In the 1970s, British holiday-makers began to be lured abroad, abandoning the bucket-and-spade beach camps of Cornwall for the sultry Mediterranean. Sixties airliners such as the Boeing 707 and the Douglas DC-8 had ushered in the jet age, and Luton and Gatwick airports became hubs for low-cost options such as Monarch, Dan-Air, and Britannia. The travel-package operators Thomas Cook, Horizon, and Instasun followed suit. “It was cowboy country,” Harry Goodman, once the head of Instasun, would recall decades later, “like the beginning of the gold rush.”
Indeed, it was a revolution. Suddenly, an all-inclusive fortnight beach getaway to Continental Europe could go for as little as $96 (half an average month’s salary), which was less than the cost of a standard return flight. Flying, exotic food, and foreigners were daunting, yes, but these three hurdles were mitigated by the presence of fellow compatriots.
The British photographer Trevor Clark witnessed the shift. He’d worked with the R.A.F. National Service in the 1950s, then traveled the globe taking pictures of vacationers on luxury cruise liners. In 1968, he closed his Soho studio, in London, packed his equipment, and moved to the quaint fishing town of Portals Nous, just south of Palma, in Majorca, to capture the mad influx of foreigners on holiday.
Spain was on the rise. The mid-60s marked the beginning of Francisco Franco’s “Spain is different!” campaign, an attempt to attract foreign investment after the ravages of W.W. II. Flamenco, sangria, and bullfighting were irresistible draws. As Deputy Prime Minister Alfonso Guerra would later note: “The first tourists to arrive in bikinis did more for the transition [to democracy] than political speeches.”
Large hotels were constructed at lightning speed in Magaluf, Palma Nova, and Santa Ponsa, and by 1972, a third of all British tourists were opting for the southern Spanish coast over traditional domestic destinations. Meanwhile, Clark captured the changes in color Ektachrome film—shooting Brits on beaches and in the new hotels, smoking their duty-free cigarettes and playing endless games of gin rummy.
Stumbling upon these archives in the 1990s, Trevor’s son, Jake Clark, found himself lured in by the tanned tourists and brash color palette. Following his father’s death, in 2018, he began collecting the images into a book, The Package Holiday, which is out now. It’s a fascinating inside look at a largely forgotten time in travel history. —Elena Clavarino
Elena Clavarino is a Senior Editor at AIR MAIL