The English: A Social History, 1066–1945 (Text Only)

by Christopher Hibbert

  Ladies dressed themselves in heavy serge with elbow-length sleeves and baggy bloomers concealed by thick, full skirts. In these they stepped from their bathing-machines and, usually concealed from the beach by a hood, they were helped down into the water by male or female dippers, the women – usually fat and frequently drunk – being clothed in waterproof wrappings and a large bonnet.

  A little table on which lay a great book stood within a railing enclosing all the bathing-machines [a Scottish lady recalled of holidays at Ramsgate].

  Each party, on entering the gate of this enclosure, set their names down in the book, and in their turn were conducted to a bathing-machine, roomy boxes upon wheels, shaded at one end by a large canvas hood that reached the water when the horse at the other end had proceeded with it to a sufficient depth; the driver then turned his carriage round with the hood to the sea, and, unhinging his traces, went in search of another fare, leaving the bathers to the care of a woman in a blue flannel jacket and petticoat and a straw bonnet, who soon waded into view from another machine, and lifting up the canvas shade stood ready to assist in the fearful plunge. The shock of a dip was always agony.19

  Ladies’ bathing places were set widely apart from the men’s; and at Southport, where they were separated by at least 100 yards, pleasure boats were prohibited on pain of a fine of 5s from approaching within thirty yards of the female area. The beaches, however, were lined with voyeurs with telescopes and opera glasses and ‘no more sense of decency than so many South Sea islanders’. At Brighton, before the advent of male bathing costumes, ladies were said to behave with an ‘almost heathen indecency’, sitting on their camp stools and watching the men emerge from the sea to climb naked up the steps of the machines.20 Dr A. B. Granville, author of The Spas of England and Principal Sea-Bathing Places, considered it a stain upon the gentility of Brighton that men should be permitted thus to expose themselves.

  Others considered it far more disgraceful that the accommodation and food provided at seaside resorts was so execrable. Most people stayed in furnished apartments rather than hotels or boarding-houses, but they all seemed to have been almost equally uncomfortable. Jane Carlyle, staying at a hotel in Ryde reputed to be the most expensive in Europe, found that ‘the cream was blue milk, the butter tasted of straw and the “cold fowl” was a lukewarm one and was as tough as leather’. She moved out into lodgings only to be plagued by bugs. Nathaniel Hawthorne also found that because a hotel was expensive it was not necessarily good. He was asked to pay like a nabob but was served with ‘joints, joints, joints, sometimes perhaps a meat pie which weights upon your conscience, with the idea that you have eaten the scraps of other people’s dinners’. ‘The dinner was very bad,’ wrote a guest at a hotel in Brighton; ‘a sprawling bit of bacon upon a bed of greens; two gigantic antediluvian fowls … a brace of soles that perished from original inability to flounder into the Ark, and the fossil remains of a dead sirloin of beef.’21

  At Blackpool it was the usual practice for visitors to rent anything from a whole house to a single bedroom from a landlady who undertook to cook the food which the visitors themselves brought in. Overcrowding was commonplace, and three or four people were often crammed into a single bed. ‘They used to be content so long as they were at Blackpool,’ said one old resident, ‘if they were crammed a dozen in a bed, but now they grumble if there’s only five.’ Another resident, a landlady perhaps letting her imagination run away with her, observed in 1898, ‘They will not be packed together as they used to be in Blackpool, from eleven to nineteen in a bedroom.’22

  Hundreds of thousands of visitors avoided this discomfort by coming down just for the day. Cheap day-tickets had been offered on the Liverpool and Manchester line as early as 1830; in 1840 the Sunday Schools of Manchester organized an excursion for 40,000 children on the Leeds and Manchester Railway; and in 1841 Thomas Cook, a young wood-turner and Secretary of the South Midland Temperance Association, organized an excursion from Leicester to a temperance demonstration at Loughborough. The fare was is return and the ticket included tea, ham sandwiches, dancing, cricket and other games.

  On the day appointed [Thomas Cook recalled] about five hundred passengers filled some twenty or twenty-five open carriages – they were called ‘tubs’ in those days – and the party rode the enormous distance of eleven miles … We carried music, and music met us at the Loughborough station. The people crowded the streets, filled windows, covered the housetops and cheered all along the line … All went off in the best style and in perfect safety we returned to Leicester; and thus was struck the keynote of my excursions.23

  Soon afterwards outings for workers began to be organized by employers, some of whom – in nearly all cases those employing clerks and shop assistants – also started the practice of granting holidays with pay. For all workers there were more official holidays after the Bank Holiday Act of 1871 which added to the existing national holidays at Christmas, Good Fridays and Sundays, extra holidays on Boxing Day, Easter Monday, Whit Monday and the first Monday in August. At first the observance of these new holidays was far from general; but within a year the August Bank Holiday, according to The Times, had already acquired ‘at least as decisive a popular acceptance as the old traditional Holydays. Last year … people scarcely realized their opportunity. But yesterday [the August Bank Holiday of 1872] was all but universally observed.’24

  A decade or so later the practice of granting paid holidays began to spread to firms employing manual workers. ‘A great proportion’ of employees on the London and North Western Railway, for example, received a week’s holiday with pay in 1890. But this, it was emphasized, was not a right but a reward for good conduct. And it was not until the next century that holidays with pay became more general. Even so, only 1.5 million workers were enjoying holidays with pay in 1925 when a Bill for compulsory annual paid holidays was introduced into Parliament without success; and in 1938, when the Holidays with Pay Act was passed, less than half the national workforce earning £250 a year or less was receiving the benefits the Act proposed. Yet the total number of families going away on holiday had risen dramatically. In the 1880s, when the average annual earnings of adult male manual workers had been about £60 a year, there had been little to spare in most families for holidays. But since then wages had risen and prices had fallen, so that by 1902 Charles Booth could write that going on holiday was ‘one of the most remarkable changes in habits in the last ten years’.25 In 1934, according to The New Survey of London Life and Labour, about half the work people in the capital were taking holidays away from home; and in 1937 the total number of holiday-makers away from home for a week or more was estimated to be 15 million.26

  The holiday resorts grew rapidly to cope with the vastly increased summer trade. Blackpool, which was said to be able to accommodate half a million people in a single night and had 7 million visitors a year, had a resident population of over 100,000 in 1931. Brighton’s population had risen to 147,000, Southend’s to 120,000, Bournemouth’s to 116,000, Southport’s to 78,000, Hastings’s to 65,000 and Eastbourne’s to 57,000. The amenities provided by most resorts had much improved and, in many, large sums had been spent in providing swimming pools, carparks, bowling greens, dance-halls, tennis courts and such buildings as Hastings’s White Rock Pavilion which was opened in 1927 at a cost of £100,000.27

  The accommodation available at the seaside was also much more comfortable, and, except in the large hotels, not expensive. At Eastbourne board residence ranged from £210s to three guineas a week (£2 a week in the winter);28 and at Blackpool, where most landladies now provided food themselves, the difference between the minimum rates for apartments and full board was usually a modest 3s 6d. Some landladies, however, clung to the old method. One of these was Mrs Cavanagh whose boarding house in Vance Road in the 1930s was fondly remembered by one of her regular guests:

  We used to do our own buying in when we got there and we had a shelf in a cupboard … and each day we would go and buy our own m
eat or fish for the day and Mrs Cavanagh did all the cooking and everything was lovely. Mr Cavanagh was in the background doing all the washing up etc. We went each year and she had something altered in the house each time. We still went after we were married and it cost us 28s per week for a double bed and all the cooking … We went thirteen years running three times a year, it was like home from home. I remember one very wet day and Mrs Cavanagh said you all have no need to go out at all. After dinner was cleared she brought out the cards, and we were all having such a good time when who should come in but the landlady, a white bucket filled with ice cream and wafers to go with it, she had been to Pablo’s round the corner and had it filled. She was a grand person and there was always tears as we had to leave. My husband was the only chap she would give a pint pot of tea to, all the others had to have cups.29

  Even in the more select resorts the social atmosphere was now much more relaxed, with bands playing on Sundays, motor omnibuses running and holiday-makers swimming. Mixed bathing was now universally permitted – it had been allowed at Bexhill as early as 1902 – and tents or cabins on the beach had replaced bathing-machines; in most places it was customary for bathers to change in their rooms and then ‘cover up’ for the walk to the beach – ‘mackintosh bathing’, it was called.

  We used to book up for a week in Southend at a bed and breakfast [one old person recalled of holidays in the 1930s]. You’d have your breakfast and then go out all day. We’d have cockles and mussels with salt and vinegar for tuppence a plate. There’d be stalls all along the road where you could get a basin of eels, winkles or shrimps. The Italians used to make their own ‘Hokey-Pokey’ [ice-cream]. You’d take a cup to their stall and they’d ask you what flavour you wanted. You’d say ‘Top her up, Jack’ if they stopped too soon. They would keep it cool in a can surrounded by ice … For us Londoners, Southend was the place. If you were a bit richer it was Margate and Ramsgate. If you were very rich you could go to Bournemouth. We never thought of going to places like Spain or Portugal. The only time we heard about such places was when a war was on.30

  Some richer families went on holidays, parents and children together. Esther Stokes, a girl from an upper-middle-class Roman Catholic family, went every year with her mother and father to Cornwall. They travelled by train from Paddington in a coach which they had to themselves. ‘All the family used to be in the front part of this coach and the maids used to be in the back,’ she recalled. ‘We were very excited about the journey for two reasons, one was that we always had tongue sandwiches … and the other was it was the only time we saw the maids without caps … All the maids went with us and the caretakers would move into the London house.’31

  In other families the parents stayed in a hotel with the older children while the younger ones stayed in a boarding-house with their nanny. But in some, like that of Joan Poynder, the daughter of a baronet, ‘parents didn’t have holidays in that sort of way. They went on shooting parties or stayed with friends or something.32

  Many families less well off stayed in holiday camps. One of the earliest of these was Cunningham’s Young Men’s Holiday Camp which had been established towards the end of the nineteenth century and attracted about 50,000 visitors a year to its site at Douglas on the Isle of Man. Here the campers, all of them men, had to sign a pledge not to drink alcohol during their holiday, nor to use improper language. They slept in candle-lit tents and were expected to join in team-games and communal sing-songs. The camp remained in business, still teetotal and still banning women, until its sale in 1945.33

  This was not the kind of holiday camp that William Butlin, a travelling showman born in South Africa, envisaged when on holiday in Wales in the early 1920s. He was ‘astounded at the way the guests were treated’ in the small boarding-house at Barry where he was staying. They were required to leave after breakfast and were ‘not made welcome again until dinner in the evening’. ‘Watching these unhappy holiday makers [he] thought, “What they need is a place where there are things to do when it rains”.’34

  Some years later Butlin bought a sugar-beet field for £300 three miles from Skegness where the first Butlin’s Holiday Camp opened in 1936, the guests paying 35s to £3 a day, according to the time of the season, for accommodation, three meals a day and free entertainment. The next year a second Butlin’s camp was built at Clacton, and ‘Butlin Special’ trains were run to take campers there. Soon there were further Butlin’s camps at Filey and Pwllheli; and by 1939 there were as many as 200 holiday camps in all in the country with rooms for 30,000 people a week. The Butlin camps alone had 100,000 guests that year.

  J. A. R. Pimlott, author of The Englishman’s Holiday, described a holiday at the Clacton holiday camp where a camp commandant was assisted by house captains and ‘“Red coats”, so called from their blazers, whose main job is to organize the entertainments’. In addition to these supervisors there were two orchestras

  and other full-time entertainers including the Frogmen (under-water swimmers), a theatre organist, ‘Uncle Mac’ (entertaining the ‘Kiddies’), and a camp cartoonist. The chief radio announcer and his assistants are responsible for Radio Butlin which has an important role in the whole organization. There are a number of other entertainers, apart from visiting artists, and a whole host of employees are engaged upon catering, cleaning, maintenance and administration … Discipline does not present a serious problem. On the whole the campers are well contented, but at the least sign of rowdiness or other misconduct a firm hand is applied, and where necessary the camper’s money is returned and he is told to leave.

  There were games and coach trips, swimming and dancing competitions and Organized ambles’, campers’ concerts, ‘grand carnivals’ with decorated motor-cars and bicycles, ‘Kiddies’ Fun’, parades of ‘Holiday Lovelies’, fancy-dress galas and ‘Toddlers’ Tea Times’. There were billiard rooms, shops, tennis courts, bowling greens, a gymnasium, a Palm Court tea-lounge, a Jolly Roger bar, a Smugglers’ Cave Bar and a sick bay. On Sundays divine service was held in the ballroom. The campers slept in chalets. The bathrooms and lavatories were labelled ‘Lads’ and ‘Lassies’. Meals were eaten in two dining-halls accommodating over 600 people at a time at two sittings.35

  Since nearly all the entertainments were free, campers would not spend much more than £5 or £6 each on a week’s stay (children up to ten years old were half price). Yet there were scores of thousands of families for whom such prices were far beyond their means; and many of them went hop-picking in Kent where the conditions in which they lived were often appalling but not much worse than they were used to at home. ‘It wasn’t a bad life,’ wrote George Orwell who went hop-picking himself in the early 1930s. ‘But what with standing all day, sleeping rough and getting my hands cut to bits, I felt a wreck at the end of it. It was humiliating to see that most of the people there looked on it as a holiday…. In fact it is because hopping is regarded as a holiday that the pickers will take such starvation wages.’36

  Yet there were those who regarded hop-picking not just as a holiday but as a most enjoyable one. ‘It was a marvellous holiday,’ one old former hop-picker recalled. ‘And you were always pleased because you were getting paid for it at the same time.’

  A hop-picking holiday gave you health [was another verdict]. The fumes from the hops did you a lot of good. That’s why a lot of people went. I’d take the children with me, cooking implements and the necessary food. Parents hid their children under the train seats to avoid paying for them. It wasn’t a genteel holiday … You’d get up at about six in the morning and see people frying egg and bacon on the embers. We’d pick hops from seven in the morning until six in the evening.37

  Most children did not much enjoy themselves, though:

  I went to the hop-fields once, because the family always went, but it was terrible really. We had to sit or lie of a night-time in a big barn. One night they started saying there was earwigs around. I stayed awake all night. If I’d had cotton wool I’d have put it in my ears, but I
hadn’t, so I sat up all night with my hands over my ears.38

  60 Wars and Aftermaths

  A few days after war was declared in August 1914 the first recruiting appeal appeared:

  YOUR KING AND COUNTRY NEED YOU

  A CALL TO ARMS

  An addition of 10,000 men to his Majesty’s Regular Army is immediately necessary in the present grave National Emergency. Lord Kitchener [the Secretary for War] is confident that this appeal will be at once responded to by all who have the safety of our Empire at heart.1

  The response was overwhelming. Recruiting offices were at once crowded with volunteers. By the end of the next month 750,000 men had joined up; by the end of the year over a million. In January 1918 the British Army numbered 4.4 million men; and although conscription had been introduced in 1916, the proportion of conscripted soldiers was only about a third of the total mobilized.2 Workers were as eager to join as young men from the universities and public schools; and, while at first one or two voices were raised in protest, these were soon drowned by the general enthusiasm. ‘When one sees young men idling in the lanes on Sunday,’ Arnold Bennett, once a pacifist, recorded in his journal, ‘one thinks: “Why are they not at war?” All one’s pacific ideas have been rudely disturbed. One is becoming militarist.’ There were, indeed, very few people in the country who did not wholeheartedly support the war which was, in H. G. Wells’s phrase, ‘The War that Will End War’.3