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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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.

Butlin had designed the camp himself with many of his ideas sketched on scraps of paper and cigarette packets. His plan was to accommodate 1,000 people in 600 luxury chalets. Facilities were to include a gymnasium, swimming pool, boating lake, tennis courts, bowling and putting greens and cricket pitches.

The camp opened its doors on 11th April 1936 and was an immediate success - at the end of the first year a £40,000 loan allowed the capacity to be increased to 2000, and construction of a larger dining room and a purpose-built theatre. The camp eventually went on to accommodate close to 10,000 holiday-makers.

Billy was clear in his intent. This was to be luxury camp, at prices that ordinary, working people could afford. One of the first adverts to appear in the Daily Express promised three meals a day and free entertainment from 35 shillings a week.

However, on the outbreak of war in 1939 the site was taken over by the Royal Navy and became a training camp known as HMS Royal Arthur. The beer garden became a sick bay, the Fortune Teller's Parlour was the dentist's surgery and the Viennese Dance Hall became the armoury. Air raid shelters occupied the rose gardens and the camp’s bright blue and yellow paintwork disappeared under military greys.

At the end of the war the site was handed back to Billy, who started to restore the camp back to its former glory. The Navy had taken great care of the camp, but it had been bombed by the Luftwaffe more than 50 times. After just 6 weeks of work, the camp reopened on 11th May 1946.

In 1948 Billy opened his own airport next to the camp to deal with passenger and freight charters, as well as sightseeing trips. The following years saw the opening of the Ingoldmells Hotel and the Butlin Theatre, which was later renamed the Gaiety. The chairlift, which ran from one end of the camp to the other, was opened in 1962. It was the longest one Butlin’s had ever installed. In 1965 a futuristic monorail was built. This is still in use today.

Butlin’s summer line-ups were impressive too. In 1962, Ringo Starr and his group Rory Storm, and the Hurricanes, arrived to play the summer season at Skegness. During that summer John Lennon and Paul McCartney visited the Skegness camp and met Ringo. Lennon later telephoned Ringo at the camp to invite him to join the Beatles. The rest, as they say, is history.

The camp continued to prosper throughout the 60s and 70s, although as holiday-makers’ expectations increased the camp needed significant investment to help it compete against newcomers such as Centre Parcs. Thus by the early 1980s, The Rank Organisation took over the Butlin’s empire with a view to providing the ultimate holiday experience.

In 1987 the camp benefitted from a £14 million investment and improvement scheme, including a change of name to Funcoast World. There was further investment in the 1990s, and the Skegness camp is now the largest of the three remaining Butlins camps.

Billy’s original ten-foot chalets have been replaced with 1900 two-storey Florida plantation-style blocks with exotic names such as Pelican Court and Oyster Bay. Just one of the original 1936 chalets survives, preserved as a Grade 2 listed building.