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As they parted, Mabel watched them cross the street. She was delighted for them both and she hoped they would be as happy as she and her Harold had been. In these difficult days, she thought to herself, we all need a little bit of good in our lives. Milly’s mother had never treated her right. Such a shame that poor Mr Charles had died. She sighed. Far too young as well.

What a blessing that he’d given her that annuity. Back then, it had saved her bacon. Even though she had been the only member of staff who had worked for Mrs Shepherd all those months after Mr Charles had died, she was still owed a lot of money – Mrs Shepherd had never paid her a penny.

She turned around and pushed open the shop door.

‘Ah, Mrs Cunningham,’ said the jeweller, coming up to the counter. ‘So glad you’ve come in. About those beads. I think you will be pleasantly surprised. I haven’t made them into a necklace yet because I have something to tell you . . .’

Author’s Note

The stories I write are entirely fictional, but I do use real-life settings and draw on historical facts. In this story, some of my readers will not be slow to recognise that I have unashamedly used parts of a real event, a story I came across some twenty years ago; one which still makes me laugh. It involves one of this country’s greatest showmen, Sir Billy Butlin.

When he died, Billy Butlin was a much-respected man, and to this day his name is still synonymous with holiday camps and family entertainment. But there was a time when the people of Bognor Regis weren’t too happy with him and neither, for that matter, were the police. The blip in his popularity was caused by a ‘missing’ lion called Rex.

In 1931, Billy Butlin acquired some land just a few hundred yards from Bognor Pier, known locally as ‘the cabbage patch’ because it had been used for allotments during World War I. He set about creating Billy Butlin’s Centre of Happiness, with ‘dodgem cars, water speed boats, roundabouts and automatic amusement machines, all brilliantly illuminated with hundreds of coloured electric bulbs’. The crowds flocked in.

The secret of Butlin’s success was that he was never one to rest on his laurels. In 1933 he decided to open a menagerie as well, so he gave instructions for certain animals to be transported from Skegness down to the south coast. These included a brown bear, a panther and an African lion. Billy Butlin made the same journey from Skegness to Bognor but not with the convoy. When he arrived the next day, the whole place was buzzing with rumour.

Following a slight accident at Clymping, a few miles from Bognor, staff noticed three bars from the side of one cage were missing. All the animals were accounted for . . . except the lion.

Butlin’s quick phone call to Skegness proved that because of the damaged cage, the lion had never actually been sent. However, the manager of the Bognor Amusements, Clifford Joste, had already informed the authorities about the missing lion. Not surprisingly, the police immediately made this their top priority. Although he was never a party to deception, Billy Butlin was not slow to see the publicity potential of keeping mum.

When a zealous young reporter called Proctor picked up the story, the News Chronicle had a front-page exclusive. The next day, twenty reporters from Fleet Street arrived in Bognor and light-hearted lion hunts were organised around the Sussex villages.

However, things took a serious turn when John Wensley, a local farmer down on his luck, reported a dead and half-eaten sheep. As soon as Proctor published this story, near panic swept through the area. Terrified parents kept their children indoors and schools closed. Campers and holiday-makers left Bognor in droves, and hoteliers suffered a sharp downturn in takings. And all this at the height of the holiday season.

Billy Butlin realised that the public would only be put at ease if they could see the captured beast for themselves, so he arranged for another lion to be sent from Kent under cover of darkness. When the animal arrived in Bognor it looked bedraggled and was covered in green muck. Butlin told reporters and photographers it had been found in a local ditch. The following day, national newspapers carried pictures of Billy and Rex sitting side by side in one of the dodgem cars on the front pages, and everyone breathed a collective sigh of relief.

The whole thing might have been forgotten except for one thing. The police had spent many hours chasing a non-existent lion and public money had been wasted. As a result, four people were arrested, the reporter Proctor, farmer Wensley, Billy Butlin and Clifford Joste. After a magistrate hearing in October, they were sent for trial at Lewes Crown court.

Back in the day, newspapers reported court cases verbatim, and the 1933 reports of the trial read more like the script of a Whitehall farce. The defendants were accused of conspiring ‘to commit a public mischief . . . and putting the public in fear’ – serious stuff. The court was told of how a policeman on a bicycle was sent to escort sixty girl guides marching from their camp site to the railway station two miles away. Quite what that lone policeman would have done had the lion suddenly appeared out of the undergrowth is a mystery. The national papers carried pictures of a long line of farmers with pitchforks and carrying a fishing net, walking across a field as they searched for the lion, as well as people riding shotgun on the backs of lorries and cars as they roamed the Sussex countryside. There were accounts of a lion eating tomatoes in somebody’s greenhouse but, as it turned out, Rex himself had no teeth at all. Had he been cornered, all the poor lion could have done was gum somebody to death! Even the green muck from the ditch turned out to be distemper, thrown over the animal to make his capture appear authentic.

Eventually, it was proven in court that although the sheep had died, it had been wilfully mutilated by the farmer, and that he and Proctor had colluded together in the hope of making money.

The trial ended with the two men being found guilty of attempting to deceive the public (Wensley was fined £10 and Proctor was fined £30), but Billy Butlin and his manager, Joste, were exonerated and acquitted.

Despite the small setback of a court case, the publicity had the desired effect. Billy Butlin’s popularity grew greater than ever. In the 1960s, he negotiated with Bognor Council to sell the cabbage patch. Using the money as capital, he set up a holiday camp on the thirty-nine acres of an area now known as South Coast World.

In this book, Seebold might have had the same kind of dream as Billy Butlin, but it remains to be seen if he succeeded!

Acknowledgements

With my grateful thanks to all the team at Avon: Raphaella, Katie, Rachel, Maddie, Sarah, Amy, Helen, Ella, Elisha and Kate. I shall miss you dreadfully . . .

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