From grannies who encouraged you to climb tall trees and mothers who let you roam unsupervised as long as you were home in time for tea, a captivating new book recalls the school summer holidays of yesteryear.
Returning home from his Sheffield primary school one summer’s afternoon in 1966, eight-year-old John Mullan asked his mother why his family couldn’t go on holiday to Majorca, like that of another boy in his class.
‘Darling, going abroad is vulgar,’ she said. Mrs Mullan thought it was something people were starting to boast about, like having a new conservatory.
John’s mother was far from alone in believing foreign holidays to be tasteless.
Summer holidays in Britain, to regions such as Kent (pictured) were deemed popular in the middle of the 20th century, as foreign travel was deemed tasteless and was attributed to going off to war
Take the reaction of Sir Nicholas Soames, the former Tory MP, when I suggested that his family might have holidayed somewhere more exotic than the north of Scotland in the 1950s.
‘Abroad!’ he said, outraged. ‘Certainly not! No one went abroad except to fight a war.’
Even had they wanted to go abroad, most people couldn’t have afforded it, including the family of Susan Brown, a draper’s daughter brought up in Bradford in the 1940s.
She remembered the excitement of the annual ‘Factory Fortnight’ when the Browns joined the long queues for trains to Blackpool.
‘They put on extra carriages and had to have two engines to pull the train out of Bradford to get it up the hill, there were that many people going.’
The luggage accounted for much of the weight. Suitcases then were so heavy that to carry one in your right hand you needed to do a counter-bend to the left for the sake of balance.
Why it took so long between the invention of the wheel (3500BC) and the invention of ‘rolling luggage’ (patented in 1972) remains a mystery.
It actually made things easier if you were carrying two suitcases of equal back-breaking weight: hence a generation of fathers who said, ‘Here — let me carry them both’.
It was fathers who came into their own as cars became more affordable — there were four million on the road by 1950.
Inside those Hillman Imps and Ford Anglias were children squished into the back, unable even to look at the cover of their I Spy book for fear of being sick.
In front were their parents, stubbing out their cigarettes in the pull-out ashtray drawer before passing round the travel sweets in a circular tin that were all too often stuck together thanks to the sweltering heat inside cars devoid of air-conditioning.
Many dads had seen wartime service and planned holidays with military efficiency. Piano teacher Anna Maxwell, who grew up in Sidcup, Kent, in the 1960s, remembered her school-master father, a former army captain, starting to pack up their Bedford van seven days before they left.
‘In went the tins of corned beef, the Fray Bentos tinned stew and the packets of Smash. Then, four days before departure, we started our daily tent practice. Every morning we had to muster on the lawn and practise the drill. My father would say, “On the count of four, lift!”, or “On the count of four, hammer!”’
On the morning that families set off — usually at an ungodly hour to ‘beat the traffic’ — last-minute checks were made to ensure that everything had been packed.
As for what you wore, the doctrine of thrift saw people cut holes in their children’s shoes to convert them into sandals.
‘There was none of this stuff about new summer wardrobes,’ said writer and broadcaster Libby Purves who grew up in Walberswick, Suffolk, in the 1950s.
‘I never had more than one swimming costume in a summer. Putting the same wet costume back on is a vivid memory. And wearing it again and again the following summers.’
Other children were put in eye-catching costumes which were home-made with love, if not much foresight.
‘My grandmother knitted me and my sister matching pink woollen bathing costumes,’ remembered Jane Adams, a doctor’s daughter brought up in 1960s Derbyshire.
‘They even had smart little knitted belts but as soon as we got wet they sagged down to our knees. They were completely unfit for purpose.’
People tended to go to the same places every year and along the way were familiar sights. Retired businessman Charles Fraser recalled his family’s car journeys from the Scottish Lowlands up to Nairn in the 1930s.
‘Near Grantown-on-Spey there was always an AA man on the side of the road, and he always saluted when he saw the AA badge on our car,’ he said.
‘My sister and I thought it was us he was remembering. He had red hair, and we called him Ginger. “I wonder if Ginger will be there this year?” we’d say. He always was.’
Once at the coast, seaside accommodation was socially stratified. Boarding houses were regarded as so common by the middle-classes that a child who stretched their arm across someone else to grab the salt was said to be doing ‘the boarding-house reach’.
‘It wouldn’t have done for our family to go to a boarding house,’ said Jane Adams.
‘We stayed in a second-rate three-star hotel in Scarborough. It was dark inside and we had to creep around, not making a sound.
‘“Best manners!” our mother kept saying to us in the dining room. My sister and I were on show in our matching frocks.’
Jane’s family would certainly not have joined the crowds at Butlin’s. But her father might have had more in common with them than he imagined.
In 1937, an emergency call for a doctor at one Butlin’s camp was answered by 23 physicians. The upper classes sent their children away to the seaside with their nannies, and one woman, who asked to remain anonymous, revealed a 1960s precedent for that modern habit of the super-rich photoshopping the hired help out of their holiday snaps.
‘Our parents drove us children and our nanny to Frinton-On-Sea, and as soon as we arrived we posed for a photograph on the beach so it would look as if this was a family holiday.
‘Five minutes later our parents left to go on a foreign holiday, leaving us with the nanny.’
The posher classes held that the fewer official activities a beach offered, the better it was for you.
While their children made do with buckets and spades, their lower-class counterparts went on beaches with entertainments such as donkey rides, amusement arcades, Punch and Judy shows and so on.
Trips to English beaches to see shows such as Punch and Judy (pictured) were popular with the lower classes, with the posher classes travelling to beaches with little activity on them
It was rare to get different social classes on the same beach. The Broadstairs-ites wouldn’t go near Margate and the Filey-ites wouldn’t go near Bridlington.
Clacton was seen as Sin City,’ said Giles Fraser, whose family holidayed at genteel Frinton, seven miles away.
In the days before water-resistant sunscreen (not invented until 1977) some families experimented with a new-fangled substance called olive oil, bought from the chemist.
But often the sun didn’t shine at all and by the late 1960s families began travelling abroad.
‘Vulgar’ foreign travel might have been, but families like the Ritchies from Fife found their trip to Majorca in 1960 quite daunting.
‘It was too scary to go on our own,’ said Harry Ritchie, 11 at the time. ‘So we went with our neighbours, a doctor’s family called the Beatties.’
Alongside sunbathing on the Costas, driving holidays also became popular. Standing on the deck of the ferry, watching the seagulls following the wake, the old land receding and the new land coming into view, you felt as if you were going to a new world.
It was a world where the bread would be long and thin and they drove on ‘the wrong side of the road’, as Jane Adam’s father put it.
Off these Britons drove, into the great land mass of ‘the Continent’, ‘and suddenly the car becomes all that’s left of the family,’ said the publisher Simon Winder — ‘a bubble of Britishness making its way across France.’
Jim Rogerson was the son of a secondary school headteacher from Barnsley and in the 70s his family toured France and Spain in their camper van.
‘I sat in the middle at the front and filled my father’s pipe with tobacco — he smoked as he drove.
‘If we saw another British car, we’d flash our lights.’
‘We took 21 tins of baked beans for our three-week holiday,’ remembered Eleanor Oldroyd, the daughter of a Shropshire clergyman whose family swapped vicarages with their French counterparts in the 1970s.
‘My mother fitted them around the wheel arch in the boot, along with the tinned mince and tinned Campbell’s soup.’
When it came to food, the Rogersons were also unadventurous.
‘We didn’t eat out, partly because of the expense, but partly because we wouldn’t have known what to eat. Paella? What was that?’
Only at the end of each trip did they indulge themselves: enjoying a silver-service meal of meat and three veg on the British ferry taking them homewards.
Often those proudly displaying GB stickers on their cars arrived home long before the postcards they had posted from abroad.
These were partly to say ‘See what an exciting life we lead’. But as the children of that era knew, there was plenty of excitement to be had without going anywhere on holiday.
The convention then was to treat children more like cats (allowed to go in or out as they pleased) than dogs (taken for walks).
When you came home on the last day of the summer term, your parents were pleased to see you but ten minutes later they expected you to vanish.
‘Our mother just used to put us on the 74 bus,’ said one woman raised in Putney, South-West London, during the 1970s.
Other places such as Butlins (pictured) were popular in terms of British mini-breaks during the 20th century
‘She told us to go all the way to the end of the route and back. So, Baker Street and home again. That kept us out of her way.’
This was Beanpole Britain: a nation of children who had not an ounce of fat on them because they were running around all day.
In 1977, eight-year-old Ben Thomas was cycling up and down his street in Chelsea when he became intrigued by the band marching past en route to accompanying the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace. Unsupervised, he followed it all the way there.
‘I got lost on the way back and asked a policeman,’ said Ben, now the headmaster of a private school. ‘He just pointed the way.’
Back from boarding school in Salisbury, author Jilly Cooper spent her holidays at the family home in Yorkshire, enjoying ‘incredible freedom’.
‘I said goodbye to my mother and got on my pony, Willow, and went off for the whole day,’ she said.
Freedom came with danger. Scabs, bruises and scars were notched up as tokens of fearlessness and people showed me great gaps in their mouths where their teeth were knocked out by heavy swings or by falling out of trees.
‘If we fell over,’ said Noreen Rimmer, a child of 1940s Newton-le-Willows, Lancashire, ‘our mother just scrubbed our knees with a brush.’
Even if mothers were a benign presence in the background of their children’s lives, the important thing was that they were there.
The baking smell wafting from kitchen windows offered reassurance that ‘my mother is at home so all is well with the world’ and extra kindness and love was provided by grandparents.
Barrister Sally Terris and her sister spent many happy holidays at her grandmother’s home in the Sheffield suburb of Walkley and a highlight of their week was a trip out to do the washing.
‘Our grandmother was in a high good humour on launderette day. She loaded up the wicker trolley and wheeled it down South Road, and we went along with her and bought comics and sweets at the newsagents on the way.
‘It was a sort of holiday outing. It’s why I like doing washing now.’
When the launderette afforded such pleasures, who needed Bridlington, let alone Spain?
Extracted from British Summertime Begins: The School Holidays 1930-1980 by Ysenda Maxtone Graham, published by Little Brown on July 9 at £18.99.
© Ysenda Maxtone Graham 2020.