Paul did not progress in this talent contest, but went back to Liverpool and joined John Lennon in his skiffle group, The Quarrymen. But Butlin’s provided a stage for another future Beatle: Ringo Starr also played several times at its camps with his band, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes.

Butlin’s holidays are imprinted on the memories of thousands. People flocked to the camps, attracted by the offer of a week’s holiday with family entertainment and myriad activities for the equivalent of a week’s pay. I went to Filey, aged five, in 1960, and to Pwllheli in north Wales (also frequented by the young Paul McCartney) in 1964, aged nine. My abiding memory of the latter holiday is mistakenly opening the door of the wrong chalet to discover a female holidaymaker in the steamy embrace of a male Butlin’s redcoat. Well, it was the Sixties.

“Our true intent is all for your delight,” said an early Butlin’s slogan — a quotation from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Later, Billy Butlin confessed he had learned it from the side of a fairground organ. William Heygate Edmund Colborne “Billy” Butlin was a remarkable showman. Born in South Africa in 1899, he had a turbulent childhood. After his parents separated, he came to England with his mother and spent years with his grandmother’s travelling fair. He followed his mother to Canada and served as a stretcher bearer in the Canadian army on the Western Front, after which he returned to England with £5 in his pocket.

Butlin spent some of it to acquire a hoopla stall in his uncle’s fair, where he discovered that sawing off the corners of hoopla blocks gave patrons a better chance of winning; while his profit margins were smaller than those of rivals, this was outweighed by extra custom. His success led him to create his own fairground empire, including an amusement park at Skegness, where he had an exclusive licence to import Dodgem cars to the UK for the first time.

All the while, he nurtured the idea of giving the UK a holiday camp like ones he had attended in Canada. He had visited Barry Island, in Wales, and felt sorry for families staying in drab guest houses with little to do. Butlin was not the first to create holiday camps in Britain, but he did it on a scale and with a panache that outshone all others. Ten camps were built in the three decades up to 1966, including one in Ireland and one in the Bahamas. In the Seventies and Eighties, Butlin’s also operated hotels, including one in Spain, and smaller holiday parks in England and France. It even ran a revolving restaurant in London’s Post Office Tower.

But it all started in Skegness. There, the first camp opened on 11 April 1936 and within a year it had doubled in size. It was officially opened by Amy Johnson, the first woman to fly solo from England to Australia. Butlin designed the camp himself and later said: “My plans were for 1,000 people in 600 chalets with electricity, running water, 250 bathrooms, dining and recreational halls. A theatre, a gymnasium, a rhododendron bordered swimming pool with cascades at both ends and a boating lake.”

The famous redcoats were soon invented. During the first week, Butlin became concerned that families were not mixing. He got Norman Bradford, senior engineer, to stand up on stage, tell jokes and explain the facilities. Realising that more easily identifiable staff would help to encourage the guests, Butlin asked Bradford to buy a distinctive blazer. Bradford came back with a choice of blue, yellow and white, but Butlin decided on bright red, inspired by the Canadian Mounties.

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A second camp at Clacton-on-Sea, Essex, opened in 1938 and work on Filey began in 1939. All the camps had bars, large dining rooms and ballrooms and aimed to give people a taste of the glamour they saw on cinema screens. Stars such as Gracie Fields performed on stage. The routine of campers saying “Hi-De-Hi, Ho-De-Ho” to one another also started in the 1930s: Butlin borrowed the idea from US bandleader Cab Calloway.

In 1937, Butlin turned his business into a limited company and offered shares to the public; they sold out within five minutes. The government passed legislation in 1938 giving industrial workers a week’s paid holiday, something Butlin had campaigned for. Despite this, most early campers were from the lower-middle classes rather than the working class. It was rising prosperity in the Fifties that drew in more working-class customers. The popularity of Butlin’s made a holiday there aspirational.

The Second World War came as a shock to Butlin, who had thought the crisis would blow over. However, he turned it to his advantage through a deal with the Ministry of War, which took over Clacton and Skegness: Clacton became an army camp, while Skegness became HMS Royal Arthur, a base used to train men and women in the basics of military life before they joined ships or other training establishments. As part of the agreement, he completed Filey, built two other camps at Ayr and Pwllheli, and negotiated a scheme giving him the right to buy the camps back at the end of the war. When peace was at last declared, there was a rush to the coast by holiday-starved workers. Many new camps were started, including a chain of smaller ones by Fred Pontin, with whom Butlin had a friendly rivalry. But Butlin remained the most successful.

That’s not to say reviews were universally positive. From the start, some commentators criticised what they saw as the regimented nature of life at Butlin’s, where campers were awakened with “Wakey wakey! Rise and shine, campers!” over the Tannoy, and urged to take part in collective activities such as Knobbly Knees and Glamorous Granny contests. Future Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell (Winchester and Oxford) paid his first visit to the camp at Filey during the party’s Scarborough conference in 1948, as a guest of the National Union of Mineworkers. He noted: “Very efficient, organised, pleasure holiday making. Everybody agreed they would not go there!”

To the thousands who enjoyed the camps, such attitudes smacked of snobbery. Paradoxically, the range of activities that they could take or leave, at an all-in price, gave them a sense of freedom. However, the charge of being akin to concentration camps for the proletariat never quite left Butlin’s. One camp, in 1959, felt the need to advertise itself as having, “No loudspeakers, no regimentation”. Later, when holiday camps were going out of fashion, the structure was a factor held against them.

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But in the Fifties and Sixties, Butlin’s was in its heyday. Camps embraced modern features such as glass-sided swimming pools, revolving bars, monorails, chairlifts and dry ski slopes. New resorts opened in Bognor Regis, Minehead and Barry Island. Billy Butlin was knighted in 1964.

“What great times we had there. The Butlin’s Beaver club (I was a member) with all your redcoat aunties and uncles who would take you off to be pirates for the day, or whatever activity was going on. Our parents would only see us at mealtimes,” said a woman who visited Minehead as a child in the Seventies. Redcoats patrolled the chalets at night to listen for children waking up, so parents could go out in the evening.

Not everything remained so rosy. Butlin’s tried to attract the lucrative teenage market in the early Sixties and gained a reputation for vandalism, gang violence and sexual immorality. It responded by segregating teenagers from families and deployed security staff to curb misbehaviour, but family bookings were affected. In 1968, the camps banned single teenagers, but its image was already tarnished.

Billy Butlin retired in 1968 and moved to Jersey for tax reasons, while his son Bobby became chairman and managing director. In 1972, the company was sold to the Rank Organisation, although Bobby remained in charge. Like other companies, Butlin’s started to see bookings decline as more Brits took to holidaying abroad. The company’s forays into overseas markets never seemed as sure-footed as those at home had been. By the time Billy was laid to rest in 1980, his funeral procession lined by redcoats, his camps were in decline.

Paul Theroux visited Minehead in 1982 and saw the deadened unhappiness of a “sleazy paradise, in which people were treated more or less like animals in a zoo”. A redcoat told him that half the male guests were unemployed: “That’s the beauty of Butlin’s — you can pay for it with your dole money.” Butlin’s fortunes had a habit of reflecting the ups and downs of working-class life.

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Some camps were sold. Others rebranded under the “Holiday World” franchise in the late Eighties: Skegness became Funcoast World and Bognor Regis became Southcoast World. There was investment in sub-tropical pools and improved accommodation. A decade later, the Butlin’s name returned. There was a new round of investment and all three remaining camps got a Skyline Pavilion, an undercover area with shops, bars, restaurants and entertainment. The Miss Lovely Legs contest ended in 1989 and the Glamorous Grandmother and Holiday Princess contests in 1997.

In 2000, Rank sold its entire holiday business, including Butlin’s, Warner, Haven and Oasis, to Bourne Leisure, which has invested in spas, hotels, premium restaurants and activities such as horse riding, coasteering, scuba diving and mountain bike rides. After a volatile time in the pandemic, it has benefited from the boom in staycations. Nevertheless, its current owner, Bourne Leisure, is trying to sell the chain — seen as not fitting the objectives of its parent company, private equity giant Blackstone. (Recent turmoil in financing markets makes a sale difficult.)

The rise, fall and reinvention of Butlin’s mirrors Britain’s changing society, culture and neuroses about class. The popular BBC sitcom Hi-de-Hi!, which started in 1980, was a reminder of a more optimistic age of 20 years earlier. Butlin’s, where the show was set, was in its prime. Brits could take for granted collective holidays, family entertainment and full employment. The early Eighties, though, were a low point for the country and the brand. Butlin’s today lacks the vividness of Billy Butlin’s original creation. But it reflects Britain’s improved, albeit patchy, prosperity.

Butlin’s has reinvented itself as a rival to upmarket family holiday group Center Parcs; the brand lives on in three remaining locations: Skegness in Lincolnshire, the original site, plus Bognor Regis and Minehead. “From the moment you arrive, you can expect nothing but full-on fun,” says its marketing literature. There is no hint of regimentation, and no mention of a Knobbly Knees competition.

In the aftermath, Donald Trump was impeached by House of Representatives, but acquitted by the Senate. The social media companies were not so lenient. The 45th President of the United States was de-platformed by Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. 

The chaotic end of Trump’s presidency provided a pretext, though, for a much wider purge of anything deemed to fall under the category of conspiracy theory or misinformation. This week the Republican congresswoman, Majorie Taylor Greene, had her Twitter account permanently suspended; and Joe Rogan who has had content removed by YouTube.  

The attack on conspiracy theory — and the power of the elites to define it as such — is a dangerous one. And not just because of the threat it poses to free speech and the growing influence of big tech that it points out. It’s also because conspiracy theories are an understandable — and sometimes useful — response to a confusing world. To repress this very human instinct risks doing more harm than good.

That’s not to say that this mode of thought is never pathological. But if the conspiracy theorist is obsessive or hateful, the problem is the obsession and the hate — vices which can apply to any belief system.

The trouble is, many conspiracies and cover-ups do exist. And they’d never be uncovered if no one theorised about them. 

So as well as de-pathologising conspiracy theories as a concept, we need to understand conspiracy theorists as a group of people. Most of them are quite ordinary. And, according to recent UK-based research from Ipsos, there are a lot of them. Asked about three conspiracy theories randomly assigned from a list of 11, half the people surveyed considered at least one theory to be “plausible”, with 20% endorsing two or three. 

Therefore, if you want to drive conspiratorial thinking out of society, you’re up against millions of your fellow citizens— not just a few fanatics. Of course, one could argue that’s all the more cause for a crackdown. How can we tolerate a situation in which whole swathes of the population believe in crazy stuff? Except that most of them don’t believe it. Not really. 

For a start, there’s a huge variation in the extent to which different conspiracy theories are accepted. The theory considered the most plausible — with 40% of those asked agreeing — was that “Princess Diana’s death in a car crash was not accidental”. In contrast, the notion that “the COVID-19 vaccine is a cover for implanting traceable microchips” got the thumbs up from just 4% of respondents and the allegation that “5G mobile phone towers are responsible for the spread of COVID-19” a mere 2%.

What do people mean when they say that they find a conspiracy theory plausible, though? What do the Diana conspiracy theorists truly believe? That she was literally assassinated? In some cases, yes. But for most of the 40% it’s probably something much less extreme — like blaming the media for hounding the princess at every turn. 

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The researchers found “a high overlap” between those who consider a conspiracy theory plausible and those who consider it “not strictly accurate but a reasonable challenge to the official explanation”, which is telling. It’s not so much that they believe the conspiracy, but that they’re using it to express their doubts about the institutions that tell us what we ought to believe.

Ipsos asked about trust in various kinds of institutional authority. While more than 40% of respondents considered media and political institutions to be “untrustworthy”, the corresponding figures for scientific and public health organisations were much lower — just 3% and 6%. It’s clearly no coincidence that the Covid conspiracy theories had the least public support.  

The lesson here is that those in authority would do better to make themselves more worthy of trust than to wage epistemic war on the public. For most people who indulge in them, conspiracy theories are not about dogmatism, but uncertainty.

As human beings, doubt comes naturally to us. Rational analysis may persuade us to think a certain way about a situation, but inevitably we’ll have irrational thoughts about it too — including secret fears and sneaking suspicions. And why not? Until a situation becomes clear it pays to have multiple, perhaps contradictory, ideas about it. Even if our gut reactions prove unfounded, we’re bound to have them anyway. This isn’t to say that we should allow the emotional, instinctual side of our nature to dominate, but to repress it completely would be just as unhealthy. 

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I’d argue that the equivalent applies at a collective level. Though a society doesn’t have a mind like a person does, it does have what Emile Durkheim called a “collective consciousness” composed of a shared set of understandings. Not everyone thinks the same thoughts about everything, of course — a non-totalitarian society makes room for multiple interpretations of reality. Nevertheless, through mechanisms such as democratic elections or the price setting function of the market place, decisions can be collectively arrived at. 

Conspiracies theories are part of this bubbling mix of interpretations. At the social level, they’re equivalent to the stray thoughts, nagging doubts, daydreams and nightmares that individuals experience. As such, they need to be talked about, not repressed — taken seriously, if not always literally.

They might, after all, turn out to be true. Consider the origin of the Covid pandemic. The idea that the virus escaped from a Chinese laboratory was once repudiated as delusional, not to say xenophobic. Fortunately, there were some investigators willing to question the established view. Though not yet proven, the lab leak hypothesis is now taken seriously. At the very least, it has focused much-needed attention on the perils posed by high-risk research.

Just because conspiracy theories aren’t true, that doesn’t mean they don’t serve a purpose. There’s no conspiracy theory — no matter how obscure — that doesn’t speak to some unmet need to make sense of the world. 

A deliberately silly example is the bizarre claim that Paul McCartney died in 1966 and was replaced by a look-alike. What possible psychological need might that satisfy? Well, how about the desire to comprehend the astonishing pace of cultural change over the course of the Sixties? Like the Beatles themselves, the world looked completely different at end of the decade from how it did at the beginning. I don’t think that McCartney’s supposed death and substitution provides any sort of useful explanation, but it does reduce a question of unfathomable complexity to a human scale. 

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The same psychological forces are at work in Covid conspiracy theories. Take the notion that vaccinations are being used to inject us with tracking technology. On one level it’s obvious nonsense, but on another it’s symbolic of the vastly expanded capacity of the state to monitor and control our movements. Even if we believe that these measures were justified, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t also be horrified by what’s been done to us. A necessary evil is still an evil. 

Our collective sense of horror needs an outlet. Conventional politics has done a poor job of providing one — as has the mainstream media. So, instead, the trauma bubbles to the surface in the form of conspiracy theories. Which is why I worry about the actions of the social media companies. Who are they to edit the collective consciousness?

They may imagine that they’re shutting down opportunities for charlatans and demagogues. But what I fear they’re really doing is closing off a safety valve.