This is the story of Billy Butlin both before he opened his first holiday camp at Skegness in 1936, and after, including his childhood in South Africa, his travels with West Country fairs in England and emigration to Canada, through his wartime experiences and extraordinary business career.
Our True Intent Is All For Your Delight features the vintage color photographs of the John Hinde postcard company, originally made in the 1970s for sale as postcards and published here in book form for the first time. Butlin's was a network of Holiday Camps that revolutionized the British holiday in the years following World War II and, by the 1970s, was attracting a million people each year. The John Hinde team of photographers documented Butlin's glamorous and kitsch bars and ballrooms with technical brilliance and with the participation of large casts of holidaymakers. Precursors to the art photography of Andreas Gursky and Jeff Wall, these images are simultaneously heart-warming and hilarious, with dazzling design and color. They are a unique social-historical record of Britain in the early 1970s, described by Martin Parr in his introduction as "some of the strongest images of Britain of the period." Martin Parr is a leading figure in British and European photography and a jackdaw collector of images and -postcards. Born in Epsom, Surrey, in 1952, he spent two summer breaks from college working as a "walkie" photographer at Butlin's, snapping holidaymakers for their family albums. His encounter at Butlin's with John Hinde's postcards helped determine his own style, and he came to fame in 1986 with color-saturated scenes of working-class British holidaymakers, The Last Resort. Author of over 30 photography books, his retrospective was shown at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, in 2002. He is a member of Magnum Photos, and his work has been collected by museums throughout the world, including the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Philadelphia Museum and the Museums of Modern Art in New York and San Francisco.
For two years British photographer Anna Fox documented holiday culture at the iconic Butlins resort in the seaside town of Bognor Regis, West Sussex. 'Resort 2' observes a very different kind of holiday, the themed adult breaks, taking place about once every six weeks inside this very British holiday camp. Butlins, famed for its family holidays since its creation in the mid-1930s, needed to rework its branding from the 1970s onwards. Cheap package holidays started to draw families away from this popular resort and several of the camps closed down.
Over 15 million adults in Great Britain have been to Butlins and they know Billy Butlin as the man who revolutionized their holiday habits. The general public revere him as the man who made luxury holidays affordable to the average British family, but do they know the true Billy Butlin? Butlins in its Prime is the second instalment in the life of Rocky Mason, focusing on his 30 year career working for a British holiday institution as well as his own personal tribute to the man, known as "The Holiday Camp King." With over 50 archive pictures, this book is a must for any Butlins Devotee
These vibrant photographs capture the unique and somewhat tragi-comic character of the most well-known of all British package holidays: the Butlin's 'jolliday'. Lewis, who worked at Butlin's in the 60s, returned to the Skegness camp in 1982 when the original vision was beginning to fade. Billy Butlin created his holiday attraction in the 1930s, when British workers were granted paid holidays for the first time and families were drawn by the promise of individual chalets, a theatre and a swimming pool.