HOW THINGS HAVE CHANGED 70 YEARS LATE

Willerby is looking forward to celebrating a landmark event in its long history.
Next year it will be 70 years since an enterprising Hull businessman by the name of Walter Allen incorporated a company by the name of Willerby Caravans.
Nothing happened for the next two years and given what was going on in the world in 1944, that isn’t, perhaps, surprising. But in 1946 production started and within six months Willerby had built almost 800 caravans.
Admittedly they were a far cry from the sleek, sophisticated park and holiday homes of today. These forties forerunners of the current, state-of-the-art New Hampshire, Cameo and Oyster Bay featured – wait for it – canvas walls and roofs on a steel frame.
Crude they may have been by today’s high standards but at the time they themselves were state-of-the-art. And they marked the birth of the mass-produced caravan which, over the next seven decades, was to take the leisure and park-home world by storm.
Highlights included:
Their ’22 Home’, the first true holiday caravan. Built on a steel chassis, it featured hardboard walls and an impregnated stretched-canvas roof offering great improvements on weather proofing compared with earlier models.
The Vista, launched in the mid 1950s. Featuring a glass-reinforced plastic body, it was the first all-plastic touring model.
The filming of Peter O’Toole’s Lawrence of Arabia. A dozen Willerby caravans were used for filming the epic in Jordan in 1962.
Nineties innovation. Domestic-quality central heating, high-performance insulation, uPVC double glazing and pitched roofs all became standard features.
Seven decades on from when it came into existence, Willerby has been transformed – just like the world in which it operates. Both are a far cry from those gloomy wartime days of the 1940s. 
For more information see www.willerby.com

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