Holidays: Great to be a child beside the seaside

Beside the seaside: The pull-over at Mablethorpe in 1948. It was exactly the same when Eric Lowe went there with his family in the 1930s and had his picture taken

The turkey’s gone. The decorations have come down. There’s a cold snap in the air. It’s time to think about summer holidays and that’s just what former Derbeian Eric Lowe has been doing – even if he is looking back rather than forwards to the halcyon days of his youth and trips to the seaside with his family in the 1930s. Here, Eric of Hayling Island, Hants, shares some of his fond memories.

A SHORT time ago, while scanning through a hefty national newspaper, a photograph in an advertisement caught my eye.

It wasn’t just any photograph; it was a photograph straight out of my dad’s family album!

A closer look revealed that it wasn’t actually me walking with my parents, but the family in the picture were walking on the same road that we had walked and, by their attire, it was the same decade,

Our photograph was taken by a seaside photographer in 1937. It could have been any resort but it happened to be Mablethorpe.

Clothing aside, there was still an unmistakable 30s look about the group – a family that had come through hard times, enjoying an overdue break in the sun.

Mablethorpe was not the biggest resort but it certainly had everything that Derby holidaymakers needed.

The photographer’s pitch was on the pull-over to the beach and the photographs he took of us on our way to the beach in the morning were on display in the afternoon.

Mum was a careful spender but, after a seemingly disinterested look, thought it would be worth a shilling to buy it. We were, even by prewar standards, on an economy holiday.

We were self-catering in a flat, one spacious wing of a single-storey building in the middle of farmland some distance outside of town.

To an impatient child, getting everything ready for a day in the sand dunes seemed to take forever. Tea and sandwiches had to be made, a little brother had to be washed and dressed and supplies had to be packed.

Fancy making sandwiches when you could buy a bun for a penny!

More frustrating was the long, long walk along the beach to our chosen spot, secluded in the sand dunes of the North End.

Past the crowds we trudged, past dads lazing on deck chairs, children buying ice-cream from the “Stop me and buy one” vendor, past “Guess your weight” machines and even a sand artist who sculpted a camel in the sand.

All this was after stopping en route and waiting for Dad to choose a sixpenny hardback novel along with his newspaper. Why on earth did he want to read on holiday? The beautiful, clean, silver sand was made for playing, paddling or making sand castles. Mind you, even I needed to keep up with Rupert Bear’s adventures.

In 1937, a Rolls-Royce employee could take a week’s holiday with pay and the option of an extra week without pay. Taking the two weeks was a proposition my parents regarded attractive enough to make sacrifices for.

Neighbouring Skegness was the more popular resort for Derby’s holidaymakers. So popular was it, in fact, that for one week, when Rolls- Royce was on vacation, it was known as Derby-by-the-Sea.

Unlike the distant, exotic resorts on the south coast or Cornwall that boasted of palm trees and bluer skies, Skegness made the “bracing climate” of the east coast its selling point and featured a frolicking fisherman in its publicity.

Mablethorpe had no such symbol but the sun always shone every day we were there.

In 1964, my colleagues were taking their family holidays abroad but I took my family to Mablethorpe to relive the type of holiday I had enjoyed.

Little had changed and the sun still shone just as brilliantly. The only difference was the music at the pleasure ground vibrated with the sounds of the Swinging Sixties.

I returned to the office so relaxed and tanned that my colleagues asked: “Where did you go to?”

You should have seen their faces when I told them “Mablethorpe”.

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