Sunday 16 October 2016

Skegness




What images are conjured up by the name of ‘Skegness’?

A queue of traffic stretching towards Lincolnshire’s most popular seaside resort?… More fish and chip shops than you can count on 6 hands?… the numerous caravan parks?… or Butlin’s holiday camp?

The railways made Skegness, just as they did so many other British seaside resorts. The familiar picture of a fisherman bounding along with the slogan ‘Skegness is so bracing!’ was originally a railway poster by John Hassall (1908) and has become an enduring emblem of the town.



Billy Butlin was the next individual that should take credit for Skegness’s tourism industry. After making his fortune by opening a chain of seaside amusement parks in resorts such as Mablethorpe, Hayling Island and Bognor, Butlin opened his first holiday camp at Skegness in Easter 1936, with admissions rising from 500 per week to 1,000 per week by June of that year (Butlin, 1982: 107). This holiday camp still survives whereas other Butlin camps at Filey and Clacton have folded.



The other most popular way to holiday in Skegness is in a caravan. As Walton argues, Skegness saw a decrease in ‘serviced bedspaces’ between 1950 and 1998, but ‘gained more than 15,000 caravans over the same period’, and saw a boom due to second holidays, and self-catering at the turn of the 80s and 90s. (Walton, 2000: 69).

Like Blackpool, Skegness appears to be a resort that acknowledges the working-class tastes of its consumers. The visitors guide usually has the resort’s nickname ‘Skeggy’ unpretentiously emblazoned across its front cover. Comic T-shirts refer to the town as 'Skeg Vegas'.
In summer 2016 I returned to Skegness after an interval of many years. I found that very little had changed since childhood. The sands were still reassuringly crowded with families, there were still plenty of places to buy fish and chips, and the delicious egg custards that aunty enjoyed were still bigger in the Skeggy bakeries than anywhere else on earth.






A Hillbilly shooting gallery that I’d last played in the 1990s was still here, firing water back at those sure-shots who managed to hit a target. One thing which did stand out as being new were the stalls openly selling alcoholic slush! This is a beverage which will cool you off and send you tipsy after sunbathing on the sands all day. 

Slush, fish and chips, donuts and the midday sun will force you to retire to your caravan for a much needed late afternoon nap... 






Further reading:

Butlin, Billy, 1982, The Billy Butlin Story, A Showman to the End, London: Robson Books.
Kerry, Matthew, 2012, The Holiday and British Film, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan


Walton, John K., 2000, The British Seaside, Holidays and Resorts in the Twentieth Century, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Sunday 2 October 2016

A Hop-Picking Holiday



I went on a day trip to pick some hops. Lovibonds' brewery in Henley-on-Thames have an annual hop-picking day in which customers are welcome to help with the harvest for a beer that will be available in a few months time.



It was great fun, and we sampled some fantastic beer on the day too. I was reminded of the Kent hop-picking holidays that existed in Britain before this process became mechanised. People from the east end of London, for example, took annual hop-picking holidays in Kent for many generations. 



A British-Pathé newsreel from September 1931 depicts (what it refers to in its title as) a ‘profit and pleasure’ holiday. The farm shown in the film employs about 2000 pickers. Whole families make the pilgrimage including mothers and young children, who in turn chaperone the babies. 

These families treat the work like ‘their annual holiday’, with one young woman commenting on the health benefits, rather than the drudgery of the job, exclaiming, “Oh what a difference to London – I’ve come down here to try and get that schoolgirl complexion”.










Further info:

Kerry, Matthew, 2012, The Holiday and British Film, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan


www.britishpathe.com