The surprising European island where the package holiday started 75 years ago today

If you'd looked up to the skies over London 75 years ago today, you might have caught a glimpse of a belching, humming, rattling Dakota DC-3 chugging with intent through the thin, spring clouds. It wouldn't have caused much interest at the time. The Second World War had been over for barely five years and, for most Londoners, life was an austere one; dominated by bomb sites and ration coupons.

Yet the plane that was in the early stages of a six-hour flight to the Mediterranean wasn't on a governmental or militarily assigned mission. On board were 11 students and teachers. They were the unwitting pioneers of an industry that's now as British as tea pots and The Archers. Though, ironically, it was exactly these things that these travellers were trying, at least temporarily, to get away from.

Taking to the skies that morning were the very first British holidaymakers on a package break. With exceptional irony, given the domestic situation in his homeland, this burst of air-borne freedom was all the brainchild of a Russian émigré, Vladimir Raitz.

1950 was the first year that the number of British people taking their summer holidays overseas passed the one million mark. Yet this still accounted for a miniscule fraction of the population. While tour operators such as Thomas Cook had been in business since 1841 and the Polytechnic Touring Association of London organized a holiday to Basel, Switzerland, in 1932 (considered to be the first charter flight), holidays, as they were then seldom called, were still almost entirely the preserve of the upper classes.

It was Raitz who first had the idea of shuttling planes to and from a specific destination several times a week during the summer months and offeringcustomers the opportunity to book both flights and accommodation in one payment.

The businessman's early life was exceptionally turbulent. Fleeing Russia with his mother at the age of just five, his family's Jewish faith was anathema to the raging anti-Semitism (not to mention the show trials, insensateviolence and propaganda) that was warping Stalin's Soviet Union into a murderous dystopia.

A move to Berlin, then Warsaw offered no safety and, as the Nazi party commenced the beginnings of what would become the Holocaust, Raitz escaped to London in 1936, using his fluency in five languages to work as a translator during the war for the news agency Reuters.

The six-hour flight that the first package holiday tourists embarked upon on May 20, 1950, was bound for Corsica, an island that Raitz had visited the previous summer, later professing amazement that it was already in the early stages of becoming a holiday playground for White Russians like himself, complete with water polo club and performing Cossack dancing troupes.

But it had taken Raitz an age to get to the island. He'd been on the move for 48 hours, including trains across France and a six-hour ferry journey.

The northern fishingvillage of Calvi was where he finally ended up, and Raitz believed that Brits would love to escape here too. But the conditions on his first package holiday in 1950 would have resulted in a tsunami of refund demands by today's holidaymakers.

Army surplus tents provided the accommodation, situated within dashing distance of the latrines if you'd glugged too much Corsican red. The "bar area" was an al fresco affair with a table made out ofbamboo canes.

There were "reps" at the camp too to make sure everyone enjoyed themselves - though not the future Tory MP and diarist Alan Clark, who Raitz turned down for a job at the camp. Considering that Raitz had rented a Fleet Street office for his new firm, Horizon Holidays (the first travel firm to have the word "holiday" in its name) had taken out adverts in the New Statesman and had just inherited £3,000 (around £130,000 today) from his late grandmother, customers might have expected something a little better. If they did, they didn't show it. These neophyte holidaymakers loved Raitz's idea. Calvi was hot, it was exotic and, more importantly, it bore no resemblance to Blackpool or Margate whatsoever.

Raitz's customers would have also enjoyed knowing that Horizon's direct flights from Gatwick had cut the time taken to get from the UK to Corsica from a few days to a few hours. The price came to £32 10s for two weeks all-inclusive (around £1,400) today, less than half of what the state owned British European Airways was charging for just flights alone to Nice.

BEA would be a thorn in Raitz's side. They objected to Horizon flying to Corsica due to what they argued would be a "material diversion of traffic". This, despite BEA not even offering flights to the island. On top of this, Raitz was only able to offer the debut trip to students and teachers due to restrictions imposed by the Ministry of Aviation.

The pioneering travellers were only able to take £50 out of the country (around £2,000 today) a figure that was later reduced to just £25. "There was no shelter... not even a little bit," Raitz later recalled about the debut flight's first landing on a Corsican military airfield.

"We had to shelter from the sun under the wings of the plane while we waited for the bus to pick us up."

Yet the group were excited by what Raitz later referred to as the temptations of "meat-filled meals and as much local wine as they could put away". And, if they didn't fancy the vino, bartenders at the bamboo bar were making their own punchy versions of a Mojito. Called a "Zen", the drink was sunk in vast quantities to a soundtrack of Edith Piaf records from a gramophone.

It took a couple of years for Raitz's idea to take hold. Chalets were built in 1952 to replace the tents at Calvi; the year after Raitz launched package holidays to Majorca. By the turn of the 1970s, Horizon Holidays was a household name; offering package deals across the Med and as far afield as Tangiers. Raitz had also invented a new package firm for younger travellers. Its name? Club 18-30. Raitz would later remark that he had no conception that the brand would go on to become a by-word for booze and sex saturated vacations in Benidorm.

According to author of Tourists: How The British Went Abroad To Find Themselves, Lucy Lethbridge, "These holidays were entirely different to anything [Britons] had encountered before. After all those years of wartime scrimping and making-do, a beach holiday positively celebrated self-indulgence.

"The all-you-can-eat buffets in some hotels were an unimaginable luxury when back at home sweets and sugar were still rationed," she wrote.

And Horizon was not the only company to have seen the potential of deserted beaches across southern Europe. East Londoner Harry Chandler, founder of the Travel Club of Upminster, capitalised on his wartime experience arranging homeward passage for POWs and the rapid conversion of wartime aircraft into passenger planes to develop the beaches of the Portuguese Algarve.

Yet the days in the sun for Raitz and his customers were about to end. The OPEC (Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) oil crisis and the three-day week prompted a sale of Horizon to the Clarksons Group in 1974, which itself filed for bankruptcy in the same year. Raitz ended up working for the Maltese tourism board, later organising cigar themed tours to Cuba while in his 80s before dying at the age of 88 in 2010.

Raitz commented that the package holiday "brought with it what can only be described as a social revolution; the man in the street acquired a taste for wine, for foreign food, started to learn French, Spanish or Italian, made friends in the foreign lands he had visited - in fact became more 'cosmopolitan', with all that that entailed."

Yet he wasn't entirely comfortable with the multi-billion pound industry he had created. "I think it's marvellous that 12 or 13 million people can have a Mediterranean holiday and enjoy themselves," he concluded.

Yet in 1989, Raitz was less effusive: "Benidorm looks bloody awful now - but that's progress, I suppose."