Holidays With Pay: The Working Holidays of the 1930s

In Chapter 3 I examined British holiday films that emerged at the dawn of British cinema, reaching a peak with the series of films made by Hepworth. These films appeared in a period of increasing mass travel (by rail) and mass communication (through film, and printed media such as the postcard). To begin with, the holiday was a luxury, largely taken by the leisured classes who could afford to rent a house by the sea, sometimes for the whole summer season, as ‘hotels had not been thought very respectable until 1900’ (Angeloglou, 1975: 25). As the twentieth century moved on, however, the working classes increasingly hankered for some free time away from their hometowns. For these people, the holiday (as opposed to the day trip) became a distinct possibility, particularly in the Lancashire mill towns which benefited from the economic success of the cotton industry. For other working-class folk (in the East End of London, for example), a working holiday was the only alternative. Some of these families took seasonal hoppicking jobs in Kent, following the adage that ‘a change was as good as a rest’. A British-Pathé newsreel from September 1931, for example, depicts (what it refers to on its intertitle as) a ‘profit and pleasure’ holiday, with one young woman commenting on the health benefits rather than the drudgery of the job by saying, ‘Oh what a difference to London — I’ve come down here to try and get that schoolgirl complexion’.1