No. 26 - Step Into a Dream (Part One)

A collection of Butlin's Pwllheli badges, all from before my time.

Butlinland

One gloomy November day in 1982, I found myself in a most unusual situation. In the East Annex of the Pwllheli Butlin's camp, I was balancing precariously on the roof of a trailer normally hauled around the site by a tractor. A manager in a suit was laboriously pulling it along the deserted chalet lines with me on top of it, clutching an eighteen-foot pole and looking for all the world like the Great Blondin crossing Niagara Falls on a high wire. But my eighteen-foot pole wasn’t merely for balance - I was using it to dislodge bottles, cans, shoes, underwear and anything else that people had seen fit to throw onto the corrugated roofs of the staff chalets.

Between 1982 and 1984, the Croft and Perry sitcom Hi Di Hi was at the height of its popularity, starring Welsh actress Ruth Madoc as Gladys Pugh - and I was working at Butlin's Pwllheli. Despite the show’s success, Butlin’s Holidays did its best to distance itself from the image of a 1950s holiday camp. It was desperate to modernise and perhaps in doing so, the company tossed aside an unique selling point. Staff were told that the ‘campers’ must always be referred to as ‘guests’ and the camp itself as a ‘holiday centre’. Use of the phrase ‘hi-di-hi’ was a sackable offence. However, there were still Miss Lovely Legs heats, Glamorous Grandmother contests, Donkey Derbies, and Knobbly Knees competitions.

The Butlinland advert featuring The White Plains' Step Into a Dream captures the public-facing feel of the camps very well, but perhaps not the labour behind it all. Whenever I mention having worked at Butlin’s I am often asked ‘were you a redcoat?’ I never was, nor did I aspire to be. It took an army to run a holiday camp and very few of them wore the red coats of the Entertainments team.

Hell's Kitchen

Many Pwllheli schoolkids did holiday work at Butlin’s. I never had - but I was persuaded to return to my hometown and seek work in the camp. It may not have been the kind of work that a graduate would aspire to, but it was early in the Thatcher government, and I had been unemployed in Manchester for sixteen months, so it was a time for desperate measures. Painless as my unemployment had been in some ways, I had started to fear that I would become unemployable. I was grateful for the work and looking back, I still am. I wouldn't change a thing. I think I learnt more about people through working at Butlin's than I ever did at college.

The only work experience I could include in my application had been holiday stints as a waiter in the café of a friend - so I was duly offered a waiting job. Because I had sent the application from Manchester, they didn’t realise that I was a Welsh boy who would be living at home and assumed that I was based on site. I was assigned to the dining hall down on Red Camp where breakfast and an evening meal were offered. This meant a split shift - one early morning, the other in the early evening. The public transport between the camp and the town four miles away was patchy and did not help with this at all. That first day, in the searing heat, to make the late shift, I spent my day wandering around the camp rather than going home.

As for the job itself - I was issued a pair of ill-fitting maroon trousers and a white jacket with maroon epaulettes. I was young, so I expect I looked alright. I was assigned a mentor from Liverpool to show me the ropes, which meant serving meals in an enormous dining hall at breakneck speed - a far cry from serving sedate slices of carrot cake in a café of some twelve tables. The huge sweltering kitchen, which was hosed down rather than scrubbed at the end of the day, was the closest thing to hell I had ever seen.

Some in Pwllheli had been full of warnings. They considered the young people who worked in the camp, mostly from Liverpool and Manchester, to be the 'scum of the earth’. From the first day, this proved not to be the case. As a rookie waiter I was treated with patience and friendly good humour by the more competent waiters around me and indulged by the guests dining in the hall. I soon realised that I was working with the salt of the earth rather than the ‘scum’.

Servicing the Staff

The camp authorities clocked that I was local, saw that the split shift was not practical, and they took swift action. My first day as a Butlin’s waiter was also my last. They transferred me to Staff Accommodation where I was to become a porter/linesman and my white tunic was exchanged for a buff coloured one. My supervisor was a young woman from Dumfries who treated me as an endearing idiot, but one she guarded jealously whenever my labour was requested away from her domain. The clerk who ruled the Staff Accommodation Office was an older Scouse lady named Jessie - obviously someone I'd be wise to stay on the right side of. Like many of her generation, she was a sucker for a well-spoken boy with nice manners, so we got on exceptionally well from the start.

Chalet key deposit token.

I was introduced to Gerry, the handyman, a moustachioed fellow from Tonypandy, old enough to have a teenage daughter who also worked on camp. Gerry and I were to work from the same job book. Any issues with the staff chalets were reported to Jesse who entered them into the book. If something needed replacing - a broken bed, chair or wardrobe for instance, then it was my job. If something needed fixing - a lock or a window, that was for Gerry. As my parents were also from South Wales, Gerry and I had plenty to talk about and he offered me a lift to and from the camp every day, which was brilliant. He had a Ford Cortina with an eight-track installed, but he had only two cartridges - Shirley Bassey’s Greatest Hits and The Carpenters - so that was the music for the whole summer. My other co-workers were a troop of chalet maids of assorted age, from Merseyside and Greater Manchester and there was one local woman.

Two groups of ageing chalets were reserved for the staff, East Annex for the men and South Annex for the women. Gerry the handyman and I were the only two men routinely allowed on South Annex, and because I was 24 and single, I was the subject of a lot of ‘nudge, nudge, wink, wink’ comments from waiters and bar staff, who assumed that I must get up to all sorts of mischief down there. In fact, after clearing the lines I used to sit in the chalet maids’ office over a cup of tea, reading the Photo-love magazines they left lying around.

Nemeses

One of my main duties was to walk up and down the chalet lines twice a day collecting rubbish that had been thrown onto the grass. At South Annex it was a simple task, because the women were tidier than the men. While it was easier for me in that respect, it had one major drawback. I would clear the lines, empty the bins and leave the bags of rubbish at the end of the block ready for Transport to take them away. Unfortunately for me, the field that housed the donkeys was adjacent to South Annex and the beasts were led past on their way to and from the beach. The temptation of bags full of foul-smelling rubbish was too great for them and they would tear at the black plastic bags to look for tasty morsels of anything edible. In doing so, they undid all my hard work and there would be rubbish strewn all over the place - so Transport wouldn’t touch it. The call to Staff Accommodation would be made and it got so that I could tell by Jesse’s face what had happened before she even said “I’m sorry love. Them bleeding donkeys have been at the rubbish again.” I would have to return and re-bag what was left - and so those dopey, otherwise endearing beasts of burden became my arch nemeses - for a while at least. Other foes were soon to emerge.

East Annex was to the left of Blue Camp, South Annex to the left of Red Camp. The map makes sense from the camp entrance, but it is geographically upside down.

Many people might expect a place full of young people from big cities living in proximity would result in a certain amount of trouble, if not violence, but I cannot recall a single incident. Everyone rubbed along surprisingly well - although there was some hi-jinks such as food fights. The staff canteen boys would liberate swill intended for the pigs and it would end up decorating the East Annex chalet lines. When I first saw it, I thought there might have been an outbreak of food poisoning and that everyone had been vomiting. On closer inspection I realised that people did not generally vomit whole potatoes. It was a matter of concern for me because I was the one who had to clear it up and I’d rather clean up pigswill than vomit any day.

Clearing up after a food fight was a bit of a nuisance, but there was far worse to come. 

[To be continued tomorrow...in Step into a Dream (Part Two)]