The Rise and Fall of Britain's Greatest Holiday Empire: Butlin's

In the spring of 1936, a former fairground barker who had landed in Liverpool fifteen years earlier with five pounds in his pocket took out a single advertisement in the Daily Express. It cost him five hundred pounds, roughly thirty-five thousand in today's money, and it made one promise so simple that nobody in Britain had ever thought to put it in print. A week's holiday for a week's wage. Full board. Four meals a day. Entertainment included. Ten thousand bookings came back. He had built accommodation for five hundred people. By the end of that first season he had squeezed in two thousand, and he was turning away three applicants out of every four. That was Skegness. Over the next thirty years the same man built nine holiday camps across Britain, Ireland and the Caribbean, hosted more than a million people a year, invented an entire profession in a red blazer, was knighted by the Queen, and sold the whole operation for forty-three million pounds. Today, of those nine camps, three are still standing. The rest are housing estates, caravan parks, an accommodation centre for asylum seekers, and a stretch of Yorkshire clifftop where the largest holiday camp in Europe was demolished so completely that the boating lake was filled in and grassed over. #Butlins #BritishHistory #HolidayCamps