Back Row: Cecil (Tom) Atkin (with parasol), Henry Cunningham. Middle Row: Fred Pond, Win Pond, Ruth Atkin, Daisy Cunningham (all three sisters, formerly Ellis). Front Row: Len Cunningham (with ball) Ron Atkin (with life belt).

A week of collective freedom

This picture captures some of the excitement and happiness unleashed by the legislation that set up a weeks paid holiday for workers introduced in 1938, after “a tough battle, one that pitted campaigners against government intransigence and resistance from employers”.

Plus ca change, plus c’est le meme chose.

The French here is deliberate; as one of the pressures on the government here came from legislation introduced by the Popular Front government in France for the 40 hour week and paid holidays for all two years earlier, after a massive wave of strikes and factory occupations, as well as similar developments in Belgium, Norway and the USA (with FDR’s New Deal).

So, to some extent, my family owe the good time they had and their carefree smiles to Leon Blum.

Daan to Margit...a long time before Chas n Dave

My Dad’s family, like so many others, took off for Margate for the week. The back of the photo shows it to be a post card. So photographers would set up a bespoke postcard from holidaymakers that they could have taken and copied to send off home, as a personal and more taseful alternative to the “cheeky” sort.

My Mum’s family, not pictured here, did the same. “We went to Margate. It was so COLD”. Miles of lovely beach, but the wind was so cold.” Both families stayed in B&Bs. “When you went back to where we were staying all you could smell all through the house was greens being cooked” (Mum).

Sunday School outings

Margate came at the end of a train journey, and gave a more exciting view of a seaside more expansive and a seaside town grander by far than those provided by the Sunday School charabang trips to Maldon, travel sickness included, that both my parents had been on for the preceding couple of years to see the sea; complete with refreshments from a tent that served up mugs of very brown tea from enormous enamel pots.

Woolly Cozzies

My Dad is wearing quite a classy boys swimsuit here. Not the one his Mum had knitted for him, as a lot of Mums did at that time; because it was much cheaper than buying one. These had the advantage of being warm before you went in the water, but had the downside of becoming incredibly heavy (and hard to keep up) as soon as you did.

Not Lobby Lud

As workers on holiday were much less likely to buy a daily paper – getting away from it all meaning getting away from it all – so, with all the factories closing pretty much at once, and facing a disastrous, if temporary, slump in circulation, the Daily Mirror and a few others like the News Chronicle used to publish a photo of a repesentative who would be present at the seaside during the holiday, so people who recognised him could approach and say “You are Lobby Lud and I claim my £5”; but with a variation printed only in that morning’s paper without which it wouldn’t work.

With average worker’s wages at 1 shilling and 2 pence an hour in 1938, this was equivalent to two weeks wages; so, worth buying a paper for.

At one point on this holiday, my grandfather was convinced he’d seen him, walked over and staked his claim. To no avail. The man said he wasn’t the mark. So, he bought a Daily Mirror to get the right form of words and tried again and, once again, and slightly more irritated, the man said he wasn’t. So, perhaps he was, but was off duty for a bit and was therefore irritated to be approached. Or he was a Lobby Lud lookalike and got approached all the time; in which case its a wonder he wasn’t more irritated than he was.

Darkness at noon?

Fred, sitting at the end of the line with the parasol, had a dark skin. After the outbreak of World War 2, just over a year later, he was in the RAF and, like a lot of other RAF personnel, was sent to Southern Africa for training; where he found that his uniform was no guarantee of being allowed into “Whites Only” bars or cafes, applying the strict colour bar that was the precursor to the fully fledged Apartheid entrenched there after 1948.

This photo was taken 20 years after the end of the First World War, and just over a year before the start of the Second. No cloud seems to dim the happiness. The sun is shining. The wind is fresh. The sand is soft and gritty. The ice creams are cold and sweet. A little bit of heaven outside the daily grind and in between two horrors.