Caravans: A British Love Affair

Loved and loathed in equal measure, caravans have captured the hearts

of British holiday-makers for over 50 years.

I think the caravan really pioneers this idea of the individual family,

carrying its house on its back and having its own possessions with it.

And, of course, this is all part of a wider ideal

of being independent in your travel and on holiday.

It bonded you together.

You were one, not four. You became one.

And not only that, we liked to move around, we liked to tour round.

We liked to see what was round the next corner.

Once the plaything of a privileged minority,

from the 1950s, caravans were to become a firm favourite

with almost a quarter of British holiday-makers.

For enthusiasts,

they provided independence and the freedom of the open road.

The chance to explore hidden corners of Britain and abroad,

while keeping their home comforts in tow.

My thinking was, "Look here, you spend your life

"at the kitchen sink and the kitchen cooker at home,

"when you come on holiday you want to get away from it!"

There are more ways to women's lib than burning your bra.

My escape from the kitchen sink lay in the open road,

towing a caravan behind the family car.

This is the story of our love affair with these homes on wheels.

One that saw Britain establish the largest caravan

manufacturer in the world.

And a love affair that was to transform the holiday habits

of generations of British families.

Caravanning has enabled us to visit places

we would never have visited if we hadn't got a caravan.

We've met people we would never have met if we hadn't got a caravan.

And the common thing about it is, we all share a love of caravanning.

For millions of British people today, caravanning is a way of life.

But that was not the case in the 1920s and '30s.

Made out of solid wood, caravans then were heavy, slow and expensive.

Hitching up and heading out to the countryside

was not a pastime for the ordinary British family.

# It's a hap-hap-happy day toodle-oodle-oodle-oodle-oodle-ay

# For you and me, for us and we all the clouds have rolled away... #

Caravanning before World War II is a very minority pursuit.

It grows originally out of romanticising the gypsy caravan,

life on the open road and clip-clopping along

in remote parts of Britain and Ireland from the late 19th Century.

The Caravan Club is founded at the beginning of the 20th Century.

It never really gets beyond a couple of hundred rather posh members.

So, caravanning is really very small-scale and...

I think quite eccentric before World War II.

I think in the '30s, caravanning was quite middle class.

Gentlemen gypsies was the phrase.

It was people with a big car - you had to have a big car to pull it.

You probably had to have some friends with land where you could pull it to.

A completely different image to the one portrayed in caravans today.

For many of today's enthusiasts, the enduring appeal of caravanning

is still the opportunity to travel and explore.

One woman who's taken full advantage of this

is Dorrie Van Lachterop from the West Midlands,

who's been caravanning for over 50 years.

Oh, I've seen things and done things that I would never have done

if I hadn't have had a caravan.

We obviously like it when it's dry and sunny, but...

I've caravanned so much in the wet, Scotland in particular,

you know...that you get used to it, I suppose.

I've been to Belgium, Holland, France,

Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy,

the old Yugoslavia...

I can never think of it any other way.

When they say Croatia, I think, where the hell's that?

Yugoslavia to Greece.

Went down as far as Sparta, in Greece...

Had adventures there. Well, I've had adventures all over the place.

But for Dorrie, it was not just a thirst for adventure

that prompted her interest in caravanning.

Unfortunate family circumstances

also lay behind her decision to take to the road.

My husband was diabetic.

My little boy had got bronchial asthma.

So it was more convenient for us to be independent.

And we hired and we liked it.

And so we bought our own in 1955, we bought our own caravan.

And I've had a caravan ever since.

The fresh air obviously helped my son with his chest.

It also relaxed my husband.

He had a very stressful job,

so he would be relaxed.

Careful!

There we are. Come here. Good girl.

She does very well, doesn't she, for a blind dog.

'Every weekend we went off somewhere.

'For holidays, we would go to Scotland.

'We liked the wild parts of Scotland.'

You could pull in along a loch, pull in by the river,

and we've even spent the night on top of Glen Coe,

as it was then. Very scary.

The dog wouldn't go out, which was rather worrying.

And we also, on one occasion, spent the night at Stonehenge,

before it was all fenced in, which I believe it is now.

And the dog and the cat refused to go out there.

The freedom that the caravan gave Dorrie and her family in the 1950s,

to travel around the country,

and even spend the night at a landmark like Stonehenge,

was a far cry from what was available

to most British holiday-makers

during the previous decades.

If you're a family from Wolverhampton,

then your holiday is that you go to a resort,

you probably go to the same resort every year.

You probably go to the same boarding house every year,

or the same little hotel, with very regimented meal times,

and there's no surprise, no possible element of difference

in your holiday from one year to the next.

The year in, year out routine of the traditional British holiday

stemmed from people's inability to travel independently.

At a time when only the privileged few

had access to a car, most holiday-makers

could only go away when and where public transport would take them.

The standard seaside holiday for almost everybody

involved going to a particular resort,

by train still for most people, right up to the 1930s.

And staying for a week or a fortnight, or,

if you were sufficiently well off, longer, in a hotel or boarding house.

If you were staying in a seaside boarding house,

they were so crowded and they had so few amenities,

that landladies, in self-defence, had to be like dragons

and send people out just after breakfast.

It was rare to be allowed back in again, except at meal times,

until the evening.

The traditions of the seaside holiday remained largely unchanged

until the Second World War when holidays came to a stop.

AIR-RAID SIREN WAILS

So too did the production of caravans,

as their factories were used to support the war effort.

Those caravans already on the road

were put to use as ambulances and emergency accommodation.

But after the war,

the caravan industry was to find a new lease of life,

and eventually, a new generation of British enthusiasts

eager to explore the country.

You can't take children to see York or Bath,

or to go Longleat or somewhere like that, in a day.

So if you're gonna take them around -

and I wanted to show them this country, because, to be honest,

England is a fantastic country. It's got wonderful scenery,

and it's got a history going back thousands of years,

all in a tiny island.

For Douglas, the touring caravan may have provided an ideal way

to show his children the beauty and history of England.

But his early experiences of caravanning

were not very encouraging.

One day I was a publicity manager for a company.

I had to go to Bournemouth with the account exec.

So we're going down there and we suddenly got behind a caravan.

And I won't use the language I used,

but I swore at this caravan holding me up on the road.

My friend who was driving said,

"If you say anything more about caravans like that,

"I'll stop this car and you can get out and walk to Bournemouth,

"because I'm a caravanner."

By the time we got to Bournemouth, I'd been converted.

So I started to read Practical Caravan,

carried on talking to my friend,

and I said to him one day, "I think I'm gonna buy a caravan,

"what do you think I should get? " And he said,

"Buy a Sprite." He said, "If you don't like caravanning

"you can sell it, because it's so popular.

"If you do like it and you need spares,

"you're never far from a dealer."

On his recommendation I bought a second-hand Sprite Major. Fantastic.

The Sprite caravan was the creation

of a young engineer from North London,

who had developed his skills in the Navy during the Second World War.

His name was Sam Alper.

But he was to become known as the King of Caravans.

Sam Alper decided just after the Second World War

that there was a market for caravans.

Now I think his first caravans were timber-framed.

I think they had hardboard sides,

because, of course, materials were difficult to get to.

He brought caravans to the masses.

He was the Henry Ford of the caravan industry.

The Model T Ford,

think of Sam Alper's Sprite, because that's what they were.

I wonder how Sam managed to fit so much into his life.

He was incredibly strong man.

And I don't just mean physically.

He had great inner strength.

He never wasted time.

He was very disciplined.

And I'm just amazed how much he achieved.

But although Sam was to become the driving force

behind a caravan empire,

it was another family member

who had first spotted the business opportunity.

Actually it was his brother, Henry,

who started making the caravans in Stratford in East London.

He decided to go on and do other things,

and Sam decided to take the caravan business on.

I think he could see that he could make something out of it.

I think I quite like... I quite like that one actually.

He actually trained as an electrical engineer.

So he had that engineering background.

And he had a great eye for design.

He was so creative. And designing a caravan is a real challenge.

You're putting literally a whole house in 12 ft by 9 ft or something.

So I think it was that design challenge.

It covered a lot of things he was interested in, like the engineering.

So... So it was a challenge.

He just loved a challenge.

But an enjoyable challenge.

The biggest challenge for Sam

was to produce a caravan that was affordable

in the burgeoning consumer society.

Up until now, caravans had been hand-built,

and far beyond the means of most families.

But at his new factory in Newmarket,

Sam set about transforming the caravan industry.

Sam was a visionary, really, and a definite entrepreneur.

He put the question out - what would be a good caravan to sell?

What can we do to make a caravan more affordable?

Of course, the answer kept coming back to him, and that was...

A cheap caravan.

But it can't be done, Sam, because cheap means cheap build.

So Sam went back, came up with his first design, the Sprite,

a little 11-footer. He took it out.

People were quite impressed.

But people said, "well, for that sort of money, £230, it's gonna break".

But Sam was determined to prove the doubters wrong, and in 1948,

aged just 24, he came up with a formula

for the modern British caravan.

And in doing so, he was to draw on his experiences during the war.

It was built on Spitfire wheels.

The main body construction was panels of plastic...

a double-walled plastic called Holoplast.

It was a cheap caravan.

I have a feeling that the first one cost £199.

When the average price of a tourer was,

if I remember rightly, £300-£400,

there was this nasty fellow

turning out this cheap tat, you see? It can't be any good.

To convince caravan dealers and the public that his Sprite

was anything but cheap tat, Sam decided to take it on the road -

on a 10,000 mile trip

across some of the roughest terrain in southern Europe and North Africa.

The Mediterranean trip had, I think...two objectives.

One, to show that a caravan could withstand rough conditions,

and they were rough in those days.

But also, if he could get it round 10,000 miles in 30 days

or something like that, it must be a fair proof of performance.

I came to be on the trip

because I was associate editor of the leading caravan magazine.

I just thought it was a jolly good trip! I looked forward to this.

Six weeks away from the office!

Once we'd got into Arab-populated country,

oh, they're all swarming around wanting to see!

Nobody had ever seen a thing like this before.

With his unlikely publicity stunt, Sam had proved his point.

If the mighty Sprite could take on a 10,000-mile trip

around the Mediterranean,

it could certainly handle a two-week holiday in the British countryside.

There was worldwide publicity, and above all,

Sam saw it as a great selling opportunity

for a salesmen at the caravan dealers'.

"Yes, madam. Do you realise

"this caravan has done 10,000 miles round the Med?"

A confidence builder.

And so it was a great success, great success.

People went on talking about this for a long time.

With his Sprite now rolling off the production line,

Sam Alper had created a touring caravan

that appealed to a new generation of consumers.

And for first-time buyers like Christine Fagg from Hertfordshire,

it opened the way to a new kind of family holiday.

This is my little Sprite, and I simply adored it, of course,

and went everywhere in it.

I wanted to take a holiday where the children would be free...

Don't photograph the bash. It wasn't me!

'..and where we were not tied to meal times or a landlady'

who was going to be madly obsessive about them coming in

without changing their shoes, and all that sort of thing.

I saw a few caravans in my travels on fields as I drove around,

and I thought, "Why not have a caravan?

"Surely that would be the thing to do."

And so that's really the very first intimation

that I was going to have a caravan and spend a lot of time.

Right, it's OK...

'What I loved about caravanning was that it was...

'there was such variety.'

One didn't have to stick in one place.

One could go to the coast and enjoy the sea

and then when you were tired of that or it was raining,

you could go inland to beautiful forests,

go by lakes, by rivers.

There is nothing to compare, really, I think!

You really want that one lit, don't you?

'Of course, I did always cook in my caravan,

'so I didn't escape from cooking and washing up!

'That had to go on.'

But somehow, doing it in my caravan

was never a chore like it is at home.

For Christine, caravanning gave her the chance to escape,

not only the monotony of some of her housework,

but also the opportunity to explore the countryside on her own.

'My husband was a maniacal sailor, and, of course,'

I tried to go with him and be a dutiful wife,

but I was always bored, sick or terrified.

So that's how it was I came to have a caravan,

tow it, and take the younger children on it.

If you are caravanning as a woman on your own,

everybody would stare at me as I towed my caravan onto a site,

because, of course, they were all in pairs.

And amazingly, they didn't like it.

They were uneasy, because it was unheard of.

And I think it's pretty rare even today.

But I had my two youngest children, and I just...

had to accept things as they were.

But I'm so glad I did it, because we had wonderful times.

In the 1950s, more and more people seemed to be having wonderful times.

Legislation had given them,

not only more time away from the factory and office,

but also greater flexibility to choose when they would go.

There was a new sense of freedom for people, and not least

for the growing numbers no longer dependent on public transport.

Car ownership is shooting up in the '50s.

In the 1920s, 1930s,

nowhere near the majority of the population had cars.

What you get in the '50s and '60s,

it's this absolute explosion in terms of car ownership.

Which means, of course, there's lots of pressure on the roads.

Huge road-building schemes, you get motorways.

All of these things which follow on the kind of...

the car boom, I guess, of the '50s.

Places like Cornwall,

the Lake District, the Yorkshire Dales, places that are rural,

actually seen then as backward and a long way from cities,

they're kind of undiscovered.

And what you get in the '50s and '60s is that for the first time

these places are being opened up by roads and by caravans,

so you get this boom in places like the Lake District.

You start getting reports in '50s newspapers about traffic jams

as all these caravanners

descend on the Lake District for a bank holiday weekend,

or whatever. And that's something new.

We think of them today as incredibly touristy and over-hyped and whatnot.

But at the time, they were forgotten.

They were obscure,

and the only people that went there were kind of,

posh people with their own travel.

And so they've been opened up to the masses,

I guess, by the caravan, and by the car and all those things.

Sometimes people say, "What's the biggest improvement in caravans?"

And a lot of my caravan friends will tell you all sorts of things,

you know, it was heaters, new cars, or whatever...

Biggest improvement, biggest change was roads.

Because now you can get on a road

and you can go pretty much anywhere you like. And it's easy.

And OK, we all know the stories of caravans holding up the bypasses.

But previously there hadn't been bypasses.

And the biggest improvement, the biggest thing that contributed

to people getting out and enjoying themselves in caravans

was the ability to take a bit of Tarmac from their house

to where they wanted to go.

That's the biggest improvement,

by far more important than anything anyone did, ever,

in a caravan factory or in a design office for making caravans.

# Now the evening passes by

# Drains the colour from the sky

# A lamp is lit

# A candle glows

# In a window high... #

With their "have car, will travel"

mentality and the expanding road network

making British holiday-makers more mobile than ever before,

the opportunity to hitch up and head off into the countryside

was making caravanning an increasingly popular pastime.

# Say the prayers you've said before... #

To be able to drive into the depths of the countryside,

I had so many surprises that there's so much history

and beauty and lovely old country houses.

# When

# The morning brings the light

# Oh, the morning brings the light... #

And of course, we'd been chained to our houses and our areas

for so many years, and had not been able to get out

beyond a few miles, because it was restricted.

It was just sort of a miraculous time to be alive,

that you could suddenly realise that you could go away and stay.

# Selling matches in the day

# So there'd be a place to stay

# A whistling tin...#

To be able to get away, to get away on your own, it was unbelievable.

It was quiet.

Because in those days you could hear the noise of factories,

and there wasn't quite so much traffic as there is now, obviously.

# The morning brings the light...#

I remember on one occasion, we were going over some...

some of the mountains, I'm awful at remembering names.

And we stopped in a little pull-in, to listen, well, to admire the view.

And we could hear the silence.

The beauty of caravanning is,

it allows you to go where you want to, when you want to.

We're totally independent, we've got our own space.

When the kids were young, we went rallying,

and they would have another circle of friends, on a rally field,

that they didn't have at school.

They would be out all day enjoying themselves,

coming back only to eat, no problems.

It is the freedom...

..to do it at a reasonable cost.

For some people, the attraction of a touring caravan

was the ability to escape to secluded parts of the countryside.

But for others, caravan rallies provided the chance to meet up

with fellow enthusiasts.

Such rallies, and the memories they evoke

are still the main appeal of caravanning

for people like Rob Carthew from Solihull.

Well, I love caravanning because to me, it's just like

going back to my childhood days,

when I used to go on caravan holidays.

And basically to buy something that's old,

you actually do things like you did then, you know.

And I still do it the same now as what I did 40 years ago,

really, to be honest.

You know, so, yeah. But I love it, I can't get enough of it, really,

there's not enough days or weekends in the year

to be able to do it, you know.

Well, we're looking at a 1969 Fisher Holivan 9ft van.

We purchased this van about three years ago for the price of £50.

Right, as you can see, it's a very, very little basic little van.

But it takes myself, my wife,

and we've also got two border collies with us this weekend.

And we all manage to get in here.

It's got two single bunks...

'I love caravans. I love the freedom of it.'

You can extend the bed then...

'You're in a different part of the country each weekend,'

so your picture window when you look out your window

is totally different from one week to the next.

We've got a sink, draining board,

we've got the old-fashioned sort of, water pump here.

'The scenery does change every weekend for you.'

Your back garden's not the same - every weekend it's different.

I've been everywhere in it.

I... I go as far south as the Dorset Steam Fair.

We've been everywhere - Shropshire, Wales, er...

We were in Wiltshire last weekend - and we get great fun,

hours and hours of fun and pleasure, and all it cost us was £50!

Well, I personally think we've got a wonderful country,

the countryside to me is wonderful.

'And over this last sort of 20 years,'

I've seen more of it in the last 20 years

than I did in the previous years.

And I sort of appreciate it more and more every time I see it.

Because in this country, you go round a bend,

and every corner that you go round, it's a different scenery.

With the growing appeal and affordability of caravanning,

by the 1960s, several British manufacturers

were at the forefront of a booming industry.

-NEWSREADER:

-I suppose there's a bit of the gypsy in most of us,

hence the caravan craze.

The last ten years have seen a minor revolution.

Another thing we learned at the Daily Mail Caravan Exhibition

is that this country is the world's largest exporter.

But leading the way among the British

and international manufacturers

was Caravans International,

the company set up by the irrepressible Sam Alper.

Designed for towing by medium-sized family cars,

the Sprite Major is a four or five berth caravan costing under £400.

There were loads of caravan manufacturers,

but they were turning out a few hundred vans a year if that.

Whereas Sprite was turning out thousands.

At that time,

somebody worked out that a Sprite was completed every four minutes.

We were bigger in finance terms, in factories,

then any other caravan operation in the world.

Sam Alper not only makes caravans, he is an enthusiast,

and a veteran of many previous record attempts.

Always the shrewd publicist, Sam continued to use high-profile stunts

to promote his caravan business.

He's in Granada, for the first ever attempt

to tow a caravan over Europe's highest road,

the Pico de Veleta.

He's well above the clouds now.

For Sam, the key to selling his caravans

was to present them not only as strong and durable,

but as an essential part of a stylish

and exciting family lifestyle.

To help him sell this image,

Sam hand-picked a talented young designer called Reg Dean.

Over the next 30 years, Reg was to help transform

the look and layout of the modern caravan.

I wouldn't have known anything whatsoever,

I'd never been into a caravan,

a touring caravan, or a caravan holiday home.

I was just looking for furniture. And I managed to bring all sorts of

proper furniture and furnishings into the caravan industry.

Which Sam seemed to appreciate very much.

I didn't follow caravan furniture, I followed domestic furniture.

A lot of the caravan manufacturers would look at the other caravans.

Sam never sent me to caravan shows,

he sent me to the Motor Show, furniture shows, all over the place.

You learn more by seeing things like that, don't you?

You learn a lot more like that,

by seeing which way fashions are going,

and the furniture's going, and things like that.

Just 300ft below the summit, but well above 10,000ft,

to become the highest caravan in Europe...

With a booming business that was never short of publicity,

and that had taken over other leading British manufacturers,

such as Eccles and Bluebird,

by the mid-1960s, Sam Alper had every reason

to consider himself and his Sprite on top of the world.

..the caravan has averaged over 30 miles an hour from start to finish.

The success of the touring caravan

was to bring with it an unwelcome side-effect.

With so many caravans on British roads, it was no longer practical

for enthusiasts to pull up and spend the night

at whatever beauty spot took their fancy.

And in the early 1960s,

new legislation forced them to stay in regulated sites.

For people like Dorrie Van Lachterop,

one of the initial attractions of caravanning had been taken away.

Oh, that's funny.

It's the kind of site that I like NOW...

I used to like it where it was wild.

Years ago, when I first started, you could pull in anywhere,

in the mountains or on a riverbank or a loch. But you can't do that now.

There are so many caravans.

And so I... I like it fairly quiet, this is a nice site.

Out of the way, Annabel.

Well, I have to settle myself in.

And then, people usually say hello to begin with.

It's difficult if you're a loner, and there are... They're all couples.

But I'm normally with people who are also on their own. And that's great.

Normally, the kettle goes on somewhere!

When Dorrie started caravanning in the mid-1950s,

it was the ideal holiday for her and her husband Henry,

and their two young children.

But in 1962, a family tragedy was to bring these holidays to an end.

Well, my husband died quite suddenly, his father died on the Saturday

and he died on the Monday. It was like that.

I didn't think I'd be able to cope with the car, but I did.

I got a job, and we didn't owe any money,

which was a great thing. It was all ours.

Of course, we'd always done it, and we went from week to week,

and we just kept on.

Cos the children, they'd got all their friends,

my daughter had got all her friends, I'd got my friends,

the dog had got her friends,

and the cat had got her... We used to take the cat!

They all supported me afterwards.

And if I looked a bit glum,

which was pretty often, somebody would shout, "Coffee's on!"

And I'd got various friends, I could have a weep on their shoulders

and then we'd have a good laugh, you know, that kind of thing.

It was the same with the children, they'd got their own friends.

And it was a great help, really.

It gave us something else to try and think about, you know.

And... And we coped.

After her husband's death at the age of 46,

Dorrie decided not only to continue caravanning with her children,

but to take them on new adventures further afield.

My mother cried when we went the first time

because she thought we'd never come back!

It was unusual for people to go abroad,

let alone take a car and caravan.

But it really was an adventure.

One of Dorrie's caravan trips abroad with her children

was to turn into a memorable holiday in France.

We did quite a bit of touring round there, some of the little towns,

the little villages and that.

And we thought, "Well, we've never been to Paris."

And we were doing very well, but we ran into the most awful storm.

So we were getting later and later.

And when we got into Paris,

I'm driving, we've got the Land Rover, and I'm driving along...

And I was quite worried, because I thought, where do we stop?

And I saw two gendarmes and got out,

and my French is ridiculously school French,

but I asked them, you know, "Camping Bois de Boulogne?"

And they said, "Toute a droite."

Turn right. Well, it isn't, is it? It's straight on.

Bottom of the Champs-Elysees,

and we go up, there are about eight rows of traffic,

and I'm sort of sitting there, and we come to the Arc de Triomphe.

So I've got to go round the wrong way, as well.

I'm driving on the wrong side of the road all the way.

And we went round,

and I made my journey tighter and tighter so I got on the pavement.

And we pulled into the best boulevard we could.

With the permission of a sympathetic gendarme,

Dorrie and her children pulled up at the side of the road

and prepared to bed down for the night,

turning the very heart of Paris

into their exclusive and private caravan site.

It was fantastic.

I don't know anyone else who's ever spent the night

almost under the Arc de Triomphe!

Free, as well, we didn't have to pay!

It really was, it was a wonderful trip.

-NEWSREADER:

-A maritime nation, the British.

And proud of it.

FOGHORN BLASTS

Just as it was for Dorrie,

during the 1960s, Europe was the new frontier

for those British caravanners

who were eager to take on fresh challenges and experiences.

Well, these adventurous caravanners,

they'd been adventurous in getting their car,

even more so in getting a caravan,

they'd toured around England, been to places

that people had never been, Scotland and...

Or if they lived in Scotland, they'd been to England.

Then they started to think they might go abroad!

There's a wonderful story,

the Camping and Caravanning Club organised a temporary campsite

outside a little tiny fishing village in Spain in the '50s.

And people flocked there, absolutely wonderful.

You may have heard of it, it's called Torremolinos!

And that was the basis -

British people going there was the basis of this huge industry.

And they were caravanners. Because there were no hotels then.

if you wanted a decent bed, you had to take it with you.

# Mind how you go

# Though going is your fancy and your right...#

Although they may have taken some of their home comforts with them,

setting off for Europe was not an easy option for British caravanners.

These were demanding holidays,

and to get to even the most accessible and popular destinations

meant a long and time-consuming journey.

My parents bought their first caravan shortly after I was born,

so the mid-'60s, a Sprite 400.

And they took it off, first holiday, and it was all the way down to Italy.

I think it's fantastic,

I really admire them, cos it was quite an adventure.

You didn't have credit cards in those days,

you had to take currency with you,

or change currency in each country you went to,

and that's not such a long time ago.

So it involved a lot of planning,

it wasn't just an easy thing to pick up and go.

They had a real sense of adventure to do that.

# Mind how you go

# Though going turns a fresh page for your eyes

# Tread like a cat

# For they're fools to take advantage of the wise

# Who would patronise... #

We've got our space, our home, on a continental site, right?

But we're eating their food, we're seeing their countryside,

we're enjoying their sunshine...!

# ..When I see your face again... #

You've got a lot less traffic to worry about.

But at the end of each day, you come back to your home.

And that's the beauty of it.

I mean, it sounds ridiculous, but to be able to go into that caravan

and make a cup of tea in my teapot, with my own tea,

it just made everything possible.

# Mind how you go

# Though going is your fancy and your right

# Tread like a cat... #

You see how other people live, which is always fascinating.

And not to just go into the big tourist towns,

or the tourist places,

but to go and see what life is really like.

# And I fear I will not know you... #

For some people, these adventurous and ambitious holidays

spent touring Europe in a caravan

were to have a positive and lasting legacy.

# ..When I see your face again... #

I guess exploring, seeing all these fantastic places,

and getting that continental experience, really.

I think that my knowledge of the rest of Europe is much wider

now than a lot of people I meet,

and it's down to those... Just that confidence, I would get up tomorrow

and drive to anywhere in Europe without thinking about it twice,

just cos I've been there,

and it seems like a perfectly natural thing to do.

Getting on a plane would be much more alien, really!

By the 1970s, the face of British caravanning was beginning to change.

-NEWSREADER:

-Each year,

the Caravan and Camping Holiday Show at Earls Court

has been getting bigger.

And the effects are plain to see on every road in Britain,

from spring to autumn.

While the more adventurous caravanners

were off exploring Europe,

many of us were choosing to spend their holidays not only in Britain,

but at the same place every year.

Now sales of static caravans were on the move.

I think the dominant image that's associated with caravans

shifted from being dominated by the touring caravan

to being dominated by the static caravan and the caravan sites.

What's available on a site varies alarmingly,

from almost nothing to just about everything...

I think in the '50s, when you said "caravan",

people thought about touring on the open road.

By the '70s, when you talk about caravan, people are talking about

serried ranks of static caravans that will never move.

A site like this of just over 40 acres

has got on it some 280 static caravans

and just over 280 touring caravans as well.

And as you can see,

you've still got a huge amount of space between those caravans.

I think there develops a very strong middle-class attitude

of snobbery towards static caravans.

I suspect that they're seen in some circles as not proper caravanners,

because they're not touring around, they're not exploring,

they're just recreating the old seaside holiday, in a way,

particularly as the caravan sites develop their own clubhouses

and their own entertainments,

and become like mini resorts, and people just stay put.

An evening in the clubhouse, of which everyone is a member...

And the people who criticise them can't imagine

what the delights might be of a holiday in such a place.

..where the young can shake whatever they have to shake

and the more staid can find their own amusement elsewhere.

So it's a lack of empathy as well, I think.

The club is fortunately placed well away from the caravans.

With caravan parks beginning to resemble vast holiday camps,

the image of caravanning was no longer a romantic one,

of independence and freedom of the open road.

And for those holiday-makers who still wanted to travel abroad,

a cheap, cheerful and off-the-shelf alternative

to the caravan was readily available.

Now, the package holiday was flying high,

and taking British holiday-makers

to sunny Spain in three hours, rather than three days.

I think what you get in the '70s is, with the explosion of package tours

to Spain particularly, but also to France, Italy and whatnot,

for a comparably cheap sum,

people can go and be guaranteed good weather.

They can also go to these resorts and they don't have to eat foreign food,

they don't have to speak to foreigners...!

That's one reason why the caravan declines,

it can't compete in terms of the weather.

I also think in the '70s, there's an element of...

I mean, Britain is not in a good state in the '70s,

these are pretty miserable times,

and I think people just want to get away.

They want to leave the strikes

and the kind of political turmoil and the terrorism

and the kind of constant gloom and soul-searching,

they want to get away from all that and go abroad and forget about it.

With the economic gloom and the rise of the package holiday,

these were hard times for Britain's caravan industry.

And no-one was immune.

Even the company that dominated the British market for over 30 years,

Sam Alper's Caravans International, was in serious difficulties.

Basically, I think we...

The group borrowed too much money.

Because acquisition was mainly by borrowing money,

buying a factory, or buying a brand, a company.

And of course...

..money doesn't come cheap.

And there came a point where the chopper came down.

And that was a chilling thing.

When the receivers walked in.

Pfff... Just before Christmas.

We weren't the only company to get into trouble.

But we were in bigger trouble because we were a bigger company.

And...our nearest UK competitors laughed like hell, you see.

But some of them went down in the end.

The gates to Sam's factory closed for good in December 1982.

It was the end of the line for the company that once produced

more caravans than any other manufacturer in the world.

It was a bad thing not just for CI, but for the industry as a whole,

because people lost confidence.

CI was seen as a major, major force, which it obviously was.

But for it to go crashing down as it did

was basically very bad for the industry as a whole.

And Sam unfortunately couldn't do anything about it,

and was left to walk away

and leave his empire in tatters. Simple as that.

Actually, Sam had a great sense of humour

and he really felt work should be enjoyable.

Everybody respected him very much, whoever worked for him,

he was as happy on the shop floor as he was in the boardroom.

Didn't mind getting his hands dirty.

'He did say to me once actually,

'he probably should have got out earlier.'

But then, when things started going wrong,

he couldn't jump ship. He was there till the last.

You know, I think he felt slightly responsible,

cos there was over-production

and they just could not contract quickly enough.

After the collapse of his business, Sam left the caravan industry

and retreated to his country estate, Chilford Hall in Cambridgeshire.

Over the next 20 years, he put much of his energy

into cultivating his own vineyard,

but died in October 2002, aged 78.

Sam is actually buried in the garden, down there.

And you know, it just seems,

so much of his energies were put into Chilford,

it seems right that he should be buried here.

From his first caravan,

made in 1948, Sam Alper had gone on to create

an international business empire.

But longer-lasting than the business itself

was Sam's impact on the caravan industry as a whole.

I think all...

It was an amazingly friendly industry, the caravan industry.

So even different manufacturers got on very well together.

At the caravan conventions and things,

everybody got on very, very well socially.

And I think with Sam putting the Sprite on the map,

it also helped other caravan manufacturers,

and I think they all felt they owed...

The industry owed a great deal to him.

-PA:

-'The show is now open.'

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.

Thank you all very much for coming along to the opening day

of International Caravan and Motor Home 2008...

Having experienced decline in the 1970s and '80s,

today, caravanning is enjoying a new lease of life.

APPLAUSE

Here at the biggest indoor caravan and motor home show in the UK,

almost 70,000 visitors will come through the doors in just six days,

eager to discover the latest caravans

and their state-of-the-art appliances.

Caravans that are a far cry from those that first took to the road.

Oh, the first one was a box on wheels, with nothing.

This caravan you're in now - and all modern caravans -

double-glazed, insulated, cookers, they're coming with microwaves now,

they've got mains electricity, they've got TV points.

They've got showers, they've got flushing toilets.

They've got everything in them.

And it is a home-from-home, including the kitchen sink.

But for some early enthusiasts,

caravanning today, with all its comforts and conveniences,

has lost some of its magic.

For them, the sense of adventure that caravanning once offered

has been eroded for good.

I think the kind of caravanning that we had and that I enjoy,

I think that's probably had it.

Life is different altogether, it's moved so quickly.

Um... I don't know whether people enjoy the same things.

I've noticed on a caravan site now, you can bet your bottom dollar that,

say 7 o'clock, everyone, instead of being out talking,

they're all in with their own television.

It's a different type altogether, somehow.

But although the nature of caravanning may have changed

over the years,

for some of its British pioneers,

the love affair continues to this day.

Their cherished caravans are much more than homes on wheels.

The thing that makes caravanning so lovely is that it opened my mind

to so many different worlds, and I met a lot of interesting people...

..and it took me to see parts of England that I would never have seen.

It's absolutely heavenly.

I mean, there's nothing to compare with caravanning.

Oh, it's been my salvation, I think.

I'm comfortable, I'm relaxed, I feel safe - which is strange, really.

Um...it's peaceful, it's quiet... I love it.

Obviously!

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