We're All Going On A Summer Holiday

Eighty summers ago, thousands of working-class Britons got their very first tastes of sun, sea and sand, courtesy of the 1938 Holidays with Pay Act. Kathryn Ferry chronicles the fraught birth of a holidaymaking revolution

In August 1938, a Coventry factory worker took his family on a holiday to the British seaside. To the 21st-century mind, there’s nothing particularly extraordinary about this. But to this particular worker, 80 summers ago, it was a cause for celebration. For he was among the first cohort of workers to take advantage of Britain’s brand new Holidays with Pay Act. So enthused was he by the experience that he wrote to his local newspaper, the Midland Daily Telegraph, to tell them all about it. He didn’t give his name, content to sign himself ‘Sunburned’.

“My wife, two children, and myself have just returned home after enjoying our first ‘holiday with pay’,” noted the correspondent. “We have had a good holiday, feeling for the first time that we could afford to pay for it without having to apologise to the butcher and baker for being unable to meet his bills the week after. I feel I am justified in saying ‘thank you’ to whoever it was who did the trick.”

The people who “did the trick” were the trade unionists, politicians and ordinary Britons who had spearheaded a 25-year campaign for all workers – no matter what their social standing – to receive paid leave from their annual toils. It was a tough battle, one that pitted campaigners against government intransigence and resistance from employers. And it would be a number of years after 1938 before the legislation truly transformed Britain’s holidaymaking landscape. But, as the millions packing their cases for destinations as diverse as Bognor Regis and Bali will attest, the long-term impact of the Holidays with Pay Act has been truly revolutionary.

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