The Black Country company of Joseph Webb & Co started in the first world war as a general construction company. They later progressed into house building and by 1960 they’d built over 10,000 homes.
In the late-1950s the son of the founder, also known as Joseph Webb, had taken his caravan down to Raymond Park in New Quay (Wales) and enjoyed it so much that he ended up buying the whole site. Facilities were improved, new roads were laid and new static caravans were installed. Suddenly they were in the holiday park business and by 1962 the park had 475 permanent caravans. The Holimarine name was later introduced.
In 1963 Webb built a brand new £750,000 self-catering holiday vilage at Burnham on Sea which contained a mix of caravans, brick villas and flats. Facilities included a boating lake, fishing lake and a large outdoor swimming pool. Webb was quoted as saying that he built a modern holiday park that he would like to visit “I don’t want to be paraded or organised or persuaded to join in”.
In 1972 Webb bought the rundown Majorca holiday park in Hopton (previously known as the Constitutional Holiday Camp) along with the adjacent Speedwell caravan site and rebuilt and redeveloped both to create a huge new park known as Holimarine Hopton.
In 1973 they acquired the closed Rogerson Hall holiday camp in Corton and extensively rebuilt it with new caravans and a swimming pool. It reopened as Holimarine Corton in 1976.
In 1977 Webb acquired two more caravan parks in New Quay from Don Everall. Traethgwyn was located next door to their own park whilst the smaller Cei Bach was located on the other side of town. The two big New Quay parks continued to be run separately.
Over the next two years they also bought some smaller caravans parks in Dawlish, Looe, Brixham, Tenby and Paignton. These smaller parks didn’t carry the Holimarine name and were marketed under their Parkland Holidays brand. In 1980 they had expanded into the South of France opening two luxury resorts on the Cote D’Azur. In 1987 the Hopton park was sold to Bourne Leisure.
In 1989 Joseph Webb sold their entire company to the Mowat Group for £18 million which included all their remaining holiday parks. Alen Warner, previously the managing director of Warners holiday camps, was headhunted out of retirement to run Holimarine. The following year they purchased the Landscove Holiday Park in Brixham in for £2.8 million and in February 1992 they acquired the Beacholme Holiday Park in Cleethorpes.
Despite the parks running at a profit the Mowat Group collapsed into receivership in August 1992 after losses of £50 million in their property portfolio. All the Holimarine camps were put up for sale. Beacholme was sold to Deenside Leisure of Middlesex. Five parks (Burnham, Brixham, Teignmouth, Looe and Corton) were acquired by Wilson Leisure who owned the Lakeside Holiday Park in Burnham, They also bought the Holimarine name and all these parks reopened as normal in 1993. Other camps were sold off piecemeal.
Over the next couple of years all the Wilson leisure camps were resold again and the Holimarine name disappeared. Bourne Leisure bought the Burnham site along with the 3 parks in New Quay – the two big parks were merged together to form one huge site known simply as New Quay. The small Cei Bach site continued in operationl with a minibus connecting it to the main park.
I’m hoping to write individual blog posts on the Constitutional and Rogerson Hall camps in the near future where I’ll dive into more of their history before Holimarine took over.
