Word: butlin
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...grimy workaday lives at Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham and London with little to look back on but dreary days in shabby, seaside boarding houses. There were some Britons, however, whose vacation memories would glow brighter through the long winter months ahead. Among these were the 21,000 returning from Butlin's five "Luxury Holiday Camps" in England, Scotland and Wales...
Rollicking Round. In 1938 the Holidays-with-Pay Act assured Britain's working men & women at least a week's paid vacation a year. It remained for William Edmund ("Billy") Butlin, a bustling, 48-year-old onetime carnival barker, to teach them how to use the new leisure. "I just think about what I'd like for a holiday," says South Africa-born Billy, "and then I give it to 'em." For the aspidistras of the traditional boarding house Billy has substituted neon lights and glass brick; for shoddy, scabrous hotels, rows of neat, bright cottages...
Arriving at Butlin's Filey Camp on the Yorkshire coast last fortnight with his wife Mary, their two children and some 400 other workers from the Midland's woolen-weaving city of Bradford, Alf Murgatroyd had little time to stand and wonder what next. Bustling all around him on the long, flat station platform was a group of bright young girls and athletic men in red blazers. Bursting with good cheer, they whisked Alf and his friends over green fields to a cluster of glass-sided buildings topped by a huge white tower bearing the word "Butlin...
Welcome. In one tiny chalet there was a double bed for Alf and Mary, a double-decker for the kids, a washstand and a bureau with a bouquet of flowers, but Alf, his Butlineer's badge pinned proudly to his breast, had little time to admire it all. Three gongs sounded and from overhead came a lady's voice, soft and refined as marshmallow: "This is Radio Butlin. Welcome, campers, it is now 12:45. In 15 minutes lunch will be served...
...other Britons, straining to shake off the psychological soot of war, were set for a whopping vacation binge. Brighton, finally rid of barbed wire and pillboxes, was triumphantly ready for the Easter trade. Yachts and motorboats, many of them veterans of Dunkirk, were fought over by sea-hungry landlubbers. Butlin's popular seaside camps, the workingman's country clubs, had more customers than they could handle. While most people wanted to get out of the city, some provincials wanted to get into it: Thomas Cook & Son offered an eight-guinea ($34) junket to London, complete with guided tour...