The British Abroad
Booze-soaked childhood holidays motivate a new photobook about young Brits’ summer-long debauchery
I first went abroad in 1986. The destination was Magaluf, a popular resort for package holidaymakers on the Spanish isle of Majorca.
Aged 14 and already a seasoned beer drinker, my parents decided it was okay if I had an alcoholic spirit. I chose white rum. Bacardi was cheaper than coke — my mixer of choice — and the measures reflected that. The bars delivered an unavoidable and hard to refuse Buy 1, Get 2 Free offer.
Mum, dad, my older sister Jennifer and I clattered our twelve glasses onto an uneven metal table outside, settled in and slowly sucked back the potent sugary blend through bendy straws. We were sat in the Benny Hill party pub, but we could’ve as easily been in any of the drinks factories located along the seafront. The Green Parrot Bollocks bar was a few doors down, no doubt offering the same drinks deals. We sat, supped, and watched the mayhem gather.
In the morning, my dad asked if I was okay. I told him I was fine. He asked If I remembered being woken from the bath tub in our hotel room on several occasions during the night. I told him I did not and suggested we go and fill our bellies with a full English breakfast.
My dad pulled on his dark blue swimming trunks with light blue trim; I pulled on my light blue swimming trunks with dark blue trim; we both pulled up a chair at our beach bar of choice and washed the omnipresent English export down with a couple of beers.
The remainder of the holiday was spent bouncing down newly-built water slides on bleak mountainsides. That the slides seemed to offer serious injury as likely as they did fun did not deter any holidaymakers. We watched fixed-grin dolphins perform predictable tricks with rings and balls. And we bobbed around in the sea with my frequently topless (according to the poorly framed and focused film photographs that remain in the album) mum and sister.
I did not drink any more Bacardi.
Older, No Wiser
The second time I went abroad was in 1989. The destination was Magaluf, a popular resort for package holidaymakers on the Spanish isle of Majorca.
My family had been replaced with friends Marc, Jason and Stuart.
At our hotel, boys from the northern British town of Bury hurled carrier bags containing their bottom deposits from their balcony onto unsuspecting fun seekers staggering along in the streets below.
Two girls from Newcastle, in an adjacent bedroom, warned us not to leave our towels to dry on the balcony as “the sun turns them yellow” it wasn’t the sun that turned them yellow — it was more likely the body deposits cascading down from the Bury boys.
During the day, we carried our money around in plastic tubes hung from string around our necks; during the night, we left the plastic tubes that carried our daily allowance in the back of taxis or at the bar. On our second morning, Jason woke up stuck to his hotel bed sheets, a layer of skin the length of his now red raw torso had been removed; he had no memory of how it happened. A few days later, as we passed a deep roadworks excavation, he remembered falling drunk into it. Peering down, we thought we could see one if his flip-flops among the rubble at the bottom.
The remainder of the holiday was spent unsuccessfully trying to endorse the reputation of the town dubbed, SHAGALUF!
Between our failed attempts to get laid, we bought imitation Lacoste polo shirts, sweatbands and tracksuits. We spent a lot of time in our new shirts at the dance club BCM. In order to exit BCM, you had to pay for all the drinks on your drinks-tally card. More than half the time, we lost the cards. It never seemed like a good system for a club selling booze to boozy types.
I did not drink Bacardi.
Always Look On The Bright Side
The remainder of my teenage years were spent being fired from every “proper” job I had. Photography, which had so far only been a hobby, was all that remained. I decided to take it seriously as a career.
Incredibly, my harrowing experiences in Magaluf hadn’t laid complete waste to my desire to travel. For me, photography was an excuse to see the world. If you can make people laugh, think, and travel the world, that’s not a bad way to live?
During my subsequent career as a photojournalist, I’ve had the privilege to work on assignment in around sixty different countries across the planet. However, it’s the British at whom I consistently point my lens. For better and for worse, Britain is my home and its people the ones I want to understand most. I’ve found my passion.
The British Abroad, the photobook for which I’m currently passing round the donation tin, is in fact my third book about the quirks and lamentable behavior of the Queen’s subjects.
My first book published on the British, England Uncensored (Emphas.is 2012), is a laugh-out-loud romp through the often badly behaved homeland. I documented everything — British food, fashion, the young and the old, race and ethnicity, the way we love, and the weather.
Next followed A&E: Alcohol & England (Bluecoat Press, 2014), a reportage on the national relationship with its favorite legal high. I shot it during the first decade of the new millenium, a time when the British were arguably drinking younger, longer, faster and more cheaply than ever before.
Exporting Bad Habits and Violence
It’s not just in Britain where drunken behavior is a concern. British binge drinking and the resulting public order problems are reported as increasingly common in European holiday resorts.
The statistics are alarming. Arrests of British citizens in Spain have increased by a third with the majority related to alcohol consumption.
A British government report flagged Greece as the most dangerous place in the world for British women. In a single year, British women made more than 40 allegations of rape. The rapists were, in most cases, British men who’d been drinking. Authorities think three-quarters of rapes go unreported.
Recently, the U.K. Foreign Office has distributed thousands of posters and beer mats as part of an anti-rape campaign in Greek holiday resorts.
My Return
In 2013, I returned to Magaluf, Majorca, for a third time. It’ll probably be the last, too. I elected to photograph in Magaluf as it is widely considered one of Europe’s “best” beach party destinations. That’s a somewhat ignoble distinction. I have a top five. San Antonio, Ibiza; Sunny beach, Bulgaria, Ayia Napa, Cyprus; and Porec, Croatia complete the quintet. I went to them all.
Magaluf is the concluding destination for a third book on British identity The British Abroad. I documented the mostly merry, and sometimes tragic, excesses of young, thrusting Brits abroad.
Clueless? Sun-hungry? Still learning? You decide. Eccentric Brits are a ceaseless source of wonder and tale. If my telling of the story has to end somewhere it might as well be on the beaches of Europe. Every year, we swarm to them to throw off our inhibitions and to throw off the clothes with which we wrap weathered-battered bodies the rest of the year.
The British Abroad book completes a personal and professional narrative. Magaluf might be a thousand miles from home but, rightly or wrongly, it doesn’t feel so. The cheap drinks, English reps, fish ‘n’ chips and pubs named “The Red Lion” and “The George & Dragon” make it feel like Britain abroad.
The British Abroad (Bluecoat Press) can now be pre-ordered on Kickstarter and will be shipped worldwide in summer 2015.
Peter Dench is represented at Getty Images Reportage.
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