Kiss me Quick! The rise and fall of the English seaside holiday

Victorian ladies enjoying the beach

It’s that time of year again. The Summer Bank Holiday has passed, September is with us and the kids will shortly be back at school. As if on cue, the temperature across the UK has dropped from the freakish highs we had last weekend to something much more typical for the time of year. One might almost say that autumn is in the air. There is that sense of the passing of another summer, the beginning of that descent towards the turn of the year’s wheel, as the days start to shorten, the birds start to leave us and a certain melancholy begins to affect those among us who are prone to that certain melancholy. As Sandy Denny so affectingly asked, who knows where the time goes?

As children of course the melancholy is all the keener as the long summer holidays are over and we are heading back to school, but adults are not unaffected. It is striking how many holiday advertisements we see at this time of year. At no time are we more likely to start thinking about next year’s holiday than that sad time at the end of this year’s, when we are faced with that grim four-month slog of uninterrupted work until the next break at Christmas.

The whole idea of going away on holiday is of course a relatively recent one. For the vast majority of people across the span of human history, getting away to relax or indulge in leisure pursuits would have been a luxury not to be dreamed of. Whether you were a medieval or early modern peasant or a factory worker of the early industrial age you laboured every day except possibly holy days – where of course our word holiday originates – you tried to stay alive and considered that you had done well if that modest aim was successfully met. The idea of travel for its own sake was one exclusively for the very rich, and its earliest expression was probably the Grand Tour of the eighteenth century, when British and other northern European aristocrats with unlimited funds would spend literally years visiting places associated with the high culture of the Classical word and the Renaissance; part tourism and part education.

For everyone else there were three problems with the idea of travelling, even if it had occurred to them to do so: They hadn’t the money, they hadn’t the time, and mostly they hadn’t the means to actually get anywhere very far away. Few before recent times were able to save any substantial amount of wealth from their work and for those that did travel would not have been seen as a sane way to spend it. If you were that relatively rare thing, an upwardly mobile medieval peasant, for example, acquiring more land or more substantial accommodation would both have been seen as a better way to build upon your success and display your new status than some frivolous, pointless and potentially hazardous trip somewhere. Few outside the wealthier families were familiar with the concept of leisure time. For most folk in Britain and elsewhere in northern Europe the only days when there was no work would have been church holidays or Saints days or, after the Reformation, just Sundays. You worked six days every week and even if you had the energy to do anything on Sunday there were religious prohibitions against doing much. When the Industrial Revolution came along and long working hours in factories became the norm Sunday was spent by many people ‘sleeping it off’, catching the rest impossible during the rest of the week.

And of course for most people there was no easy way to cover large distances. To get from one town to another you could sometimes get a stagecoach but such things were slow and expensive. Even within the cities public transport was slow to arrive, with horse-drawn omnibuses and trams not appearing until the second half of the nineteenth century. For most people outside of the rich, the only available form of transport down the ages has been by foot.

So the invention of the holiday was a gradual one and the result broadly of two developments, the emergence of reasonably cheap public transport in the form of the railways and, later, the expansion of non-working time with public holidays and paid and unpaid time off work.

The expansion of the railways in England was a phenomenon of the 1840’s. At the start of the decade railway coverage was patchy and limited to a few major routes, but by the early 1850’s nearly every town of any size had at least one connection and sometimes several. In addition, the Railway Regulation Act of 1844 stipulated that all rail companies must provide, on every line, at least one train a day in both directions stopping at every station with a fare of a penny a mile and an average speed no less than 12 miles per hour. Further, the passengers using this ‘third-class’ service should be protected from the weather and provided with seats as opposed to being expected to stand in open goods wagons. This was not an altruistic measure – it was hoped that it would make it easier for unemployed workers to travel in search of work – and it was unpopular with the train companies, who feared they would lose money as second class passengers switched to the cheaper and now-bearable third-class provision. For this reason the service was sometimes a token one, with the minimum allowed number of daily journeys being scheduled for inconvenient times to discourage passengers; they became known as Parliamentary Trains and are referenced in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado (where we also learn that some forms of railway carriage vandalism have been around for perhaps longer than we may realise) :

The idiot who, in railway carriages Scribbles on window-panes We only suffer To ride on a buffer On Parliamentary trains.

Despite the reluctance of the train companies to abide by the spirit of the law, it was now by law possible to travel significant distances for lower prices than previously, and this was a step in the democratisation of travel that was not lost on contemporaries.

Third class rail travel before the 1844 act - nearly as bad as Economy Class air travel today?

Meanwhile, the working classes gradually started to gain time, paid or otherwise, away from the loom or the office stool. The Bank Holiday Act of 1871 created the first official public (Bank) Holidays in the UK; in England this was Easter Monday, Whit Monday (last Monday in May), first Monday in August and Boxing Day (Good Friday and Christmas Day already being recognised as common law holidays). The Act was introduced by the Liberal MP Sir John Lubbock, a typically Victorian mix of politician, businessman, philanthropist and scientist (it was he who coined the names ‘palaeolithic’ and ‘neolithic’ to describe the Old and New Stone Ages respectively), and the effect was so gratifying that some took to calling the new holidays St Lubbocks Days for a while. (Remarkably, New Years Day didn’t become a bank holiday in England until 1974, at the same time Boxing Day became a holiday in Scotland) At the same time some groups of workers were starting to get Saturday afternoons off, and hence the weekend was born. With time on their hands and inexpensive transport available it was not so difficult for the newly emancipated workers to descend upon the seaside towns such as Margate, Blackpool and Brighton, which saw the start of a long boom period as holiday destinations for the working class.

Blackpool in its Victorian heyday

In the mill towns of the north the period saw the phenomenon known as the Wakes Week, initially a shutdown by the mill owners for maintenance of machinery, where all the mills of a particular town would shut for a full week; the workers started the practice of paying in for the rest of the year to accumulate a fund that would allow them to take the week as holiday at a seaside resort – these savings clubs were a local feature of industrial Lancashire right up to the introduction of paid holiday in 1939. Thus every week between June and September would see a different Lancashire town effectively close while its inhabitants decamped en masse for the seaside, normally Blackpool but perhaps Southport or Morecambe if you were a bit posh.

Wakes Week crowds at the station

Wakes Week - fashionable for a week

This was the zenith of the English seaside resort. Seaside towns from Blackpool to Brighton saw the construction of piers and promenades, gardens and amusement parks, genteel hotels for the middle classes and cheap and cheerful boarding houses for the workers. It was the birth of the British seaside holiday as generations knew it, donkey rides on the prom, sticks of rock, Punch and Judy shows on the beach. With the same people from the same factories and offices rubbing shoulders on the beach it was a communal experience of a sort we can hardly imagine in these hyperindividualistic times. The idea of descending on a seaside resort with everyone you know sounds more like the experience of Soviet-era towns in Eastern Europe where the whole town would be taken away on holiday to some windswept Baltic spa resort curtesy of the Party.

An even more communal experience of course was that of the holiday camp. The first holiday camp in Britain was opened in 1906 but they saw their heyday in the decades immediately after the Second World War. The most successful by far was Butlins. The South African entrepreneur Billy Butlin founded his first camp in Skegness in 1936, inspired by traumatic childhood memories of going on holiday with his parents and being locked out of their boarding house between breakfast and dinner time, a practice not unusual in those days. Within 30 years 9 more Butlins camps had opened. Again, it is odd to think in these days of tailored holidays that so many people welcomed the highly regimented holiday experience of a Butlins holiday camp. Sleeping in identical chalets, eating the same food together in a huge canteen, taking part in camp-wide activities organised by a sinister group of perennially cheerful uniformed camp staff, the refusal of which would mark you immediately and irrevocably as some kind of antisocial oddball, it sounded to me growing up as something quite similar to being in the army. And yet, whenever I saw my childhood best friend Carl going off with his family to the station for their annual holiday in Pontins, a sub-Butlins camp group, it always filled me with envy. I finally got to stay in a holiday camp some years later, Warner Brothers on the Isle of Wight in 1981, by which time the nature of the experience was starting to change as the holiday camps were struggling to meet the tough challenge of cheap holidays abroad. It was at the height of the popularity of the British sitcom Hi-de-Hi, set in a holiday camp in the 1950’s, and every so often someone, in the canteen or around the swimming pool, would bellow apparently at random ‘Hi-de-Hi!’ and someone else would respond with the required ‘Ho-de-Ho!’ A sad example of life self-consciously imitating art.

Knobbly knees competition, Butlins, 1950s. My money is on Number 2.

In 1939, finally, a law was passed that gave all British workers the luxury of a statutory week of paid leave annually, and by the 1950’s two weeks of paid leave a year was common. The increase in paid leave and the growing ownership of cars, as well as the opening up of larger sections of the British countryside, made other activities such as camping and caravanning possible, but the seaside holidays and holiday camps held sway right up until the rise of the Mediterranean package holidays in the late 1960s and 1970s. I imagine I will say more of the rise of the foreign holiday in its proper place, but it had a baleful influence on the British seaside towns. The holiday camps were slightly more adaptable; more able to vary their agenda of activities, they could to an extent change to meet the changing tastes of the British holidaymaker. It was different for the seaside towns. No longer the holiday destination of choice for even the more penurious British holidaymakers, and without any other raison d’etre to replace that of holiday spot, the towns tended to fall into decrepitude, hotspots of poverty, unemployment, alcohol- and drug-abuse, the piers and promenades empty and echoing to the soulless electronic burblings and the chunk-a-chunk of the slot machines, the Punch and Judy shows consigned to the rubbish bin of social history (‘gone to join the growing ranks of things that we look back upon’ to quote the colourful phrase of the singer Leon Rosselson).

Closed fast food restaurants on the seafront at Margate

Derelict buildings on the road into Margate - the one on the right was once the Old Fort Hotel

It is hard now to see them in the context they would have been seen by excited visitors of a century ago or more, full of sound and colour and laughter of a sort very likely hard to find in their home environments. It is even harder to imagine the excitement of those brief few days, once a year, when your family and every other family in the town would pack up their few belongings and head en masse for the station for the short trip on the overcrowded train, to check in to that same old boarding house with the grim landlady who despite having seen you every summer for the last ten years or more would still without compunction kick you out after breakfast and switch the lights out and lock the door at 10pm whether you were back or not.

The British holidaymaker had largely abandoned the prom for the Costas, but more of that another time.