[2007] THE1950s
[2007] THE1950s
0054 Butlin's 1
My second vac job while at school was very different. It was purely about making money, though in fact it was a great experience -- much more so than the laboratory at Levers. I got it through my uncle, who ran the shops and bars at Butlin's Pwllheli. Making full use of this nepotism, I was employed as a beer porter in the Pwllheli camp!
I well remember the trip there, I left from the Riverside Station in Birkenhead. In those days this was a busy transport interchange; with the Mersey ferries and all the buses congregating outside the station itself. The station has long since disappeared, for the line is now merely an extension to the Mersey underground railway which bypasses the site. Thus, it is now essentially a commuter line, but in those days it really was a mainline station. There, accordingly, I caught the Pwllheli express!
This was billed as a mainline express. In fact it was the slowest train I have ever come across. It took a full six hours to get from Birkenhead to Pwllheli, where the same journey by car took no more than two to three hours - even on the country roads of the time. We meandered backwards and forwards across the countryside. I remember it running along the banks of Bala lake and visiting Barnmouth. All these rail lines have now disappeared in the cut-backs of branch lines since then; though the stretch alongside Bala Lake is, I believe, run for (heritage) tourists! It was a very pretty route, but very boring, especially as I was getting increasingly homesick -- this being the first time I had been away from home for any length of time. Incidentally, a train driver I worked with at Butlin's later complained bitterly because, taking a freight train over the same route, he had taken two and a half hours!
I remember getting off the train at Barmouth to ask the guard where it was going. The guard casually said to me "Ask the driver, and then would you tell me as I don't know either!” This was truly one of the joys of the railways in those days. We arrived eventually at Pennychain, which was the stop before Pwllheli, and was where the Butlin's camp was. Thus began one of my adventures.
The camp itself in contained something like 1,000 staff to service around 10,000 campers. We were kept away from the rest campers in a separate area, with our chalets surrounded by a high wire fence. At first I thought this was to keep us away from the campers, and from the facilities they had paid for, but I learned very soon that it was to keep the campers away from us! Our chalets were fairly bare, a couple of bunks, one on top of the other. But then so were those of the campers. My roommate was an elderly gentleman who managed the supplies for the staff canteen - which meant he had to go round each day to beg, borrow or steal food from the campers' restaurants; Billy Butlin didn't budget for his staff having to eat!
My job, as I have said, was as a beer porter. This meant I had to work in the beer stores. There I helped tranship the numerous loads of beer coming in every day to the bars around the camp. The camp in those days survived on the beer and sex! Or at least that was the case for the young. It was certainly where Billy Butlin made his money -- hence my uncle, who was in charge of this veritable gold mine, was the most important manager in the place! Accordingly, massive lorries, carring hundreds of crates full of bottles of beer or dozens of 32 gallon barrels of beer, used to draw up outside our warehouse; and we would have to unload them. It was a backbreaking job. The beer mainly used to come 24 bottles to a crate, and we used to put a 12 of these crates on a hand-trolley and wheel them into the warehouse. Needless to say, with the typical British flair for planning, there was a steep ramp before the door which made life much more difficult. Once inside we stacked then up to twenty high. I set the record for such stacking, with something like 200 of them stacked in just over a quarter of an hour.
It was very energetic job I lost three stone in weight in a fortnight. The guy with whom I worked most closely also lost a couple of stone; and he was a docker who started off at just 9 stone! We then reversed process, pulling out the beer bottles to match the orders from the various bars, loading them on to low-loading trolleys which would pulled by a 'Planet' tug around the camp. Equally these would return with the empties which were stacked in another part of the warehouse until they could be loaded onto the empty lorries.
As well as those crates we had the barrels of beer. There were to be found in a range of sizes, but they were mainly 32 gallon barrels; which took two of us to handle. Rolling along the ground was no problem, but we then we had to load them on to the trolleys for them to be distributed around the camp. This required special skills, since the trollies were about 18 inches off the ground and the two of us had rock the barrels backwards and forwards and then almost bounce them on board.
But, surprisingly, though the work might have been said to be as boring as in the laboratory of previous year, in fact it wasn't. We were a great group of workers together. We were always tired. I well remember developing the ability to climb onto the stack of crates with the empty bottles and lie down to go to sleep for just ten minutes. I should point out that this meant lying on top of empty bottles, with their necks upwards in the crates – and lying on that was rather like a fakir lying on a bed of nails. Even so was able to instantaneously snatch ten minutes sleep, here and there during the day.
My greatest mistake was misdirecting the lorry on, which I was going around the camp – where some lorries went direct to the bars - to a road over which there was a low power line. The lorry pulled this down, so I managed to shut down the whole fair, which was at the end of the road. I suspect that I was only kept on as my uncle was in charge!
hits