It was all a bit different then ...

One web site that I love to dip into now and again is this one, the history of Butlins, the first and best known holiday camp operators in the UK.

Not that we ever went there as kids, oh no, Butlins was a bit too down market for our family, although our dad would have loved the opportunity to take part in the famous Butlins national talent competition where the weekly winners went forward to a grand final at the end of the season, he'd have won the grand final easy with his crooning.

No, instead of going to the Butlins Filey camp we went five miles or so up the road to Wallis's holiday camp , a smaller, privately owned version of Butlins, the full story of our times at Wallis's in the early 1960's can be found here.

But back to Butlins and in particular the full copy of the 1974 entertainment guide to the Filey camp which is itemised page by page here. It gives an extraordinary insight into the life of a holiday camp where each individual day of your seven day stay revolved around the entertainment guide and the clock, including your meal times where you had to arrive at the huge dining hall on time and at the right sitting or you went hungry.

Of course Butlins had its redcoats to ensure that you were kept busy and active right through the day in order that you didn't dwell too much on the fact that you were contained within a barbed wire compound for the whole of your holiday but what they don't tell you in the brochure is that the Filey camp was certainly run on an almost military basis. Our Uncle Ralph owned a caravan on a site right next door to Butlins and the one thing that he regretted was choosing a pitch so close to the Butlins barbed wire fence as they were woken up every morning by the Butlins tannoy announcements informing campers that if they were on the first breakfast sitting then they should be shifting their lazy arses out of bed by now, followed by a song about Gibbs SR toothpaste.

We did once visit the Filey camp on a day pass as our dad knew someone who was staying there at the same time that we were at Wallis's, it must have been around 1963-ish and all I can remember about the visit was the fact that our dad took the piss out of everything there, pointing out how shabby the buildings were and how corny the frequent tannoy announcements were, he may also have goosestepped his way down one of the campsite roads holding the index finger of his right hand horizontally under his nose and his left arm stiffly raised in a nazi salute as we were all shuffled along by a redcoat to the next event on the sports field, its the sort of thing he'd do as he was never shy of making his point of view, especially if he felt superior about something - our host never invited us back to Butlins.

That sort of thing never happened at Wallis's, we did not have tannoy announcements and while there was always plenty of organised shennanigans going on you were never forced to take part like the guards, erm, redcoats did at Butlins, in fact Wallis's only had a small staff and more then likely it would be our dad that would be organising a cricket or football match on the beach or the solitary Wallis's playing field, 130-a-side football with me in goals wishing I was making sand castles on the beach instead of letting in a goal a minute in our 92-0 defeat which would take our dad two days to get over - he could never understand why sport never mattered to me.

I did once stay in the Butlins hotel in Scarborough around 1978 when I was old enough to know better but me and three mates had gone to the resort on the north east coast on a sudden impulse for a weekend pissup and the only place with a vacancy was The Grand Hotel, a run down victorian monster of a place (when built it was the largest hotel in Europe) which had recently been bought by the Butlins organisation and which had so many bedrooms that it would never be filled.

On our weekend I had a room on floor nine, I should have suspected something was slightly amiss when we took the lift to floor eight where my friends were staying, for there was no button for floor nine in the lift.

Eventually we found a narrow door with my room number on it and upon opening it saw a narrow staircase winding its way upwards into darkness - my room was actually in one of the four decorative towers at each corner of the hotel which sounds very romantic but in reality I shared my room with several hot and cold water tanks and their associated pipework and every time someone went to the toilet during the night my room shook and I lay awake until the water tank filled again - having the main hot water tank for that end of the hotel actually in my room with me did mean that I was as warm as toast right through the cold February weekend though.

The whole of that weekend was block booked by dozens of coach party's which meant that the four of us twenty-something year olds were marooned in a hotel full of pensioners who thought that the idea of being shepherded from entertainment room to entertainment room to dingin room and then more entertainment was a superb way to spend three days, £28 all-in. Fortunately we managed to find an escape route through an open emergency exit that the guards dogs had missed so donkey derby's and bingo were forsaken for beer in pubs, disgraceful behaviour that was frowned upon when we returned to Butlins hell.

My children refuse to believe me when I tell them this sort of stuff.