Nostalgic film of Prestatyn Holiday Camp in about 1965

The 8mm home movie shown in this post shows holiday makers at the Prestatyn Holiday Camp and also has a short sequence at the Snowdonia mountain railway. I’m not sure of the exact date of this film because there is no box or other way of confirming it, so I’ve taken an estimate based on the clothes the people are wearing, and the cars which appear later in the film.

The film was shot on a reel of Ferrania, Standard 8 film and was digitised using my standard telecine process.

The Prestatyn holiday camp was apparently opened in 1939. This link has a bit of information about it and mentions the Prestatyn Clipper, which appears during the first few seconds of the film.

Prestatyn Holiday Camp

The film starts at the swimming pool in the holiday camp with what appears to be a female and then male competition of some kind. I’m not sure what was going on, but there is first a line up of women and after a brief ceremony, where we see Neptune crowning a winner, there is a similar line up of men. In both cases the men and women involved are carrying cards with numbers on – possibly this was a beauty contest? In 1965 that sort of thing would have been acceptable and expected I guess.

One difference is that the winning man seems to have been dumped into the pool rather than being crowned.

Following on from the competition there seems to be a demonstration of diving from the high diving board along with some acrobatics and diving into the pool.

After the diving the action switches to the Snowdonia Mountain Railway and we see Clogwyn Station and then scenes looking out the the railway as it climbs up Snowden. Once the rail car arrives at the Railway station we see some typical 1960s cars parked in the car park((These cars are how I judged the age of the film. If you thing that is wrong please let me know in the comments )) and then the final few minutes of the film are on the beach and some shots of the main part of the holiday camp.

By the end of the film there is some serious dirt built up on the right hand side of the picture but I’m pretty sure that was in the camera during filming rather than on the scanner during scanning.