Billy Butlin
Sir William Heygate Edmund Colborne ("Billy") Butlin, (
September 29,
1899 –
June 12,
1980), was the founder of
Butlins Holiday Camps.
Billy Butlin was born in
Cape Town,
South Africa. His father, also called William Butlin, was the son of a clergyman but his mother, Bertha Hill, was a member of a family of travelling showmen. Their marriage was considered something of a disgrace in Leonard Stanley,
Gloucester, UK, where they lived, and they were encouraged to emigrate to South Africa. When the marriage failed, Billy's mother returned to
England with her children and rejoined her own showmen family in
Bristol.
For a time Billy joined his mother in travelling around the fair circuit but, in 1911, his mother remarried and emigrated again, this time to
Canada. For a couple of years Billy was boarded with a widow in Bristol. Then his mother and step father asked him to come to them in
Toronto, Canada.
He was very unhappy at school in Canada and was always being mocked because of his
English accent, so he left school at fourteen. Eventually got a job as a messenger boy at
Eaton's, Toronto's largest department store. One of the best aspects of working for the company was that he was able to visit their
summer camp, which gave him his first taste of a real holiday, indeed a taste of what was to become a very big part of his life.
Butlin volunteered somewhat reluctantly to the
Canadian Army in
World War I but saw very little action. After the war he returned to England and worked for a time running a hoopla stall for his mother's family, discovering that he was quite successful at it. He moved to London and set up a very successful stall in
Olympia outside the Christmas Circus run by
Bertram Mills. By the end of the season Bill had been so successful that he could now afford to bring his mother (now widowed) from Canada.
Over the next few years Billy toured the country with the Hills Travelling Fair, leaving his mother, Bertha, to run the Olympia site. In 1927 he leased a piece of land from the
Earl of Scarborough at the seaside town of
Skegness. He set up a holiday fun park with hoopla stalls, a tower slide, a
haunted house ride and, in 1928, a scenic railway and
dodgem cars -- the first in Britain. Later on he rented disused bus garages in
Whitechapel,
Brixton,
Tooting,
Putney,
Hammersmith and Marble Arch in
London and turned them all into fun fairs. His mother, Bertha, died in 1933 and so never saw his first holiday camp.
For some time Butlin had nurtured the idea of a holiday camp. He had observed the way landladies in Skegness would (sometimes literally) push families out of the lodgings between meals, regardless of the inclemency of the weather. Butlin toyed with the idea of providing
holiday accommodation that encouraged holiday-makers to stay in the premises and even provided entertainment for them between meals.
He opened his first
Butlins camp at Skegness on 11 April, 1936 (Easter Eve). It was officially opened by
Amy Johnson from
Hull, who was the first woman to fly solo from England to Australia. An advertisement was placed in the
Daily Express, announcing the opening of the camp and inviting the public to book for a week's holiday, enclosing a
ten shilling registration
fee. The advertisement offered holidays with three meals a day and free entertainment. A week's full board cost anything from 35 shillings to three pounds a week, according to the time of year.
The camp was a huge success and soon other
Butlins were constructed at
Clacton (
1938) and
Filey (
1945),
Pwllheli and
Ayr (both in
1947, during
World War II), and still more at
Mosney (
1948),
Bognor Regis (
1960),
Minehead (
1962) and
Barry Island (
1966). The growth of his business was spurred by World War II when a number of camps were requisitioned for use as military training camps, generating revenues for a post-war boom.
In the
1950s Butlin began acquiring
hotels in
Brighton,
Blackpool and several in Cliftonville. In later years they were joined by further hotels in
Scarborough,
Llandudno,
London and
Spain. The camps at
Ayr and
Skegness also had separate self-contained hotels within the grounds.
In 1972 the company was sold to the
Rank Organisation for £43 million. Butlin was knighted in 1964 and
retired in 1968. Bill Butlin was not the first Butlin to have been knighted as his great uncle, who lived from 1845 to 1912 was the eminent surgeon, Sir Henry Trentham Butlin. Billy Butlin died on 12th June, 1980.
Much of the material for this article comes from the
"Butlin Memories" web site.
