Butlin's camp-y vacation images live again

CHICAGO ART SCENE

By Ellen Fox

Special to the Tribune

Published December 19, 2003

The "Wakey Wakey" loudspeaker announcements that roused vacationers from their beds each morning. The grass-skirted waitresses serving drinks in the Beachcomber Bar. The windows in the lounge that peered into the heavily chlorinated swimming pool. The chipper guest-hosts, or Redcoats. The Glamorous Grannies competition. The monorails.

These were the trappings of Butlin's Holiday Camps, the vacation spot of choice (if not necessity) for millions of English families, and the subject of a photography show, "The John Hinde Butlin's Photographs," at Daiter Contemporary gallery through Jan. 3.

Photographed between 1965 and 1972 for Somerset-born postcard manufacturer John Hinde, the large, lollipop-colored pictures offer a glimpse into a lost world of leisure and tradition that--much like their American counterparts, the Catskills "Borscht Belt" resorts--might seem kitschy now but were for many, a staple of post-war upbringing.

As the 10 pictures on display show, families spent their days swimming in heated pools, climbing onto amusement rides or chilling in huge Quiet Lounges. At night, they headed to big, schlocky ballrooms and bars--the Beachcomber, the Continental, the Empress--for drinking, dancing and live acts.

Though they were originally shot for use as souvenir postcards, the pictures are gallery-worthy for a number of reasons, explains Daiter director Michael Welch, not least of which was the aesthetic and technical perfectionism that John Hinde brought to the largely banal world of postcard photography.

"His product was the top of the heap in terms of the postcard world at that time. This postcard was the lushest, the glossiest. It had the thickest stock paper. It was the postcard that you paid the most money for," says Welch.

The first of nine Butlin's camps was opened in 1936 by Billy Butlin, an amusement park-owner who wanted to create resorts in England for working-class families who perhaps couldn't afford to escape their native drizzle for the shores of the Mediterranean.

The camps' popularity grew after World War II (during which they were used as military barracks) until the early 1970s, when competition from cheap Spanish and Portuguese getaways weakened business. Today, only three Butlin's remain in operation, but in their heyday, the camps were an institution of British camaraderie and, for some, forced merriment. (The resorts were surrounded by security fences which were locked at night to keep out freeloaders.)

After getting through the war together, the British "would have been used to this whole idea of having their lives structured," explains Welch. "It was all about being together, part of the cause. Part of that culture I think was built into Butlin's."

Though Hinde dictated the look of his lovingly detailed postcards, it was a trio of photographers--two German, one British--who snapped the actual pictures. Getting a good shot might take all day; the laborious process involved setting up numerous flashbulbs and an unwieldy camera and coordinating scenes so that there was some color, or at least a pretty girl or two, in the foreground.

And yet, despite the surreal Stepford-like stiffness to the photos, they are equally compelling for the details the photographers couldn't--or chose not to--control. Thanks to their enlarged size, one notices that in almost every picture, some one is looking at the camera, be it a quizzical boy at the pool with an inner tube, or a honey of a blond in the tiki bar. In the corners of a lounge photo taken at one camp, more than one person has nodded off in an armchair.

While it is their diorama-like quality (so fake-looking, yet so real) that first attracted Welch to the photographs, the show's biggest selling-point--at least to modern Chicagoans--might be its inherent nostalgia, or kitsch factor. We see the beehive hairdos, the painful-looking dance band, the vintage light fixtures, the raucous color patterns and the careless, shaggy seventies clothes that are all the rage all over again.

 "This imagery is stepping up the social ladder," confirms Welch. As postcards, these images might have cost vacationers at the Minehead or Skegness camps just a handful of pence. Today, in their two large, laser-printed sizes, they are worth $2,000 and $4,000.

But if there's something a bit cheeky in the high-art fondness for low-brow culture, not every one is getting a kick out of it. Welch recalls a recent visitor who said she had stayed at the camps in the 1950s.

"I don't think she was too pleased to be reminded. She had a big smile on her face, but she only stayed three or four minutes in the gallery. She's like, `Oh, this is interesting, I . . . think I'm gonna leave now,'" says Welch.

"Maybe she was uncomfortable walking into a gallery and having her teenage years dredged up."