In August 1957, a 15-year-old boy, on holiday with his family at Butlin’s camp in Filey, Yorkshire, jumped on stage for the first time during the thrice-weekly morning audition for Butlin’s National Talent Contest. His brother Mike joined him in the Everly Brothers’ Bye Bye Love. Then Paul — surname: McCartney — performed a couple of Little Richard numbers solo.
Paul did not progress in this talent contest, but went back to Liverpool and joined John Lennon in his skiffle group, The Quarrymen. But Butlin’s provided a stage for another future Beatle: Ringo Starr also played several times at its camps with his band, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes.
Butlin’s holidays are imprinted on the memories of thousands. People flocked to the camps, attracted by the offer of a week’s holiday with family entertainment and myriad activities for the equivalent of a week’s pay. I went to Filey, aged five, in 1960, and to Pwllheli in north Wales (also frequented by the young Paul McCartney) in 1964, aged nine. My abiding memory of the latter holiday is mistakenly opening the door of the wrong chalet to discover a female holidaymaker in the steamy embrace of a male Butlin’s redcoat. Well, it was the Sixties.
“Our true intent is all for your delight,” said an early Butlin’s slogan — a quotation from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Later, Billy Butlin confessed he had learned it from the side of a fairground organ. William Heygate Edmund Colborne “Billy” Butlin was a remarkable showman. Born in South Africa in 1899, he had a turbulent childhood. After his parents separated, he came to England with his mother and spent years with his grandmother’s travelling fair. He followed his mother to Canada and served as a stretcher bearer in the Canadian army on the Western Front, after which he returned to England with £5 in his pocket.
Butlin spent some of it to acquire a hoopla stall in his uncle’s fair, where he discovered that sawing off the corners of hoopla blocks gave patrons a better chance of winning; while his profit margins were smaller than those of rivals, this was outweighed by extra custom. His success led him to create his own fairground empire, including an amusement park at Skegness, where he had an exclusive licence to import Dodgem cars to the UK for the first time.
All the while, he nurtured the idea of giving the UK a holiday camp like ones he had attended in Canada. He had visited Barry Island, in Wales, and felt sorry for families staying in drab guest houses with little to do. Butlin was not the first to create holiday camps in Britain, but he did it on a scale and with a panache that outshone all others. Ten camps were built in the three decades up to 1966, including one in Ireland and one in the Bahamas. In the Seventies and Eighties, Butlin’s also operated hotels, including one in Spain, and smaller holiday parks in England and France. It even ran a revolving restaurant in London’s Post Office Tower.
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