By Bob Collins

They used to say that you could remember where you were when you heard the news of John Kennedy's assassination. I was too young for that but I know where I was on 30th July 1966 when England won the World Cup, I was on Mersea Island, more particularly at the International Youth Camp, packed into the hall with young people from all over Europe going through the highs, lows of watching England versus West Germany on a black and white television at the far end of the hall.

I was fourteen years old and spending my first month at International camp. The minimum age for the camp was sixteen and youngsters would attend for two weeks at a time, so how come I got to go at fourteen for the whole month? Well, it was easy really, I went with my mum, dad and sister. Dad was Harry Collins a youth worker at Rainsford Youth Centre and he went as part of his duties. Mum, Joyce was a teacher and she came along and ran the tuck shop and my sister and I came too. I was tall for my age and easily passed for sixteen so I blended in well while my younger sister spent more time with her mum.

For the first year or two the camp was arranged into Boys' Lines and Girls' Lines and after dark the space in-between was patrolled by staff. In later years the tents were arranged in villages and each village would go off on a trip to another part of the country for a few days. I was lucky enough to go to Maldon and board a Thames Barge for a trip around the Essex coastline. There were three barges, Kitty, Dawn and Marjorie and for a boy who was keen on the sea I couldn't have asked for anything better. The next time I went to Newport in the West Midlands and the only things I can remember about that visit is climbing up the Wrekin and going to see a play at Stratford Upon Avon.

There were other activities that you could do on site, football, volleyball and the craft tent spring to mind and each week you would spend a day on duty helping run the camp. When I wasn't cleaning the toilets I seemed to get the dreaded Kitchen Wash. With some duties, like the dining hall or toilet cleaning you could do your work and the rest of the day was your own. With Kitchen Wash you spent all day in the kitchen from breakfast until well after the evening meal when you were washing up the enormous cooking pots and trays which inevitably had burnt food on them. When you had finished that there were always potatoes to peel! Still, it was only for one day then you had freedom and if you didn't feel like doing much you didn't have to, after all there were always new people to meet and some of them were girls!

I am not going to give a day to day account of camp life but will recount some of my memories over these formative years of my youth in the Sixties and into the Seventies when I came back as a driver handyman during my college vacation. One of the things that I did for the first time and which has stayed with me for all of my life is sailing. At first we sailed off the beach so could go anytime the tide was in but in later years you had to go in a minibus to Bradwell Sailing Centre and that took the best part of a day so I didn't go so much. When we had the boats at Mersea I can remember sailing them back to Bradwell at the end of Camp on a damp and windy day, quite a journey!

There was the year that it rained, and rained and rained. I volunteered to go to a timber yard to help collect wood to make duckboards so we could get around. I was standing on a pile of wood with several other people throwing pieces of timber into a lorry where Bob MacDonald, the camp warden at the time, was arranging them neatly. We must have lost our rhythm as I threw this decent sized piece of timber just as Bob was reaching out for a different piece and it hit him on the back of the hand and opened it up. I believe that he had to go to hospital to have stitches and although he didn't blame me I did feel guilty.

Another year when the weather was better I built a kite from bamboo canes and paper, it was big, about 6ft or 2 metres tall and to my surprise it flew beautifully. The wind was steady and the kite just hung there in the sky. After a while I got bored with holding it and found a tent peg, banged it into the ground and tied the kite to it. To my amazement it was still up the next morning and it stayed aloft until the wind dropped.

I got a job keeping Mr Driscoll's hut clean and tidy and polishing his shoes etc. He was the Bank Manager and lived in a hut next to the bank. He paid very generously and it was a standing joke in my family that I would come back from camp with more money than I went with!

I also helped Tony Butcher in the darkroom. Photography was a hobby of mine and Tony was the official camp photographer and as I knew my way around a darkroom I was a useful assistant. I can't remember now but some of my photographs may have been developed and printed there.

As I got older, trips to the pub became attractive. Staff went by car to the Dog and Pheasant in East Mersea while campers walked along the beach to the Two Tides, now long gone. There I learnt to drink fizzy beer and Bacardi and Coke! Getting to the Fox was harder unless you had a car but I can remember sitting in there with a group of friends watching a Norwegian girl, Sunny, drinking scrumpy out of a keg and assuring everyone that they had apple juice at home. She soon found out that our Scrumpy wasn't quite the same thing! It may have been the same evening when a couple of police officers came taking a good look at the customers. I kept my head down as I was only sixteen but they didn't say anything to me, being tall for my age came in useful sometimes!

Then there were camp concerts with a variety of performers, one of my favourites was Gerry Keyes, a youth worker from Braintree and a friend of my dad's who mimed actions to a tape of martial music interspersed with different sound effects, he always got a laugh! Tony Butcher was the camp electrician and I helped him with the stage lighting, a skill which came in useful in my later years.

Looking back at the Camp Programmes I see that there were a number of organised visits to local places of interest. I didn't go on these as I either had been already or I thought that I could do them any time. I do remember hitch hiking to Colchester on a number of occasions and having to walk back to the camp from the Strood more than once!

Other things that I can remember. The Swedish boys who brought a tandem with them and let me have a go. Quite tricky but I soon got the hang of it.

A girl pointing to Shredded Wheat at breakfast time and asking. "Does it come from the sea?"

Realising that five years spent learning French at school was not wasted as I could actually talk to French people! Up until then it had just been learning how to conjugate verbs with lots of rote learning and I didn't do very well. If only we had been able to speak it my exam results may have been quite different!

Dances in the hall often with the local band "Coltrane Union."

Picking Mushrooms very early in the morning with Eddie Yarnell and frying them in the kitchen before anyone was about, delicious!

The Tilley lamps and the shed where they were all stored.

My Dad making the local paper when "Hippies Came To Colchester." He got a group together and they all dressed up in Hippy gear and went to Colchester giving out flowers to people and wishing them "Peace and Love, man." It created quite a stir! Another time his village celebrated Christmas in August, the Langenhoe Lion was the venue for that one.

I remember a guy called Vaclav who came in 1968, the year of the Prague Spring. On his way home to Czechoslovakia he walked away from his group on Liverpool Station and came to stay with us before claiming political asylum from the communist regime at home.

Most of all I remember the friendships we made. Many of them just for two weeks at the camp, some lasted longer. I did go and stay with a Dutch girl in 1970 when I was in Holland but our friendship didn't last. I don't think that her father approved of me, she told me that he didn't like my blue jeans.

I remember Christopher Swain, another English lad who I stayed in touch with for a while. We went to Norway in 1969 instead of camping as I was working at that time. We drove in his minivan from the Hook of Holland through Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Norway, finding camp sites on the way and coming back to Harwich from Kristainsand. I came back to camp the following year as I had given up work and was waiting for the college term to start.

My last year at International Camp was 1973 when I was working as a driver/handyman during my college vacation. I was busy during the day but had plenty of time to socialise in the evenings and at the weekend. By the following year I was married and working as a teacher and so my time at International Camp was at an end although not quite my time at the site. I spent a couple of weeks as a staff member with a camp for younger children and a bit later my own daughter went to a camp there, possibly for music and drama. In more recent years I took a group from my school for a week and in true Mersea fashion it rained solidly for three days and led to one of the pupils exclaiming, "Sir, there's a duck in my tent!"

I have seen the camp site grow and develop over the years in order to meet the demands of the modern world but in my heart it still remains, locked in time, as the International Camp that I remember so fondly.

See also
Bob's Photos

Read More
International Youth Camp - Dick Brennan