered horses and sat in front of a board with holes in and a large ball. The players rolled their balls into the target holes, which were numbered from one to four – the number of the hole your ball rolled into was the number of paces your horse moved forwards. It could also miss altogether so your horse wouldn’t move at all. The winner won a prize, or you could stay on and try to win again. And the more wins you got, the bigger the prize.
Another favourite was the much simpler ‘Allwin’ machine, though actually hardly anyone won. This consisted of a fairly small case containing a spiral track and a number of cups, some with numbers on, on top of a wooden stand. The player had to insert a coin in the slot at the top right-hand side of the case; this released a ball inside the machine, which fell onto a spring-loaded hammer at the bottom right. Using all your skill and judgement, you then had to fire the ball by means of a trigger on the outside of the case. This shot the ball up and around the spiral tracks. If the ball fell into one of the cups with a number, you had to turn a knob at the bottom of the case and the machine then paid out the appropriate number of pennies. Most times the ball went right round the spiral and fell through a hole at the bottom, which won you nothing.
There were a number of other machines I liked, including the cranes, pinball machines and football games, which I played with John or Dad. The fact that there were so many machines led me to name the places ‘Machine Shops’ rather than amusement arcades, and that’s how they were always known in our family. On one occasion, we were there on early closing day (yes, even seaside towns had an early closing day at that time) and they were shutting up. The particular machine shop we were in, Marshall’s, had a large iron shutter, which they were already bringing down as we were walking towards the exit. I panicked, thinking we might be locked in, and ran for the exit. Mum and Dad continued at their normal pace. When they got outside, Dad said to me, ‘You’re a nice fellah, aren’t you? Running out and leaving us in there!’ It was only then that it suddenly struck me that things could have been worse and I might have got out but they could have been locked inside. Only an ice cream cornet could console me.
In town we looked round the shops, particularly Woolworths and Timothy White’s and Taylor’s, as well as a couple of small toy shops. It was very rare that I came back from a trip into Clacton without some small toy. In spite of the fact that we got all the food we could ever hope for in Butlin’s, we usually stopped off for morning or afternoon tea at one of the many cafés and restaurants; Davey’s and Cordy’s are two I remember in particular.
Walking back to the camp, we would suddenly be assailed by the delicious smell of doughnuts being made. This smell emanated from a small stall not far from the gates of Butlin’s itself. It was very difficult to avoid the temptation of buying some hot out of the fryer. Those holidays were non-stop eating!
After our sixth year in Clacton, we decided to be a bit more adventurous and go further afield for our holiday. We still went by coach and always to a holiday camp, though mostly to Warner’s rather than Butlin’s, starting first with Dovercourt Bay, the camp where the television sitcom Hi-de-Hi! was filmed. This time we went with Nan, Grandpa and Aunt Clara, but it wasn’t so good as it didn’t have anything like the facilities or the laid-on activities of Butlin’s.
Aunt Clara got herself into trouble with the rest of us, but especially Nan, when she volunteered to judge the children’s fancy dress competition. We all felt that the girl dressed as a television OMO commercial should win. She wore a large, box-shaped dress in the form of an OMO laundry packet with a television aerial sticking up from it. We all thought it was a very well-executed and original idea that must have taken quite a bit of ingenuity and work on the part of her parents. However, the winner was another girl just dressed in her pyjamas, representing the hit musical The Pajama Game, which had recently opened on stage in London.
When Clara returned to us from her seat with the judges, Nan said to her, ‘What the bloody hell was all that about? I hope you didn’t vote for that pyjama girl.’
Clara replied rather sheepishly that she had and Nan really went off on one – ‘She was just wearing her bloody pyjamas! What sort of bloody fancy dress is that? What about the OMO girl? She knocked your winner into a cocked hat.’
In the face of this onslaught, my aunt simply said, ‘You wouldn’t understand – it’s a modern thing.’
Of course, that didn’t help and Nan was off again: ‘Too right I don’t bloody understand,’ she bawled. ‘All that bloody work that girl and her parents must have put in and you give the prize to a girl who’s just wearing her normal bloody pyjamas!’
Aunt Clara didn’t comment further, but she and Nan refused to speak to each other for the rest of the day. There was a very frosty atmosphere and all over a bloody fancy dress competition, as Nan would no doubt have put it.
In the following two years, we went even further afield to the Warner camps of Corton in Suffolk, Ryde on the Isle of Wight and finally Seaton in faraway Devon. On these occasions, it was just Mum, Dad and me. After our experience with Nan and Aunt Clara in Dovercourt, we never went with them again and John was now too old to want to come on holiday with his parents any more. By the time I left Junior School, we had certainly got the bug for travelling, which was to intensify even more over the next few years once we’d bought our first car.
CHAPTER SEVEN
JELLY AND ICE CREAM
THE CORONATION
The earliest special day I can remember was the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. I was just four years old when King George VI died, and it is my earliest memory of a national news story. Mum and I were visiting Dad’s sister, Aunt Julie, Uncle Isaac and their four children, my cousins, Wendy, Rita, John and Carol, who also lived in a prefab, in Bethnal Green. I can still clearly remember Uncle Isaac coming home from work, throwing the door open to announce loudly, ‘The King is dead.’ Actually, looking back on it, I’m amazed I understood as he was Scottish and spoke with a very broad accent; most times I couldn’t understand a word he said. I always wondered how Aunt Julie managed. Obviously, on this occasion, he must have put on his poshest voice, owing to the momentous news he had to impart. On our way back to the bus stop to go home, I saw the evening newspaper placards (Star, News and Standard) all carrying the same news.
This, of course, was in February 1952. The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II didn’t take place until June 1953, by which time I was six. For weeks beforehand, preparations were being made and by the time the big day arrived our street was full of flags and pennants flying from every house and stuck up in every window. We had a couple of very large Union Jacks in our windows, together with some other bunting around the prefab.
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