Holiday Camp Talks
My phone is overheating with WhatsApps from Arts Club members raving about your talk! Your charming, relaxed style, your vast knowledge so lightly worn, and your sheer professionalism and enthusiasm were all superb.
Thank you for being such a brilliant part of this year’s Folkestone Book Festival. Your event was one of the most popular and entertaining of the whole programme, and I know everyone had such a great experience hearing about the history of Folkestone and seaside architecture in general.
The talk made me realise how many unlauded people there are in history who have done worthwhile things and how unsung women are in those histories.
The Holiday Camp Phenomenon
During the 1930s, holiday camps offered an immediately popular package of all-in accommodation, meals and communal entertainment. Their origins, however, lay in charitable and co-operative holiday ventures that date back to the 1890s. This talk explores the evolution of the holiday camp’s winning formula, its huge commercial success under the entrepreneurship of Harry Warner, Billy Butlin, and Fred Pontin, and its late twentieth-century decline.
Camping De-Luxe: Billy Butlin’s Holiday Villages by the Sea
As the author of the Official History of Butlin’s, Kathryn is well-qualified to reveal the story behind one of Britain’s best-loved holiday companies. This lecture focuses on the early decades as entrepreneur Billy Butlin pursued his dream of offering affordable luxury to middle-income customers in the 1930s. Looking at fashions in leisure and health, it demonstrates the revolutionary nature of Butlin’s all-inclusive package and the Modern design used to transport campers to a holiday world of Elizabethan chalets, floodlit tennis courts and American cocktail bars.
Billy Butlin: The Holiday Maker
Born in South Africa in 1898, by the 1930s, Billy Butlin was a household name in Britain. Now most famous for his chain of holiday camps, this lecture explores Butlin’s unconventional background, his early career as a travelling showman and amusement park owner and the phenomenal success of his all-inclusive camp idea. Butlin’s rags-to-riches story was key to his company’s branding, but his own family life was rather less happy than the image he portrayed to the world. He was, nonetheless, one of the greatest entrepreneurs of the twentieth century and the ultimate holiday maker.
