Scrap Book Project – Continental Holidays

  

From the Scrap Book, these are 1965 newspaper advertisements for holidays to Spain and the Balearics and the cost seems to be an average of about £35 which may not sound a lot now but to put that into some sort of perspective in 1960 my dad took a good job at a salary of £815 a year so that fare would have been about two and a half weeks wages! Each!  The average weekly wage in the United Kingdom today is £490 so on that basis a flight to Spain at 1957 British European Airline prices would now be about £1,225 so some things in life have defied inflation and become cheaper.

In the first few years of the 1960s, in the days just before and then during the Freddie Laker days of early package holidays, my grandparents visited Benidorm in Spain several times.  For people from London who had lived through the Luftwaffe blitz of the 1940s and the killer smog of the 1950s they applied for passports (which was practically unheard of for ordinary people) and set out with pale complexions on an overseas adventure and returned home with healthy Mediterranean suntans and duty free alcohol and cigarettes.

They brought back exotic stories of exciting overseas adventures and suitcases full of unusual souvenirs, castanets, replica flamenco dancing girls, handsome matador dolls with flaming scarlet capes and velour covered bulls that decorated their living room and collected dust for the next twenty years or so.

In the photograph my grandparents Ernie and Olive were roughly the same age as I am now and they were clearly having a very good time sitting at a bar enjoying generous measures of alcohol, the same sort of good time that I like to enjoy when I go travelling.  I’m guessing of course but Grandad, who looks unusually bronzed, seems to have a rum and coke and Nan who looks younger than I can ever remember her appears to have some sort of a beer with a slice of lime and that’s about forty years before a bottle of Sol with a bit of citrus became anything like fashionable.  With him is his brother George (no socks, very impressive for 1960) and his wife Lillian. Nan and Grandad look very relaxed and with huge smiles that I can barely remember.  I wonder how they managed to be among the first early holidaymakers to visit Mediterranean Spain in the 1960s?

In 1950 a Russian émigré called Vladimir Raitz founded a travel company in London called Horizon Holidays and started flying people to Southern Europe and the package tour was born.  Within a few years he was flying to Majorca, Menorca, and the Costa Brava.   In 1957 British European Airways introduced a new route to Valencia and the designation ‘Costa Blanca’ was allegedly conceived as a promotional name when it first launched its new service on Vickers Vanguard airoplanes with four propeller driven engines at the start of the package holiday boom.   By the end of the decade BEA was also flying to Malaga on the Costa Del Sol.

The flight took several hours and arrival at Valencia airport some way to the west of the city was not the end of the journey because there was now a one hundred and fifty kilometre, four-hour bus ride south to Benidorm in a vehicle without air conditioning or air suspension seats and in the days before motorways on a long tortuous journey along the old coast road.  Today visitors to Benidorm fly to Alicante to the south, which is closer and more convenient, but the airport there was not opened until 1967.

I am curious to understand how they were able to afford it?  Grandad was a bus conductor with London Transport on the famous old bright red AEC Routemaster buses working at the Catford depot on Bromley Road (he always wore his watch with the face on the inside of his wrist so that he didn’t break the glass by knocking it as he went up and down the stairs and along the rows of seats with their metal frames) and Nan worked at the Robinson’s factory in Barmerston Road boiling fruit to make the jam.

Benidorm developed as a tourist location because it enjoys a unique geographical position on the east coast of Spain.  The city faces due south and has two stunningly beautiful beaches on the Mediterranean Sea that stretch for about four kilometres either side of the old town, on the east the Levante, or sunrise, and to the west the Poniente, the sunset, and it enjoys glorious sunshine all day long and for most of the year as well.  Today, Spain is a tourist superpower that attracts fifty-three million visitors a year to its beaches, 11% of the Spanish economy runs off of tourism and one in twenty visitors head for Benidorm.  The city is the high rise capital of Southern Europe and one of the most popular tourist locations in Europe and six million people go there each year on holiday.

Thanks to http://www.realbenidorm.net/ for the use of the image

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Other Benidorm Posts:

Benidorm c1960

Benidorm, Plan General de Ordinacion

Benidorm, The War of the Bikini

Benidorm 1977 – First impressions and the Hotel Don Juan

Benidorm 1977- Beaches, the Old Town and Peacock Island

Benidorm 1977 – Food Poisoning and Guadalest

Benidorm – The Anticipation

Benidorm – The Surprise

World Heritage Sites

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Package Holiday to Benidorm

In 1976 I travelled to Europe for the first time to Sorrento in Italy with my dad who obligingly stepped in at the last moment following girlfriend trouble.  Very soon after that we patched things up and in October the following year I went to Spain with my fiancée, Linda.  We could have gone practically anywhere we liked, so long as it was within our restricted budget of course, but we choose to go to Benidorm on the Costa Blanca for two whole weeks and we selected the Don Juan hotel on the Avenida del Mediterráneo, just behind the Levante beach because Linda had been there some time before with her parents and had liked it.

We flew from Luton Airport in Bedfordshire (made famous by Lorraine Chase in the 1970s Campari television adverts) on Monarch Airlines which was in the days before low cost airlines when flying still felt exclusive and glamorous.  The pilots were all ex RAF and called Toby or Edward and the air hostesses were tall and elegant, wore smart uniforms and looked like catwalk models.  The seats were comfortable with generous leg space and there was a free meal thrown in.  There was a drinks trolley at below United Kingdom prices (today a cup of tea on Ryanair costs nearly £3) and a genuine duty free service for spirits, tobacco and perfume.

The flight lasted a little over two hours and then we landed at Alicante airport about sixty kilometres south of Benidorm and as this was in a time before Spain’s modern motorway network had been constructed the coach took the old coast road north through a string of small towns and villages.  Just past Villajoyosa on the coast and the one thousand four hundred metre high Puig Campana Mountain to the west we snatched our first glimpses of Benidorm out of the right hand side windows of the coach and we could see a ribbon of golden sand at the fringe of the magnificent bay and behind it a strip of concrete skyscrapers towering into the blue sky above.

Once in Benidorm we went through the tedious process of dropping people off at their hotels and as the Don Juan was at the far end of the eastern Levante beach we had to wait quite a while to arrive there.  Thirty years or so later the Don Juan isn’t there anymore and I might be mistaken here but it might now be the refurbished Helios Hotel.  It certainly looks similar and it is just about the right location.  If I am correct it is only two hundred metres from the Hotel Los Pilicarnos on the Calle Girona, which is famous for being the setting of the Television comedy series, Benidorm.

The Don Juan was a typical 1970s Spanish seaside resort hotel with a cavernous reception and public area, a dining room that was little more than a school canteen and an entertainment room for evening activity.  The hotel was an eight storey concrete and chrome building and we had a room on the front about half way to the top with a good view out to sea.  In the 1970s rooms could only be described as functional because these were the days before mini-bars, televisions, internet wi-fi access and complimentary cosmetics in the bathroom but it was nice enough and it was going to be our home for two weeks.

Later that day we had our first evening meal at the Don Juan and it has to be said that this was by no stretch of the imagination a gourmet experience.  The menu was limited and consisted mostly of the sort of food that British holidaymakers, unfamiliar with Spanish cuisine, would have insisted upon in 1977, beef burgers or chicken, chips and overcooked vegetables, and for sweet it was a restricted choice between crème caramel or ice cream and it was the same for the whole of the fortnight.  One thing was certain – it was unlikely that we would be introduced to traditional Spanish food on this holiday.  To be fair however anything ethnic may have come as shock because like most English people I wasn’t ready for tortilla and gazpacho and although I am now rather partial to tapas and paella I had certainly never been introduced to these Iberian gastronomic delights in 1977.

If the twelve million visitors to Benidorm came in equal numbers each week, which of course they didn’t, then there would have been nearly a quarter of a million visitors to entertain every night and after dinner we walked to the old town, which even in October was bursting at the seams with visitors wandering around the bars getting lashed and in the shops buying things they didn’t really need.  In 1977 most of Spain was still shaking off the restrictions of the Franco regime, in June there had been the first elections to the National Parliament since 1936, but Benidorm was way ahead of the rest of the country.

It was loud, brash and noisy and so was the hotel when we returned later on.  There was entertainment on the ground floor and even though we were at least four floors up the noise from the discotheque could be heard all the way up to our room.  The booming of the bass kept us awake and so did the loud German couple sitting on the balcony of the room next door who were having a conversation with someone in Hamburg – without a telephone!  Sleeping has never really been a problem for me and I eventually managed to drop off but sometime in the early hours of the morning I woke up and found Linda on the balcony tired and sobbing and desperately in need of sleep.  I think that it was at this point that I wondered just how we were going to survive fourteen nights in Benidorm!

__________________________________________________

Other posts about Benidorm:

Benidorm – The Anticipation

Benidorm 1977 – First impressions and the Hotel Don Juan

Benidorm 1977- Beaches, the Old Town and Peacock Island

Benidorm 1977 – Food Poisoning and Guadalest

World Heritage Sites

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Every Picture Tells A Story – 50, Barmeston Road, Catford

“(Catford) the only place in all of London and the south-east set to remain impervious to gentrification” – Lucy Mangan, Journalist (The Guardian)

One day in 1995 I was at work and driving through London and on impulse took a detour to Catford and to Barmeston Road where my grandparents used to live to see the house that I used to visit with my parents when I was a boy.

It was having a bit of renovation work carried out to it at the time but although it seemed smaller (everything looks smaller as you grow older, especially chocolate biscuits) it looked almost as I remembered it and the memories came flooding back.

We used to visit Catford two or three times a year.  At first we went on the train because dad didn’t learn to drive until about 1963 and then we would drive down there in his Austin A55, registration SWD 774.  He hated parking his car on the road because of the blind bend and the steep camber, so steep it meant that the car door would hit the pavement if not opened with caution.  He had a parking light which was clipped to the drivers window and then attached to a torch battery. I think it was the law to have a parking light in those days.

Nan and Granddad didn’t live in all of the house because they only rented the top floor and this meant that there was a curious arrangement of walking through someone else’s home to get to theirs because there was only a single shared front door.  As I grew older I always found this rather odd and can remember feeling shy and self-conscious about walking through an entrance hall that obviously belonged to someone else.

At the top of the stairs there was a door into the living room and the stairs dog-legged through a mezzanine and doubled back towards the front of the house.  The living room was quite small but this was the main room of the house where they lived, entertained and had all of their meals.  It was always smoky because there was an open fire and granddad used to smoke a couple of packets of embassy cigarettes every day.

There was a dining table and chairs and a blue three piece suite with granddad’s chair in front of the fire and with the best view in the room of the television set.  In one corner there was a black bakelite telephone and four colour coded volumes of the London telephone directory.  Not many people had telephones in the late 1950s and when they answered the phone they always said the number, which was Hither Green 6515.  By the fire place there was large empty whisky bottle which granddad used to fill with silver sixpences and this was their savings plan for their holidays to Benidorm in Spain.

There was a side window which looked out over the front gardens of the neighbours (I recall the curiously named Kitty Roper)  most of these have been tarmacked over now to provide car parking space but there weren’t so many cars then so most people still had proper front gardens with front lawns and lovely flower beds.

There was a door which went to the very back of the house and the small kitchen with old fashioned cupboards and a sink with a cylindrical gas water heater over it.  There was no bathroom in the flat so this is where they had to wash and there was always someone ‘on guard’ when Nan was in there doing her daily ablutions!

Back on the stairs there was a WC with a high level cistern on the mezzanine, painted a vibrant canary yellow and then a few more steps and a corridor with my grandparents bedroom first and then at the front of the flat a small spare bedroom where I used to sleep and then the best front room, which was only opened up once a year at Christmas.

We weren’t really allowed to go in the best room for fear of breaking something precious or rearranging the brightly coloured velour cushions on the two-tone grey three-piece suite but when no one was around my sister Lindsay and I used to sneak in there and throw the cushions around and jump on them in some sort of juvenile outburst of defiance.

At the front of the house there was a concrete wall with sturdy pillars supporting a wooden gate with a small front garden (that’s my mum in the pictures above probably somewhere between 1946 and 1948), the garden was neat and tidy with Victorian ceramic rope edging separating the lawn from the borders but by 1999 that had all gone and the inevitable wheelie bin stood where the lawn used to be.

People didn’t have wheelie bins in the 1950s and most of the rubbish was either burnt on the fire or was taken away by the rag and bone man who used to come along the road once a week on his horse and cart shouting at the top of his voice something I could never make any sense of to alert residents to his approach and I can remember the shout and the clip-clop of the horses hooves on the road surface as though it were only yesterday.

At the back of the house was a garden which belonged to the owners but Granddad had a little plot at the bottom.  The soil was dark, almost satanic black and he grew a few vegetables on his patch.

There was a rough built wall at the bottom of the garden and directly behind that the River Ravensbourne, a tributary of the Thames, it was only a couple of yards wide and quite shallow but it bubbled and gurgled across pebbles and got faster and more dramatic after it had rained.  I used to pick up stones from the garden, lean over the wall, and throw them into the water.  In September 1968 there were heavy rains and the little river became so swollen that it burst its banks and there was a lot of flooding in Catford and nearby Lewisham but I don’t suppose this affected nan and granddad in their first floor flat.

There was a smell about London in those days which I can almost still taste but can’t describe it, it has gone now so it was probably pollution!  The name Catford, by the way, is derived from a ford across the river around about here where cattle used to cross when being taken up to Smithfield Market.

This is more up-to-date picture of the house that I found on an Estate Agency website:

I thought it looked rather sad; the old cord pull sash windows have been replaced with UPVC but interestingly the house next door has kept the original feature, the half tiled porch has gone and the plastic front door has been brought forward to the building line, the garden wall has gone and the little space behind is now a car parking area.

Sir Henry Cooper, British heavyweight boxer came from the area and Spike Milligan went to school at Catford Brownhill Boys School and often visited the suburb where his aunt and uncle lived. He always claimed to have lived in Catford and wrote about the area in his books and sketches.  Ben Elton the comedian and writer was born in Catford in 1959 and Cat Stevens lived in a flat above a Catford furniture shop in the early sixties

Both nan and granddad used to go work which was quite unusual really.  He was a bus conductor on the old London double-decker Routemaster buses operating from the Catford depot on Bromley Road in South London.  I can still remember him in his dark blue London Transport uniform with his red conductors badge and his leather satchel slung over his shoulder walking home from work in a jaunty sort of way all along Barmerston Road.

The Catford Garage was originally opened in 1914 and was one of the largest south London depots.  It was always associated with the Routemaster and in fact was the last garage in South East London to operate them.  The Routemaster was a double-decker bus that was built by Associated Equipment Company from 1954 and introduced by London Transport in 1956 and saw continuous service until 2005.

Nan worked at the Robertson’s jam factory which was on Barmerston Road itself.  They used to make Golden Shred marmalade and a range of jams and had an inappropriate golly as the company symbol.  We used to have golly badges and they are collectors items now  but I haven’t got them any more and that’s a real shame.  In 2006 Robertson’s sold out to Premier Foods and in 2008 the new company announced that it would discontinue the Robertson brand in 2009 in order to focus on its more successful Hartley’s.  Robinson’s factory has gone now but the bus garage is still there.

We used to go to Catford throughout the 1960s, once in 1965 I went on holiday there with my friend Tony Gibbard for a week by ourselves.  As I got older I didn’t really like going there that much and I was excused the visits.  Then in about 1969 or 1970 nan and granddad left Catford and London and came to live in a flat in Hillmorton near to us and I never visited Barmeston Road again until that unplanned detour thirty years later.

This is me with the badges in about 1959.  The dressing gown was bright red.

I am glad that I passed by Barmeston Road that day in 1995, I don’t suppose for a moment that I will ever do it again!

1960s Package Holidays

In the first few years of the 1960s, in the days just before and then during the Freddie Laker days of early package holidays, my grandparents visited Benidorm in Spain several times.  For people from London who had lived through the Luftwaffe blitz of the 1940s and the killer smog of the 1950s they applied for passports (which was practically unheard of for ordinary people) and set out with pale complexions on an overseas adventure and returned home with healthy Mediterranean suntans and duty free alcohol and cigarettes.  They brought back exotic stories of exciting overseas adventures and suitcases full of unusual souvenirs, castanets, replica flamenco dancing girls, handsome matador dolls with flaming scarlet capes and velour covered bulls that cluttered up their living room and collected dust for the next twenty years or so.

In 1950 a Russian émigré called Vladimir Raitz founded a travel company in London called Horizon Holidays and started flying people to Southern Europe and the package tour was born.  Within a few years he was flying to Majorca, Menorca, and the Costa Brava.   In 1957 British European Airways introduced a new route to Valencia and the designation ‘Costa Blanca’ was allegedly conceived as a promotional name when it first launched its new service on Vickers Vanguard airplanes with four propeller driven engines at the start of the package holiday boom.   By the end of the decade BEA was also flying to Malaga on the Costa Del Sol.

The flight took several hours and arrival at Valencia airport some way to the west of the city was not the end of the journey because there was now a one hundred and fifty kilometre, four-hour bus ride south to Benidorm in a vehicle without air conditioning or air suspension seats and in the days before motorways on a long tortuous journey along the old coast road.  Today visitors to Benidorm fly to Alicante to the south, which is closer and more convenient, but the airport there was not opened until 1967.

I am curious to understand how they were able to afford it?  Grandad was a bus conductor with London Transport on the famous old bright red AEC Routemaster buses working at the Catford depot on Bromley Road (he always wore his watch with the face on the inside of his wrist so that he didn’t break the glass by knocking it as he went up and down the stairs and along the rows of seats with their metal frames) and Nan worked at the Robinson’s factory in Barmerston Road boiling fruit to make the jam.

I cannot imagine that they earned very much and at that time the cost of the fare was £38.80p which may not sound a lot now but to put that into some sort of perspective in 1960 my dad took a job at a salary of £815 a year so that fare would have been about two and a half weeks wages! Each!  The average weekly wage in the United Kingdom today is £490 so on that basis a flight to Spain at 1957 British European Airline prices would now be about £1,225.

______________________________________

Other posts about Benidorm:

Benidorm c1960

Benidorm, Plan General de Ordinacion

Benidorm, The War of the Bikini

Benidorm 1977 – First impressions and the Hotel Don Juan

Benidorm 1977- Beaches, the Old Town and Peacock Island

Benidorm 1977 – Food Poisoning and Guadalest

Benidorm – The Anticipation

Benidorm – The Surprise

World Heritage Sites

Continental Holidays

These are 1965 newspaper advertisements for holidays to Spain and the Balearics and the cost seems to be an average of about £35 which may not sound a lot now but to put that into some sort of perspective in 1960 my dad took a good job at a salary of £815 a year so that fare would have been about two and a half weeks wages! Each!  The average weekly wage in the United Kingdom today is £490 so on that basis a flight to Spain at 1957 British European Airline prices would now be about £1,225 so some things in life have defied inflation and become cheaper.

I have posted about this before and you can read my story of 1960s Spanish holidays to Benidorm here:

http://apetcher.wordpress.com/2010/03/02/every-picture-tells-a-story-benidorm-c1960/

A Life in a Year – 8th October, Package Holiday to Benidorm

In 1976 I travelled to Europe for the first time to Sorrento in Italy with my dad who obligingly stepped in at the last moment following girlfriend trouble.  Very soon after that we patched things up and in October the following year I went to Spain with my fiancée, Linda.  We could have gone practically anywhere we liked, so long as it was within our restricted budget of course, but we choose to go to Benidorm on the Costa Blanca for two whole weeks and we selected the Don Juan hotel on the Avenida del Mediterráneo, just behind the Levante beach because Linda had been there some time before with her parents and had liked it.

We flew from Luton Airport in Bedfordshire (made famous by Lorraine Chase in the 1970s Campari television adverts) on Monarch Airlines which was in the days before low cost airlines when flying still felt exclusive and glamorous.  The pilots were all ex RAF and called Toby or Edward and the air hostesses were tall and elegant, wore smart uniforms and looked like catwalk models.  The seats were comfortable with generous leg space and there was a free meal thrown in.  There was a drinks trolley at below United Kingdom prices (today a cup of tea on Ryanair costs £3) and a genuine duty free service for spirits, tobacco and perfume.

The flight lasted a little over two hours and then we landed at Alicante airport about sixty kilometres south of Benidorm and as this was in a time before Spain’s modern motorway network had been constructed the coach took the old coast road north through a string of small towns and villages.  Just past Villajoyosa on the coast and the one thousand four hundred metre high Puig Campana Mountain to the west we snatched our first glimpses of Benidorm out of the right hand side windows of the coach and we could see a ribbon of golden sand at the fringe of the magnificent bay and behind it a strip of concrete skyscrapers towering into the blue sky above.

Once in Benidorm we went through the tedious process of dropping people off at their hotels and as the Don Juan was at the far end of the eastern Levante beach we had to wait quite a while to arrive there.  Thirty years or so later the Don Juan isn’t there anymore and I might be mistaken here but it might now be the refurbished Helios Hotel.  It certainly looks similar and it is just about the right location.  If I am correct it is only two hundred metres from the Hotel Los Pilicarnos on the Calle Girona, which is famous for being the setting of the Television comedy series, Benidorm.

The Don Juan was a typical 1970s Spanish seaside resort hotel with a cavernous reception and public area, a dining room that was little more than a school canteen and an entertainment room for evening activity.  The hotel was an eight storey concrete and chrome building and we had a room on the front about half way to the top with a good view out to sea.  In the 1970s rooms could only be described as functional because these were the days before mini-bars, Televisions, internet wi-fi access and complimentary cosmetics in the bathroom but it was nice enough and it was going to be our home for two weeks.

Later that day we had our first evening meal at the Don Juan and it has to be said that this was by no stretch of the imagination a gourmet experience.  The menu was limited and consisted mostly of the sort of food that British holidaymakers, unfamiliar with Spanish cuisine, would have insisted upon in 1977, beef burgers or chicken, chips and overcooked vegetables, and for sweet it was a restricted choice between crème caramel or ice cream and it was the same for the whole of the fortnight.  One thing was certain – it was unlikely that we would be introduced to traditional Spanish food on this holiday.  To be fair however anything ethnic may have come as shock because like most English people I wasn’t ready for tortilla and gazpacho and although I am now rather partial to tapas and paella I had certainly never been introduced to these Iberian gastronomic delights in 1977.

If the twelve million visitors to Benidorm came in equal numbers each week, which of course they didn’t, then there would have been nearly a quarter of a million visitors to entertain every night and after dinner we walked to the old town, which even in October was bursting at the seams with visitors wandering around the bars getting lashed and in the shops buying things they didn’t really need.  In 1977 most of Spain was still shaking off the restrictions of the Franco regime, in June there had been the first elections to the National Parliament since 1936, but Benidorm was way ahead of the rest of the country.

It was loud, brash and noisy and so was the hotel when we returned later on.  There was entertainment on the ground floor and even though we were at least four floors up the noise from the discotheque could be heard all the way up to our room.  The booming of the bass kept us awake and so did the loud German couple sitting on the balcony of the room next door who were having a conversation with someone in Hamburg without a telephone!  Sleeping has never really been a problem for me and I eventually managed to drop off but sometime in the early hours of the morning I woke up and found Linda on the balcony tired and sobbing and desperately in need of sleep.  I think that it was at this point that I wondered just how we were going to survive fourteen nights in Benidorm!

Benidorm – The Anticipation

Benidorm 1977 – First impressions and the Hotel Don Juan

Benidorm 1977- Beaches, the Old Town and Peacock Island

Benidorm 1977 – Food Poisoning and Guadalest

World Heritage Sites

A Life in a Year – 20th January 1959, 1st Flight of a Vickers Vanguard

In the first few years of the 1960s, in the days just before and then during the Freddie Laker days of early package holidays, my grandparents visited Benidorm in Spain several times.

For people from London who had lived through the Luftwaffe blitz of the 1940s and the killer smog of the 1950s they applied for passports (which was practically unheard of for ordinary people) and set out with pale complexions on an overseas adventure and returned home with healthy Mediterranean suntans and duty free alcohol and cigarettes.  They brought back exotic stories of exciting overseas adventures and suitcases full of unusual souvenirs, castanets, replica flamenco dancing girls, handsome matador dolls with flaming scarlet capes and velour covered bulls that decorated their living room and collected dust for the next twenty years or so.

In 1950 a Russian émigré called Vladimir Raitz founded a travel company in London called Horizon Holidays and started flying people to Southern Europe and the package tour was born.  Within a few years he was flying to Majorca, Menorca, and the Costa Brava.

In 1957 British European Airways introduced a new route to Valencia and the designation ‘Costa Blanca’ was allegedly conceived as a promotional name when it first launched its new service on Vickers Vanguard airplanes with four propeller driven engines at the start of the package holiday boom.   By the end of the decade BEA was also flying to Malaga on the Costa Del Sol.

The flight took several hours and arrival at Valencia airport some way to the west of the city was not the end of the journey because there was now a one hundred and fifty kilometre, four-hour bus ride south to Benidorm in a vehicle without air conditioning or air suspension seats and in the days before motorways on a long tortuous journey along the old coast road.  Today visitors to Benidorm fly to Alicante to the south, which is closer and more convenient, but the airport there was not opened until 1967.

I am curious to understand how they were able to afford it?  Grandad was a bus conductor with London Transport on the famous old bright red AEC Routemaster buses working at the Catford depot on Bromley Road (he always wore his watch with the face on the inside of his wrist so that he didn’t break the glass by knocking it as he went up and down the stairs and along the rows of seats with their metal frames) and Nan worked at the Robinson’s factory in Barmerston Road boiling fruit to make the jam.

I cannot imagine that they earned very much and at that time the cost of the fare was £38.80p which may not sound a lot now but to put that into some sort of perspective in 1960 my dad took a job at a salary of £815 a year so that fare would have been about two and a half weeks wages! Each!  The average weekly wage in the United Kingdom today is £490 so on that basis a flight to Spain at 1957 British European Airline prices would now be about £1,225.

 ______________________________________

Other posts about Benidorm:

Benidorm c1960

Benidorm, Plan General de Ordinacion

Benidorm, The War of the Bikini

Benidorm 1977 – First impressions and the Hotel Don Juan

Benidorm 1977- Beaches, the Old Town and Peacock Island

Benidorm 1977 – Food Poisoning and Guadalest

Benidorm – The Anticipation

Benidorm – The Surprise

World Heritage Sites

Benidorm, The War of the Bikini

“It was not only in Farol that brusque changes were taking place…they were happening at a breakneck pace all over Spain…. Roads, the radio, the telephone and now the arrival of tourists… were putting an end to the Spain of old.  And for those who wanted to see it as it had been, there was not a moment to be lost.”                                                                                                                                           Norman Lewis ‘Voices of the Old Sea’

If Pedro Zaragoza Orts is remembered for the Beni-York skyscraper he is even more famous for the so called ‘War of the Bikini’.  In the later years of the 1950s the icon of holiday liberty was the saucy two piece swimsuit but in staunchly religious Spain, still held in the firm two-handed grip of church and state, this scanty garment was seen as a threat to the very basis of Catholic society.   According to the official version a French engineer called Louis Réard and the fashion designer Jacques Heim invented the swimsuit that was a little more than a provocative brassiere front with a tiny g-string back.  It was allegedly named after Bikini Atoll, the site of nuclear weapon tests on the reasoning that the burst of excitement it would cause on the beach or at the lido would be like a nuclear explosion.  Plenty of fallout and very hot!

And it certainly had this effect in Spain and although occasionally allowable on the sandy beaches, it had to be covered up in all other areas; on the promenades and in the plazas and in the shops and the bars and cafés for fear of causing any offence.  In one famous incident, a British tourist, sitting in a bar opposite a beach wearing only a bikini, was told by a Guardia Civil officer that she wasn’t allowed to wear it there.  After an argument she hit him, and her strike for social justice cost her a hefty fine of forty thousand pesetas.  Zaragoza needed tourists and tourists wanted the bikini and with more northern European tourists arriving each year in search of an all over suntan the Mayor knew that the banning of the two piece swimsuit simply couldn’t be sustained or allowed to threaten his ambitious plans.

Zaragoza took a gamble and signed a municipal order which permitted the wearing of the bikini in public areas and in this single act he effectively jump started the Spanish tourist industry.  Zaragoza said: “People had to feel free to be able to wear what they wanted, within reason, if it helped them to enjoy themselves as they would come back and tell their friends about the place.”  In deeply religious Catholic Spain not everyone was so understanding or welcoming of the bikini however and in retaliation the Archbishop of Valencia began the excommunication process against him.

Excommunication was a serious matter in 1959 and his political supporters began to abandon him so one day he got up early and drove for nine hours on a little Vespa scooter to Madrid to lobby Franco himself.  The Generalissimo was suitably impressed with his determination and gave him his support, Zaragoza returned to Benidorm and the Church backed down and the approval of the bikini became a defining moment in the history of modern Spain ultimately changing the course of Spanish tourism and causing a social revolution in an austere country groaning under the yoke of the National Catholic regime.  Zaragoza went on to become Franco’s Director of Tourism and a Parliamentary Deputy.

Not many people would have described Franco as a liberalising social reformer and perhaps he just liked to look at ladies breasts but not long after this lots of women on holiday in Benidorm dispensed with the bikini bra altogether and brazenly sunbathed topless and Benidorm postcards had pictures of naked ladies on them to prove it.

One thing I am certain of is that this wouldn’t have made a great deal of difference to my Nan because I am not sure that she ever possessed a swimming costume, never mind a two-piece!  She was a bit old-fashioned and the human body in the naked form was only permitted behind closed doors with the curtains closed and preferably after dark.  If she ever went in the sea I imagine it would have been in one of those Victorian one piece bathing costumes of the previous century.  Grandad too wasn’t one for showing bits of his body normally kept under his bus conductor’s dark blue uniform and didn’t even concede to a pair of shorts, preferring instead to wear his colonial style slacks even during the day.  When he came home his impressive suntan stopped at the line of his open neck shirt and his rolled up sleeves.

For people who had never been abroad before Benidorm must have been an exciting place in the early 1960s.  Palm fringed boulevards, Sangria by the jug full and, unrestrained by optics, generous measures of whiskey and gin, rum and vodka.  Eating outside at a pavement café and ordering drinks and not paying for them until leaving and scattering unfamiliar coins on the table as a tip for the waiter.  There was permanent sunshine, a delightful warm sea and unfamiliar food, although actually I seem to doubt that they would be introduced to traditional Spanish food on these holidays because to be fair anything remotely ethnic may have come as shock because like most English people they weren’t really ready for tortilla and gazpacho, tapas or paella.  They certainly didn’t return home to experiment with any new Iberian gastronomic ideas and I suspect they probably kept as close as they could to food they were familiar with.

Benidorm is a fascinating place, often unfairly maligned or sneered at but my grandparents liked it and I have been there myself in 1977 for a fortnight’s holiday and then again on a day trip in 2008 just out of curiosity.  It has grown into a mature and unique high rise resort with blue flag beaches and an ambition to achieve UNESCO World Heritage Status and I hope it achieves it.  You can read about those trips at:

Benidorm 1977 – First impressions and the Hotel Don Juan

Benidorm 1977- Beaches, the Old Town and Peacock Island

Benidorm 1977 – Food Poisoning and Guadalest

Benidorm – The Anticipation

Benidorm – The Surprise

Thanks to http://www.realbenidorm.net/ for the use of the postcard image

 

Click on an image to scroll through the gallery…

 

Benidorm c 1960, Plan General de Ordenación

“By the end…it was clear that Spain’s spiritual and cultural isolation was at an end, overwhelmed by the great alien invasion from the North of money and freedoms.  Spain became the most visited tourist country in the World, and slowly, as the foreigners poured in, its identity was submerged, its life-style altered more in a single decade than in the previous century.”                      Norman Lewis – ‘Voices of the Old Sea’.

Sixty years ago Benidorm, although not a fishing village as such, was still a modest beach side community, a place of sailors, fishermen and farmers who patiently tended almond, olive, carob and citrus trees.  Early visitors would have marvelled at the double crescent of virgin golden sand and rolling dunes that stretched out in both directions from a rocky outcrop that divided the two beaches where Benidorm castle is believed to have once stood.  Small fishing boats, the tarrafes, each with four large lanterns to attract fish at night bobbed in the water or lay drawn up resting on the sand.  In 1950, Benidorm didn’t attract many visitors and life was difficult, it had no water supply or sewage disposal system and waste was tipped in the sea or simply buried in the earth.

The watershed year was 1954 when the Franco loyalist, Pedro Zaragoza Orts was nominated as town Alcalde, or Mayor, by the Civil Governor of the province, Don Jesús Aramboru and he threw himself into his work and set himself an objective of improving the quality of life in the small town.  In terms of economic potential there wasn’t a lot to work with so he decided to concentrate on tourism and he imagined a dream of creating a bourgeois pan-European holiday utopia.  Benidorm had sun, it had beaches, it had sea but what it didn’t have was visitors.  Few people in Spain enjoyed the sort of standard of living to be able to take holidays in the 1950s, so he needed to attract overseas visitors.

The town had always been popular with veraneos, people who took a few days break to be by the sea, but by the 1950′s, visitors from northern Europe were beginning to arrive in greater numbers and staying for a full week at a time, sometimes two!  Zaragoza recognised the potential of increased numbers of visitors and quickly created the Plan General de Ordenación, or city building plan, that would exploit that potential.  The plan ensured that every building would have an area of leisure land, guaranteeing a future free of the excesses of cramped construction seen in other areas of Spain and it is the only city in the country that still adheres to this rigid rule.  This vision for the future took six years to come to reality, while he waited he piped in domestic water from Polop, fifteen kilometres to the north in the mountains on the road to Guadalest and he ignited the building boom that followed and the flying start that Benidorm achieved in the package tour boom of the 1960s and 70s.

The vision for Benidorm was simultaneously brilliant and exciting and it gave the modern city its modern unique landscape because Zaragoza encouraged vertical construction of dozens of sky scrapers in a deliberate plan to make efficient use of land and to keep the city at ground level spacious and airy with green parks and open spaces and all of the accommodation relatively close to the beaches.  He explained his plan like this; ‘If you build low, you occupy all the space and have a long walk to the beach. If you build high, you can face the sea, and leave room for gardens, pools and tennis courts’.  This was in contrast to nearby Torrevieja and on the Costa Del Sol in the south, Marbella where excessive horizontal development led to great sprawling ugly urbanisations that have practically destroyed the coast by burying it under concrete and tarmac.  Zaragoza called this urban concentration instead of urban sprawl.

The first developments started at the centre at the rocky outcrop in the twisting narrow streets hemmed in by claustrophobic whitewashed houses, the San Jaime church with its distinctive blue tiled hat roofs, the old town promontory with the Balcon Del Mediterraneo, and pretty Mal Pas beach below and quickly spread east and west along the splendid beaches.  Today Benidorm has some of the tallest buildings not only in Spain but all of Europe but the first were fairly unassuming by comparison, the tallest reaching only a modest ten floors or so.

My grandparents were used to living higher up than most people because they lived in a first floor flat but I imagine that they found a high rise hotel in Benidorm really exciting.  In the early hotels there was a lot of utilitarian concrete and steel and I am certain that we would consider them quite basic affairs now but they had something that Nan and Grandad were not accustomed to – an en-suite bathroom, because they didn’t have the luxury of any sort of bathroom in their Catford flat.  The first hotels have mostly been demolished and replaced now but I imagine they enjoyed sitting on the balcony of their room and looking out over the inviting Mediterranean Sea because this was a thousand miles and a hundred thousand years away from reality.  They were certainly very relaxed because feet on the table like this would never have been permitted at home.  We were only allowed into the best front room once a year at Christmas and we weren’t allowed to touch anything so I am surprised by this.

Every Picture Tells a Story – Benidorm c1960

“It was not only in Farol that brusque changes were taking place…they were happening at a breakneck pace all over Spain…. Roads, the radio, the telephone and now the arrival of tourists… were putting an end to the Spain of old.  And for those who wanted to see it as it had been, there was not a moment to be lost.”                                                                                                                                           Norman Lewis –  ‘Voices of the Old Sea’

In the first few years of the 1960s, in the days just before and then during the Freddie Laker days of early package holidays, my grandparents visited Benidorm in Spain several times.  For people from London who had lived through the Luftwaffe blitz of the 1940s and the killer smog of the 1950s they applied for passports (which was practically unheard of for ordinary people) and set out with pale complexions on an overseas adventure and returned home with healthy Mediterranean suntans and duty free alcohol and cigarettes.  They brought back exotic stories of exciting overseas adventures and suitcases full of unusual souvenirs, castanets, replica flamenco dancing girls, handsome matador dolls with flaming scarlet capes and velour covered bulls that decorated their living room and collected dust for the next twenty years or so.

In the photograph my grandparents Ernie and Olive were roughly the same age as I am now and they were clearly having a very good time sitting at a bar enjoying generous measures of alcohol, the same sort of good time that I like to enjoy when I go travelling.  I’m guessing of course but Grandad, who looks unusually bronzed, seems to have a rum and coke and Nan who looks younger than I can ever remember her appears to have some sort of a beer with a slice of lime and that’s about forty years before a bottle of Sol with a bit of citrus became anything like fashionable.  With him is his brother George (no socks, very impressive for 1960) and his wife Lillian. Nan and Grandad look very relaxed and with huge smiles that I can barely remember.  I wonder how they managed to be among the first early holidaymakers to visit Mediterranean Spain in the 1960s?

In 1950 a Russian émigré called Vladimir Raitz founded a travel company in London called Horizon Holidays and started flying people to Southern Europe and the package tour was born.  Within a few years he was flying to Majorca, Menorca, and the Costa Brava.   In 1957 British European Airways introduced a new route to Valencia and the designation ‘Costa Blanca’ was allegedly conceived as a promotional name when it first launched its new service on Vickers Vanguard airoplanes with four propeller driven engines at the start of the package holiday boom.   By the end of the decade BEA was also flying to Malaga on the Costa Del Sol.

The flight took several hours and arrival at Valencia airport some way to the west of the city was not the end of the journey because there was now a one hundred and fifty kilometre, four-hour bus ride south to Benidorm in a vehicle without air conditioning or air suspension seats and in the days before motorways on a long tortuous journey along the old coast road.  Today visitors to Benidorm fly to Alicante to the south, which is closer and more convenient, but the airport there was not opened until 1967.

I am curious to understand how they were able to afford it?  Grandad was a bus conductor with London Transport on the famous old bright red AEC Routemaster buses working at the Catford depot on Bromley Road (he always wore his watch with the face on the inside of his wrist so that he didn’t break the glass by knocking it as he went up and down the stairs and along the rows of seats with their metal frames) and Nan worked at the Robinson’s factory in Barmerston Road boiling fruit to make the jam.

I cannot imagine that they earned very much and at that time the cost of the fare was £38.80p which may not sound a lot now but to put that into some sort of perspective in 1960 my dad took a job at a salary of £815 a year so that fare would have been about two and a half weeks wages! Each!  The average weekly wage in the United Kingdom today is £490 so on that basis a flight to Spain at 1957 British European Airline prices would now be about £1,225.  After paying the rent on the first floor Catford apartment Grandad used to spend most of the rest of his wages on Embassy cigarettes, Watney’s Red Barrel and in the Bookies so perhaps he had a secret source of income?  He does look like a bit of a gangland boss in some of these pictures or perhaps he had a good system and had done rather well on the horses.

Benidorm developed as a tourist location because it enjoys a unique geographical position on the east coast of Spain.  The city faces due south and has two stunningly beautiful beaches on the Mediterranean Sea that stretch for about four kilometres either side of the old town, on the east the Levante, or sunrise, and to the west the Poniente, the sunset, and it enjoys glorious sunshine all day long and for most of the year as well.  Today, Spain is a tourist superpower that attracts fifty-three million visitors a year to its beaches, 11% of the Spanish economy runs off of tourism and one in twenty visitors head for Benidorm.  The city is the high rise capital of Southern Europe and one of the most popular tourist locations in Europe and six million people go there each year on holiday.

Benidorm – The Anticipation

Benidorm 1977 – First impressions and the Hotel Don Juan

Benidorm 1977- Beaches, the Old Town and Peacock Island

Benidorm 1977 – Food Poisoning and Guadalest

World Heritage Sites

Thanks to http://www.realbenidorm.net/ for the use of the image