Coast (2005) s01e11 Episode Script

Robins Hood's Bay to The Wash

There are just two legs to go on our epic circumnavigation of the United Kingdom.
Behind me is the North Sea, over there the North Yorkshire Moors.
Between the two, the starting point for the next leg of our journey.
From here, we'll be travelling south from the craggy grandeur of the Yorkshire coast across the River Humber, along the Lincolnshire seaside and on down to the marshy fenlands by the Wash.
One of the things that characterises this stretch of coast is a taste for innovation.
We'll tell stories of pioneers, visionaries and those with a talent for turning a fast buck.
I'll be accompanied on my journey by our usual band of specialists.
Neil Oliver looks at what made us want to be beside the seaside.
I have to say, Victor, it's not saying luxury holiday.
Alice Roberts conducts a 17th-century chemistry experiment with stale urine.
Yuck.
While Miranda Krestovnikoff goes bird-tagging in the Wash, Mark Horton sails down the River Humber in a 4,000-year-old boat.
And me, I get to investigate fish fingers in Grimsby.
Together, we'll take you for a bracing trip along this windswept Eastern seaboard.
This is the story of Coast.
Our journey takes us 250 miles from Robin Hood's Bay down to King's Lynn.
Our starting point is a tight-knit community on the Yorkshire coast, whose relative isolation made it a bit different from your usual fishing village.
This is Robin Hood's Bay, a cascade of cottages and narrow lanes carved into a cliff.
It's the prettiest kind of place to visit, but don't let its innocent facade fool you.
For over 100 years, smuggling was the unofficial town trade.
From the early 1700s, contraband regularly arrived here from all over Europe.
Because of its location, Robin Hood's Bay could have been custom designed for illegal imports.
It was one of the few safe havens on the east coast - a broad bay protected by massive headlands and backed by inaccessible moorland.
And the cliffs made perfect lookouts for the smugglers.
From here, they could signal to their accomplices out at sea.
and at the same time, watch out for the revenue men.
Smuggling was at its peak in the 1700s, when the government slapped hefty import duties on luxury goods like silk, tobacco and tea to pay for its almost constant wars with France.
Local knowledge gave the smugglers access to a labyrinth of secret routes.
Under cover of darkness, they could creep up the beach with their booty and disappear into this tunnel.
They ventured into drainage tunnels like these at enormous risk.
Smuggling carried the death sentence.
But the rewards were worth the risks.
Bringing in just a pound of tea would have netted the smuggler the equivalent of a week's wages.
At one point, 80% of all the tea drunk in Britain was imported illegally.
The smugglers turned this tunnel to their advantage.
I'm looking for holes in the ceiling above my head like this.
They could creep up here and you can imagine them stuffing rum and tobacco up through here into the house above.
It's very ingenious.
It wasn't just the men who struggled through tunnels like this that made money out of smuggling.
Pretty much everybody in the village had their hands dirty.
The boatmen, the storer, even the local squire, who lived here at Thorpe Hall.
He financed the smuggling and would have expected a good return on his investment.
Here in the grounds of the squire's house is an underground chamber where he stashed his share of the booty.
Look! It's carefully lined in stone.
You can imagine it packed with gin, tobacco, brandy and silk.
By 1815, at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, soldiers were redeployed as excise men putting a stop to large-scale smuggling but not entirely.
Today, Customs and Excise reckon nearly ¡ê4 billion-worth of revenue is lost every year to illegal imports of tobacco and alcohol.
But there's never been a shortage of legal ways to make a living along this coast if you've got the ingenuity.
While the villagers of Robin Hood's Bay were lining their pockets by smuggling, the people here at Ravenscar, just three miles down the coast, made themselves rich with a startling scientific discovery.
These are the remains of one of the UK's very first chemical factories.
Anthropologist Alice Roberts has come to see what's left.
400 years ago, the cloth and wool trade formed the backbone of the British economy.
None of it could have happened without an industry that grew up here.
I'm meeting archaeologist John Buglass who knows the extraordinary role Ravenscar played in saving Britain's cloth industry.
I have to say, John, this looks rather disturbingly like a quarry.
I don't really understand how rock can have anything to do with cloth.
It is a quarry, it's an alum quarry.
The type of rock that's here is actually shale.
Shale is a sedimentary rock which is laid down on the seabed.
Yeah.
Hidden inside the shale are crystals or salts of aluminium.
Right.
The aluminium salts can be used as a mordant in the dyeing industry.
What's a mordant? Basically it's a glue.
It acts to stick the dye molecules in the cloth.
It stops the colours fading and it maintains the brightness.
So what is the actual substance that they're after? What they're after is this material.
It's called alum.
Right.
That's a crystal of pure, naturally occurring alum.
Why don't they use natural alum then? Natural alum doesn't occur in this country.
Yeah.
They're having to bring it in from other places.
So they'd try to seek an alternative source in order to break the monopoly.
400 years ago, sites like this one at Ravenscar were large industrial communities, employing hundreds of people in the production of this precious substance.
You'd have gangs of men working up against the quarry face, pickaxes and shovels, digging it out, shovelling it into barrows.
Then they'd burn it for three months.
Why are they burning it? That changes the chemical composition slightly.
They can then extract the salts.
It's very acidic, so they have to burn alkali in there.
They had a special ingredient they used for that.
Really? That "special ingredient" comes courtesy of the production team.
We're trying to make alum on this site for the first time in 150 years.
We'll try to recreate the process, and hopefully discover why they needed to use stale human urine! I've teamed up with Open University chemist James Bruce.
Right, James.
This is a natural alum crystal.
Your challenge is to make us one of those.
This is a solution of aluminium sulphate, isn't it? Yes.
Equivalent to the liquor they got from the shale? Yes.
We have to add the magic ingredient.
Yes! Come round this side.
To you falls the honour of taking the piss.
Thank you very much(!) Right How did they know urine would work? Because urine was used for other processes.
They'd used it in the textile industryon leathers.
It wasn't that unusual to be using urine in these sorts of processes.
It was a bottle on the shelf.
They would have said, "Let's try this.
" URINE TRICKLES Yuck.
You chemists are a weird lot! 'We simmered the disgusting solution for half an hour, 'until something interesting happened.
' It's working! That is the alum coming out now.
That cloudy stuff? That white stuff is the alum.
Boil off the remaining liquid and what remains is alum.
These are some of the crystals we're left with.
Like snow.
Yes.
They're not as big as the one you showed me before, but size doesn't matter! That would have been grown over a long period.
'Before we dye these pieces of cloth, one's treated with our alum solution, 'so, hopefully, it will hold the dye better.
The other is untreated.
' It looks about done.
Let's see what the result is.
This one is much brighter.
There's much more dye in this cloth than in this cloth.
'It becomes obvious why alum was so important to the cloth industry.
'Bright fast colours sold for much higher prices.
' We've made alum on a tiny scale but the original alum works was massive, producing 600 tonnes of the stuff every year in this cliff-top chemical factory.
However, it was Ravenscar's proximity to the coast that was crucial to its success.
To make the alum, tonnes of coal from Newcastle and gallons of urine from the slums of Hull and London arrived by sea.
Clues on the beach show us how this happened.
What they have off to the side are these rut ways, used to bring the carts in, with the material in barrels, ready to be loaded straight into the boats.
Yeah.
You can see quite a nice channel Yeah.
.
.
So these are to stop the carts slipping on the rocks? Partly.
It's bad enough keeping your footing without a cart full of product you need to sell.
The other one's over here? Yes.
They run off down the beach.
The ruts are going to guide the wheels in the right direction.
Like a train track.
Very much.
This is the dock itself.
These rocks would be cleared out so the boats didn't damage themselves.
It's badly eroded now but it's all been cut away by hand.
The boat would sit to one side so it could be loaded.
Large boats? Yes.
There'd be room for two, even three.
How did they get the alum down from the cliff top? That comes down there.
There's a diagonal line that runs all the way down the cliff.
Yes.
They'd come down there, onto the beach then up to the harbour.
If you hadn't have pointed that out, I wouldn't have noticed that.
That's the edge of a road? You can see cobbles sticking out.
You can see the line of the roadway.
The boats would be in the dock They'd load the stuff up, the tide comes in, they'd walk the boat back, turn them round and off to sea, to ship the alum wherever required.
.
.
Possibly worldwide, certainly across Britain and northern Europe.
A very valuable commodity.
But the invention of synthetic dyes rang the death knell for alum factories.
After 250 years, this ingenious industry, created by people making the most of scant resources around them, ended.
Ravenscar finally closed in 1862.
One of the best things about this journey for me is the chance to see some of the less well-known coast paths.
This is Cleveland Way, a wonderful hike which teeters between the moors and the sea.
A few miles south, we temporarily leave behind the wild Yorkshire hills and the shoreline changes completely.
"Welcome to Britain's first seaside resort", it says on the sign as you drive into Scarborough.
This is where the seaside holiday was invented way back in 1667.
Historian Neil Oliver has been making the acquaintance of what the guidebooks call, "The queen of the Yorkshire coast.
" I remember coming on holiday to Scarborough with my mum and dad.
Innovations in holiday-making you're after? This is the place! Victorian engineers transformed a remote fishing port into one of Europe's premier resorts.
Scarborough has always prided itself on being able to stay on top of the tourism game.
It had this, the world's first cliff tramway, opened in 1874, Europe's biggest hotel, The Grand, and, in the 19th century, the largest aquarium in the world.
BRASS BAND PLAYS And it had this, the focal point of every visit to Scarborough, the spa, opened in 1858, and its elegant Sun Court.
Though that's not to say the sun always shines! During its Victorian heyday, the spa's reputation grew as a place of entertainment and relaxation, and was the most popular music venue outside of London.
Simon Kenworthy is the leader of the Spa Orchestra and something of an expert on the town's history.
When was Scarborough's heyday? Well, the trains arrived in Scarborough in 1845.
From then on, people started to come to Scarborough in their masses.
By 1860, when this wonderful building was built, the place would have been heaving with people.
.
.
People of a certain quality, as well, because people would have to pay to come in.
You'd have the aristocracy promenading about in front of the spa, listening to the music.
Scarborough was alive with people.
It was an incredible tourist resort.
People say that the bay here looks like the Bay of Naples.
A lot of the architecture is to do with the lie of the land in Scarborough.
It's quite hilly, so we've got these wonderful opportunities for terraces, bridges, we've got the castle on the hill.
Was there a lot of snobbery during the heyday? "We are the best"? There is now.
It carries on, this snobbery.
A lot of people who come to us come specifically to Scarborough because it has this air of quiet gentility about it.
It does make them feel really good about themselves because they're in this fantastic atmosphere.
I'm sold.
Great.
I'm going to see out my twilight years here as well! Despite its snobbery, Scarborough's success as a seaside resort was actually based on an accidental discovery.
The whole fortune of this town is based on this little bit of water coming out here.
People came to Scarborough after the water was discovered in 1620, by a local lady.
She discovered it had miraculous properties.
This is what's left.
That's it?! That's it.
What's that?! It's just a little brown smeary mess.
It's the magic water of Scarborough.
It's not really safe to drink these days but you can have a go.
Do you think not?! People were taking the waters into the 1950s for its medicinal properties.
Instant dysentery, I'd have thought.
I wouldn't fancy it myself.
It looks fairly horrible.
Where there's muck, there's brass! The water simply contained magnesium sulphate, as effective as Alka-Seltzer is today.
Did they make much use of the beach itself? Initially, no.
People just came for the waters.
But Dr Wittie - in about 1660 - wrote a treatise which went around the whole of the country.
In this treatise, he extolled the virtues of sea bathing.
He said that a naked plunge into the salty waters followed by a sweat in a warm bed was a good cure for gout.
People thought, "We can take the waters and also plunge into the sea and we'll be cured.
" 'With a few aches and pains myself, I think I'll go for a paddle.
' Oh! OH! It might look like the Bay of Naples but it doesn't feel like it! OH! In the early 20th century, Scarborough was still anxious to bring in the high-spending upper classes.
But with competition from newer, brasher resorts, it was time to rethink its image.
It had to think big.
Scarborough turned to big-game hunting for its next attraction.
Africa had lions, India had tigers Scarborough had the tunny - to you and me, the tuna fish.
Tunny fishing brought the gentry and the wealthy back to Scarborough.
Fisherman Fred Normandale was just a small boy when their yachts and Rolls-Royces pulled into town.
Lovely.
I had no idea there were tuna here.
I thought it was a tropical fish.
The blue-fin tuna lives in the Atlantic as much as anywhere.
It goes all over Europe.
Yes.
It was quite an amazing way of life.
Look at the size of that! That line-up there! The biggest one caught round here was 909lb.
They had to be caught from an open boat, a rowing boat.
They could be attached to the rod and line, but not the boat.
Imagine having a 900lb fish on your rod! It must have been like a Nantucket sleigh ride! A real danger of getting pulled out.
I'd say that.
And they weren't catching them to eat.
It was big-game fishing, just as you'd hunt marlin or swordfish.
It didn't last long.
The first were caught in the early '30s and the last was caught in '54.
They started to decline with the decline of herring.
A special few years? It was exclusive.
People came from all over Europe, they came in their yachts They came in their private ships to go tunny fishing at Scarborough! Today, blue-fin tuna are close to extinction worldwide.
It's unlikely there'll be tunny fishing here again.
It may be a bit old-fashioned and trying a little too hard to impress, but I like Scarborough.
What really comes across is the pride people have in their town and that's got to be a good thing.
From Scarborough, our journey takes us past a sheltered bay which embraces the resort of Filey and onto the most notorious headland on the Yorkshire coast.
This is Flamborough Head, a lethal spike of land jutting six miles out into the North Sea.
In the 17th century, 174 ships were wrecked here in just 36 years.
This part of the coast still sees plenty of shipping action.
53 miles further south we come to Spurn Head, another remote spit of land.
Located at the mouth of the River Humber's busy shipping lane, it's home to the country's only full-time residential lifeboat station.
During big storms, the road floods, cutting off from the outside world the seven families who live here.
For them, isolation's a way of life.
Last winter we was cut off for about two months.
Um Until the sea decided to behave itself and went back to normal.
When we know it's coming up to winter and the high tides, we tend to do a really big shop.
I've got three freezers on the go and they're always full.
Us wives on the station do everything, because the men can't get off it, no matter what.
To go out there in rough weather You have to be proud of him of all of them.
I wouldn't be normal if I didn't worry about him.
With the beach on their doorstep, it may look idyllic.
But this is part of the fastest-eroding shoreline in Europe, in some places losing up to two metres every year.
Before long, the map of Spurn Head may have to be redrawn.
From here we follow the coast inland, where Mark Horton is investigating our earliest seagoing traditions.
This is the enormous Hull docks.
From here, ships bring their cargoes from all round the world.
This is where the ferries leave for Continental Europe, the timber comes in from Scandinavia, the iron and steel from Italy.
This is the River Humber, the gateway to Britain.
But it's not just recently that the Humber has been so busy.
People living around here have been using this river for trade and transport for thousands of years.
I've come to meet Hull archaeologist Ben Gearey, to find out why the Humber estuary was our birthplace as a seafaring nation.
There are lots of harbour installations all the way round.
It's important nowadays.
Was it important in the past as well? You may not think of Humber mud as being an important archaeological resource but it is.
The most important finds of the last 50 years have come out of the Humber mud - boat remains, dating back 3,500 years.
The Bronze Age! These remains are what we call sewn-plank boats - they're the earliest examples of that outside Egypt.
Five Bronze Age boats were exposed by the shifting mud of the estuary near the small village of Ferriby, just outside Hull.
In 1963, amateur archaeologists waded knee-deep in the mud, racing to dig out the most complete find before the incoming tide washed it away.
40 years after this boat was removed, only now has the full significance of the find become apparent.
New radiocarbon dates reveal the Ferriby boat to be 4,000 years old, the oldest seagoing boat ever found in Europe.
Before the boat disintegrated, enough was learnt about its design for boat builders to make this half-size replica.
What did the archaeologists actually dig out of the mud? The three bottom planks, and also this part of the side here.
This is key to deciphering the technology used to build the boat.
We're seeing a transition from a dug-out canoe technology to this sewn-plank construction.
Where you have individual planks and, because you don't have iron nails, you sew them together? Exactly, yes.
As we paddle our way towards Ferriby, I want to find out why, of all the places along the banks of the Humber, so many ancient boats were found here.
We think we have a Bronze Age boat yard.
We have evidence of boats being dismantled, working on boats It's a boat yard.
They would have chosen this particular spot? We've the whole estuary - why here? What you have to imagine is the environment being very different - extensive salt marshes around the river, wet woodland at the edges.
In those circumstances, it's very important to find somewhere dry.
This was the only dry land around? Yes.
As you're going up and down this estuary, this is the ideal place to beach your boat to repair it? Exactly.
Two of Ben's colleagues have some other finds from nearby which suggest the Ferriby boats weren't only sailing along rivers, but also capable of crossing the North Sea.
What's this one? This is a very interesting example.
This is a French axe.
This is trade? Exactly - this has been brought over from the Continent.
The sort of axes that would have been traded in boats like the Ferriby boat? Quite possibly.
Isn't it extraordinary? Presumably it's that new maritime technology that enabled the Bronze Age to happen? .
.
Enabled societies to have metal.
It was the boat Exactly, the boat is central to development at this time in this area, we think.
'It seems Ferriby was once an international Bronze Age trading centre.
' This area would have been a hive of activity? Yes.
Communities connecting themselves to other communities.
By boat.
Yes.
To travel these long distances, it's thought the Ferriby boats had sails.
We've built a replica and actually shown it's possible to do this! That's the important step from a few bits of wood in the mud to a fantastic object like this, that could have had an incredible impact on society.
I don't think you can overestimate the impact it would have had.
The Ferriby boats really are extraordinary.
They were being used at the same time Stonehenge was being built, proof of our earliest adventures as seafarers and traders with the outside world.
Who would have thought in the Bronze Age that they would have built this bridge 4,000 years later! It's an incredible mix of old and new! Ferriby may have been the hub of life on the Humber 4,000 years ago, but in the 1940s, that role belonged to Grimsby, then the largest fishing port in the world.
Sailing as far away as the Arctic Circle and Newfoundland, fishermen often worked in appalling conditions, but they reaped a rich harvest with trawler skippers being some of the best-paid men in England.
These days, it's a very different picture.
SEAGULLS CALL Over-fishing, depleted stocks and now fish quotas have reduced that mighty fleet to only ten vessels.
But Grimsby's still a major player in the fish business.
Ahoy there, mates, anyone partial to a Birds Eye fish finger? Fish fingers first made their appearance in 1955.
And were considered a luxury after wartime rationing.
By the early '60s, they'd formally established their unassailable position as a child's staple diet.
So take a tip from Captain Birds Eye, give 'em Birds Eye fish fingers.
ALL CHEER And Grimsby is fish finger central, processing nearly a million tons of fish a year.
Although, sadly, none of it's caught locally any more.
Most of it arrives in frozen blocks from as far away as Alaska.
Here at this processing plant, 3,000 fish fingers roll off the conveyor belt every minute.
At full throttle, Grimsby can splatter, breadcrumb and flash fry ten million fish fingers weekly.
The outside is cooked so fast, that the inside remains frozen.
From block to box takes only 35 minutes.
Today, cod stocks are diminishing worldwide and so manufacturers are looking at new ideas, and at more exotic fish.
For added Continental panache, Young's have even brought in a French chef, Serge Nollent.
What have we got here? So we've got the barramundi which comes from the Indian Ocean, three days old.
That's sharp! Be careful, this is very sharp Big ugly mouth.
Wouldn't want to get your arm struck down there.
And what about this guy here? OK.
This one is a barracuda.
It's got big teeth, hasn't it? It's a very lively fish.
Barracuda again from the Indian Ocean.
Will the British really warm to barracuda and chips? Possibly.
The challenge for Serge and his team is to devise a dish that will sell as well as the trusty fish finger.
Serge clearly has aspirations for haute cuisine but I can't help wondering if there's really a place for these in the supermarket.
Is that fish wrapped around the asparagus? It's filleted sea bass, some British asparagus and a little beurre blanc sauce, which is a reduction of shallots, white wine, butter and cream.
These dishes look delicious but one uses scallops, the other uses asparagus and neither are mass-produced, factory fodder to the UK public.
They're specialised food.
Have you created a dish which is economical and which can be mass-produced in factory like this one? We have.
We're actually working on it at the moment with scallop.
Serge has come with, wait for it That is the biggest fish finger I have ever seen, Serge.
An old recipe with a new twist.
.
What's inside here? Inside, we got some mushy pea which is a classic, classic um accompaniment with fish and chips, yeah? Do you mind if I perform a small autopsy on it? Not at all.
SO you've got a batter layer on top? Yep.
And that's the pollock there, is it? Yes it is, yeah.
Then inside, there's the mushy peas.
The mushy peas, yep.
Can I try a bit? Yes you can? Looks very hot.
Yeah, I prefer those to fish fingers.
Yeah? Yeah.
The mushy peas gives some strong flavour.
It's got a tang in the middle.
What are you going to call this? I don't know, Jumbo? Jumbo mushy peas fingers? Jumbo mushy peas fingers.
Sorry, Serge, jumbo mushy peas fingers is not going to work.
You need a good name.
Something we're working on.
You've got the product, you need the name.
Leaving Grimsby, we follow the flat windswept coast southwards into Lincolnshire.
Grimsby's fish fingers and you never know, maybe even Serge's jumbo mushy peas fingers may end up being eaten here, at one of Lincolnshire's bracing seaside resorts.
Cleethorpes, Mablethorpe, Ingoldmells.
Together, they boast, if that's the right word, Europd's highest concentration of caravans, with 6.
5 million visitors every year.
This coast's flair for ingenuity and innovation is nowhere more evident than here - in Skegness.
One day, the fairground showman came upon an old turnip field by the sea.
And there he saw gold.
His name was Billy Butlin.
Butlin was about to revolutionise the great British holiday, by inventing the mega camp.
SHOW MUSIC PLAYS Butlin's, Skegness, the first camp Billy built, is still packing them in, bold, brash and brassy as ever.
Neil Oliver has joined the crowd.
This is my first time at Butlin's so I didn't know what it'd be like, but I think I expected it to be winding down.
But look at this place, it's jumping and it's going like a fair.
Come on! Feel the music! It's party time, come on! Billy Butlin opened this place in 1936, and it became the template for every holiday camp in the country.
Even today, just about when you can get a cheap holiday anywhere, four million of us choose to come on holiday to somewhere like this every year.
The name Butlin's has been synonymous with the British seaside holiday for 70 years.
But why did it all start here? It was in Skegness that Butlin opened his first funfair in 1927.
He saw the opportunity to cater for the day-trippers coming here in their masses, from the industrial cities of Nottingham, Doncaster and Leicester.
'I'm meeting Professor Victor Middleton, an expert on British tourism.
'He knows all about the secrets to Billy's success.
' What was it about Billy that made him different? I think he was first and foremost a brilliant entrepreneur.
You know the dodgems story? I don't.
He went to Olympia in 1927, saw an US manufacturer demonstrate these cars, and immediately went back, invested every penny in a fleet of dodgems in Skegness.
1928 was the first season, and then he managed you saw how popular they were, he got the sole agency for selling dodgems in UK and whole of Europe.
That is sheer genius.
Absolutely.
So the money that he made from dodgems built everything else? It was a key part of the whole empire.
An empire built on dodgems? Yeah.
They're still my favourite thing! Billy Butlin's timing was perfect.
In 1938, the Holiday With Pay Act was passed.
This year, we've got holidays with pay, look at that.
Whoo! Isn't that lovely? 'Holidays with pay - who says the world doesn't progress? 'Not every business pays this premium yet, 'but a start has been made and what has long been an office privilege will become the rule in factories.
'The holiday exodus has begun, so a happy time to all of you.
' For the first time, millions of ordinary workers had a week's paid holiday and wanted somewhere cheap to go in the summer.
Butlin's masterstroke was to offer the masses an all-inclusive seaside holiday for a week's wage.
And by providing all the facilities and entertainment on site, the holiday-makers would never need to leave the camp.
The original campers stayed in basic wooden chalets like these.
Though the chalets were small, the camp was on a scale not seen before, accommodating over 2,000 holiday-makers.
So this is the original home from home, then? Yes, I think this is one of the last of the original 1936 chalets of which there were hundreds in lines around the camp at that time.
We'll have a look inside.
I'll have to say, Victor, it's not saying luxury holiday to me! No.
I think to be fair, it is looking a little bit sad at the present time, listed building though it is.
But it's got everything people needed.
They had single beds, basic furniture, a mirror, a single light bulb We have to remember the sort of conditions that people lived in at that time - their houses, the industrial smog.
Very small houses, overcrowded This would have seemed like a holiday heaven to people perhaps coming for their first ever holiday.
And so you'd have a whole family in here? Yes, but then they were used to doing that.
In boarding houses you would have had rooms with five or six people in.
It's the way people took holidays at that time.
Amazing.
Mmm.
I'm amazed.
Yes.
So, what was the daily routine here for the campers? Well, right from the beginning, breakfast would have been arranged in a fairly regimented way.
It was the mass catering.
'Then there would have been a series of activities all announced over a Tannoy system.
' The remainder of your afternoon programme is exactly as printed.
So, go out and enjoy yourselves and have a good time.
This is George saying, Bye-bye! So, if people wanted it, virtually every hour would have been taken up with the holiday arrangements which were provided, and that, of course, was completely unusual and a new part of the Butlin plan.
But the campers' fun came to an abrupt halt with the start of the Second World War in 1939.
Not one to miss a trick, the ever-resourceful Butlin hired out the site to the military, and Butlin's Skegness became a naval camp.
When the war ended, the troops were replaced almost immediately by an army of holiday-makers in even bigger numbers, eager to let their hair down after wartime austerity.
As a result, more and more holiday camps opened.
Pontin's and Warner's also capitalised on the trend.
Butlin's was the market leader and seemed unstoppable.
By 1966, Billy's empire had grown from one camp to nine and its advertising pulled in even more visitors.
Here's your tea, Miss Sales.
Oh, thank you.
Gosh! Isn't this exciting? I do envy you your job.
Yes, I must admit I do love it.
And for holidays, you can stop off anywhere you like in the world.
Well, I could, but I don't.
I always go to Butlin's.
Instead of Honolulu?! Yes, you see, Butlin's can never, never be a letdown.
'You know for a start that you're certain to meet a gang of young people, 'so you're bound to find friends.
'And it's for sure you'll never get bored.
' Stop the plane! I'm getting off for Butlin's.
Not this trip, perhaps, but next time.
This boom period for British holiday camps peaked in 1972 with six million visitors, but the bubble was about to burst.
By the late 1970s, package holidays to the Med took their toll on the old-fashioned camps.
After 40 years of unrivalled success, Butlin's needed to reinvent itself if it was going to survive.
An advertising campaign from 1992 shows just how determined they were to blast away the image of the tired old holiday camp.
A holiday experience is born.
The regimented keep-fit classes and pre-planned sing-alongs have all gone and the chalets have been replaced by apartments like this.
The reinvention seems to be working.
Over a million visitors came to Butlin's last year.
It's their 70th anniversary next year, but I wonder if it will all still be here in another 70 years.
I think some of it will be much the same, in the sense that the beaches will still be here, give or take what global warming does.
The resorts will still be here because I see no reason why people will not want to spend leisure time in attractive environments.
And the type of accommodation will change, the type of meals will change, the type of entertainment will change, and possibly another brilliant entrepreneur will come along with a totally different idea and will change the mould again.
Do you think they can change the weather? No, that would be a very tall order.
I wouldn't guarantee that! Butlin's is a survivor.
Despite all the competition, it's hung on, changing with the times.
But perhaps what is says more than anything is that people will always want to be beside the seaside, even if it is cold, wet and windy.
Just four miles down the coast from Skeggy, we come to a very different kind of seaside.
From here on, it becomes impossible to define where the land ends and where the sea begins.
It's a coast in a constant state of flux.
This is the salt marsh of the Wash, one of Britain's last great wildernesses, with half a million migrating birds passing through every year.
Artist and conservationist Sir Peter Scott was one of the first to recognise its importance.
In 1933, Scott came to live at this lighthouse on the banks of the River Nene where it enters the Wash.
As a painter, he was drawn to the beauty and the extraordinary variety of migrating birds.
And through his art, he increased his understanding of the birds' behaviour.
But Scott's interest in wildfowl wasn't just in painting them - it was also in shooting them.
I'd never really thought seriously about the conflict of emotion or interest in killing and in enjoying the birds alive.
It was a natural thing, almost a noble thing, to be trying to outwit them.
The carnage of the Second World War was to shift Scott's perspective.
Before the war, I'd been a tremendously keen wildfowler and after the war, I was no less interested in the birds themselves.
But I was much less keen on destruction.
I think I'd had enough of that during the war.
And so I decided to give up the sporting part and simply concentrate on studying and painting, and, if possible, helping to conserve these marvellous birds.
LOUD EXPLOSION One of the innovative conservation methods he introduced was the ringing programme using cannon nets to capture the birds and tag them.
Eventually, he went on to found the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, which protects and manages the UK's precious wildlife habitats, and it's still growing strong.
Our zoologist, Miranda Krestovnikoff, has come to the marshes of the Wash to see Sir Peter Scott's legacy in action and to meet ornithologist Sarah Dawkins - a member of the Wash Wader Ringing Group.
The Wash is this huge expanse of mud flats.
They're packed full of food that the birds can eat.
That's why in winter we've got something like 400,000 birds here.
They're eating the food that's in the mud flats.
Estuary mud is so full of food that it attracts huge flocks of wading birds.
When the tide comes in, it pushes the birds off the mud flats, creating one of the UK's great wildlife spectacles.
But Sarah hasn't come just to look at the birds.
Her group comes here every month to catch and ring them.
And it's only at high tide when the birds are concentrated in one place at the top of the beach that they stand any chance of doing this.
The plan is to fire a cannon net, adapted from the one invented by Sir Peter Scott, over the group of birds.
It's a tricky operation and hidden behind the sea wall, we all wait anxiously for the net to be fired.
VOICE ON RADIO 'Fire!' The group have worked together for so long that they operate like a well-oiled machine, and as soon as the nets are fired, everyone sprints into action.
The nets have got to be lifted away from the approaching tide and then covered.
Once they're in the dark, they calm down, they don't get too distressed.
Exactly.
Now you can leave them here.
We can sort ourselves out, we can get some cages, think about And calm down! It was dramatic, wasn't it? One of the reasons for netting the birds is to see if they've been caught here before.
If not, they give the birds an identifying ring.
Oh, my hands are so cold I can't squeeze! What's the significance of the rings? It's got a number and an address.
It's unique to this bird.
Anyone in the world who catches this bird can contact that address and find out this bird was ringed on The Wash today.
They're so easy to handle, aren't they? The ringing I've done in the past has been frantic because the birds are a bit skippy and not happy being handled, but this is very easy.
Waders are much calmer than other birds which makes it easy for us to deal with them in this way.
'In order to minimise stress, we release the oystercatchers as soon as we've ringed and measured them.
' We just literally pick them up and pop them out.
And then off they go.
What the research of the Wash Wader Ringing Group has shown is that most of these birds are on huge migrations - breeding in the summer in the high Arctic and then travelling south, some as far as Africa, in the winter.
It's always nice releasing them and realising you've not damaged or affected them in any way.
And for the birds to make these migrations, our estuaries are vital.
The birds use them like service stations on a motorway.
If they can't stop off and refuel, they're unable to complete their migration.
But rising sea-levels threaten estuaries like this.
For the future of these birds, we'll have to think long and hard about how to protect places like The Wash.
The quicksands and the quagmires of The Wash's fickle landscape are also the stuff of legend.
This is the mud that 800 years ago swallowed the treasure of Bad King John.
It's Autumn 1216 and King John is in the final days of a bitter struggle against rebel barons.
He's lost London and is trying to mount a last strike against the rebel heartland in East Anglia.
Effectively homeless, he's carrying everything with him - including the crown jewels.
The king took the longer but safer inland route around The Wash, but sent his slow-moving baggage train, together with the jewels, on the more dangerous direct route across the marshes.
Navigation on The Wash would have been extremely difficult - there are no notable features and water in creeks like these rises quickly with the tide.
The story goes that they mistimed the crossing and got caught by the incoming tide.
Chronicler Ralf of Coggeshall said many members of John's household were submerged in the sea and sucked into the quicksand.
The treasure went down with them.
But despite the efforts of hopeful treasure-hunters down the centuries, King John's crown jewels have never been found.
The mud flats that consumed the treasure stretched about four miles across The Wash, but all that has now become firm, fertile land.
Welcome to The Fens.
Over the last 800 years, human intervention and invention have altered the line of the coast and completely changed the face of this landscape.
At the time of King John, The Fens stretched 40 miles along this coast and 20 miles inland.
But not any longer.
Maisie Taylor, a local archaeologist, knows what brought about this dramatic change in The Fens.
I can't begin to imagine what The Fens must have looked like 400, 500 years ago.
What would they have looked like? How big were they and how difficult was it to travel? They were absolutely vast, which was wonderful for the people who lived here and exploited it.
But for outsiders, it was an evil, godforsaken place.
What makes a fen so fertile? To some extent, it's the silts and sediments that wash in, but mostly it's like a compost heap - just leaves and stems, and soft parts of plants.
It has been said that The Fens are just a giant grow bag.
To turn this giant grow bag into fertile farmland, 17th-century engineers came up with this - soft lines became sharp, meandering curves became straight.
The marshlands were drained and tamed by the creation of artificial waterways.
These rivers were put right through the middle of The Fens to take all the water by the shortest route to the sea.
So this is a man-made landscape? It's completely man-made.
And this goes right across The Fens.
It's massive! I know, extraordinary, isn't it? Reclamation from the sea continued until the 1970s and created over 1,500 square miles of farmland - an area one-fifth the size of Wales.
No other part of the UK coastline has been as extensively altered by human intervention.
For the time being, this is the front line between man and the sea, but with sea levels rising, the question for the future is whether to defend this man-made land or to hand it back to nature.
This awesomely flat, reclaimed landscape is a tribute to man's ingenuity.
This part of the east coast really does feel like nowhere else in Britain.
But our hold here is precarious.
It's not just farmland on the front line, but also low-lying towns like King's Lynn.

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