Bringing you the news year after year
The Skegness Standard was first published on Wednesday, July 5, 1922, from a premises in Lumley Road.
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A brief history of tourism
The Skegness area has been occupied since Roman times.
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Find out about the Fisherman
The Jolly Fisherman, with his sou'wester, gum boots and broad smile, has become synonymous with Skegness.
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Paddle boats and a pier to be proud of
Skegness’ most famous feature is undoubtedly its pier, which is one of only 50 remaining in the UK.
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Billy Butlin - funfairs and fame
William Heygate Colbourne Butlin was born in Cape Town, South Africa on 29th September 1899 to William, the son of a clergyman, and Bertha, the daughter of a small town baker who had become a travelling showman.
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Carry on camping
Billy Butlin, a travelling fairground worker from Canada, set up his first holiday camp at Skegness in 1936 having identified a need for all-weather recreation for holiday-makers.
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80 years of Skegness yesterdays
After the foreshore became the property of Skegness Urban District Council in 1922, the local authority quickly went ahead with developing it.
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Flying bombs and wartime rations
By 1939 the nation seemed to have almost recovered from the Wall Street disaster of 10 years earlier, and then Hitler marched into Poland and Europe was aflame again.
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The ups and downs of life in a grand old English seaside town
As at the end of the Great War 1914-18, the aftermath of the Second World War found Britain with a huge housing shortage and local authorities’ first priority was solving that crisis.
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Sir Billy Butlin and Gracie Fields take a spin on one of the rides at Butlin’s, Skegness.

William Heygate Colbourne Butlin was born in Cape Town, South Africa on 29th September 1899 to William, the son of a clergyman, and Bertha, the daughter of a small town baker who had become a travelling showman.

William and Bertha had met in Leonard Stanley, near Gloucester, where William’s father was the vicar. Although they had fallen in love almost immediately, their different stations in life meant a marriage would be very much frowned upon. With the backing of their families, they emigrated to South Africa.

William, being a country gentleman, had never expected to work and had no particular trade. However, they opened a bicycle shop in a shed to the rear of their small timber house and imported the new safety cycle, the Pennyfarthing’s successor.

Working life and William did not agree, and more and more Bertha found herself looking after the both shop and their two young boys, Billy and Binkie, while William played tennis. Eventually the cycle shop failed, as did their marriage.

Bertha returned to her family in Bristol, and leaving the two boys with her sister Jessie, travelled around summer fairs selling gingerbread. After Binkie’s untimely death, Billy joined his mother on the road.

When Billy was 11 Bertha met and married Charles Rowbotham. They emigrated to Carada, putting Billy into boarding with a widow in Bedminster. For the first time education became a big part of Billy’s life. He attended the St. Mary Redcliffe school where he proved to have an aptitude for reading, drawing and painting.

However, Billy’s education was short-lived. Once Bertha and Charles had settled into their new home and Charles had secured a sales job with the Toronto Gas Company, they sent for him. He was teased by his new classmates because of his accent and, at the age of 12, left school. Although the family wasn’t poor, the $2 he earned each week with a waste paper collection company came in handy.

Keen to progress, it wasn’t long before Billy became a messenger boy at Toronto’s largest toy store, Eaton’s. He attended art school during the evening and was eventually promoted to the art department. It was at Eaton’s that Billy had his first taste of a holiday camp when he visited their summer camp.

1914 saw the outbreak of the First World War. Billy’s foreign nationality meant that, much to his delight, he was unable to enlist in the Canadian army. However, 12 months into the war, policies changed. Keen to impress his girlfriend, he signed up, intending to become a motorcycle despatch rider to avoid the front line.

In a strange twist of fate, Billy landed up as a regimental bugle boy, despite not knowing a note of music. Within weeks he was bored, and with a comrade deserted his regiment in favour of the cavalry regiment. However, after just two days of intensive training they had changed their minds again, and went back to their original barracks.

The army was very sympathetic and gave them 21 days in jail for their misdemeanours.

Eventually Billy settled into army life and was posted to France where the war passed quietly for him. He never saw any front-line action and received his one and only injury during training when a detonator went off in his face, hospitalising him for a week.

Billy was demobbed in 1918, a few months after the death of his step-father. Having failed to find a new job (his application for a lavatory attendant was even turned down) he returned to his old post at Eaton’s.

Within 18 months Billy was bored and left Eaton’s. He and Norman Littlewood, with whom he had served in France, set up a darts stall at the Toronto Exhibition. The stall was a success and they thought nothing of paying the £400 advance needed to take their stall to another event in northern Canada.

However, within weeks Billy was back at Eaton’s begging to have his job back again. There had been no exhibition, and his £400 was gone, along with the man who had conned him into handing it over. Although he was re-instated, it wasn’t long before he was off to Newfoundland where he signed on as a crewman with a ship bound for England.

On February 17th 1921 Billy arrived in England with just £5 in his pocket and headed straight for Bristol to catch up with Bertha's family, who gave him a job refurbishing their fair ridees. With a loan from them, he then set up a hoopla stall.

Billy’s first fair was at Axebridge, where he made £10, even taking into account the 30 shillings he’d paid out for prizes. His stall was more popular than other hooplas at the fair because the blocks he had used were smaller and easier to get the hoops over. Word quickly got round that his stall was lucky and people just kept coming back to try again.

Continually looking for new ideas, it wasn’t long before Billy opened a goldfish stall and took on some staff, who he kitted out in a uniform with a “B” stitched to the pockets. He also painted his stalls a recognisable blue and yellow – the colour scheme he would use 15 years later at his first holiday camp in Skegness.

He opened several stalls near the entrance to the big top at a Christmas circus at Olympia in London, which were so profitable that he could finally afford to bring his mother back from Canada. For several years, Bertha ran the Olympia site while Billy toured Britain, adding to his empire at every turn. It was as he toured in 1924 that he met Dolly. They were married the following year.

Times were changing. Billy had observed that people were no longer staying at home during their precious free time. The extension of the railways and car ownership meant that people were now travelling further afield. Although there was still no such thing as a paid holiday, whole villages, families or factories would save up for a whole year so that they could take a trip together, often to the coast.

Exploring the Skegness seafront in the winter of 1927 Billy found a piece of land which he leased from the Earl of Scarborough. The site was covered in large sand dunes and needed levelling. This would have been a huge and expensive undertaking had Billy not realised that sand was much in demand for post-war construction. He sold the sand to builders for five shillings a lorry load, with the proviso that that buyer collected. By the end of 1928 Billy had set up hoopla stalls, a helta skelta, a haunted house ride and a scenic railway on the new site.

Within a few years Billy had moved to a bigger and better site and introduced bigger and better attractions, including the first dodgem cars in Britain. The cars were an instant success and so, after considerable negotiating, he secured the sole agency rights to them throughout Europe.

Billy continued to expand his empire with new fairs and rides all over the country, but was now developing even bigger plans. While in Skegness he had observed landladies turning their guests out into the streets for the day, and groups of holiday makers wandering around in the rain with nowhere to go. Remembering his time at Eaton’s summer camp he realised there could be real demand for an all-weather activity camp.

Billy’s mother died of complications arising from a chill in 1933 without seeing her son’s greatest achievement – the camp that he built on 200 acres of farmland near the village of Ingoldmells. He’d spent two years looking for a suitable site and had happened on it while visiting his amusement park in Mablethorpe.

As soon as the 1935 summer season had ended and his amusement parks had closed, Billy summoned his best men to Skegness and work began, ready for a grand opening the following spring. Adverts were placed in the Daily Express, inviting the public to book a week’s holiday, with the price including all meals and entertainment. The response to the advert was phenomenal.

The camp was officially opened on Easter Sunday 1936, although one camper, a Miss Freda Monk from Nottingham, was so excited that she turned up a day early! It snowed for the first four days of the season, during which time Billy became aware that some of the holiday makers seemed a little bored in the evenings. Billy had spent so much money on the infrastructure of the camp, that he had very little left for professional entertainers. Instead, he appealed for volunteers to put on a show in the dining room. The redcoat had been born!

The outbreak of the Second World War put a temporary hold on Billy's plans, but he later built more camps, including those at Clacton and Filey. His achievements were recognised in 1964 when he was knighted and became Sir Billy Butlin. He died at the age of 80 in 1980.