Wish You Were Here!: The Lives, Loves and Friendships of the Butlin's Girls. Neil Hanson
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was talking nonsense, of course,’ Mavis says. ‘It wasn’t like today when they have computers that can do all sorts of fabulous things, but I didn’t know that at the time.’ So she ended up in a rather less stimulating work environment: the accounts office of the British Rail goods department. It was a job, at least, but she was still playing in the clubs at night and often not getting to bed until the early hours, so she admits that she probably wasn’t the most wide-awake or efficient accounts clerk British Rail ever had.
Over the next couple of years, the group went through three different line-ups and eventually dwindled to just three people: Dave, Ken and Mavis. So they formed a trio and carried on doing the clubs for a while, calling themselves The Verdi Three. Mavis chose the name, just because the accordion she used was a Verdi III and she liked the name.
When Mavis had joined the group at just twelve years old, the gap between her and Ken had seemed like a chasm. He was everything she wasn’t at that time: mature, poised and confident. He was a grown man who’d been away in the Army, and had been working as a professional musician and comedian, and she was just a kid, a schoolgirl, who happened to be able to play the accordion. She was more than a little in awe of him. ‘Though I might have had a bit of a teenage crush on him as well,’ she says, ‘he was really more like a much older brother to me.’ By the time she was seventeen, however, that began to change, and despite the age gap there was definitely some chemistry between them. They started spending time together off stage as well as on, and although they never really went courting (as they called it in those days), because they were always on stage in the evenings, and very rarely went out on a proper date, just the same, they were going out together from 1955 onwards.
When Mavis told her parents, they were nervous about it at first, especially her mother. Mavis remembers her asking, ‘What happens if he meets someone his own age and doesn’t want you any more?’ Both her parents came round to the idea fairly quickly, though. They knew Ken pretty well by then, because five years before, when Mavis had started playing with the band, her dad had made Ken promise that he would always make sure she got home safely. So he’d always see her to the door and say hello to her parents and sometimes, if it wasn’t too late, he’d pop in for a cup of tea before he went home.
Rumours had started going round her school that Mavis was going out with a bandleader from the moment she had started playing with the group. ‘It made me laugh at the time,’ she says, ‘because it sounded like I was going out with Joe Loss or Mantovani!’ So when she actually did start going out with Ken several years later, her friends were already quite used to the idea, and most of them didn’t really react to the news. There were inevitably some people who showed their surprise. A couple of her friends said, ‘Why are you going out with an older man?’ One even asked her if she was going out with Ken just because he was so popular. (Working as a comedian, Ken often had the audience in hysterics when he was on stage, and he was fairly well known locally as a result.) Most people, however, just accepted their relationship.
In the summer of 1956, Mavis and Ken went on holiday to Butlin’s Skegness with another couple. Mavis had been away without her parents before; when she was fourteen she went to Morecambe with a friend, which they both thought was very grown-up, even though they stayed in a boarding house run by her friend’s aunt, so they weren’t completely unchaperoned. Before she went to Skegness with Ken, however, she’d never been to Butlin’s and didn’t really know a lot about it, other than the things she’d read in magazines.
The camp seemed enormous. Mavis can remember walking along the road that ran between the rows of chalets on one side, and the shops, bars and theatres on the other, and she could just see the big old-fashioned merry-go-round at the entrance to the fun fair right at the far end – ‘It looked miles away!’ she says. The camp was like a mini-town and she felt sure she’d always be getting lost, but once she got used to it, it no longer seemed as vast as it had on that first morning.
The camp also seemed to have a glamorous air, even if it was sometimes only skin-deep, with its ‘marble’ columns that were actually painted plywood. Another girl who made her first visit to Butlin’s at the same time remembers being overwhelmed by the facilities, which were quite unlike anything she had ever seen before. She still recalls how ‘gorgeous and opulent’ the ballrooms were, with their chandeliers and the smell of polish from the gleaming dance floor.
The redcoats also made quite an impression on Mavis. Speaking of when she later became a redcoat herself, she says, ‘If we were not quite idolised, we were certainly very popular and admired by the campers, and I think I felt the same about them when I first went there as a holiday-maker. They always looked amazing and were always smiling and chatty, and very friendly.’ She doesn’t know if she really got the most out of Butlin’s at the time, because she was too shy to enter most of the competitions, though she did a few of the sports and games. Ken certainly wasn’t shy about getting up on stage, but then he’d been doing it for years. Mavis wasn’t the same kind of performer.
They could only afford to stay for a week, but Mavis and Ken had a great time while they were at Butlin’s and loved all the entertainment, including the Champagne Spinner in the ballroom on a Friday night. This was a big dial at the side of the stage, which had numbers painted round the edge and an arrow in the middle. The redcoats would spin the arrow and if it was pointing to the number of your table when it stopped, you got a bottle of champagne – at least, they called it champagne; it was fizzy and went ‘pop’ when it was opened, and best of all it was free!
Mavis even quite liked the stream of Radio Butlin’s announcements over the tannoy, apart from the early-morning ones, which would ease you out of a deep sleep with what was supposed to be soothing music.
Mavis and Ken got married eighteen months later, in the spring of 1958, when she was nineteen and he was thirty-one. They carried on performing with Dave at the working men’s clubs until the spring of 1959 when they saw an advertisement for an audition for Butlin’s. They were all a bit fed up with constantly having to load and unload their equipment and drive for hours to get to yet another club that didn’t pay much, and the thought of regular money – even if it was quite modest – plus free bed and board, with sun, sand and seaside thrown in, sounded pretty good.
All three of them went and auditioned at a hotel in Leeds. There were other groups everywhere, and microphones and loudspeakers all over the place. A lot of them were rock groups, with guitars, drums and ‘plenty of rock ’n’ roll attitude’, and Ken, Mavis and Dave weren’t sure how well their somewhat gentler music would go down, but they passed the audition and were offered a contract at the Butlin’s camp at Ayr. They were to be employed as musicians, playing in the bars and doing background music for the competitions.
Mavis’s mother was heartbroken when they set off, and Mavis felt pretty emotional about it as well. She was still only twenty and had never been away from home for more than a few days, yet now she was going to be away for a whole season: five months. They packed two great big trunks with clothing. At that time they had ‘a big, old car, a bit like a taxi with a drop-down boot lid at the back’, so they piled the trunks on top of that and then the three of them drove up to Ayr. It was the first time Mavis had ever been there, but then it was also the first time she’d ever been to Scotland.
They travelled through the night, with no real idea of how far away it was, nor of how long it would take them to get there. In the event, they got to the camp at about 5.30 a.m. It was only just getting light and the camp gates were still locked at that time of day. They drove up to the entrance and when they got out of the car, a huge Alsatian came bounding up to the gates, barking and growling and baring its teeth. On first impressions, with the locked gates, snarling dog and arc lights illuminating the barbed-wire fences, it seemed more like a prison camp than a holiday camp, but then the night security guard came to their rescue, called off the dog and let them in. He saw that they were absolutely shattered from driving all night, so he said, ‘Come and have a cup of tea and sit in the gatehouse with me until everyone else is up and doing.’
They waited until the other staff had arrived