The Battle of Butlinʹs: Vulgarity and Virtue on the North Wales Coast, 1939-49

At the outbreak of the Second World War the holiday camp entrepreneur Billy Butlin agreed a secret deal to build an Admiralty training camp near Pwllheli in North Wales. The camp would be transferred to Butlin at the end of the war for use as a holiday camp. Whilst planners were initially horrified, the strategic argument that such camps would concentrate coastal development and also provide the necessary places for the expansion of ʹholidays with payʹ prevailed. More sustained opposition came from those concerned about the imposition of a culture of urbanised mass leisure on the Welsh heartland of the Llyn Peninsula. For some, the threat was ʹbathing beautiesʹ and alcohol; more profoundly, many feared the destruction of a Welsh-speaking rural polity. National sentiment rallied around an alternative social service camp and an overt form of Welsh nation-building. Nonetheless, Butlin won the case and the holiday camp opened in 1947.