Holidays at Home in the Second World War

Abstract

The way of looking at British civilian life during the second world war, characterized by Angus Calder's 1991 book, The Myth of the Blitz, has little to say about wartime holidays. Paul Addison who, like Calder, helped to implant the 'myth' of wartime solidarity, in later editions of his The Road to 1945 argues for a much more restricted 'Whitehall consensus';' attitudes to wartime holidays seem not to have informed his argument. Mark Donnelly's general study Britain in the Second World War (1999), is equally silent on the subject, as is Arthur Marwick: the broad sweep of the latter's History of the Modern British Isles (2000) contains only the briefest reference to the 1930s holidays with pay legislation, without going on to look at its wartime legacy. Even collections of essays about 'cultural' or recreational activity on the home front, like Kirkham and Thom's War Culture (1995) and Hayes and Hill's Millions Like Us? British Culture in the Second World War (1999) generally disregard holidays. Colin Griffin's essay, 'Not Just a Case of Baths, Canteens and Rehabilitation Centres', however, in the Hayes and Hill collection, usefully confirms that the family leisure activities organized by the Miners' Welfare Commission complemented arguably outshone the official 'Holidays at Home' programmes in mining areas during the war. Most recent works on the history of holidays, too, say little about the detail of wartime holidays, whether 'at home' or in conventional resorts. Lencek and Bosker's The Beach (1999) has rather more to say about restrictions on pleasure travel in the USA than in Britain. J.K. Walton's The British Seaside (2000), like James Walvin's earlier Beside the Seaside (1978), makes the important point that some British resorts, notably Blackpool, did well out of the war, thanks to a combination of military 'occupation', the influx of government and private employment from London, and the concentration of such holiday traffic as existed on Britain's northern and western coasts. Walton also links wartime 'myth' with the postwar explosion of the holiday trade: 'The Second World War interrupted the process of democratisation of