Twentieth Century British History

Twentieth Century British History Advance Access originally published online on August 22, 2007
Twentieth Century British History 2007 18(3):277-305; doi:10.1093/tcbh/hwm005

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TCBH Postgraduate Essay Prize Winner for 2006

Working-Class Consumers and the Campaign for Holidays with Pay

Sandra Dawson^*

University of California, Santa Barbara

* sdrn60{at}cox.net.

	Abstract

Top Abstract * The Holidays With Pay... Conclusion Notes

 
The Holidays With Pay Act (1938) marked the end of a twenty-year campaign for paid leisure time. The final legislation recommended, but did not mandate, one week's annual paid vacation to all full-time workers. Although the leisure habits of British workers remained relatively unchanged until after 1945, the popular campaign for paid leisure time, the report of the Holidays With Pay Committee, and the Act itself marked an important moment in British political and social history. In short, the campaign for paid holidays legitimated the leisure desires and activities of the working class and encouraged state support of the growth of inexpensive commercial leisure in the interwar years. The campaign for paid leisure and the resulting 1938 Act not only helped to create a market for mass pleasure sites, but also helped to define the types of commercial leisure appropriate for a mass of newly leisured workers. The campaign, the report and the legislation deeply implicated the state in the construction of a consuming working-class and in the expansion of commercial, class-based sites of leisure. The 1938 Holidays With Pay Act thus redefined who was considered a legitimate consumer of pleasure and what forms that commercialized pleasure should take.

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Mr Charles Turner, a manual worker in the upholstery trade, dreaded holidays. Married with two children, Turner lived in a rented house in Stratford and brought home wages of three pounds each week. Neither Turner nor his wife had ever experienced a vacation away from home. They could not afford to do so. In April 1938, the Turner family was three weeks behind in their rent and faced meagre meals as a result of the upcoming Easter Bank holiday. The two and a half days unpaid public holiday meant that Turner's wages would be halved that week. ‘You have no idea’, he told a staff reporter for the Daily Express, ‘how these unpaid holidays throw our budget out of gear. It takes us months to recover’. Turner also explained that when the upholstery factory closed for a week in August and during the Christmas break, he suffered a loss of wages for the days he was not permitted to work. If only he could work during the holidays, Turner maintained, he could catch up on all his bills. As her husband expressed his frustration over unpaid holidays, Mrs Turner offered the reporter a meal of homemade meat pudding and a cup of milky tea. She apologized for the food and explained, ‘We were going to have fish for lunch today but that would have cost one and six and we can't afford that this week’. The following week would be even worse. Of her husband's thirty shillings wages, ten would pay the rent and the rest, Mrs Turner estimated, ‘would just about buy us food for the week if we go slow’. The Turners, as the Daily Express reporter informed readers, were just one of millions of families in Britain who suffered from unpaid holidays. ‘Can we’, the reporter asked, please ‘make this the last holiday without pay?’¹

Two weeks after the Daily Express published the article about the Turner family, a long awaited report by the Holidays With Pay Committee recommended that all full-time workers in Britain receive at least one week's annual paid vacation.² The suggestions from the Committee formed the basis of the Holidays With Pay Act passed later that year. For those nineteen and a half million manual workers in Britain who, like Charles Turner, earned less than two hundred and fifty pounds per year, the legislation marked the end of a twenty-year campaign for holidays with pay and the beginning of paid leisure time. The final legislation, however, did not guarantee this leisure time. The 1938 Holidays With Pay Act recommended, but did not mandate, one week's annual paid vacation to all full-time workers in Britain.³ Anticipating the legislation, some employers had already made agreements with workers and unions for paid holidays.⁴ Thus the 1938 Act merely nudged many employers in the direction they were already headed.⁵ For this reason, many scholars have dismissed the Act as largely insignificant. Furthermore, the Act did little to change the leisure habits of British workers until after 1945. The outbreak of war in 1939 interrupted the full implementation of the statute, and, as the predicament of the Turner family illustrates, the cost of vacations lay outside the realm of possibility for most workers until labour shortages elevated wages in the post-World War Two era.⁶ Other historians note that the campaign for paid leisure in Britain and the 1938 Act mirrored similar movements and legislation in other European nations.⁷ The Holidays With Pay Act in Britain followed many similar types of legislation in other nations.⁸ Thus many scholars consider the Act relatively insignificant except as a milestone in international labour history.

Nevertheless, the popular campaign for paid leisure time, the report of the Holidays With Pay Committee, and the Act are significant for a number of reasons. First, the popular campaign for paid holidays helped construct working-class families as consumers of leisure time and highlighted the image of the ‘poor suffering British housewife’. Second, the report of the Holidays With Pay Committee and the 1938 legislation document state support for the growth of commercial leisure in the interwar years. Recommendations from the Committee urged the government to sanction the development of cheap forms of mass leisure, such as holiday camps, to cater to low paid workers. Thus the Act recognized the needs of workers to enjoy leisure time, but also met the needs of business to keep wages low and profits high. Third, the campaign for paid leisure and the resulting 1938 Act not only helped create a market for mass pleasure sites such as holiday camps, but also helped define the types of commercial leisure appropriate for a mass of workers. Thus the campaign, the report, and the legislation deeply implicated the state in the construction of a consuming working-class as well as the expansion of commercial class-based sites of leisure.

The suitability of such sites of worker pleasure revolved around popular perceptions of the working-class household. As the Committee met to discuss paid holidays, several popular daily newspapers printed a series of articles that emphasized the plight of the ‘poor British housewife’ who depended on her husband's wages to feed and clothe the family. Unpaid holidays, the papers explained, created hardship and more work for housewives who were forced to try to ‘make do’ without a pay packet from their husbands. At the same time, newspapers also advertised new and inexpensive holiday camps that catered especially to the needs of women and children.⁹ When the Committee published their recommendations in April 1938, they pointed to large organized holiday camps to model the potential for low cost mass catering that would enable all members of the family to enjoy a respite from the chores of daily living. Holiday camps offered individual accommodation, three hot meals day, childcare services and constant activities and age-specific entertainment for an all-inclusive price. The Committee recommended the construction of more holiday camps to make ‘use of the advantages of large-scale enterprise’ to ‘provide facilities for families at low weekly terms’ to cater to the ‘worker who wishes to take his family on an inexpensive holiday in which his wife can enjoy rest and recuperation and freedom so far as possible from arduous household duties’.¹⁰ Thus the campaign for holidays with pay and the recommendations of the Committee encouraged the growth of the holiday camp industry by focusing on the plight of the working-class housewife and her need for leisure.

Although most of the holiday camps were owned by individual entrepreneurs or unions, two new ‘chains’ emerged in the 1930s. The holiday camps operated by Billy Butlin and Harry Warner gained national recognition through advertising and their ability to accommodate thousands of campers each week of the holiday season. In part their recognition was driven by middle-class anxiety that the droves of vacationing workers and their families would overwhelm the already congested seaside resorts along Britain's coast. Although some in the leisure industry clearly anticipated Holidays With Pay as a boon for British tourism, others deplored the invasion of their resorts by working class people and looked to the holiday camps to provide contained and inexpensive pleasure for those unwelcome workers and their families. By featuring the mass holiday camps built and operated by men like Butlin and Warner, the Committee gave political legitimacy to the camps, as well as the promise of commercial success.

Through an examination of the popular campaign for paid holidays in Britain in the 1930s, the report of the Holidays With Pay Committee, and the provisions of the legislation, this article explores the complexities inherent in the negotiations of worker leisure. The debates surrounding and embodied within the campaign rhetoric and the Committee report illuminate some of the contradictions of the interwar years, when worker leisure became the focus of government attention.

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Top Abstract * The Holidays With Pay... Conclusion Notes

 
Most scholars agree that the demand for paid leisure time for all workers accelerated with the activity of the trade union movement at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1911, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) adopted a motion in favour of paid holidays, and the following year, George Lansbury introduced the first Holidays With Pay Private Member's Bill into Parliament.¹¹ Despite the support of the TUC, the idea of paid holidays did not gain general acceptance before WWI.¹² Employers rejected the suggestion that production increased when workers received paid leisure time. Unions focused their attention on the fight for basic social, political and industrial rights, and dismissed the idea of paid leisure time as ‘somewhat utopian’.¹³ In addition, union membership was relatively small—roughly one quarter that of Friendly Societies—before WWI. The working class membership of the Friendly Societies preferred to maintain pressure for higher wages and retain worker independence in spending rather than support demands for paid leisure that might give employers more control over their pay packets.¹⁴

This changed in the interwar years.¹⁵ With increased union membership after WWI, annual paid vacations became part of the negotiations for an eight-hour day. Workers and unions recognized the intimate connection between basic social rights and recreation, so that the idea of paid leisure time became anything but utopian. Thus, in the interwar years, unions and workers conceived of paid leisure time as a necessary adjunct to the vote as a symbol of social as well as political citizenship.¹⁶

Workers recognized that paid leisure time signalled class differences in and outside the workplace. Manual workers wanted annual paid vacations on an equal basis with salaried workers who had enjoyed paid leisure time for almost a century.¹⁷ Salaried white collar workers received one or two weeks annual paid leisure in the belief that ‘brain work’ required recuperative leisure while manual unskilled labour did not. Paid leisure was therefore a marker of worker value and class distinction.¹⁸ The insistence on the right to annual paid vacations by wage earners was in part a demand to remove the class distinction between manual and white collar workers. Ironically, manual workers and their union leaders also pressured married women to leave employment, and many industries introduced a formal marriage bar.¹⁹ While manual workers demanded equal class treatment in terms of paid leisure, it was a gendered equality that strove to uphold the idea of the male worker as the ‘family breadwinner’.²⁰

As workers and unions in different regions of the country agitated for higher wages, shorter working days, and holidays with pay, one of the earliest and most successful strikes brought about a National Hours and Holiday Agreement in the print industry. The Printing and Kindred Trades Federation secured an agreement in 1918 that entitled all employees in the print industry to a week of paid vacation annually after one year's service. The importance of this groundbreaking agreement lay in the fact that it covered all categories of worker in the print industry, unlike earlier agreements that targeted specific groups of workers (such as white collar workers) and excluded others (largely manual workers).²¹ This agreement modelled a democratic approach to annual paid leisure. The publicity surrounding this and other strikes garnered a degree of public support, including the introduction of a second unsuccessful private member's bill in the House of Commons in 1925.²²

Despite the failure of the second Holidays With Pay Bill, the campaign for paid leisure continued, especially in the left-wing press. In April 1926, a letter published in the Lansbury Labour Weekly highlighted the impact of holidays without pay on the lives of many manual workers. The author of the letter, a rail shop worker, insisted that many thousands of workers dreaded public holidays such as Christmas, Easter and the August Bank holiday because they were unwaged days ‘paid for by the starvation of ... mothers and children’.²³ For this employee, the Easter holiday resulted in a loss of thirty shillings in pay. As a result, every weekly payment thereafter, including rent, was behind. The alternative for this worker was unthinkable—to pay the rent and allow his family to go without food.²⁴ This letter focused the reader's attention on the plight of the worker's family and the fear of hunger.²⁵

Indeed, the problem of poverty and hunger, not only during unpaid holidays, concerned many social scientists and politicians in the interwar years. When medical examinations of working class school children in London in 1927 and in Jarrow in 1933 showed signs of calcium deficiency and the onset of ‘rickets’ despite the provision of school meals, the Independent Labour Party (ILP) campaigned for a minimum ‘living wage’ of four pounds per week.²⁶ This campaign to alleviate poverty and ensure adequate nutrition for working class children was complicated by the debate over family allowances. Should the state intervene and pay mothers an allowance for each of her children, or would this policy lead to lower wages for male workers? Were family allowances a means by which married women could regain some economic independence, or would they serve to strengthen the marriage bar in some industries, decreasing women's claim to equal pay? While unionists debated the potential problems, concern for the working class family, particularly for the dietary health of poor children, led the Labour Party to support family allowances as a means of ensuring adequate nutrition.²⁷ Through its attention to the hardships experienced by the worker's family when no wages were brought home, the campaign for paid holidays became allied with debates about family nutrition and received more support from politicians and reformers concerned with the health of the nation. The campaign for holidays with pay thus firmly situated hunger and want as problems of unpaid leisure time in a modern industrial nation.²⁸

While social scientists, politicians and reformers debated the effects of poverty on the health of the working class family, others were concerned with the effects of modernity upon the physique and psyche of the manual worker. The relative inactivity of unions after the General Strike in 1926, combined with the world economic depression, encouraged many industries to rationalize production methods. As a result, many workers felt dehumanized by their changed relationship in the workplace. The Lansbury Labour Weekly offered readers a £2 prize for the best article submitted that exposed the worst conditions in a modern factory or workshop.²⁹ Following the failure of a third Parliamentary attempt to secure paid holidays,³⁰ novelist Aldous Huxley voiced his critique of modernity in the dystopic Brave New World where the industrial worker was transformed into an automaton, biologically predestined to undertake any menial task required for maximum production.³¹ The same year that Huxley's novel reached the reading public, Dr J. Mensch argued in the Labour Magazine that paid leisure time was necessary for the urban worker to alleviate the physical and psychological effects of modern production methods. Without paid leisure, Mensch claimed, the modern industrial worker was no different from a ‘beast of burden’. A holiday from the ‘dulling round of habit,’ and the ‘daily struggle for existence’ he argued, was an ‘immunization’ from the depression caused by modern industrial work.³² Mensch and other campaigners insisted that workers required more than a day or a weekend to recuperate from the incapacitating and dehumanizing effects of modernity. The modern worker, they claimed, required an annual paid vacation of at least ten days.

When workers in France and Belgium successfully united and struck for paid leisure time in 1936, campaigners stepped up the pressure to achieve the same kind of legislative support in Britain.³³ Writing in the Fabian Quarterly, Guy Rowson, Labour MP for Farnworth, refocused the debate on the working class family. The MP maintained that because wives were in charge of family budgets they suffered unduly from unpaid holidays. For that reason Rowson had no doubt that annual paid holidays would reduce the workload for workers' wives and thus be ‘regarded as a boon in thousands of working-class homes’.³⁴ Rowson, like many supporters of annual paid vacations, recognized household budgeting as unwaged work.³⁵ Yet he also identified that work as the undisputed domain of women. While this assumption imagined the working class household as one with a male ‘breadwinner’ who worked outside the home, and a wife who worked without pay within the home on a budget limited by, and contingent upon, the wages of her spouse, it did not fit the reality of the labour market or the modern working-class home.³⁶ The number of unskilled married and unmarried women workers in the new industries grew at a faster rate during the interwar period than the number of men employed, and some women were single parents as well as the head of their households.³⁷ Many working class women took seasonal and part-time work in hotel service or catering to supplement the family income. Some, like the infamous ‘Blackpool landladies’, created an industry within their homes that catered to boarders and seasonal guests.³⁸ Other women cooked, cleaned or took in laundry for an income and expected working children to contribute to the family economy.³⁹ They did so in addition to their care-giving roles, with or without the wages of a male ‘breadwinner’. Although some unemployed or disabled men helped with the housework and childcare, this was the exception rather than the rule, and a breach of accepted masculine roles.⁴⁰

The gendered household with a sole male breadwinner and a female household manager was rarely possible in the interwar years, but it was an ideal to which working class men and women aspired.⁴¹ It was also an image that gained currency in the popular imagination through fiction and advertising. Women's magazines and annual events such as the Ideal Home Exhibition marketed domestic efficiency and the significant role of modern women as household consumers and managers.⁴² For working class households, however, the constraints of low wages marked the limits of getting and spending. Thus Rowson's argument harnessed the popular image of the important role of the modern housewife while at the same time it highlighted the hardships experienced by many workers’ wives. Rowson's argument did not, however, fully appreciate the complex financial relationships within the working-class household, nor did it leave room to contemplate the possibility of the modification or even reversal of gender roles within the working-class household. And yet it appealed to many workers and received support from constituencies on the political left concerned with the plight of the poor, and those on the political right determined to maintain a patriarchal family structure. The dual images of the working male as the family ‘breadwinner’ and the ‘struggling’ housewife as the ‘victim’ made a more salient and persuasive argument in a society that was critical of working married women and that failed to give workers annual paid leisure time.

As Rowson's article focused the campaign for holidays with pay on household management, the popular press assumed a greater role in the production of articles that featured the hardships suffered by the worker, his family and especially his wife because of unpaid holidays. By June 1937, the Daily Herald began to publish letters from readers that illustrated the problem of unpaid holidays.⁴³ One author, calling himself ‘Military Medalist’ and the father of two children, asked readers to ‘picture a good wife and mother going to an early grave; children growing up in C3 condition [unfit for national service], and [his] own mental torment’, because of the lack of money for a holiday. Mrs Hewitt of Hebburn-on-Tyne claimed holidays meant ‘making one weeks’ wages go the way of two’, while the wife of a bricklayer in Lowestoft claimed her last holiday was nineteen years previously, just before she married. Mr R. G. Woods of Bristol reiterated the problem of unpaid holidays in his letter to the Herald. Woods maintained that he and his wife dreaded Bank Holidays because they meant ‘a lock-out with the worry of a light pay packet and going short, and a new struggle to get straight’. Like many thousands of other working class families, the Woods ‘struggled on’ without paid holidays and without an annual vacation.⁴⁴

Another popular but more conservative paper, the Daily Express, conducted its own campaign to highlight the international movement for holidays with pay and the exclusionary class system in Britain that denied millions of wage earners the right to an annual holiday.⁴⁵ The Express campaign strategically began just prior to the Easter bank holiday and listed twenty-four nations that provided annual paid holidays for all workers, including Chile, Venezuela, France, Finland, Norway and the USSR. A further four nations granted paid holidays to industrial workers, and a further six nations, including Sweden and Denmark, were considering the legislation.⁴⁶ Two days later a Daily Express staff reporter brought a human interest story to the campaign when he visited a Mr and Mrs Charles Turner of William Street, Stratford, to illustrate the plight of a working class family during the unpaid Easter holiday. The family not only ate poorly during the public holidays, but neither Mr nor Mrs Turner had ever ‘been away’ for a holiday in their lives.⁴⁷ Juxtaposed next to a photograph of swarming Easter holiday crowds, this article once again placed the limits of the working-class household budget and the plight of the housewife at the centre of the Daily Express campaign for holidays with pay.⁴⁸

Another Daily Express reporter went to Brighton during the Easter Bank Holiday weekend, a favourite seaside resort for many Londoners, to investigate how many of the visitors received paid holidays. Of every ten people interviewed, nine received pay for the Easter holiday. The reporter claimed, ‘It was a tonic to find that nine out of ten of the people I talked to were being paid during Easter, ‘Otherwise’, they said,’ we wouldn't be able to come’. On the other hand, the reporter argued, ‘It was depressing to meet the people who were trying to make the most of the sunshine and then going home to pinch and scrape this week’. The reporter described a meeting with Mr and Mrs Albert Johnson, who did not enjoy a paid Easter holiday. ‘Feeding their baby boy ice-cream by the Palace Pier’, Mr Johnson cheerily responded to the reporter's questions, ‘No good being miserable about it, but when I only earn £2 15s a week the loss of two-and-a-half days pay makes a big difference’.⁴⁹

In response to the popular campaign, and in preparation for the introduction of a new holiday bill when Parliament resumed in the autumn, the women of the Labour Party organized a ‘Seaside Campaign’ for holidays with pay throughout July and August in 1937.⁵⁰ Organizers displayed thousands of posters and distributed over one million leaflets in their demand for a universal legal obligation to provide paid leisure time for all workers.⁵¹ Furthermore, Labour women convened over one hundred and fifty meetings in over forty seaside resorts, inviting Labour MPs and mayors to speak in support of holidays with pay.⁵² The campaign targeted those fortunate enough to enjoy a summer seaside holiday and emphasized the millions who could not.⁵³

The seaside campaign initiated by the women of the Labour party not only supported party policy but also reflected broader aims of Labour women who sought to ‘enhance society's valuation of women's maternal and domestic role’ throughout the interwar years.⁵⁴ While supporting the right to work and opposing the marriage bar, Labour women also recognized the contribution women's unwaged work made to the economy and wanted to make this visible. The arguments given for the need for paid holidays focused on the problems and stresses experienced by the working class housewife faced with the responsibility of feeding her family during unpaid holidays. Indeed, the importance of women's domestic role in the campaign was emphasized by an investigation launched by Labour women in the mid-1930s into the connection between unpaid holidays and the nutritional state of working class families. In May 1936, a year before the seaside campaign, investigators presented their findings to the National Conference of Labour Women. Working class women, they argued, should not be blamed for the poor nutritional state of their children. Instead, they should be lauded for their ability to overcome the exigencies of low wages, unemployment, and unpaid holidays that contributed to the dietary deficiencies of the British public. The only way to improve the health of the nation's children, the investigators claimed, was to accommodate the domestic needs of the housewife through increased wages and the provision of paid holidays for all workers.⁵⁵ By placing the plight of the working class housewife at the centre of the debate over worker leisure, Labour women sought to elevate the value of the domestic and unwaged work of women.

The Daily Herald supported the women of the Labour Party and joined the crusade. An investigative journalist for the Herald went to a working class neighbourhood in London to ask residents about their experience of holidays. In his article, S. E. R. Wynne began with a description of the homes’ exteriors:

Such very clean doors–the knockers polished so that I could see my face in them as I stood on the step. And the steps themselves were newly whitened, like table napery just out of the linen room. You would never suspect the stories behind those doors–stories I learned when those doors were opened, when we got over difficult introductions, and I asked simply, ‘What do you do about holidays?’

The simple question asked of six families in the same neighbourhood revealed a variety of answers and a range of work experiences. Wynne utilized nineteenth-century imagery of the deserving poor, particularly cleanliness as a signifier of respectability. The vivid description of the cleanliness of the homes signalled to readers of the Daily Herald that these were ‘respectable’ if poor households, worthy of public support.⁵⁶ Yet the description also highlighted the unwaged ‘work’ of the household required to maintain the polished knockers and the whitewashed steps. The first family, a sixty-eight-year-old non-unionized printer and his wife, claimed they had a holiday once. Mrs B qualified the answer and claimed she and the ‘kiddies’ went to Ramsgate for a week during the war years, without her husband, when he earned ‘good money in war work’. This year, however, as part of the Coronation celebrations, Mr B looked forward to a week's paid vacation. The couple planned to go to Folkestone. The second couple, Tom and his ‘pale, thin, tired-eyed wife’, never took a holiday. She explained to Wynne, ‘He's a painter, you see. Works when he's lucky, nine or ten months a year and then gets stopped when the weather's bad’. The couple experienced financial hardship during bank holidays because ‘Tom is just put off—7s cut out of his £2 2s a week’. On these wages a summer vacation was unthinkable. The third family described in the article made a holiday for themselves in the summer—fruit and hop picking in Kent. Although Mrs Bill claimed the hard work and long days in the fields made the whole family ‘feel good’, Wynne surmised that ‘Mrs Bill was not quite [as] enthusiastic as she wanted to suggest. The accommodation, for one thing, is doubtful: huts where she does all the cooking with her own utensils, and has to bring her own bedding’. This was a working holiday with Mrs Bill undertaking a double shift outside the comfort of her home. The reporter simply could not believe it was a recuperative time for this or any other housewife.⁵⁷

The next door revealed David, a tinplater, recently moved from Wales to London for the sake of his wife's poor health. David's company offered one hour of holiday pay for each week worked—but only to men who joined the Territorial Army and spent their holidays in training camp. David told Wynne, ‘I want to be fit to work, not fit to fight. I won't take their money’. In that case, Wynne concluded, the health of David's wife would probably not improve. The final knock revealed an unemployed man, Mr N, who supported his wife and three children through seasonal and part-time work as a barman and porter. This family thought themselves fortunate as a holiday benevolent fund would enable the two younger children to experience a seaside holiday this year. "Thank God for that fund", say Mr and Mrs N, and they mean it ... They are grateful, sincerely, poignantly ... One day they hope for a job and a holiday for themselves’, and so, claimed the reporter, should the readers of the Herald.⁵⁸

As the Daily Herald, and other newspapers such as the Daily Express, detailed the predicament of many low-paid workers who did not receive holidays with pay, Rowson, the Labour MP for Farnsworth, introduced a new holiday bill in Parliament that obliged employers to grant annual paid vacation of a minimum of eight consecutive days for all workers.⁵⁹ Most Parliamentarians supported the bill. It received a second reading in the Commons and went to a Standing Committee for further discussion. Despite Parliamentary support, Conservative members of the committee removed the obligatory clause. Rowson disowned the bill and the largely Conservative National Government dropped it entirely.⁶⁰

The popular support for holidays with pay in the press, however, forced the government to convene an investigation into the possibility of extending paid holidays to all workers. The Holidays With Pay Committee, led by Lord Amulree, met for over a year to investigate the extent to which paid holidays already existed and to look into the possibility of broadening the provision to include another nineteen and a half million manual workers who earned less than two hundred and fifty pounds per year.⁶¹ As the Committee met and compiled a report, the popular press and the leisure industry maintained pressure on the government and the Committee through the publication of excerpts from the proceedings and through its own analysis of the problems associated with an extension of paid leisure.

	The Holidays With Pay Committee

Top Abstract * The Holidays With Pay... Conclusion Notes

 
The Amulree Committee compiled information from a number of sources, including government statistics and reports, as well as interviews with unions and employers. While the members of the committee grappled with the data, publicity surrounding the Committee encouraged many employers to voluntarily grant annual paid vacations to full-time manual workers in anticipation of the legislation they believed would soon force them to do so. In 1936, an estimated one and a half million workers received annual paid vacations. Two years later, this figure reached almost four and a half million even without statutory support.⁶² Indeed, the increase in the number of workers granted holidays with pay seemed to support the Minister of Labour's assertion that there was a ‘national desire’ for a ‘beneficent revolution’ that would give all workers in Britain paid leisure time.⁶³ Nevertheless, in April 1938, fifteen and a half million full-time workers still did not receive annual paid vacations in any form.⁶⁴

The Committee received evidence compiled and presented by the TUC that persuasively argued that the nervous strain caused by mechanization decreased worker productivity.⁶⁵ Regular annual vacations, the TUC asserted, counteracted the damaging psychological effects of dull repetitive work and improved industrial efficiency.⁶⁶ Modern work, the evidence suggested, required modern remedies, including annual paid leisure time. Furthermore, the evidence presented recognized that wives, mothers and sisters of workers contributed to industrial efficiency through their unpaid management of the household. As a matter of ‘social justice’, a TUC representative claimed, these women deserved to benefit from the health and recreational value of holidays with pay.⁶⁷ Behind this argument lay the assumption that annual paid leisure time not only renewed the health and efficiency of the worker, it also functioned to regenerate the working class family and served as a demonstration of collective egalitarianism.

The argument mirrored feminist demands for paid housework.⁶⁸ The TUC recognized the importance of the unpaid contribution made by women in the home. Unlike feminists, however, the TUC did not challenge gender roles or suggest that men should contribute to the management of the household in any way, except financially. The recognition of the importance of the unpaid role of women came at a time when some unions were engaged in a concerted campaign to exclude married women from the workplace in a period of high unemployment.⁶⁹ Not only did married women experience discrimination in the workplace due to lower wages and ‘marriage bars’, but after 1930 most became ineligible for unemployment benefits.⁷⁰ As Susan Pedersen notes, the labour market and the emergent welfare system in Britain ‘developed along male breadwinner lines, disproportionately distributing income to men on the assumption that they were (or soon would be) supporting dependent wives’.⁷¹ While the TUC recognized the unpaid contributions made by women in the home, social justice was not, in this sense, tied specifically to the idea that married women deserved full-time employment and annual paid vacations for themselves. Instead, the TUC sought to reinforce the notion of a male breadwinner with dependents to increase wages and benefits for union members. Paid holidays would benefit the unwaged wife as much as the waged worker.

Despite the fact that the TUC suggested married women would benefit from annual paid vacations, cheap holidays often entailed more work packing and unpacking, worrying and looking after children, shopping, cooking, and making beds in a caravan, tent, or boarding house. In order to keep down the cost of the vacation, boarding houses often allowed guests to buy and even cook their own food during their stay. The responsibility for the provision of food and meals for the family on vacation remained within the realm of women's work.⁷² Thus, the family holiday did not necessarily mean leisure for women.⁷³ A series of articles in the Daily Herald offered ways in which women could plan ahead to experience some semblance of leisure time with the family.⁷⁴ One article even gave suggestions to women about how to cope with the difficulties of cooking away from home when the family enjoyed a holiday together.⁷⁵ Thus while the TUC supported the rights of all workers to annual paid leisure time, the popular press exposed one of the major incongruities of that justice, the unpaid domestic labour of many women, even on holiday.

As the Committee gathered information and took detailed testimony from union representatives and employers, the issues gained clarity. Three areas of concern emerged: the interruption to domestic industries that worker holidays would cause if taken at the same time, the question of how the annual paid vacation would be financed, and finally, the lack of facilities at which the newly leisured workers could spend their holiday time.⁷⁶ The concern surrounding the interruption of domestic industrial production faltered since entire industries such as the Lancashire cotton industry already closed their factories for a week in the summer to repair and update machinery. Furthermore, the cotton industry claimed that employee–employer relations improved as negotiations between the two groups settled the week of factory closure. Evidence also suggested that regular holidays reduced absenteeism and improved worker efficiency.

The question of how holidays with pay would be financed caused more problems. While the Lancashire Wakes Weeks provided the committee with successful examples of factory closure during the summer holiday period without detriment to the domestic industries, these enforced vacations were paid for by employee contributions. One well-known industrialist, Sir Malcolm Stewart, suggested that paid holidays were the right of every worker and should be financed entirely by employers. Holidays in his view were the responsibility of industry ‘prior even to the interest of capital’.⁷⁷ The majority of industrialists did not agree. Profits remained their chief motivation and employer contributions to paid holidays would potentially interfere with the profit margin. Those opposed to the idea of employer contributions claimed the cost of holidays would be passed on to consumers as it was, in effect, a statutory increase in wages.⁷⁸ Others argued there would be an unequal burden on certain industries and might even force closures and create unemployment. When employers suggested that holidays with pay should be left to voluntary arrangements, many union officials feared paid leisure would not become universal. Some companies could not afford the cost of worker vacations, while others would simply choose not to offer their employees paid holidays.⁷⁹

Union representatives agreed with Sir Malcolm and argued that if salaried workers received paid annual leisure as a right, why shouldn't manual workers? While industrialists supported the idea of employee wage deductions to finance annual vacations, union representatives disagreed. Employee contribution schemes maintained class distinctions between blue and white collar workers, and, union officials argued, wage deductions interfered ‘with the worker's own distribution of his income by forcing him to have a certain amount deducted from his wages for the purpose of holidays’.⁸⁰ When asked if the TUC would consider a system where the employer and the state contributed to a holiday fund, Sir Walter Citrine, the chief witness for the TUC replied, ‘Who is the State?’ He then continued, ‘We, the taxpayers’ are the State. Any scheme to include state contributions, according to Sir Walter, was simply another way to make workers pay.⁸¹

A year later the Holidays With Pay Committee remained undecided as to the means by which holidays for all workers could or should be funded. Several possibilities existed, including a central fund administered and paid for in the same manner as unemployment insurance by contributions made by the employee, employer, and the state.⁸² Committee members did, however, agree to the principle of annual paid vacations for all workers, if not the means of funding. Nevertheless, the timing of that leisure and the provision of appropriate holiday sites for the eighteen million prospective new holidaymakers and their families presented the committee and the leisure industry with a sizeable political and logistical problem. If the committee recommended paid holidays for all manual workers, sheer numbers threatened to overwhelm the British leisure industry should the millions of newly leisured workers descend on popular resorts in the same month. Reports about congested resorts suggested the traditional seaside venues were already experiencing severe problems during bank holidays. An extension of paid holidays would amplify the chaos.⁸³ As a picture of crowds of people on the beach during the August bank holiday in the Caterer and Hotel Keeper illustrated, holidays with pay threatened to create more congestion on the roads, on the railways, and in the resorts. With the extension of paid leisure time, predicted prominent economist Sir James Marchant in a speech to the Bournemouth Hotel and Boarding House Association, the crowded August scene was likely to occur in the other summer months as well. The leisure industry, he insisted, must prepare to meet a ‘great rise in the number of holiday makers’ in the coming season.⁸⁴

While the discussion about overcrowded resorts in August ostensibly focused on the prospect of even more chaos should the government choose to extend holidays with pay, the issue was really one of citizenship. The idea of leisure and chaos in the 1930s rested, as David Matless argues, on the relationship between citizenship and aesthetic sensibilities. Those concerned with the public spaces of the nation, including beaches, parks and resorts, saw the ‘appropriate conduct and aesthetic ability’ of citizens as crucial elements in the determination of who should be allowed access to those spaces. Those who claimed cultural custodianship of the landscape in the interwar years constantly questioned the kind of public to be permitted and cultivated. In the 1930s, the potential increase in numbers of worker-citizen holidaymakers expanded the potential for an increase in vulgar behaviour and anti-citizenship.⁸⁵ Thus the issue of ‘overcrowding’ signalled both real and imagined concerns about ‘cultural trespass’, public behaviour, and the right of access to national space.⁸⁶

The problem of overcrowding was a subject of great concern at the 1937 British Health Resorts Association (HRA) Conference. While association members agreed that holidays with pay had great economic merit and would increase worker health and efficiency, the efficacy of annual vacations was thwarted by overcrowded resorts and a lack of adequate facilities.⁸⁷ The August holiday in particular caused overcrowding and increased prices, and led to staff shortages.⁸⁸ If, as many in the leisure industry hoped, the season was extended, prices would stabilize and seasonal staff, difficult to find because of the short season, would benefit from a longer work year.⁸⁹ In a speech to the HRA in Blackpool later that year, J. Roland Robinson MP argued for a holiday season that spread from April to October. This, he assured association members, would alleviate congestion, keep expenses relatively low, and extend the work season. ‘So far as the English weather is concerned’, Robinson continued, ‘there is nothing to indicate that we can rely upon any better weather in one of these months than in another’. The problem, as Robinson saw it, lay in the habit of ‘looking upon the August holiday as an essential part of our elementary education system’, but, he argued, ‘there is no reason why this should be’.⁹⁰

The August holiday habit proved more difficult to solve. Mr Brown, the Minister of Labour suggested a solution to the problem: schools should alter their traditional schedules to accommodate family vacations.⁹¹ Workers traditionally followed the school examination and vacation schedule, taking holiday time during late July and August, the two warmest months of the year. If schools changed their schedules, workers could vacation at other times of the year, and the resorts would not be overburdened.⁹² The Department of Education proved intractable on the issue of changing either school vacations or examination timetables, despite a concerted campaign by the hotel industry, which lobbied Parliament and induced national newspapers to ballot readers on the subject.⁹³ If part of the justification for holidays with pay rested on the idea of family regeneration, the inclusion of school children in vacation time mattered. An article in the Daily Express accused the school system of barring families from enjoying an annual holiday together. The following day the same paper attempted to persuade those without children to take a vacation in June or September when the beaches were empty.⁹⁴ The Daily Express advocated a staggered holiday policy based on the presence or absence of children. However, the most expensive vacation months remained July and August, largely because of the weather. The Daily Express plan consigned the single and childless to colder weather but cheaper accommodation, while forcing families to vacation in the most expensive, if warmest, months.⁹⁵

Some members of the Amulree committee saw the debate over crowding and the timing of worker holidays in terms of class. One vocal member, Mr H. F. Rosetti, Secretary to the Minister of Labour, claimed that the supporters of staggered holidays were class snobs who ‘shudder at the thought of a huge crowd swarming on the beach’. While Rosetti believed the vast majority of wage earners enjoyed crowds, he claimed workers on holiday should not ‘suffer unduly’ from congestion during July and August or be compelled to take holidays in the cooler months of May and June.⁹⁶ Rosetti's solution lay in the provision of alternative forms of holiday accommodation so that workers could enjoy the recuperative effects of an annual vacation in warm weather, without unnecessary expense or overcrowding. As some of the committee made favourable references to the German model, Kraft durch Freude (‘Strength Through Joy’) organizations, and the Dopolavoro (‘After Work’) organization in Italy, other members looked to union and commercial models in Britain and suggested the ‘extension of holiday camps and similar facilities’ as alternative sites of leisure for workers.⁹⁷ Committee members pointed out that while it was not ‘desirable to shepherd people into common centres at holiday periods, the establishment of rationally organized holiday facilities, such as union and commercial holiday camps, ‘would enable many who could not afford a holiday at all to be able to go away and recuperate under attractive conditions’.⁹⁸

Indeed, the quality and attractiveness of inexpensive accommodation in Britain was a major cause of concern for the Amulree Committee. When invited to speak to members of the Health and Resorts Association, Committee member Ernest Bevin urged the resort industry to change the prevalent attitude to working class patrons. Middle-class caterers, Bevin claimed, viewed working people as ‘vulgar’ and considered ‘cheap and nasty accommodation’ with ‘garish and tawdry coverings’ good enough for these guests. This, Bevin argued, was a short-sighted attitude. In five or ten years this type of accommodation would simply not appeal to workers. In addition, industry, ‘which will have to pay for the holidays, will demand the best possible results for its money and expect their workers to come back fit and well’, not full of ‘stodgey, unappetizing food’. Furthermore, Bevin asserted, resorts should pay more attention to the needs of working-class children. ‘After all’, Bevin reminded the audience, ‘the holiday is not just for the man, it is for the woman also’. The problem of suitable facilities for all the family is a ‘very serious one indeed’, Bevin claimed. Unless resorts adequately catered for children, with organized activities even in bad weather, ‘the holiday will not have very beneficial results for the mother or the family’.⁹⁹ In the Committee's view, the provision of suitable sites of pleasure for workers and their families included inexpensive, but not ‘cheap and nasty’ accommodation, entertainment for all ages, and appetizing food.

As the TUC and Committee members discussed a solution to the problem of inadequate accommodation and inexpensive sites for worker leisure, they looked to holiday camps as a potential solution. By 1938 there were approximately two hundred holiday camps in Britain organized by commercial enterprises, unions and political groups. Each camp varied in the degree of luxury and size. Some consisted of as little as tents in a field, while others included permanent buildings and barrack-style sleeping accommodation.¹⁰⁰ Many of the camps relied on guests to organize their own entertainment and activities. However, two new chains of ‘luxury’ holiday camps emerged in the 1930s that departed from the earlier models in size, facilities, activities and organization. The camps owned by William (Billy) Butlin accommodated 100,000 guests, and those owned by Captain Harry Warner catered to almost 40,000 visitors each season. Unlike hoteliers who feared that holidays with pay would bring chaos, Butlin and Warner saw the potential in the emergent mass market. They quickly transformed the political and logistical problems associated with millions of newly leisured workers into a viable new leisure industry built on a vision of affordable pleasure that successfully competed with traditional British holiday resorts.¹⁰¹

The mass camps built by Warner and Butlin provided all the entertainment, activities and amenities necessary for a healthy and restful vacation in cheerful surroundings for an inexpensive all-inclusive price. For families and individuals on a limited budget, the fixed price and all-inclusiveness of the food, accommodation, entertainment and activities gave a security that other seaside resorts could not. The original ‘package holidays’ took place in newly built, modern buildings with bright, cheerful and interesting ‘themed’ décor. Guests slept in individual ‘chalets’ that were cleaned daily by the domestic staff, and ate in communal dining rooms with full service. Guests also enjoyed professional entertainment and age-appropriate activities organized by trained staff. A daily programme of activities that could be transformed and transferred to indoor facilities solved the problem of the unpredictable British weather, and special age-appropriate clubrooms, snooker and billiard halls, table tennis and skittles, concerts, fancy dress competitions, beauty pageants, plays and physical culture classes alleviated boredom.¹⁰² In addition, the luxury holiday camps built by Warner and Butlin catered specifically to the needs of the housewife by providing babysitting, childcare and laundry facilities, entertainment programmes for all age groups, relatively luxurious surroundings, and three nutritious and hot meals a day. For these reasons, the Holidays With Pay Committee saw the idea of holiday camps as an inexpensive healthy vacation where families could breathe coastal air, eat regular meals, and participate in physical exercise not usually undertaken in the modern urban setting.¹⁰³

The luxury holiday camps built by Warner and Butlin in the 1930s evoked mixed interest as outstanding commercial successes, as experiments in large-scale mass entertainment, and as potential threats to others in the tourist industry. Warner and Butlin responded to what they perceived as a demand for low-cost all-inclusive holiday resorts for working people during the holidays with pay campaign. Butlin's slogan clearly emphasized the link, ‘Holidays With Pay, Holidays With Play at Butlin's.’¹⁰⁴ Warner and Butlin envisioned holidays for the masses as mass holidays. Contained within sites situated on the outskirts of middle-class resorts and towns, camps such as Butlin's at Skegness and Clacton, and Warner's on Hayling Island, Seaton and Dovercourt Bay, provided all the amenities of a small and contained town, including amusement parks, first aid, shops, cafes, bars, a post office and even Church services.¹⁰⁵ The grounds contained thousands of rose bushes and acres of lawn, the ballrooms and bars were decorated with themes of the ‘exotic’ and the majestic, a far cry from the everyday experience of most working people.¹⁰⁶ These sites of organized pleasure in luxurious surroundings targeted working people and both anticipated the success of the holidays with pay campaign and the needs of worker leisure. Warner and Butlin recognized the desires of the consumer and the British government as they established islands of leisure and built empires of wealth.

For the Amulree Committee, the Butlin and Warner holiday camps proved to be the commercial answer to a difficult political and economic problem. They were cheap, easily and quickly constructed, provided affordable accommodation and entertainment, and, perhaps most importantly, offered all family members a time to relax. The committee could only make the recommendation that all workers should receive one week's annual paid vacation if there were sites at which that leisure could take place. Echoing the gendered language of the holidays with pay campaign, the committee concluded in their report that such facilities such as Warner's and Butlin's camps catered especially well to ‘the [male] worker who wishes to take his family on an inexpensive holiday in which his wife can enjoy rest and recuperation and freedom so far as possible from arduous household duties’.¹⁰⁷ Thus, luxury holidays camps provided the physical sites at which the symbol of the campaign for paid holidays—the suffering housewife—could receive a break from her unpaid work without undermining the gender system believed to be central to the working class household.

When the committee published the report at the end of April 1938, it recommended that all full-time workers receive at least seven days consecutive paid annual vacation in addition to bank holidays. The report also recommended the immediate construction of large-scale holiday camps to accommodate the newly leisured workers and their families.¹⁰⁸ The response of local governments, entrepreneurs and unions was immediate. Municipal councils offered lower local tax rates for commercial holiday camps and even considered the construction of municipally funded and run camps.¹⁰⁹ One week after the publication of the Committee report, Butlin opened his second luxury holiday camp at Clacton-on-Sea with accommodation for over two thousand people per week, with plans to extend his camp at Skegness to provide accommodation for 4,500 guests each week.¹¹⁰ He immediately advertised his plans to open similar large scale holiday camps at Ryde on the Isle of Wight in 1939 and Bournemouth in 1940.¹¹¹ Harry Warner opened his fourth holiday camp in 1938 with accommodation for a total of forty thousand visitors each season. In May 1939, the Derbyshire Miner's Union opened a holiday camp to accommodate a thousand people each week, based on the successful Butlin and Warner luxury camp models.¹¹² In July 1939 the L.M.S. Railway and the travel agent Thomas Cook & Son, Ltd. opened a large holiday camp in Prestatyn, North Wales, to accommodate 1,700 visitors, and the TUC proposed to build a large-scale holiday camp in Yarmouth for union members.¹¹³ By the summer of 1939, Britain's new mass holiday industry stood poised to cater to millions of newly leisured workers and their families.

	Conclusion

Top Abstract * The Holidays With Pay... Conclusion Notes

 
By the time the Holidays With Pay Act passed into law in 1938, luxury holiday camps were a permanent feature of British summer life. Much to the chagrin of the British Federation of Hotel and Apartment Associations, holiday camps offered a competing vision of leisure at a moment when British workers demanded paid vacation time and public policy sought to democratize leisure. Faced with a potential nineteen and a half million newly leisured workers, entrepreneurs like Butlin and Warner built on earlier ideas of all-inclusive camping holidays and developed more comfortable accommodation for the emergent working-class family market.¹¹⁴ Encouraged by the interwar debate that politicized leisure, Warner and Butlin seized the opportunity even before the passage of the Holidays With Pay Act to provide low cost holiday destinations for those economically excluded from traditional resorts.¹¹⁵ In response to a growing demand for inexpensive holidays and the popular campaign for paid leisure time, Warner and Butlin advertised their camps as ‘A Week's Holiday for a Week's Pay,’ and targeted working-class families with the offer of one-price, pre-paid family vacations. Equipped with up-to-date facilities that catered to the perceived needs and desires of the worker's housewife—individual sleeping chalets, shops, hairdressing services, floodlit swimming pools, concerts, childcare services, ballroom dancing, tennis, boating, and bowling—the mass commercial holiday camps created by Warner and Butlin provided a new concept in modern leisure as package holidays on one site.¹¹⁶ The creation of this new form of mass pleasure both responded to and advanced the desire of the government to expand paid leisure time for workers and provide ‘suitable’ accommodation for working class families, especially the ‘struggling housewife’.

As a central motif in the popular campaign for paid holidays in Britain, the plight of the working class housewife appeared to garner support from workers because it shifted the image of the modern worker as emasculated by rationalization and mass production, to one that represented the British manual worker as the family breadwinner. While that image might not be an accurate depiction of the interwar household, it was one that many working-class families aspired to. At the same time that the image imagined the roles within the working-class household as divided along traditional gender lines, it also elevated the role of women's unwaged labour in the home as an important adjunct to waged labour and thus to the modern industrial economy. This appealed to feminist sensibilities and to the broader aims of Labour Party women who strove to elevate the social position of women in the domestic and the public sphere. At the same time, the argument also satisfied many interwar conservative forces that sought to re-establish gender roles based on biological differences.¹¹⁷ Thus the success of the campaign rested in the ability of the strategists to use rhetoric that appealed to a large cross section of the population through gendered arguments that both imagined the British worker as the family breadwinner and used the image of the suffering housewife as a symbol of worker needs.

The image also appealed to the new social sciences that focused on the family unit as the locus of worker well-being. In their view, the role of the housewife gained significance as the family budget-keeper and nutritionist. At the same time, the focus on the family meant that it was necessary to allow workers to vacation with their school children during the short six week summer break. This posed a significant logistical problem to those catering for workers and their families at the already overcrowded resorts. Yet, even as this vision of the wage-earner family posed political problems, it also provided a discursive framework in which a new culture of mass leisure developed in the interwar years. The political and popular campaign for paid holidays and the image of the struggling housewife not only succeeded in bringing about the Holidays With Pay Act, it also provided the agenda for mass holidays that centered specifically on the needs of the housewife. The support of the Holidays With Pay Committee legitimized the holiday camp industry and placed the provision of sites for mass leisure at the centre of debates over resort development in the mid-twentieth century.

Other contemporary issues such as the alleviation of hunger, the living wage debate, and the notion of social citizenship fashioned the campaign rhetoric, predisposed the Committee, and shaped the Act itself. The provisions of the Holidays With Pay Act reinforced the image of the British worker as the family breadwinner and inadvertently upheld women's inequity in the labour market. While the popular campaign for paid leisure emphasized the plight of the ‘poor British housewife’, those workers who did not qualify for annual paid leisure time in 1938 included part-time and domestic service workers, those most likely to be female. Thus while the Act recognized the right of all workers in a modern industrial nation to annual paid leisure time as an important signifier of social citizenship, it also defined who those workers were, and, through exclusion, who they were not.¹¹⁸ While the legislation embodied a shift in attitudes to working class leisure in the interwar years, it also failed to acknowledge the leisure needs of unorganized and casual workers.

The campaign and the provisions of the Holidays With Pay Act are significant in a broad sense in that they exemplify some of the major debates and contradictions of the interwar years and serve as a prism through which to view the emergence of the welfare state. The campaign and the final legislation in many ways illustrate the multiple constituencies that influenced and made up the government of modernity. While the final provisions of the Act failed to provide all workers equally with annual paid vacations, the leisure industry that developed in response to the campaign for holidays with pay embodied some of the principles of the later welfare state that promised cradle to grave provisions for all Britons. Holiday camps provided the basic elements of welfare through accommodation, food and childcare. Thus the vision for worker leisure that emerged in the interwar years was implicated in the development of one of the most comprehensive welfare systems in Europe.

	Notes

Top Abstract * The Holidays With Pay... Conclusion Notes

 
I wish to thank Erika Rappaport, Kenneth Moure and Carolyn Hebst Lewis for their comments on earlier drafts of this article, as well as the anonymous referees of Twentieth Century British History. For further details of the TCBH Postgraduate Essay Prize, including the deadline for the 2007 competition, see www.tcbh.oxfordjournals.org

¹ ‘Mrs. Turner Not Buying Joint Today: Her Husband's Pay is Halved This Week’, Daily Express, 16 April 1938, 3.

² The Holidays With Pay Committee, chaired by Lord Amulree, met for a year before making their recommendations. See Holidays With Pay Committee Report, The National Archive: Public Records Office, Kew (hereafter PRO) LAB 31/1, 1.

³ Holidays With Pay Act, November 1938, House of Commons Parliamentary Papers.

⁴ In 1922 The Ministry of Labour Gazette listed approximately 130 different industries or regions where these agreements took place in England, Scotland and Wales. Most paid holidays depended on a certain qualifying length of service and excluded public holidays. The length of paid annual vacation days varied from three days for butchers, or Paint, Colour and Varnish manufacturers, to twenty-one days for indoor Mental Asylum workers. Ministry of Labour Gazette, No. 12, December 1922, 474–5. According to an estimate by the Ministry of Labour, one and a half million manual workers received holidays with pay under collective agreements by 1925. By the time the Committee met in April 1937, the number had risen by a mere quarter of a million. See J. A. R. Pimlott, The Englishman's Holiday: A Social History [1947] (Sussex, 1976), 214.

⁵ See for example John K. Walton, The British Seaside: Holidays and Resorts in the Twentieth Century (Manchester, 2000), 57–61.

⁶ See for example Pimlott, Englishman's Holiday, 211–37, L.C.B. Seaman, Life in Britain Between the Wars (London, 1970), 164, James Walvin, Beside the Seaside: A Social History of the Popular Seaside Holiday (London, 1978).

⁷ Gary Cross, Time and Money: The Making of Consumer Culture (London, 1993), chapter 4.

⁸ Stephen Jones, ‘Trade Union Policy Between the Wars: The Case of Holidays With Pay in Britain’, International Review of Social History, 31 (1986), 40–55.

⁹ For a discussion of the role of the popular press see Adrian Bingham, Gender, Modernity, and the Popular Press in Inter-War Britain (Oxford, 2004).

¹⁰ Holiday With Pay Committee Report, 28 April 1938, PRO LAB1/1, 38.

¹¹ Jones, ‘Trade Union Policy’, 40–55. See also Cross, Time and Money, 81, and Pimlott Englishman's Holiday, 214–22.

¹² Lansbury Labour Weekly, 17 April 1926, 5. According to this article, the Bill did not succeed because of a lack of union support and agitation.

¹³ Jones, ‘Trade Union’, 41. Pimlott also asserts this in Englishman's Holiday, 214.

¹⁴ Pat Thane, ‘The Working Class and State "Welfare" in Britain, 1880–1914,’ in David Gladstone (ed.), Before Beveridge: Welfare Before the Welfare State (London, 1999), 86–112.

¹⁵ See for example, Robert Graves and Alan Lodge, The Long Week-end: A Social History of Great Britain, 1918–1939 [1940] (New York, 1963), especially chapter eight, Seaman, Between the Wars, chapters four and five, and Pimlott, Englishman's Holiday, 211–68. During WWI, the government suspended all holidays, paid and unpaid.

¹⁶ For the significance of the 1918 Parliamentary Reform Bill see Nicoletta Gullace, The Blood of Our Sons: Men, Women, and the Renegotiation of Citizenship During the Great War (New York, 2002), Introduction.

¹⁷ Holiday With Pay Committee Report, PRO LAB 31/1, 12.

¹⁸ For a classic and expanded discussion of a theory of leisure and class distinction, see Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class [1899] (London, 1994), especially 1–71.

¹⁹ The institution of the marriage bar increased in British industry and the professions in the interwar years. See Pat Thane, ‘Women of the British Labour Party and Feminism, 1906–1945’, in Harold L. Smith (ed.), British Feminism in the Twentieth Century (Amherst, 1990), 124–43, Susan Kingsley Kent, Making Peace: Gender Reconstruction in Interwar Britain (Princeton, 1993), Claire A. Culleton, Working-Class Culture, Women, and Britain, 1914–1921 (New York, 1999).

²⁰ Sally Alexander, ‘Men's Fears and Women's Work: Responses to Unemployment in London Between the Wars’, Gender and History, 12 (2000), 401–25

²¹ Jones, ‘Trade Union Policy’, 40–55.

²² The second Holidays With Pay Private Member's Bill failed to secure a second reading in the House of Commons.

²³ ‘Holidays,’ Letter to the editor, Lansbury Labour Weekly, 17 April 1926, 5. The Lansbury Labour Weekly was edited by George Lansbury, author of the first unsuccessful Holidays With Pay Bill. George Lansbury was also a member of the Joint Committee on the Living Wage appointed by the government in 1927. See Susan Pedersen, Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State in Britain and France, 1914–1945 (Cambridge, 1993), 192–208.

²⁴ ‘Holidays,’ Letter to the editor, Lansbury Labour Weekly, 17 April 1926, 5.

²⁵ For a discussion of the significance of hunger in Britain in the twentieth century see James Vernon, ‘The Ethics of Hunger and the Assembly of Society: The Techno-Politics of the School Meal in Britain,’ American Historical Review, 110 (2005), 693–725.

²⁶ Mary Abbott, Family Affairs: A History of the Family in Twentieth Century England (London, 2003), 38. For a contemporary critique of the efficacy of school meals see Barbara Drake, ‘Starvation in the Midst of Plenty: A New Plan for the State Feeding of School Children’, Fabian Tract no. 240, December 1933.

²⁷ For a discussion of family allowances see Hilary Land, ‘Eleanor Rathbone and the Economy of the Family’, in Harold L. Smith, (ed.), British Feminism in the Twentieth Century (Amherst, 1990), 104–123. For a history of the Labour Party's relationship with the Trades Unions, see Steven Fielding, The Labour Party: Continuity and Change in the Making of ‘New’ Labour (London, 2003), 18–36.

²⁸ Matthew Hilton also argues that similar rhetoric was used in the Labour Party campaign for price control in the interwar years. See Matthew Hilton, Consumerism in Twentieth Century Britain (Cambridge, 2003), chapter four.

²⁹ Marion Philips, ‘Where You Work: £2 Prize For the Best Exposure’, Lansbury Labour Weekly, 3 April 1926, 2.

³⁰ Labour MP Ernest Winterton introduced the Annual Holiday Bill in 1929 but despite some Parliamentary support, the world wide economic depression forced the Bill into obscurity. See Jones, ‘Trade Union Policy’, 40–55.

³¹ Aldous Huxley, Brave New World [1932] (New York, 1998).

³² J. Mensch MD, ‘The Urban Worker's Need for Holidays’, The Labour Magazine, Vol. X No. 11, March 1932, 502–3.

³³ ‘Big Holiday With Pay Drive: France and Belgium Give Fresh Impetus to British Workers’, Daily Herald, 22 June 1936, 13. The TUC used the success of the French and Belgian workers as a recruitment tool. See ‘Meetings to be Held at 200 Factories: Union Hopes for Thousands More Members’, Daily Herald, 22 June 1936, 13. The TUC also looked to the International Labour Organization to support their claims for paid leisure time. See ‘ILO Defeat for 40-Hour Week-Victory For Paid Holidays’, Daily Herald, 24 June 1936, 17, and International Labour Conference Report, 22nd Sitting, 23 June 1936, 433, in Jones, ‘Trade Union Policy’, 58. Significantly, the British Government abstained from the ILO vote, and the British employers’ representative voted against the resolution on the pretext that paid holidays would increase production costs by two percent and thereby increase unemployment. The following day, the Daily Herald published a scathing critique of the British delegation of ‘wreckers’ who intended to stall the proceedings but the vote in favor of the agreement stopped them. See ‘Double Rebuff to the Wreckers—"Trying to Make us Lose Our Way," ’ Daily Herald, 25 June 1936, 8.

³⁴ Guy Rowson, ‘Holidays With Pay’, Fabian Quarterly (London, 1937), 26.

³⁵ The Fabian Women's Group made wages for housework central to their report on ‘The Economic Position of Women’ in 1919. See Fabian News, Vol. XXI, No. 2, 7. Feminists and women of the Labour Party also debated the issue of unwaged home work in the interwar years. See Thane, ‘Women of the British Labour Party’, 124–43.

³⁶ For a discussion of middle class family values and gender roles see Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London, 1991), and John Tosh, A Man's Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven, 1999).

³⁷ McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, 109. See also Carolyn Steedman, Childhood, Culture and Class in Britain: Margaret McMillan 1860–1931 (London, 1990), Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (New Brunswick, NJ, 1994), and Sheila Rowbotham, A Century of Women: The History of Women in Britain and the United States in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1997), especially chapter three for a discussion of female-headed working class households in the 1920s.

³⁸ John Walton, ‘The Blackpool Landlady Revisited’, Manchester Region History Review, 8 (1994), 23–30.

³⁹ See for example Selina Todd, Young Women, Work, and Family in England 1918–1950 (Oxford, 2005), chapter two.

⁴⁰ Judy Giles, Women, Identity and Private Life in Britain, 1900–50 (New York, 1995), especially chapter 1.

⁴¹ See McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, chapter V.

⁴² Judy Giles, The Parlour and the Suburb: Domestic Identities, Class, Femininity and Modernity (Oxford, 2004), chapter 3.

⁴³ The Daily Herald called itself the mouthpiece of Labour. George Lansbury, a prominent socialist, was editor for many years.

⁴⁴ ‘Holidays With Pay?’ Letters to the Editor, Daily Herald, 22 June 1937, 8.

⁴⁵ For a discussion of the political leanings of the popular press in interwar Britain see Bingham, Gender, Modernity and the Popular Press, introduction.

⁴⁶ ‘Paid Holidays Go Round the World’, Daily Express, 13 April 1938, 9.

⁴⁷ ‘Mrs. Turner not Buying Joint Today—Her Husband's Pay is Halved This Week’, Daily Express, 16 April 1938, 3.

⁴⁸ Bingham argues that the Daily Express attempted to broaden its readership with ‘women's pages’ and news stories that appealed to a female audience. Bingham, Gender, Modernity and the Popular Press, 40–41.

⁴⁹ ‘Holidays With Pay Make Brighton Brighter’, Daily Express, 18 April 1938, 7.

⁵⁰ ‘Holidays With Pay’, Daily Herald, 3 June 1937, 10.

⁵¹ ‘Fortnight's Paid Holiday at Least’, Daily Herald, 25 August 1937, 11.

⁵² ‘Hear This Side at Seaside’, Daily Herald, 19 August 1937, 4. The seaside resorts included Southend, Swansea, Sidmouth, Deal, Newhaven, Brighton, Dover, Blackpool, Weston-Super-Mare and Great Yarmouth.

⁵³ ‘Labour Women's Drive Went With a Bang’, Daily Herald, 5 July 1937, 13, and ‘Crusade Gives Youth its Chance’, Daily Herald, 19 July 1937, 11. The seaside holiday campaign grassroots workers were the women and the youth of the Labour Party, the speakers at the meetings were most often the men—either elected representatives or those standing for election. This gendered role division spoke to the inequalities within the Labour Party, but also illustrated the organizational strength of Labour women. This is a point made by Pat Thane in ‘Women of the Labour Party’, 124.

⁵⁴ Thane, ‘Women of the Labour Party’, 127.

⁵⁵ ‘800 Labour Women Meet’, Daily Herald, 18 May 1936, 13.

⁵⁶ See for example, Ellen Ross, ‘Not the Sort That Would Sit on the Doorstep: Respectability in Pre-WWI London Neighborhoods’, International Labour and Working Class History, 27 (1985), 39–59.

⁵⁷ S.E.R. Wynne, ‘I Knocked at Six Doors’, Daily Herald, 23 July, 1937, 10.

⁵⁸ Wynne, ‘I Knocked’, 10.

⁵⁹ The Times reported the official support of the Labour Party for annual paid holidays in an article dated 9 January 1928. When Labour gained power after the 1929 General Election, the government immediately granted nearly 100,000 workers in state-owned industries one week's paid holiday and introduced a third Holiday Bill into the House of Commons. The Bill failed, but the flood of union resolutions that demanded the extension of the paid-holiday principle continued, and the publicity surrounding the Parliamentary campaign kept the debate constantly before the public.

⁶⁰ Guy Rowson, ‘Holiday With Pay’, N.F.R.B. Quarterly and Fabian Quarterly, (London 1937), 26–31. In this article for the Fabian Society, Rowson argues that his bill was amended and obstructed at Westminister by two Conservative votes on the Standing Committee. Nevertheless, Rowson claimed the publicity and interest aroused through the introduction of the bill led to an official Committee of Inquiry.

⁶¹ The Holidays With Pay Committee was chaired by Lord Amulree, a member of the National Housing Committee and former President of the Industrial Court in Britain. Holidays With Pay Committee Report, PRO LAB31/1, 1.

⁶² The Holidays With Pay Committee Report estimated that between eighteen and a half and nineteen and a half million manual and non-manual workers earning less than £250 per year were potentially eligible for annual paid vacations. Of that number approximately sixty percent received no holidays with pay. Some wage earners had received annual paid vacation since 1884. However, it was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that provision for consecutive days' holiday began to appear in collective agreements in industries such as the railways, public utilities and newspaper printing. The report claims that by 1925 approximately one and a half million manual workers received annual paid vacation through collective agreements. This figure had only increased to one and three quarters of a million workers by 1937 but many more received annual paid vacation without such agreements. See Holidays With Pay Committee Report, 28 April 1938, LAB 31/1 PRO, 12–20.

⁶³ Mr Brown, Minister of Labour, quoted in ‘Spreadover Holidays at Last: Principle Accepted by Parliament’, The Caterer and Hotel Keeper, April 8 1938, 17–18.

⁶⁴ Part-time workers were exempt from annual paid vacation. These workers often included women and seasonal workers in the hotel and tourist trade.

⁶⁵ This was an argument also made by the International Labour Organization in Geneva at the 1935 Conference. Report of the International Labour Conference in Geneva, 1935, in Rowson, ‘Holidays With Pay’, 30–31.

⁶⁶ British industry underwent rationalization in the 1920s because of increased competition and in the 1930s largely because of the economic depression. For example, the British car industry ‘rationalized’ 1931–2 in an attempt to combat competition from American companies such as Ford and General Motors. See for example Roy Church, The Rise and Decline of the British Motor Industry (Basingstoke, 1994), and Dick Hebdige, ‘Towards a Cartography of Taste, 1935–1962’, Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things [1989] (London, 1994).

⁶⁷ Holidays With Pay Committee Report, Part II, 28 April 1938, LAB31/1 PRO, 25.

⁶⁸ Land, ‘Eleanor Rathbone’, 111.

⁶⁹ Married and single women also suffered from exclusionary employer practices as they were often the first workers ‘let go’ in a slow period and thus often disqualified from holidays with pay because of the qualifying service time period clause in the collective agreements. See Kingsley Kent, Making Peace, and Gender and Power in Britain, 1640–1990 (London, 1999).

⁷⁰ Married women were ineligible for unemployment benefit unless they could prove they had not left insurable employment and that they were actively seeking insurable employment. This provision left married women in a double bind as they were often discriminated against when seeking employment because of potential childbearing. For a full discussion of the double bind see Pedersen, Family, Dependence, 297–316.

⁷¹ Pedersen, Family, Dependence, 130.

⁷² Bingham suggests that the incorporation of articles specifically geared to women readers was part of the feminization of the popular press in the interwar years. See Bingham, Gender, Modernity and the Popular Press, chapter 3.

⁷³ Claire Langhamer, Women's Leisure in England 1920–60 (Manchester, 2000), 133–86.

⁷⁴ See for example, ‘Time Off for Mother’, Daily Herald, 30 April 1936, 5, and ‘It's Mother's Holiday Too’, Daily Herald, 9 July 1936, 5.

⁷⁵ ‘Cooking Away from Home’, Daily Herald, 31 July 1936, 5.

⁷⁶ Holidays With Pay Committee Report, 28 April 1938, PRO LAB 31/1. The committee consisted of sixteen members, fourteen men and two women, and included Ernest Bevin, then General Secretary of the Transport and General Worker's Union, and the leaders of all the major industry unions in Britain, the Chairman of Debenham's Department stores, and a professor of Philosophy at Oriel College, Oxford.

⁷⁷ Holidays With Pay Committee Report, PRO LAB31/1, 26.

⁷⁸ Holidays With Pay Committee Report, PRO LAB31/1, 29–30.

⁷⁹ Holidays With Pay Committee Report, PRO LAB31/1, 28.

⁸⁰ Holidays With Pay Committee Report, PRO LAB31/1, 28.

⁸¹ ‘Holidays With Pay: TUC Scheme’, News Chronicle, 9 June 1937, 7.

⁸² This idea came from Mr A. S. Comyns-Carr, K. C. See ‘Holidays With Pay: TUC Scheme’, News Chronicle, 9 June 1937, 7.

⁸³ ‘Holidays With Pay Mean Spread-over–or Chaos’, The Caterer and Hotel Keeper, September 10, 1937, 3.

⁸⁴ ‘Prepare for More Holiday Makers,’ The Caterer and Hotel Keeper, February 4 1938, 17–18.

⁸⁵ David Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London, 1998), chapter two.

⁸⁶ See for example Brad Beaven, Leisure, Citizenship and Working-Class Men in Britain, 1850–1945 (Manchester, 2005), chapter six, and John Urry, The Tourist Gaze (London, 1990), and Consuming Places (London, 1995).

⁸⁷ ‘Points from the British Health Resorts Association Conference at Skegness: TUC Chief and Holidays With Pay,’ Skegness News, 28 April 1937, 7.

⁸⁸ Caterers and restaurants had difficulty getting women to do seasonal work because they were denied unemployment benefits for the rest of the year. See ‘Catering Trade Labour Troubles,’ The Caterer and Hotel Keeper, 12 April 1935, 31.

⁸⁹ A longer season would also enable seasonal staff to qualify for unemployment insurance. See ‘Spreadover Holidays at Last: Principle Accepted by Parliament’, The Caterer and Hotel Keeper, 8 April 1938, 17–18. Members of the Hotel and Caterers Association argued for an extension of the traditional vacation period and staggered worker holidays from May to September as a solution. See ‘Holiday With Pay Mean Spread-Over—or Chaos’, The Caterer and Hotel Keeper, 10 September 1937, 3, and ‘Warning to Seaside Hoteliers: Serious Effect of Holidays With Pay Plan’, The Caterer and Hotel Keeper, 10 December 1937, 31.

⁹⁰ ‘Holidays With Pay Will Force a Spreadover: Need For a National Campaign’, The Caterer and Hotel Keeper, October 8 1937, 19.

⁹¹ ‘Mr. Brown Tackles Holiday Chaos: Plan for New School Terms’, Daily Mail, 7 April 1938, 16.

⁹² The press reported on these suggestions. See ‘MP to Press for Staggered Holiday Plan: Backed by Resorts and Railways’, Daily Mail, 2 April 1938, 11, ‘MP Has Plan to Spread Holidays’, Daily Express, 4 April 1938, 7.

⁹³ ‘Holiday With Pay Will Force a Spreadover: Need For a National Campaign’, The Caterer and Hotel Keeper, 8 October 1937, 19, ‘Hotel's Holiday Problems Reviewed’, The Caterer and Hotel Keeper, 20 May 1938, 26, and ‘Stagger Holidays With Pay: Parliament Backs Plan for 11,000,000’, Daily Express, 7 April 1938, 9.

⁹⁴ ‘School is Family Holiday Bar’, Daily Express, 19 April 1938, 7, ‘But—Beaches Will Be Empty: Stagger School Holidays is Seaside Plea’, Daily Express, 20 April 1938, 3.

⁹⁵ An article in The Times argued the success of staggered holidays using Blackpool as an example, ‘Staggering of Holidays Where Lancashire Leads: Blackpool's Gain’, The Times, 15 August 1938.

⁹⁶ ‘The Timing of Holidays Proposed Questionnaire to Divisional Controllers’, Inter-Departmental Committee on Holidays With Pay, 30 September 1938, PRO LAB 31/3, 92.

⁹⁷ Holidays With Pay Committee Report, Part II, 28 April 1938, PRO LAB 31/1, 37. For a discussion of the German model see for example, Shelley Baranowski, ‘Strength Through Joy: Tourism and National Integration in the Third Reich’, in Ellen Furlough and Shelley Baranowski (eds) Being Elsewhere: Tourism, Consumer Culture, and Identity in Modern Europe and North America (Ann Arbor, 2001), 213–36, and for a discussion of the Italian model see Victoria DeGrazia, The Culture of Consent: Mass Organization of Leisure in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, 1981).

⁹⁸ Holidays With Pay Committee Report, Part II, 28 April 1938, PRO LAB 31/1, 37. For discussions of earlier ideas of ‘rational recreation’ in Britain see Beaven, Leisure and Citizenship, chapter one.

⁹⁹ ‘Points from the British Health Resorts Association Conference at Skegness: TUC Chief and Holidays With Pay’, Skegness News, 28 April 1937, 7.

¹⁰⁰ For a discussion of the earlier holiday camps see Colin Ward and Dennis Hardy, Goodnight Campers! The History of the British Holiday Camp (London, 1986).

¹⁰¹ In his autobiography, Billy Butlin claimed his idea to provide luxury holiday camps began in the 1920s when he stayed at a boarding house on Barry Island in South Wales where he was required to leave the premises after each meal. Constantly in search of things to do he saw families with children as ‘they trudged around wet and bedraggled, or forlornly filled in time in amusement arcades until they could return to their boarding houses’. Sir Billy Butlin with Peter Dacre, The Billy Butlin Story: A Showman to the End (London, 1982), 30.

¹⁰² ‘Easter Opening of Mr. W.E. Butlin's New £50,000 Holiday Camp at Skegness’, Skegness News, 15 April 1936, 1.

¹⁰³ One of the points made by the Amulree committee was that annual holidays with pay would serve to improve the physique of the nation. Report of the Holidays With Pay Committee, PRO LAB 31/1, 50.

¹⁰⁴ ‘Skegness Holiday Camp Opened—W.E. Butlin's faith in Advertising’, World's Fair, 18 April 1936, 1.

¹⁰⁵ Butlin and Warner combated the criticism of the Sabbatarian movement that opposed Sunday leisure by incorporating Church services in their camps. See ‘Holiday Camp Service Conducted by Bishop's Curate’, Skegness News, 3 June 1936, ‘Skegness Rector Conducts Holiday camp Service’, Skegness News, 28 July 1937, 6, and ‘Opening of Dovercourt Holiday Camp’, Harwich and Dovercourt Standard, 12 June 1937, 2,3.

¹⁰⁶ For example, the ballroom at Butlins in Skegness was named the Viennese Ballroom and contained crystal chandeliers. By way of contrast, a report by Mass Observation published in 1943 on the condition of working class homes contained many complaints about a lack of natural and artificial light in homes, as well as unsightly pipes in walls and ceilings. See An Enquiry into People's Homes: A Report Prepared By Mass Observation for The Advertising Service Guild, (London, 1943), chapter XIV and XX.

¹⁰⁷ Holiday With Pay Committee Report, Part II, 28 April 1938, PRO LAB 31/1, 38.

¹⁰⁸ Report of the Committee on Holidays With Pay, Part V, 96, April 1938.

¹⁰⁹ ‘Low Rating of Holiday Camps Discussed by R.H.A. National Assembly’, The Caterer and Hotel Keeper, 7 July 1939, 16.

¹¹⁰ ‘Butlin's Holiday Camp Wonderful Progress and Designs’, Clacton News and East Essex Advertiser, 14 May 1938, 2.

¹¹¹ ‘Butlin's Plans More Holiday Camps at Ryde and Bournemouth’, The Caterer and Hotel Keeper, 8 June 1938, 11.

¹¹² Geoff Grafton, The Best Summer of Our Lives: Derbyshire Miner's Holiday Camp (Breedon Books Publishing Company, 2000).

¹¹³ ‘Giant Holiday Camp in North Wales’, The Caterer and Hotel Keeper, 7 July 1939, 25–6, 30. Local residents, however, protested against the proposed TUC camp and claimed the site was unsuitable. See, ‘Yarmouth Protest at T.U.C. Camps Proposal’, The Caterer and Hotel Keeper, 25 August 1939, 10.

¹¹⁴ For a discussion of the popularity of camping and caravanning vacations in Britain see John Hassan, The Seaside, Health and Environment in England and Wales Since 1800 (Aldershot, 2003), Walton, British Seaside, Steven Braggs and Diane Harris, Sun, Fun, and Crowds: Seaside Holidays Between the Wars (Stroud, 2000).

¹¹⁵ See for example Walton, British Seaside, and ‘Blackpool Landlady’, 23–30, Nigel Morgan and Annette Pritchard, Power and Politics at the Seaside: The Development of Devon's Resorts in the Twentieth Century (Exeter, 1999).

¹¹⁶ ‘Butlin's Succeed With All-In Tariff: Holidays Under One Roof’, The Caterer and Hotel Keeper, 9 September 1938, 19.

¹¹⁷ Kingsley Kent, Gender and Power, chapter 12.

¹¹⁸ Advocates of paid leisure time argued that democratic leisure was an extension of political and social citizenship. See ‘ILO Defeat for 40-Hour Week: Victory for Paid Holidays’, Daily Herald, 24 June 1936, 17.

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