2006.05.09 The Guardian
Yesterday the new millionaire Peter Englert was wearing a short-sleeved blue shirt, striped tie, dark blue trousers, socks, and sandals. He spotted the question before it was put, sighed, and proferred a plastic ballpoint pen.
Mr Englert has made his fortune out of other people casting aside their inhibitions and their clothes. At the weekend he wrapped up a £1.8m deal to sell his company Peng Travel, which specialises in sending British naturists to resorts where they can sleep, swim, eat, dance, cook and play volleyball - his brochure comes with the reassurance all the resorts offer volleyball facilities - without the encumbrance of clothes.
"Every time I do a commercial show, a holiday trade fair at Earls Court or wherever, somebody comes up to me and says, 'Shouldn't you be in uniform?' So I give them a pen and say, 'Congratulations, madam,' - it usually is a lady - 'you have won the booby prize, you are the first one to say that to me today.' I gather up the free pens first thing in the morning when other stalls are giving them away."
The traditional image of British naturist holidays is a grim mixture of boarding school and Carry On films. Mr Englert's company has flourished offering instead a brochure as glossy as any conventional firm, and holiday resorts from Croatia to Mexico. Most have wholesome photographs - many taken by himself - of evenly tanned men and women lounging in the sun, or cautiously prodding at barbecues. "Please don't make the joke about sausages," Mr Englert, who originally trained as a chef and has heard that one too, begged.
Only on page 52, a description of the Desire Resort and Spa in Mexico, does a hint of any other naked activity arise. "The house rules are relaxed but do not permit overt sexual activity in public areas. More private 'lifestyle' areas are the spectacular Jacuzzi Lounge and the playroom adjoining the disco bar."
Berlin-born
Mr Englert was born 70 years ago in Berlin, brought up in a conventionally clothed, highly academic family, and first decided that special clothes for swimming were perverse when he got sciatica as a schoolboy, from sitting in wet togs on a cold marble bench after lessons. His first glimpse of a better approach was a school camping holiday to a small island in the North Sea, where everyone bathed naked. He continued to shed clothes "in the right time in the right place - certainly not in Earl's Court on a cold January morning", but after an unhappy brush with a university business studies course, worked for several traditional travel companies, in Germany and then in London.
"I was trying to think what I could do for myself, when I hadn't two pennies to rub together," he said, "and I suddenly thought this would be a niche in the market. I saw a brochure from a German company which was sending 160,000 naturists on holidays every year, and I realised nobody was doing it here."
In his first year, keeping on the day job and running the new company from his spare bedroom, he sent 28 people to Yugoslavia. The following year he doubled his trade, and sent 56 people to Yugoslavia. "I had no marketing costs. I just sent the brochure to the secretaries of all the naturist groups, and I only advertised in the two naturist magazines. It was a very simple operation, but it worked very well."
His company has flourished by ignoring the factions within the naturist movement, and selling to anyone who wanted to go on holidays and wear no clothes. There is agreement on little in the movement, even on what to call themselves - naturist, nudist, sky clad, free, social nudity, clothes optional - while referring to the clothed as "textiles" is regarded as acceptable by some, offensive by others.
The first known naturist club, part of a philosophical belief in the moral values of fresh air and physical exercise, opened in Germany in 1903. Clubs blossomed across Germany and Scandinavia, but Britain had to wait until 1924, when a club was founded in Essex. Despite the unpromising climate, and merciless teasing, the British movement spread rapidly, up to a claimed 100,000 members at its peak in the 1960s. But if British naturism ever was a collection of happy campers, singing around the bonfire and slapping at midge bites, those days seem past. There have been reports of drastically falling membership, and internal feuds.
The website of British Naturism - formed in 1964 when the British Sunbathing Society and the British Federation of Sun Clubs merged, and still claiming 16,000 members and 130 clubs - carries a strikingly pugnacious statement from its new treasurer, Richard Daniels (complete with clothed picture) which will do nothing to dispel the rumours. "Constant carping on the internet and in other publications does not advance our cause, it only helps to destroy us. How can we as an organisation attract members if we are not a happy welcoming group of people?"
"Committees," sighed Mr Englert, who has met every naturist committee in the country. "Committees are made up of people who have time to be on committees. They like rules. You can wear clothes on your lower half and not on your top and that's all right, but clothes on your top half and not on your bottom is not acceptable.
Blacklist
"Or they will only take family groups or couples, they won't take single people. We ignore all that."
He admits that they have built up "a sizeable blacklist" of one-time customers now barred, but insists drunken noisiness, or damage such as smashed patio doors, is a far more common reason than "weirdo behaviour". Even the "weirdo men" - weirdo women are apparently virtually unknown - are usually guilty of no worse than taking sneaky photographs, or lurking behind trees to ogle passing women.
Yesterday staff including his daughter Heidi, at the modest office in a 1930s parade on the outskirts of Romford, east London, sandwiched between an old-fashioned barber shop and a small post office, reassured a stream of callers that nothing will change. Mr Englert is being retained for a year as a full-time consultant, and after that is cautiously considering the possibility of partial retirement, at the age of 71. Buried in the small print of the 126 pages of his contract with Travelzest, the company which has bought up Peng Travel, he discovered that his new status entitles him to 20 days of paid leave a year.
"Can you imagine that?" he said incredulously. "I've never had such a thing - 20 days! I haven't taken 20 days' leave in a year in my entire working life!"
