Knobbly Knees and Other Fun
In and out of their homes, what were the British of the forties doing for fun? They were certainly not watching television, something owned by less than 0.2 per cent of the adult population in 1947 and by only 4 per cent in 1950. They were not travelling abroad for their holidays. For one thing, people had less time on holiday, and less money to spend too. The Holidays with Pay Act, passed shortly before the war, had hugely expanded the number of people with guaranteed paid holidays but a fortnight was more common than a month. In 1947, in the days before jet travel and with the amount of money one could take severely restricted, just over 3 per cent of people holidayed abroad, the vast majority being wealthy and going no further afield than the Mediterranean or northern France. They did not drive around the British countryside, either, or ‘go motoring’ in the pre-war phrase; petrol rationing had seen to that. But in that same year, slightly over half the British did take some kind of holiday. Many took the train to one of the traditional Victorian-era seaside resorts, which were soon bursting with customers. Others went for cycling and camping holidays – the roads were by modern standards almost empty of traffic. Yet more would take the charabanc or train to one of the new holiday camps, run by such early entrepreneurs of leisure as Billy Butlin.
The South African-born Butlin had come from a broken family and, on his mother’s side, fairground barkers. She gave him his first taste of the showman’s life with her gingerbread stall which she took around West Country market towns. After a much-interrupted education and a short spell as a commercial artist in Canada, followed by service in the war, Billy Butlin began a hoopla stall in the twenties. Year by year, he slowly built up a business in amusement parks – with haunted houses, helter-skelters, hoopla and merry-go-rounds. His big breakthrough was getting the European licence for selling the new Dodgem cars. Then, having spotted the miserable time spent by many families in seaside landladies’ accommodation, he opened his first camp at Skegness in Lincolnshire in 1936.
Holiday camps of different kinds, often run for employees of a particular company, had existed before. But Butlin’s Skegness was a hugely ambitious undertaking, with a swimming pool, theatre, cinema, many amusements and – crucially – crèche facilities so that parents could spend time together without their children. A second camp followed at Clacton two years later and after handing over facilities to the armed forces, he ended the war with five large holiday camps just at the opportune moment. A tough little man, who had carried a cutthroat razor in his top pocket while building his fairground and exhibition business before the war, and who boasted to friends that his aims were ‘money, power and women’, Butlin had a shrewd understanding of what war-weary people wanted. He offered colour, fun, warm cabins, surprisingly good food and almost constant activities, from dancing to the famous ‘knobbly knees’ and ‘glamorous granny’ competitions.
Butlin, who was a millionaire within two years of the war ending and who, after various financial crises, would be knighted and receive the Queen at one of his camps, was targeting the middle classes as much as the better-off workers. Italian opera, Shakespearean productions, radio stars, politicians, the odd archbishop and sporting heroes were all invited to the camps – and came. There was nothing ‘naff’ about the camps, certainly in the forties and fifties, their heyday; indeed, for a lot of people they were pricey. After the wartime experiences of everyone mucking in together, the morning-to-bedtime activities provided by the Redcoats, with their relentless jollity, seems to have been welcomed. Butlin had his fingers burned with an ill-timed attempt to expand into the American market with a Caribbean camp in 1948, and the mass overseas tourism which began in the sixties would end the glory days of his camps, and their rivals. But for millions of British people they would remain a synonym for summer holiday well into the age of Benidorm. And, if cheap air travel falls victim to oil price rises or worries about global warming, the age of the domestic holiday camp may yet return.
Outside the annual holiday, the traditional spectator sports made a swift post-war return. Football had been badly hit during the war years, not just because so many players were away in the forces, leaving veterans the field to themselves, but because the English Football League had been suspended, and the country simply divided into north and south. New rules meant that League players had numbered shirts, could earn up to £12 a week, and that games could be played until they produced a result (though in 1946 this meant Doncaster Rovers and Stockport County playing into the darkness after 203 minutes without a goal, there being no floodlighting then). The great soccer teams were soon back in action, to capacity crowds.
Stanley Matthews, the Stoke barber’s son who was a pre-war legend, was back amazing crowds for Blackpool after the war. In 1953, when Matthews was the ripe old age of thirty-eight, some 10 million people watched him in the first televised Cup Final. By 1948-9 there were more than 40 million attendances at football matches and a general assumption that British football was the finest there was, something seemingly confirmed the previous May when Britain had played a team grandly if inaccurately named the Rest of the World (they comprised Danes, Swedes, a Frenchman, Italian, Swiss, Czech, Belgian, Dutchman and Irishman) and thrashed them 6-1. That illusion would be dispelled before long, but in other ways too this was a golden age of football. The stands were open and smelly, the crowds unprotected and the greatest stars of the post-war era still to come. But football was relatively uncorrupt, was still essentially about local teams supported in their immediate area, and was not dirty on the pitch: throughout his long career Matthews, for instance, was never cautioned, never booked.
Another famous footballer of the time was Arsenal’s Denis Compton. It is just that he was still more famous for cricket, which became massively popular again after the war. Some three million people watched the Tests against South Africa in 1947 and Compton’s performance then and in the following years produced a rush of English pride and mass enthusiasm. The cricket writer Neville Cardus found him the image of sanity and health after the war: ‘There was no rationing in an innings by Compton.’ In cricket as in football, many of the players were the stars of pre-war days who had served as PT instructors or otherwise kept their hand in during hostilities; but with the Yorkshire batsman Len Hutton also back in legendary form at the Oval, cricket achieved a level of national symbolism that it has never reached since, not even in the heyday of Botham or the summer of 2005. Again, as with football, the stars of post-war cricket could not expect to become rich on the proceeds. Hutton, a builder’s son who first made his name beating teams of public schoolboys on behalf of London council schools, became England’s first professional captain of the century in 1952 and the dishevelled Compton, whose father had worked in a chemist’s shop, first came into decent money as the face of Brylcreem adverts.
Greyhound racing, using electric hares developed before the war, was a prime working-class focus for betting. The sport had begun in Britain in 1926 at Manchester’s Belle Vue stadium and spread quickly across the country; unlike horse-racing, it was something that millions of people in the industrial towns could go and watch near home, and many of the most famous dogs were bred and trained by people using a narrow back garden or local parks. The greyhound tracks were also used for Speedway – the 500cc brakeless motorcycle racing which had arrived from Australia in the twenties and which went through a big expansion after the war. So too, more bizarrely, did bicycle speedway, with men and boys pedalling furiously around bombsites throughout Britain, the courses marked out with painted lines on grass or house-bricks. Cities such as Coventry, Birmingham and London played ‘Test matches’ against each other and there was even an international, England against Holland, in 1950. Eventually, rebuilding removed the courses and the craze gently subsided.
But the main leisure activities of the time were more traditional. Britain was, then as now, gardening-obsessed. Pottering around in a shed was how many a British male liked to spend any spare time, not in the pub. There was a post-war boom in attending football and cricket matches. Cinema, though, was for everyone, and to give some idea of its popularity, it is worth recording that in 1947, there were around ten times as many visits to a film as there are today, with a much smaller population. At the post-war peak, there were 4,600 cinemas in the country, each showing news films alongside the main and second features. The British film industry, which extended far further than Ealing, was turning out a steady flow of wartime adventures, history films, adaptations of Dickens and romances, but was not then or ever really able to stave off the power and glamour of Hollywood.