Reconstructing the Family Holiday: The Holiday Camp in Postwar British Film

Abstract

In Chapter 4 I examined the holiday film in a period without widespread holidays with pay for the working classes. When the Holidays With Pay Act was passed in 1938, the opportunity of an annual break was in turn scuppered by the restrictions of the Second World War. Widespread holidays for the working classes only became a reality after the war had ended, and even then, this was a relative luxury in the immediate postwar period. For most people, some sort of restoration of ‘normality’ was their main concern in a period of ‘make do and mend’ and rationing. It was in this era that the regulated jollity of the holiday camp flourished. The mass pleasures on offer at these camps were perhaps temporarily able to convince the British holidaymaker that life wasn’t such an anticlimax after the victory celebrations had ended.