The Rest Is History - 223. Sun, Sea, and Sex

Episode Date: August 22, 2022

The rise and fall of Butlin's, Benidorm and Franco, class, package holidays, bikinis, mass tourism and sunbathing. The third episode in our holiday series has it all - join Tom and Dominic as they discuss the history of modern holidays in the post First World War era. Join The Rest Is History Club for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. Or, if you're listening on the Apple Podcasts app, you can subscribe within the app in just a few clicks. Although in 1914 Thomas Cook's evacuated 6,000 tourists who were stranded in Europe, they continued sending tour groups to unaffected parts of France, particularly the Côte d'Azur,

which was advertised as being fashionably uncrowded due to world events, the poet A.E. Houseman paid his first ever visit to the Riviera in 1915 when the invention of holidays in the modern sense, tourists, which Dominic, I know you're a big fan of as well. We both unreservedly recommend, do we not? We do indeed. And we were talking a lot about it last time, when we, the invention of Victorian tourism. We've done the 18th century,

we've done the 19th century. So we thought that, you know, we'd really unsettle and surprise you by doing the 20th century and maybe even go into the 21st century. Who knows? We're very unimaginative on this podcast. But Dominic, so we're now very much moving into your period, your era of expertise. And I know that you've written about tourism in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s. So very much looking forward to what you have to say about that. But before that, we got in the previous episode to the First World War,

Lucy Lethbridge's extraordinary fact that people, I had no idea that people were still going on holiday to the south of France throughout the First World War. Incredible, isn't it? Who knew? So Dominic, the First World War, the beginning of the last episode, we looked at the way in which when the Napoleonic Wars come to an end, people from Britain flood across the Channel and visit the continent.

They go to the Battle of Waterloo, don't they? The site of Waterloo. They do. And the same thing happens pretty much after the end of the First World War, doesn't it? Yeah, it does, absolutely. So I think what you have is two different kinds of tourism. You have, I mean, we talked before in our podcast about the end of the first world war

we talked about kipling's wonderful short story the gardener incredibly moving short story about a woman who goes to visit the grave of um as we think her nephew in flanders obviously there were lots of trips organized for people to go to cemeteries and people to go to kind of pay their respects on the battlefields and so on but there's also just as in with Waterloo and we talked about in the last podcast there are people who are sort of ghouls who are going to see the the battlefields I suppose you would say are they ghouls I mean I mean are people going today ghouls I suppose they're not but I think there's something slightly different about going in 1919, Tom, don't you?

But maybe you want to see the scene of great events. I mean, if you've been reading about it, perhaps. No, I think you're probably. Maybe I'm being a little bit harsh. Maybe I am being too harsh. But people are being, you know, people go to watch bodies being dug up out of shell craters and things. I mean, that, I don't know. I think that is probably a little bit ghoulish.

I mean, certainly I won't be, you know, I wouldn't be planning that as a family holiday. No, myself. But obviously the First World War, by and large, I would say it's an interruption. I mean, obviously for most people, they're at the front or they're kind of working overtime at the factory.

They don't have the money. They can't travel because of blockades or whatever. So for a lot of people, this is not a great – the 1910s are not a great holiday period. But then after, once you get into the 1920s, you get a lot of trends that had started in the late Victorian or the Edwardian period really kind of coming to fruition. So obviously still most people in Britain do not have statutory holidays.

So that's not going to come in until the late 1930s. So for manual workers, for example, I mean, they're not something, if you're sort of self-improving and earnest and sort of high-minded and so on and so forth, you may have signed up to a kind of travel club. And those started in, I would say, probably the 1880s. One of the most famous ones is the – so, Tom, you must be familiar with the travel agency Lund Poly, which was quite successful when we were children and teenagers. So they had those adverts where the end people would say lun poly get away and the person would kind of vanish so

it's called lun poly because it's the merger of two different travel agencies one of which was the the polytechnic touring association i did not know that which organized incredibly high-minded group outings so dominic we is is, I mean, this is, again, part of a continuum with Thomas Cook, who was a high-minded teetotaling Baptist. It's exactly part of that continuum. Yeah, it's appealing to, I would say, an even more sort of high-minded group of people.

I mean, I'll be frank. We talked in the last episode about how horrible it would be to go to a German spa in the 19th century and drink this disgusting water and all that. To me, what would be even worse would be to go on an outing with the Holiday Fellowship or the Workers' Travel Association in the 1920s and spend my evening singing folk songs and discussing the novels of Virginia Woolf, which is what tourists are expected to do. Would you like to go to the Norwegian fjords and do that with your fellow travellers? Do you know, I think it would make a kind of wonderful reality TV show

to send you off on one of those, to try and recreate one. Because there was a big craze for that, wasn't there? People living in Iron Age villages or servants in country houses, that kind of thing, or 1940s house. You could go off on the 1920s walking tour. I'd pay good money to watch that. So this is also the year of camping. Yes. So how does that begin? So again, that's non-conformists, kind of political radicals, back to nature.

So all the kind of people that George Orwell is rude about. Prune drinkers. Exactly. In that George Orwell podcast, we read with great, well, I read with great relish, that section where George Orwell attacks sort of left-wing people, his fellow left-wing people. And he says, nature cure quacks, feminists, nudists,

fruit juice drinkers, sandal wearers. They are precisely the people who are on these holidays. At the beginning of the 20th century, they are singing folk songs. They are walking in woods with shorts. But Dominic, Dominic, to play devil's advocate, you're a worker in a factory. Yeah. You know, you're breathing in filthy air all day. It's backbreaking.

It's exhausting. It's relentless even you surely in that situation would enjoy the chance to breathe in the fresh clean air of a field wouldn't you well maybe i would but they i don't think the people who are going on these trips are ordinary workers and factories trades unionists are they i think they're very very high-minded and sort of um they're the fabian society are they fabian they're very, very high-minded and sort of... They're the Fabian Society, are they? They're a bit Fabian. So there would be some trade unionists maybe,

and particularly if the trade unions had organised such an outing, I think there would probably be less folk singing and more... Drinking of... Maybe drinking of real ales or something. But that I could live with. The other stuff with the sandals and the nudism, I could not live with. But camping is part of that world. So camping is absolutely part of this sort of – it's very cooperative in spirit.

It's very politically radical. You're surrounded by people who are talking about philanthropy and about building utopia and stuff. And I think camping still slightly has that maybe i'm maybe campers listening to this will be offended but i think it slightly has that tinge doesn't it there's a sort of high-mindedness yeah perhaps yes although there's glamping now isn't there which is basically like living in a very posh hotel i could do glamping but not um yeah but i'll tell you what it's really. So what also is high-minded, which people will not think of, is sunbathing.

So people who like camping and like going on these tours also believe that the sun is good for you. I mean, this is something completely new, isn't it? Because for so much of human history, paleness was prized because it was a sign of being part of the elite. Yeah. By the sort of turn of the 20th century, people are talking about sun baths and things like that. So Lucy Lethbridge in her book Tourists has a quote from what the writer Norman Douglas calls it, paganism and nudity and laughter.

And D.H. Lawrence, she has a wonderful, very D.H. Lawrence quote where D.H. Lawrence has got a, from 1925, he has a woman who's sunbathing. Do you want to know? I mean, you can almost, it's like written by somebody, one of Lawrence's enemies doing a parody. Is it pre-epic? She feels that the sun is mating with her in his words.

Well, she says, she slid off all her clothes and lay naked in the sun. As she lay, she looked up through her fingers at the central sun, his blue pulsing roundness whose outer edges streamed brilliance right pulsing with marvelous blue and streaming white fire from his edges the sun he faced down to her with his look of blue fire and enveloped her breasts and her face her throat her tired belly her knees her thighs and her feet yeah never changed dh lawrence never changed but D.H. Lawrence, never changed. But so, Dominic, anybody who's even faintly approximated to nude sunbathing, and I haven't,

but- That's a terrible image, Tom. I once inadvertently sunbathed, I won't go into the details, but the tops, let's say the tops of my back thighs were inadvertently exposed. And by the end of the day, they were bleeding oh no sun had beaten down on them because if the sun doesn't normally see your skin it it burns very quickly so if people have never sunbathed before if if the the custom is is that you don't go into the sun what happens when you're suddenly a dh lawrence heroine and you're stripping off and the sun with its boiling great whatever masculinity yeah

masculinity is probing itself towards you i mean you're gonna burn aren't you no because you will have invested in the brand new 1930s produced um suntan lotion made by uh i knew you were gonna say that a man from l'oreal uh so the founder of l'oreal is a man called eugene schuler and he creates the first sun protection cream and calls it ombre solaire and it launched in 1935 but i'm pleased to say because we always like a bit of a bit of a laugh on this podcast to other people's misfortunes don't we tom that um a lot of people didn't put this on because it was presumably very expensive. And they put on homemade potions of their own devising

or ones that were recommended in magazines. And a very popular choice was olive oil and lemon juice. Did it work? I don't believe it did. Or some people, there's one guy, again, from Lucy Lethbridge's book, she says, he writes,

it's very easy to prepare a homemade sun lotion, mix equal parts of olive oil and vinegar and add a dash of iron that's good that's going to appeal to the ladies isn't it yeah basically you dress you put yourself salad dressing um so it wasn't until 1956 that people discovered the link between being sunburned and skin cancer so people were completely and I think running right to the end of the 20th century, a lot of people just continue to be sort of almost willfully ignorant of the danger of excessive.

I suppose it's rather like smoking, isn't it? I suppose, yeah, it is. But obviously people are becoming, people are going on holiday in greater numbers. You've got air travel, obviously. I mean, it's extraordinary that so many people, for example example are going to mallorca before the second world war so 20 000 people um were going to mallorca a year in 1930 by 1935 40 000 people staying in hotels and 50 000 people were visiting on cruises a year because the famous famous person who goes there is Robert Graves.

Robert Graves. But I think even before he goes, I mean, actually, even though he would deny it because he would sort of say, oh, Mallorca was ruined after I moved there, I think the very fact that he's there is part of a trend, that people are going. Yes. So is it the kind of the pattern that you have people like Robert Graves and the Durrells and Paddy Lee Firmur and kind of bohemian middle class people going to live on Greek islands or Balearic islands and they settle there and the people with their salad dressing and all that kind of stuff right so cardamoli

where patrick lee firmer lived you know it's now a very very you know i mean it's not it's not a resort with concrete hotels but it's very busy in the summer guest houses full tons of people on the beaches you struggle to get a table in the tavernas it's exact and and actually the fact that patrick lee firmer lived there is part of the attraction. It's part of the attraction. Of course, all of this said, most people are not going on these kinds of holidays in the 1920s and 30s

because it's not until 1938 that you have the Holidays with Pay Act. So that's something that the trade unions have been pressing for throughout the 20th century. And finally, basically, effectively, it's a complicated business, but effectively you get a week's holiday in Britain. Absolute, utter socialism.

Well, it isn't socialism. It's actually the Chamberlain government. Of course it is. Why didn't Stanley Baldwin? It seems a very Stanley Baldwin measure. Allow the working man to have a week's holiday. That's a very good question. I'll have to consider that, Tom.

Maybe Stanley was not, maybe he had feet of clay. Yeah. Maybe he was distracted by his strenuous efforts to rearm before the Second World War, Tom. Maybe he was. Maybe he was.

Of course, Stanley Baldwin was a great believer in holidays. I mean, he basically took about six months holiday a year in Aix-les-Bains in France, where he just sort of strolled around and read books and smoked his pipe and didn't do any work. People would say Baldwin was terribly indolent when he was prime minister.

Paul Rudstani is not emerging well from this podcast, which is unusual on the rest of his history. I think prime ministers should go off and don't mess things up. Don't do any work. I think there's a case to be made for that. That is the essence of conservatism tom well you've just said so anyway most people are not going to mallorca most people are doing two things one is they're going to the seaside resorts that we talked about in the last podcast so someone like blackpool blackpool is

getting 17 million visitors a year by the 1940s absolutely extraordinary number of people and the people going to the lake district as well is that more middle class thing it's a very middle class thing right so the masses are definitely not going to the lake district yeah okay they're going to the beach because this is this is beatrix potter isn't it so she's presumably starting to i mean people going to the lake district that goes back to wordsworth and coleridge but you know the national trust yeah you're not going to sell that to people who are working in in mills in bolton or something Would you like to go walking in the Lake District? No, but it's part of the British tourist ecosystem, isn't it? It is. So it's kind of all emerging in parallel.

Yeah. But the big thing that has become part of the ecosystem is the holiday camp. I might be wrong about this, but I think this is something that in its popularity is unique to Britain. And it comes out of the cooperative, the collective ethos of the mid-20th century. So there had been camps with tents from about the early, about 1903 or so on, I think it is. 1906, there's a camp in Norfolk. There was a camp on the Isle of Man. But the man who is most associated this is um Billy Butlin so lots of our British listeners will have heard of Butlins Butlins which is even though it wasn't actually the biggest of the holiday camp chains it's the one that's most

famous the first one was at Skegness it was a Skegness because uh I went and you know I mentioned the this tour that we did going in a straight line across britain yeah did you go to butlin's and skegness we ended up in skegness no we didn't we didn't stay in butlin's i stayed in the worst hotel in britain in skegness it was awful you're going to blackpool next year so enjoy blackpool the walls were very very thin yeah and i was sleeping next to a group of i guess six people because their voices were all very penetrating, who were playing a kind of computer game, you know, lots of noises. Yeah. And then they started having group sex.

Oh, no. Which went on until half past one. Then it stopped. I thought, oh, thank God. And then, obviously, the two who were left kicked off again. Oh, no. I had to get to sleep till three. That sounds terrible. I wish I'd gone to, thank God. And then obviously the two who were left kicked off again. Oh, no. I had to get to sleep till three. That sounds terrible.

I wish I'd gone to Butlins. So that happened to me in the Hotel Niki in Sofia, Bulgaria. People who've listened to our previous podcast will be aware of my rendezvous with Boncho Todorov and the Bulgarian Football Union on my own grand tour in the 1990s. And we stayed in a hotel in sofia and there were a group of finnish soldiers who were serving with a un peacekeeping force in what is now north macedonia and they were on a weekend leave and we started and after we'd been to this match that

boncho todoroff had procured us the tickets for we started we were chatting in the hotel to these finnish soldiers and they were very very friendly very personable and then their eyes lit up and that Boncho Todorov had procured us the tickets for, we were chatting in the hotel to these Finnish soldiers, and they were very, very friendly, very personable. And then their eyes lit up and they said, ah, excellent, the order has arrived. And the order was an order for some local ladies of the night that they had placed with a pimp. And they're all sharing the same room.

So again, it was the same. Were the walls very thin? Well, actually, I wasn't right next to them my friends were right next to them and my friends complained about halfway through the night they complained to reception and uh the finnish soldiers invited them to join in and they didn't um so yeah this is obviously a theme of both our holidays yeah but not really a theme of of the hits that's not going on in but we've gone off We've gone off piste again. So Billy Butlin, he was born in South Africa.

He came to Britain. He ended up as a sort of fairground entrepreneur. And he had the idea. He thought, what if we had basically accommodation at fairgrounds? And he builds his first camp in 1936. And straight away, you pay, I think it's three pounds, and you get a week's accommodation at this holiday camp, and you get all your food. And they have all these activities, but he notices on the first day that the guests aren't really, they're a bit diffident, and they're not kind of

joining the activities. And he gets one of the staff to entertain the guests with jokes and sketches. Hidey-hi. Hidey-hi, exactly. Anyone who's seen the sitcom of the 1980s will know this. And it's with that that the Redcoats were born, the idea that the camp will have its own troop of entertainers who will kind of cajole you into all of these. Force jollity. Utter enforced jollity. Knobbly knees competitions, singing.

To me, I mean, if it's that or the folk singing, for me, that's a very tough. Which would you go for? I'd probably choose butt lens over the folk singing. I think you would. What would you choose? I'd definitely choose butt lens. I've always quite fancied it.

I could see you as a red coat, Tom. I think you'd be an excellent red coat. Yeah. So lots of very, Jimmy Tarbuck was a red coat. Cliff Richard was a red coat. Jimmy Perry wrote Dad's Army. Michael Barrymore. Right, Michael Barrymore.

Now, Ringo Starr used to play at Butlins. Before we joined the Beatles. He did indeed. Yeah. So you could see Ringo Starr. But anyway, Butlins is tremendously successful. He opens another one in Clacton and then bang, World War II happens. So that's a bit of a break.

And what's interesting about World War II coming is that high-minded people are going to Germany on holiday. They're going to see concentration camps, aren't they? They go to Dachau. Yeah, it's astonishing. So the Nazis actually put on tours of Dachau. They are pretending that it's a kind of model camp. And people who are interested in kind of international fellowship, so people who are kind of pacifist and pacifist inclination,

they're still going to Germany. So the things like the, the, the polytechnic travel association. So that group is still organizing tours. But they're not going to Dachau are they? No, but it's,

they're going to German castles. It's people who are more on the right. Who are. No, I don't think that's right castles. I mean, surely it's people who are more on the right who are doing – No, I don't think that's right at all. I think quite the reverse. I think if you are on the right, firmly on the right – I mean, okay, not if you're far right, but if you're – so, for example, you might sympathize with Churchill.

You're not going to go to Germany on a holiday. But if you're on the far right a nazi sympathizer so philip larkin we talked about philip larkin in the previous yes his awful parents his parents loved hitler's germany and they went on holiday there and um or ted heath actually went on holiday to germany and shook himler's hand at a nuremberg rally but he was he was appalled by it wasn't he he was appalled by it yeah he was on a cycling holiday he was indeed yes he was but cooperative so the cooperative tours i mean the cooperative that's obviously politically kind of progressive um they were still advertising rhineland and bavaria walking tours in august and september 1939 on this basis they said they will lead to the formation of friendships which

will break through the barriers of race creed and class and make for understanding and peace and amazingly these sort of travel groups were avid because obviously austria didn't exist anymore so they just listed all the austrian destinations under germany i suppose i don't know i mean i'm not attacking them tom you don't have to stick up for them i'm'm just stating a fact. Yeah, well, it's... You just don't want to hear anything against the sandal-wearing folk singers. Am I right? We are so conditioned to the morality and the politics of protest that I imagine then it was a more novel experience.

First of all, you have to know how bad the Nazis are. And I accept that probably by 1939, people do know how bad they are. But then there's a certain kind of mental calculus required isn't there to think well we shouldn't go there because we by going there our money will be going towards yeah i think that's a fair economy but also i mean because you might say well we want to go there to show that we are still friends of course of course you might i mean you and i have both been to vladimir putin's russia haven't we yes so i mean it's not like but i mean people could well say oh you you would get happy to give him your you know your your money and support his economy and yeah and i very much felt i was you know it was a chance to meet russians that i wouldn't

otherwise have did you yes did you convert you convert them to your way of thinking? I didn't have to because we already agreed on the same, pretty much the same things. But I think it would have been a more complicated because more novel decision to make. And of course, the people who are doing this think that they are, by and large, they're doing the right thing. They absolutely think they are.

We've talked in all these episodes about how travel and tourism has always been associated with the idea of broadening the mind, of making friends. It's always perceived to have had a kind of spiritual and ethical dimension. Going back, I suppose, to pilgrimages, if you really want to trace it all the way back. And I definitely think the people in the 1920s and 30s thought that they were doing their bit to avoid another continental war by making friends in Bavaria and all that sort of thing. Anyway, listen, we should take a break.

So when we come back, we're going to look at the post-war world. We are indeed. Very much moving on to your home territory. So that's very exciting. Sandbrook at its best. Don't miss it. With no pressure. See you after the break.

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the rest is entertainment.com hello welcome back uh we are going on holiday again, are we not, Dominic? We're always on holiday. This podcast is one long holiday for me, Tom. One long, sunny holiday. And Second World War has ended. And I guess we are now entering the age of, well, we're kind of approaching the age of mass tourism, aren't we? We are. How does that develop? How long does it take for mass tourism to kind of become the phenomenon that we're familiar with today after the war? Depends what you mean by mass tourism.

So mass tourism in terms of people having holidays, just holidays very basically, once Britain is out of austerity at the end of the 1940s, but even actually during that, I mean, they've still got statutory holidays. So the late 1940s, very early 1950s is the absolute high point of the seaside resorts, I would say. Tens of millions of people going to these resorts. If you're a British soldier and you've been slogging your way up Italy or across France and Germany, I mean, maybe going abroad again is the last thing you want to do. Possibly. I mean, it completely depends on the individual. For some people, you definitely hear people saying that. But then for others, you hear people saying, I'd love to show my family Egypt or Sicily or... People who would not normally have seen Sicily or Greece or Egypt have seen it.

Exactly right. But at first, they're not doing that because not really until the 1960s does the age of package tourism start in earnest so for about 15 years after the end of the second world war the big things are still the holiday resorts and the holiday camps so we talked about billy butlin before the break butlin opens loads of camps in the 1940s and 1950s so air and mosney atney at Bognor Regis and Minehead. And these are appealing to thousands and thousands of people. So at the big camps, you will have 10,000 people there at a time. And there are all these amazing statistics about, you know, Butlin will be getting through 4 million eggs a week

or 240 tons of pork chops or whatever it might be. And these camps now have this incredible ecosystem of games. They have all these prizes. So Lovely Legs Prize, Knobbly Knees, we mentioned before. Shiniest Bald Head Prize. Now, we both know who would have won that. Anastasius. Anastasius.

Yeah, he would have absolutely aced that. Who we talked about in our Justinian Theodora podcast. Because he was complimented, wasn't he, on the baldness of his head. Yeah, the gleam. The silvery gleam. By Roman writers. So you're doing that now. One other thing you have now in the 50s that a lot of people would not have had before the war is cars.

So you have caravanning. Caravanning is a massive success story in the 50s and 60s. Mr. Toad had a caravan, didn't he, in The Wind in he in the wind and the wind he did but then he gets a car yeah but a lot of people um do it the other way around after the second world war they get a car and then they get a caravan and these are not mr toad style gypsy caravans they are sort of as people call them kind of bungalows on wheels so um they are sort of very shiny and very fancy driving very very slowly down single lane roads and it's also this is probably the point at which places like you talked about the lake district before the break devon and cornwall are swamped with caravan

sites and the roads now i know the a303 is a particular concern for you tom because of stonehenge this is the point at which people are complaining about the roads to the West Country being blocked by caravans. But then the big innovation, I mean, I know you've been waiting for this. It is the story of Vladimir Reitz. So Vladimir Reitz is a white Russian emigre, very excitingly. He was born in Moscow. His mother fled to Western Europe in 1928 and left his father behind. He never saw his father again.

He arrives in London in 1936, and he speaks Russian, Polish, and German, but not a word of English. And he ends up becoming a Reuters journalist. And Vladimir Reitz is, to this podcast, what Thomas Cook was to the last one. He is the pioneer, the inventor. Because what he does is he basically invents the overseas package flight so thomas cook is leading not just britain but the world is this something specific to britain or is this being developed elsewhere as well

no i think rights develops it before anybody else does actually i mean i think maybe the germans are just behind because the germans are always stereotypically are the the competition aren't they for the sun loungers and well stereotypically they're always um half an hour ahead aren't they yeah the competition get their towels out yeah but in fact in fact we were developing them just ahead of the germans i mean that's very i think so i think so maybe maybe if we have german listeners they can write in and correct me i mean i imagine actually these things often happen roughly the same time but i'd imagine just because britain is recovering perhaps that little bit quicker than germany i mean obviously

then is later overtaken by germany i mean who knows anyway reitz was a reuters journalist and he went to corsica where his friend was running a water polo club for some white Russians in Corsica. And he basically has this eureka moment where he thinks, I could do a bit of a Thomas Cook. I could book them onto a plane, bring them over, put them up. And he goes back home and there are all kinds of regulations that make this really difficult. So what he has to do is charter his own DC-3 planes, and then he basically needs

to get tourists onto them. And because of the incredible sort of complicated bureaucratic regulations that are designed to protect the existing airlines, the state-owned or state-funded airlines, he is only given the permission by the Ministry of aviation if he does this purely for students and teachers so they advertise he advertises his plan in the teacher's world magazine the nursing mirror and the new statesman but again this this kind of progressive exactly worthy exactly so yeah fascinating people who are sick of the folk songs and the sandals now have another another option another outlet yeah and he basically says you pay me £32 and I'll fly you out to Corsica and you'll be under canvas initially, but you'll get unlimited food, unlimited wine, loads of sun, beach. Brilliant.

And they go. They go from Gatwick, the 180 of them. When they get to Corsica, there's a brass band waiting for them and villagers with garlands of flowers. And they stay in the Camp Franco-Britannique, Calvi, where they have a dance floor and a bar and all this stuff. And the rest is history, Tom, because after this, Wright says, Company Horizon, they have camp in Mallorca, they have camps in the Costa Brava. And they become more and more. And they have club.

They have reps. Do you know who he interviewed? Get this. Who Vladimir Wright interviewed as a travel rep for Horizon and turned him down. Didn't think he'd be very good in the 1950s. Alan Wicker. You're actually pretty close. It's the future Tory MP and rake Alan Clark.

Okay, that's very improbable. Yeah, that's very improbable. Yeah, that's very improbable. I know Corsica is kind of France-ish, but it is France. The sense I have of Britain and France, say in the 50s and early 60s, is that Britain is absolutely, it's all about knobbly knees competitions and handkerchief, knotted handkerchiefs on on stopping pates from going red whereas france it's effortless chic uh it's bikinis oh i'm so glad you mentioned that tom because did you think i would come to this podcast without information about the history

of the bikini no so you're great you haven't got information about the bikini have you i haven't just inadvertently allowed you to reveal everything you know about the bikini i i very much enjoyed researching this as you can imagine um so the bikini was invented by a man called louis rayar in 1946 and it was unveiled at the the pissine molitor which was a swimming pool in paris he got a showgirl called micheline bini. You see, that is the difference. We have butlins. They have showgirls advertising newly invented bikinis. So swimsuits had always been, you know, enormous.

And I should say that Dominic at this point is gesturing. I am gesturing to myself. In a very French manner. I am. Swimsuits had always been enormous and made of wool and just generally very unsexy. Yeah. But French designers were sort of competing in 1946 to invent something befitting an age that had come out of the war and wanted to sort of let its hair down and stuff. So there are two different designers.

There's one called Jacques Haim, and he advertises his bathing. he calls it the world's smallest bathing suit and he calls it the atom and louis rayard you know invents what we know now as the bikini it's all about nuclear weapons isn't it it is he says his advertising slogan is smaller than the world's smallest bathing suit and he names it the bikini after the bikini atoll where the Americans have just done an atomic test. So it's very much, it's a swimsuit for the atomic age. Yeah. So you've got the atom and then you've got a swimsuit named after a nuclear explosion. It's enormously successful, though not interesting in America. Because they're too puritanical.

Too puritanical. So it's the 60s that it takes off in America, is it? With the Beach Boys and itsy bitsy teeny weeny yellow polka dot bikini yeah and the sort of beach boys surf culture and all of that stuff you were asking about california in the last episode i mean the 60s is the heyday of the californian beach scene and bikini is i guess a part of that but meanwhile obviously the british are beginning to desert their holiday camps in the 60s and to go abroad. So by 1971, British tourists are taking 4 million holidays abroad. So you get places like Benidorm.

So Spain basically, isn't it? Which at this point is still under Franco. Franco needs cash. He needs hard currency because his economy is so sclerotic. And one way of kick-starting his economy is to go for tourism in a big way. And Franco, in alliance with Spanish property developers and sort of landowners and things, they basically turn a lot of these very sleepy, pretty fishing villages into concrete black pools, basically.

And Benidorm is a famous example. So Benidorm in 1957, south of Valencia, it has fewer than 3,000 people living in it. That's 1957. By 1960, it's getting 30,000 British and German visitors every August. It has 300 new buildings. It has 30 high-rise blocks of flats, 34 hotels and four cinemas, and however many thousand English breakfasts being served a day. And this is almost an overnight transformation of huge stretches of the Spanish coastline, but also an overnight transformation for lots of ordinary Britons, many of whom would never have aspired to go abroad. They could never have dreamed of emulating the Grand Tour that we did in the first episode, or even the Thomas Cook tours of episode two. So there's a great moment actually, Tom, 1970, the former deputy Labour leader, George Brown, is addressing a meeting at a Labour club in the 1970 election. And he says, only a couple of years ago at the Labour club in my constituency,

you'd have seen a poster advertising the annual outing it used to be a day at blackpool or new brighton or skegness where do you think people go now and at that point the secretary of the labour club gets up and he says oh this is a great opportunity to advertise our annual outing we're actually going for a week at the mediterranean and that you know i mean that's interesting that he says the mediterranean because he doesn't clearly doesn't know the name of the resort they're going to it is conscious that it's somewhere hot with sun and sand and sangria and I suppose the film that holds a mirror up best to this kind of great sociological process of change would be carry on abroad wouldn't it oh yeah good choice Tom very good choice 1972 carry on crew yeah so for our overseas listeners we'll just find this weird obscure babble now but uh british listeners will probably have seen the

film will be aware of it so the carry-on film are these sort of um sort of farcical bawdy uh this sort of institution isn't it they do a carry-on film a year or so. Same team. Yeah, kind of bras snapping and... Oh, exactly. Letchers going... And all that kind of stuff. Sid James' Laugh, which I know you'll remember that time. It's very, very 70s, very 60s, 70s. So they go to what is billed as a paradise island

in the Mediterranean called Elles Bells. And they get there. The hotel isn't finished. All the electrical fittings explode. The sand comes out to the taps rather than water um all of these kinds of things they behave very badly chaos okay absolutely hilarious chaos tom hilarious antics they all end up in prison but of course the reason that this is funny and resonant is because this was completely recognizable

yeah to thousands if not millions of british i, I can well remember going on a holiday in the 1980s with my parents to Crete and getting the phone call literally as we were on our way out of the door. So our bags were packed and the tour company saying, your hotel's not quite finished. So the first week of your two-week holiday, you'll have to stay at this other hotel. So we stayed at this other hotel. And then on on friday they said why don't you go and

drive out to the new hotel and check it out and we went and it was a build it was a complete building site i mean just laughable absolutely laughable there was no quality control at all and it was actually only at the beginning of the 70s really that the bbc did its holiday program and itv did wish you were here in which they were i mean part of the beginning of the 70s really that the bbc did its holiday program and itv did wish you were here in which they were i mean part of the point of those programs was they were holding all these companies to account and actually horizon was one of the better companies but they were holding companies that otherwise were pretty much i mean the regulation was pitiful okay so that's really changed then hasn't it because travel programs now are all about basically

making you feel jealous yeah but back then it was it was much more kind of consumer watchdog there was an element to that but there was definitely because of course it was incredibly nerve-wracking for people to go on i mean there's no internet you'd have any information about the place you're going other than some flimsy brochure and and relying on the travel rep when you get there you would go on the plane where everybody you know through clouds of smoke on the plane smoking their pipes you get off through clouds of smoke on the plane because everybody was smoking. Yeah, smoking their pipes. You get off into the heat. You don't speak a word of Spanish or Greek or something.

And then you're sort of all herded on buses to this hotel, and you've got no idea really what's awaiting you. But it must have been amazing. Oh, incredible. I mean, you read the diaries and letters and things of people who went to, let's say, Ibiza in 1969 or 1971. And they say, you know. They'd never experienced heat like it, I guess. Heat and the smells and the food.

Obviously, at first, people are very suspicious of the food. There are wonderful stories of groups. There's a lovely story about a group of Derbyshire miners who take their own beer and their own tinned food to Italy. Because they think, you know, obviously, you can't eat the local food it's going to be awful foreign mark yeah foreign mark exactly but by the 70s what you definitely get in britain is all of those places we've been talking about before like blackpool and the holiday camps they are in the most hideous decline so at butlins for example all the days of the knobbly knee competition they're still trying to do them but butlin's have had terrible trouble with it's so cheap you see that

they've had teenagers going and sort of uh rowdy youngsters and it's basically become there's a lot of stories about violence and drunkenness and this sort of thing butlin's have banned single young men from going yeah in an attempt to clean up and reclaim their family basically because because the package tour to spain isn't that much more expensive exactly it's so cheap so companies like horizon are doing it you know what did we say it was 32 pounds in uh 1950 or so i mean okay butlins is a fair bit cheaper but it's not out of reach for working class people in the 1970s. If you're in work, if you've got a steady wage, you can aspire to go to

Spain for a week or even two weeks. So Dominic, the development of the tourist industry in the 70s, to what extent, say in 2022, is the tourist infrastructure descended directly from that is this when tourism as as we have experienced it through our lives as people experience it now is is that basically where the foundations are being laid no actually i would say there's a great break and i think the great break is the internet and the 19 of course yes of course um so i think the difference is that the 70s is very much in the tradition that goes back to thomas cook going back to the you know the victorians um and and there's always a middleman there is always a you know there's a sort of there's a collective ethos you go in a

you know there's a sense of a group you know if you were staying at one of these big concrete hotels as as i did as a child in the early 1980s, lots of kind of group activities laid on. There was an expectation you'd be in the kids' club. There was a sort of flamenco evenings, excursions by coach from the hotel, all that sort of stuff. And I think that world really began to break up in the 1990s. Once people are booking their own flights individually

because cheaper flights, deregulation of the aviation industry once they're you know i mean of course those that industry still exists but it's there are so many challenges to it now right and i think for younger people the idea that you would walk into we mentioned lun poly because of the polytechnic association the idea that you would walk into a high street travel agent and from an incredibly flimsy brochure and about six lines of text, choose a hotel to spend a week or two weeks and then put yourself completely in the hands of these gatekeepers, I guess, which is the travel company and its representatives.

I mean, you would never do that now, would you? So Thomas Cook's gone bust, hasn't it? So, yes, Thomas Cook Group went bust in 2019 into compulsory liquidation. Thomas Cook Holidays was spun off as a successor and has been trading for a couple of years. That's a great shame, isn't it? Well, it still exists with the same name.

I suppose. Yes, I suppose. The interesting question, I suppose, I mean, there was tons of stuff we were meant to be talking about and we haven't talked about Eviva España, the Sylvie Rathammer hit. I'm quite relieved about that. But now that we've mentioned it, we don't need to mention it again. We haven't really talked about Heidi High

and its role in the culture of the 1980s, but maybe it's important to leave people wanting more, isn't it? It always is. It always is. I suppose the interesting questions are, what are the sort of the themes that run through this and actually i think there's an extraordinary sense of continuity in the way that people understand travel and holidays don't you that sort of sense

of well i'd say first of all the thing that's really striking is class divide yes definitely always been there and always will be so that is absolutely kind of soldered through, going right the way back to the 17th century. And your choice of holiday now says an enormous amount about your class position, doesn't it? Because choice is almost infinite now. And what you choose says so much about you. But I guess also this extraordinary tradition of teetotal percenters basically constructing the kind of the fabric of the tourist industry.

Well, that sort of high-mindedness to holidays, that's something that before we got into this subject, I hadn't gauged the extent to which the Grand Tour, for example, there was a high-mindedness to the grand tour the idea about you know educating yourself as people now um say so so sort of um sensoriously yeah yeah and but we still have that don't we there's still a sort of sense that when you go if you're a sort of educated middle class person you're expected to go on a holiday that will broaden your horizons in which you will see, I don't know, indigenous people weaving some nice rugs or something like that. We went on a family holiday to stay with friends in America who had a wonderful place by the sea. And we just stayed in this house and, you know, had wonderful American food and just

kind of lazed around. And I remember my daughters being stunned that there wasn't an obligation at some point to go and see a temple on a hill in mid you know midday but did you feel cheated that you weren't able to do that no i loved it i really loved it but maybe that's because going to see a temple in boiling heat is work to you whereas to a lot of people it's not work it's it's fun no it's always fun but i just realized i did have a kind of i it came to me that my holidays had always been faintly puritanical which is why i found the puritanical strain throughout you know this

everything we've been looking at so interesting because there's quite a lot of self-recognition there yeah well i think what's really fascinating is that holidays are not just meant to be fun they're meant to be good for you and that idea about health as well um which goes back to the sort of to brighton and to bath and then to the those awful german 19th century spas that's still there but i think also and this is as true of butlin's as it is of the my lord going off in 1720 there's a there's a fear of boredom which also hangs over it yeah and anxiety you know you think you work so hard you're you know so tired you need a break but even as you're heading off there's this nervous what if i'm bored you know what if there's nothing to do what if i get fed up i need to book and i need to urgently book a sea kayaking

trip for us or whatever it might be. Exactly. You know, so that's, you know, the Butlins expresses that just as much as the Boswell going off to see Rousseau. It does indeed. But Tom, you've got a holiday coming up, haven't you? I mean, this hasn't put you off your holiday, has it? End of September, yeah. Where are you going?

Are you able to tell the listeners? Going to Corfu. Oh, very nice. Is this the cricket? Playing cricket and then staying on for two weeks after. Very nice. The key question, as listeners to the last podcast will know, is this. Are you going to drink any seawater?

I think, well, I probably will because I'll, you know, I'll probably fall out of a boat or something, inadvertently gulp it down. But not deliberately, no. I'm not going to. Okay. Well, I mean, that's the thing that is, I think that and those terrible treatments and the gas injections, I think I could definitely live without that on holiday.

I mean, maybe there'd be a market for a kind of retro holiday agent. That's a brilliant idea. That would provide you with all these terrible- Tom, that, forget the podcasting. That is how we will make millions. Well, maybe we could do it under the aegis of the podcast the rest is history period period holidays period holidays we you can have a choice of you can go

on a grand tour you can go to to brighton and drink seawater you can go to a german german spa yeah or you can do the kaiser's fjord trip before the first world war maybe or a butlin's i've been to a butlin's holiday i've been i've filmed to butlin's holiday camp well i think this is this is a very exciting kind of spin-off from the from the podcast this is great watch this space very very exciting the blind beak didn't work out but this is the future we haven't quite finished because tomorrow we're going to do something slightly different and yet also at the same time similar we're going to go back to uh the ancient world and see if there was anything that approximates to what we would understand as holidays, tourism in the ancient world.

So we will see you then. Bye-bye. All right. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishtertainment.com