Hi-de-hide, Campers! Morecambe Pontins During Nuclear War

Today’s fun-filled itinerary is as follows:

10.00am, Children’s Scavenger Hunt: Join us on the irradiated beach as we dig for scraps of food.

12.00pm, Miss Post-Nuclear Great Britain Pageant: Flaunt your long legs, tiny waist and open wounds. Who will live long enough to win?

18.00pm, Gala Dinner in the Ballroom: Get your glad rags and best bandages on to enjoy a feast of boiled rats and disease-ridden water. Disco follows, 20.00pm until the radiation sickness gets too much to bear.

Sounds fun, doesn’t it?

Unfortunately, bookings for this kind of holiday closed at the end of the Cold War, when Lancashire County Council scrapped their plans to pack people fleeing nuclear war off to Pontin’s in Morecambe for a week away to die for.

This bizarre scheme came about as a result of early eighties government legislation, which compelled every council in Britain to produce emergency nuclear civil defence plans. High amongst the problems to be tackled by the local war planners was where to put the estimated ‘three quarter of a million refugees’ who were estimated to surge up the M6 in a desperate bid to flee presumed industrial targets, such as Manchester. According to the 1982 exposé, Target North West, ‘local authorities [were being] asked to prepare emergency accommodation in schools, church halls, etc., to give “transients” – people away from home or work – somewhere to go.’

Luckily for those plotting – sorry, planning – for the Morecambe area, a myriad of pre-prepared refugee camps stood ready and waiting for the coming of the apocalypse: hotels, holiday parks and campsites, all conveniently decked out with industrial kitchens, accommodation and tennis courts… It’s not too difficult to imagine local councillors creating a mock-up of Doctor Strangelove’s war room in Lancaster Town Hall, pouring over holiday brochures and debating where to go for their jollies after the Bomb dropped. One option clearly stood above the rest: Target North West revealed that ‘Pontin’s holiday camp in Heysham has been suggested as Lancaster’s refugee centre.’

So, what amenities could ‘transients’ expect to find at Pontin’s when they were herded through the gates by the authorities? Let’s start by looking at an advertisement printed in The Liverpool Echo on February 23rd, 1979. Here, the ubiquitous nuclear family – mum, dad and two kiddies – grin ecstatically at the prospect of a stay in one of nine hundred chalets on a sixty acre site. These chalets were ‘comfortable, with private bath, fitted carpets and heaters’; all very nice at the best of times, but I wouldn’t hold out much hope for the structural integrity of a flimsy prefab chalet when faced with the shockwave of a one megaton bomb…

Supposing your allocated chalet did remain standing, however, it’s certain that your accommodation wouldn’t have been ‘comfortable’. The camp’s maximum capacity was three thousand guests, equating roughly to four people per chalet. Bear this figure in mind when you of consider that a Department of Health and Social Security circular from the early eighties warned that, ‘after a nuclear attack […] hundreds of thousands of people [would be] living in grossly overcrowded and often temporary accommodation, in unsanitary conditions worse than those found in the poorest and most overcrowded areas of the underdeveloped countries’. If 20,000 refugees had surged into Pontin’s, twenty people would have to be crammed into a tiny chalet designed to house four. Each of these people are suffering intense radiation sickness. Vomit and blood are everywhere. Better call housekeeping.

Luckily for the injured, the nearby ballroom and theatre complex would have stood a better chance of remaining standing after the Bomb had dropped. Post-attack campers needn’t have looked forward to ‘dancing to super bands, discos [and] cabarets’ here, however. As Julie McDowall confirms in her book Attack Warning Red, ‘a makeshift hospital could be hurriedly set up in a ballroom’, as, ‘cleared of furniture and decoration, and with a big dancefloor, they would offer plenty of space to accommodate the sick and injured’. With a capacity for 2000 peacetime partygoers, Pontin’s ballroom could have transitioned from Agadoo to A&E with lightening speed, it’s medical supplies no doubt bolstered by a few packets of Elastoplast and tubes of Germolene sourced from the camp first aid room.

Sadly, all holidays must come to an end, and after a brief – very brief – stay at the camp, it would be time for the transients to return to the normal world; the normal world being a barren wasteland, thick with radioactive fallout dust and strewn with corpses. Despite being officially dubbed ‘rest centres’ by the government, there was to be nothing thing restful about the camps and their makeshift hospitals. Official advice issued to Civil Defence groups argued that if refugees remained in the centres too long, ‘it would be bad for morale, is trying on the temper and nerves and makes family life strained’. Anyone who’s ever endured a holiday holed up in a chalet with the extended family while rain batters the windows will fully understand this reasoning. Swap that rain for a raging nuclear winter and you could expect things get a lot more tetchy.

Occupants would have to be careful to ensure their shock-strained nerves didn’t become too frayed, however. Violence, theft and looting simply wouldn’t be allowed under holiday camp rules. Remember those tennis courts I mentioned earlier? War plans drawn up during the eighties described the need for ‘the detention and restriction of movement of subversive persons’, and frequently highlighted the ideal suitability of sport sites as ‘holding pens’ for criminals (Target North West). For a chilling example of how a tennis court could become a blood-filled chain-link cage, watch Threads. (Quick note: don’t expect a good night’s sleep afterwards).

And so, after a week of fun-filled high jinks and frivolity, the holiday is at an end. Our grinning nuclear family from the Pontin’s advert have either been incarcerated in a tennis court, are slowly dying an agonising death on a dancefloor, or – mercifully, some might argue – are dead.

Oh, and while we’re on the subject of that family, haven’t I seen them somewhere before?

By Rebecca Shaw

Sources

The Liverpool Echo, February 23rd 1979 (Sourced on British Newspaper Archives)

Target North West, Robert Poole & Steve Wright. 1982.

Attack Warning Red: How Britain Prepared for Nuclear War, Julie McDowall, 2022

Protect and Survive, HM Government, 1980