HOSTELS FOR HOLIDAYS
By SIR RONALD DAVISON
IN a recent Spectator Amabel Williams-Ellis recorded her im- pressions of various munition-workers' hostels which she had visited in two different areas. She liked them and hoped that they would be put to good social use after the war, e.g., as holiday-centres for workers. That is exactly what some of us, and notably the National Council of Social Service, have been trying to impress on the Planning and Reconstruction authorities during recent months.
The best approach is from the angle of the consumer, the would- be holiday-maker. After this war, there is little doubt, the vast mass of people demanding and able to pay for an annual holiday away from home will amount to a new social phenomenon. All the facts associated with the spread of the Holidays with Pay movement since 1938 suggest a sensational increase which ought to be welcomed and prepared for. In 1938, the last full holiday year, only about four million workpeople had a contractual right to holidays without loss of wages. By 1939 the Minister of Labour estimated the number at over eleven millions, and since then collective agreements, Trade Board orders, &c., have added greatly to the total. Indeed, the Government are more or less committed to the policy of making holidays with pay universal.
It may be said, of course, that, somehow or other, the great mass of the people did manage a holiday and did get away for short spells before this war. Look at the Wakes Weeks, Blackpool, Margate and the litter of holiday camps spreading round our coast- line. But these appearances are deceptive. The best available figures show that well over half the population, particularly the married couples with young children, had to stay at home in their city streets. It was estimated that in 1937 only some 13 million out of a total population of 46 million took a holiday of a week or more away from home. The rest could not afford the cost of fares and lodgings. Moreover, adequate accommodation in the popular resorts was simply non-existent. Not even with staggered holidays and full wages could they possibly have been housed. Nor will there be room for them after this war, when they are able and determined to get away to the country or the sea for a brief spell. The gains from such a movement in national health and happiness cannot be questioned, but they will have to be planned-for if they are to be won. A policy of laissez-faire will be no policy ; it will lead to high prices and the wrong sort of building in the wrong places. Here is work for country planning on a large scale and a long-term policy. Incidentally, there are good reasons why we should not expect to see very much of the new building on the crowded sea coasts of England and Wales. But these great schemes cannot, and should not, be hurried. Their many-sided development will take years, whereas the need for holidays cannot wait ; it will be urgent from the first year following the " cease fire." This is where, to my mind, the hostels come in.
The war-time provision of residential hostels for munition-workers, land-workers, &c., has now reached an enormous figure. Added to that is the still larger creation of permanent and semi-permanent service camps of many kinds for men and women with the colours. Much, if not most, of this is in rural areas very suitable for urban families seeking a holiday at a modest cost. The more rural the site the more likely is its early release for peaceful uses and its early evacuation by its present occupants. There, ready provided with all services, including recreation-halls and playing-fields, will be the essential buildings for a number of National Holiday Villages. The hostels, built on the cubicle plan, will serve well for families, the camps with dormitory accommodation can be either adapted or used as they are. Where necessary, a bathing pool and other amenities could easily be added.
What a windfall! What a happy legacy from the grim necessities of war all this may become, if only it is treated with a little Imagination! Now is the time to begin. Let the policy be accepted In principle and let the suitable sites and buildings be provisionally earmarked now for these high social purposes after the war. An allocation of, say, 350,000 places beds) for workers' holiday- centres under public management would not make an excessive in- road into the total war-time accommodation now erected or in course of erection. The great thing is to ensure that no Government Depart- ments are allowed prematurely to dispose of their buildings or.enter into commitments for their future use, save according to a master plan drawn up by the Ministry of Works and Planning after a thorough national survey. Plenty of commercial interests are eager for the pickings, and there will be a great temptation to the Depart- ments to unload their " surplus " properties. That is a temptation we must help them to resist. Early in 1939 The Spectator gave its blessing to the suggested establishment of School Camps for Peace and War. Eventually a Bill was passed, and some 31 of these rural boarding-schools were erected in pleasant places by the Government just in time for occu- pation by secondary school children before the blitz in 1940. They have amply fulfilled their purpose, and we could do with more of them. They are managed by the National Camps Corporation—a public body set up under the Act by the Ministry of Health, with Lord Portal as chairman and Sir E. Howarth, of the Board of Education, as managing director. Camp-managers were installed to look after the physical side, including the catering, and local education authorities in the cities were invited to become lessees of the camps and allot the children and teachers—about 300 to each institution. Greater London now uses 14 of these school camps, which may well be the pioneers of the public boarding-schools of the future.
Here, then, is a precedent showing how a new and greater scheme of National Holiday Centres could be managed. A public corpora- tion would look after them as " hotels," and would lease them to holiday-promoting bodies (non-profit), such as the Holiday Fellow- ship or the Workers' Travel Association. In time some of the urban local authorities would, I hope, come into the picture as lessees, following up experiments in communal holiday management already made by Lambeth and one or two other borough councils before 1939. It seems to me not a visionary, but a perfectly practicable, pro- position that within a few years we should enable as many as five million of our less affluent citizens, particularly the families, to take a health-giving week's holiday in this style and pay for it.
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