Metadata
WORK ID: YFA 1504 (Master Record)
| Title | Year | Date |
| BUTLINS, SKEGNESS | 1957 | 1957-01-01 |
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Details
Original Format: 16mm Colour: Black & White / Colour Sound: Silent Duration: 31 mins 20 secs Subject: Fashions Family Life |
| Summary This is a film covering two separate weeks at Butlins Holiday Camp at Skegness, showing the various events, games and competitions. |
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Description
This is a film covering two separate weeks at Butlins Holiday Camp at Skegness, showing the various events, games and competitions.
The film begins with a group of holidaymakers lined up in a game following the movements of women staff members. They are dressed in white gym gear and redcoats, and they are watched by other holidaymakers. This is followed by a man doing a comic dance to the accompaniment of an accordion player and holidaymakers dancing in a line. A woman is lowered over a...
This is a film covering two separate weeks at Butlins Holiday Camp at Skegness, showing the various events, games and competitions.
The film begins with a group of holidaymakers lined up in a game following the movements of women staff members. They are dressed in white gym gear and redcoats, and they are watched by other holidaymakers. This is followed by a man doing a comic dance to the accompaniment of an accordion player and holidaymakers dancing in a line. A woman is lowered over a balcony of a hall where there is a beauty contest. Women line up in front of a table of judges, first clothed and then in bathing costumes. A man shows off his knobbly knees, followed by a children’s beauty contest. There is then a boy’s ‘muscles’ competition, with the boys puffing out their chests. The winners of the girl’s and boy’s competitions are placed together on the stand in front of everyone.
The film switches to a children’s group where some girls are knocking different shaped wooden blocks into a holes, supervised by a nurse. At the Infant Feeding Centre, the cooks are dishing out bowls of food for the toddlers. Some couples go rowing on a lake, and there is a boat race with the rowing boats being used as canoes. Two men get thrown in and start splashing about, followed by more onlookers getting thrown in.
Next comes a children’s fancy dress competition, with one dressed as a ‘walkie-talkie doll’ still in her box. One by one they get up onto a platform to display their costumes. The film returns to the women’s beauty competition grouped together by area, with one group behind a ‘York’ banner. The winner poses with a bouquet. The holidaymakers then take part in a parade around the camp, many singing and dancing. A large group poses for the camera, waving and laughing. There is then another beauty competition, this time outdoors next to the swimming pool. This is followed by a men’s knobbly knees competition, with women judges. Then another children’s beauty contest and another boy’s ‘muscles’ competition, again with the winners of the girl’s and boy’s competitions placed together on the stand in front of everyone.
Back again to the boating lake, and more splashing about, and another children’s fancy dress competition, one of them made up as a ‘golliwog’. The film switches to a skating rink, and one young woman in particular who keeps falling over. Then there is a diving competition in the swimming pool, with some of it filmed in slow motion and run backwards. The film returns to the beauty contest and the contestants parading behind their area banners, with a woman from York winning. She poses for various pictures and for the cine camera wearing her pennant for ‘Butlins Holiday Camp Princess of the Week’. With this, the film comes to a close.
Context
This film was made by photographer Malcolm Trousdale, who worked for Butlins at Skegness for about four years in the late 1950s. He was the press photographer, filmmaker and cinema projectionist. He would film the holidaymakers during the week and show an edited film of their antics on a Friday evening before they left. The film shows were always well attended and highly enjoyed. The whole idea sits somewhere between the film shows of ordinary folk in the very early days of films, and the...
This film was made by photographer Malcolm Trousdale, who worked for Butlins at Skegness for about four years in the late 1950s. He was the press photographer, filmmaker and cinema projectionist. He would film the holidaymakers during the week and show an edited film of their antics on a Friday evening before they left. The film shows were always well attended and highly enjoyed. The whole idea sits somewhere between the film shows of ordinary folk in the very early days of films, and the reality TV of recent times. As one can imagine, Malcolm notes that the film shows produced great hilarity for the communal audience. He remembers 1957 as a year of flooding, and as the year that Olympic swimmer Julie Hoyle opened the new glass walled indoor pool.
And talking of swimming, Billy Butlin funded the cross channel swim in the 1950s between Cap Gris Nez and Folkestone, when Egyptian swimmers were dominant. The year before this film, in 1956, when Nasser, the Egyptian President, caused a crisis by seizing back the Suez Canal in 1956, Billy Butlin banned Egyptian swimmers from competing in his international cross-Channel race, declaring: “They’ve got the Suez Canal, I’m not going to let them have the English Channel.” Billy Butlin was a classic rag-to-riches self-made millionaire (and like many others, later become a Jersey-based tax exile). Coming from a family that had a touring fair, Butlin started out in the same business, first arriving in Skegness in 1923 as a travelling showman, with his hoopla stalls, and founding his first static fairground there, to the south side of the pier (known as ‘the jungle’), in 1927; becoming an amusement park in 1929. This was also the site of the first dodgems, introduced to this country from the US by Billy Butlin in 1928. Noticing that many holidaymakers booked into local hotels, and having seen a Canadian holiday camp, he introduced accommodation to the amusement park. Thus it was that the camp at Skegness was the first one opened by Billy Butlin, on 11th April 1936, built on 200 acres of a former turnip field. But although we can be eternally grateful for Butlin bringing over the dodgems, the homogenisation and branding that he also introduced from the North American example has its detractors, such as Travis Elborough: “his amusement parks and camps were the pinnacle of a transatlantic corporatisation of leisure.” (References, p. 148) With an initial capacity of 500 holiday makers, this was soon increased to around 1,200, then 2,000 and eventually accommodating close to 10,000. The idea was that it would be a ‘luxury’ holiday camp that working people could afford. A week’s stay, with three meals a day and free entertainment, started from 35 shillings (£1.75) a week. In today’s money (December 2011), this would be £92.20, according to the retail price index. In 1936 average earnings were around £2.94. So, it can be seen to be significantly cheaper, relatively, to a comparable holiday today. The slogan of the day was, ‘a week's holiday for a week's pay’. During the war the camp was taken over by the Royal Navy, as was the case with most holiday camps – and as a result was on the receiving end of 52 Luftwaffe bombs. Some 250,000 navy personnel passed through during the war years, including one David Jacobs of Jukebox Jury fame. Billy Butlin received an MBE for loaning out his camps, ‘wartime services’. According to the excellent h2g2 website, the camp was refurbished for its re-opening on 11 May, 1946, just six weeks after the Navy had moved out. There wasn’t that much development after this before the 1960s, other than the swimming pool. The 1960s saw several developments, including a chairlift and a monorail, and the greater introduction of a corporate architectural style across all the Butlin’s camps. By the 1960s there were over a hundred registered holiday camps in the UK, and although Butlins had competition in Harry Warner and Fred Pontin, the combined attendance of all the other camps didn’t match the one million plus holiday makers that headed to Butlins every year. Holiday camps were favourite places for entertainers, and among the many acts that have played at Skegness are Laurel and Hardy and the great Suzi Quatro. It was also here, in 1962, that Ringo Starr, at the time playing there for the season with his group Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, met John Lennon and Paul McCartney and was invited to join their band. What the film highlights is the fun that everyone has – albeit at the price of reinforcing many stereotypes! Apparently, at first the holidaymakers seemed at a loss to know how to enjoy themselves or mix with each other, and so Billy Butlin got one of the building engineers, Norman Bradford a natural comedian, to help break the ice. His success led to the setting up of the Redcoats– memorialised in the TV series Hi-de-hi. The whole set up has been described as ‘organised merriment’, inventing such entertainment as the ‘Glamorous Granny' and ‘Knobbly Knees' competitions. All the dressing up has resulted in Butlins having the second largest costume department in the UK (behind the BBC). The crazy games and competitions could be equally enjoyable for the Redcoats: one ex-Redcoat from Skeggie (as it is affectionately known), ‘skegred Andy’, notes on the BygoneButlins website that he took the role of a "Capt. Blood". He also recalls that holidaymakers were assigned to one of six Houses: Kent, Connaught, Windsor, Gloucester, Warwick and Edinburgh, depending on which dining hall you ate in. Each house had a committee of campers and a Redcoat as House Captain. He goes on to recount that, “House points were given to every Competition and Tournament and at the end of the week the Winning House won the Shield on a Friday Prize giving in the Empress Ballroom, when all competition winners won a Butlin cup, medal and a prize. . . . When the winner of the Holiday Princess was announced there used to be a rush of about 20 male Redcoats or more to escort her, lots of fun.” We can also thank the Redcoat’s for providing us with such wonderful entertainers as Des O'Connor, Jimmy Tarbuck, Michael Barrymore and Cliff Richard (but then they did also give us the great Dave Allen). For more on the background to holiday camps in general, see the Context for Cayton NALGO Holiday Camp (1950), and for Butlins in particular, see the Context for Butlins - Filey (1975). Frank Richards used Butlins at Skeggie as the setting for his book Billy Bunter at Butlins, published in 1961; with one edition having a dustjacket showing Billy Bunter – a coincidently similar name? – enjoying the swimming pool, and another taking advantage of the copious food! Today, with the camp still going strong, food is no longer thrown in as part of the price – although there is a dining plan for children. Out of season the camps often host music festivals, including the innovative All Tomorrow's Parties at Minehead (formerly at Pontins, Camber Sands). In a period of severe hardship for many, the camp may well have a bright future. Skegness itself has become a byword for the English seaside resort, with, apparently, Billy Butlin choosing as the epitaph on his gravestone the slogan from a well-known poster: 'Skegness is so bracing'. References Sylvia Endacott and Shirley Lewis, Butlin's: 75 Years of Fun!, The History Press, 2011. David Kynaston, Family Britain: 1951-57, Bloomsbury, London, 2009. Sarah Jane Daniels, Remember Filey Butlins, reliving eight decades of history through the memories of former staff and holidaymakers, East Riding of Yorkshire Council, 2006 Travis Elborough, Wish you were here: England on Sea, Sceptre, 2010. Butlins memories, Skegness Holiday Camps BygoneButlins h2g2: Butlin's Holiday Camps - a British Institution |
