activities in the way he had planned. Most kept to themselves, and others looked bored. He asked Norman Bradford (who was engaged as an engineer constructing the camp) to take on the duty of entertaining the guests, which he did with a series of ice breakers and jokes. By the end of the night the camp was buzzing and the Butlin's atmosphere was born. From that point on, entertainment was the heart of Butlins, and Bradford became the first of Butlin's Redcoats. The same night Butlin decided that for his camp to work he would require many more people to carry out the same job as Bradford, and the role of Redcoat was conceived. In his autobiography, Butlin refers to Clacton as his second camp; In 1937, architect Harold Ridley Hooper, who had drawn the plans for the camp at Skegness, created plans on behalf of Butlin's Ltd., for a second camp at Dovercourt, in Essex. In the winter of 1938, the camp at Dovercourt was requisitioned by the government for housing children evacuated from Germany by the Kindertransport programme. Writers and speakers discussing that programme, such as Anthony Grenville and Ela Kaczmarska, claim that the camp had been constructed by Butlin and operated as a Butlin's camp for the 1937–1938 season, Kaczmarska also suggests that it had closed in the summer of 1938, the same time the Clacton camp opened. Recollections of the refugees suggest that by December 1938 the camp was being run by Harry Warner, whose company Butlin was on the board of. At around the same time Butlin's advertised Dovercourt as "associated with Butlin's" and into the early 1940s Butlin was putting on rail packages with the London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) to the Dovercourt camp. Butlin proposed a new holiday camp at Clacton-on-Sea in Essex in 1936. Both the council and the local association of hotels opposed the idea, as did boarding house keepers. To persuade them, Butlin took the members of the council to Skegness to see how the people there appreciated their holiday camp. The councillors were soon won over when they learnt that the local traders in Skegness had seen an initial dip in custom after its construction followed by a rise as campers had visited the town and seasonal workers had come to spend their pay. Once approved by the council, construction began and the camp opened in 1938. On