∙Britain's Billy Butlin, 63, has built a hefty fortune giving vacationers more for their money: this year a million Britons will pay $42 each for a week of solid comfort and corny entertainment at one of eight Butlin's Holiday Villages. Now the ebullient Billy has decided to give Butlin Ltd.'s 26,000 shareholders more for their money, too. Under a 1948 agreement. Butlin and his ten co-directors were entitled to draw bonuses of $464,800 on 1961 profits of $7.8 million. Instead, Butlin and friends propose to take only $154,000 and to limit future bonuses to 5% of any profits over $5,600,000.
Explains Butlin: "The shareholders stood by us when times were tough, and we don't think we ought to take such a flipping great share of the profits now that they are looking up." Besides, most of the bonuses went for taxes.
∙A confirmed insomniac, Dutch Engineer Hubert J. van Doorne, 62, flees to his drawing board whenever he cannot sleep. So far, Van Doorne has stayed awake there long enough to win 102 automotive patents, including one for the automatic transmission used in the two-cylinder DAF cars he began to make five years ago. DAF, which brags that "The Dutch Took the Clutch out of the Compact Car," sold 16.000 vehicles last year. To meet this year's goal of 25,000 cars, Van Doorne has had a hard time finding enough workers in the labor-short Netherlands, recently took on 1,200 Belgians at DAF's Eindhoven plant. Pleased with their work, he plans to build a second DAF plant in Belgium's Limburg province, where coal-mine automation will ultimately idle 80,000 men.
∙When he left Cambridge University in 1945 to join Courtaulds Ltd., Physicist Sir Alan Wilson, 56, was best known as an expert in quantum theory. He did so able a job of reorganizing the British textile giant's research program that he was named chairman-elect of the company last October.
Then Imperial Chemical Industries Ltd. launched its bid to win control of Courtaulds (TIME, Feb. 26). Sir Alan, who had previously been engaged in secret merger talks with I.C.I., found himself under pressure from Courtaulds' board to fight back. He managed to defeat the I.C.I, bid, but felt that his usefulness had been compromised by his shift in position. Last week, Courtaulds' directors finally accepted his resignation and began looking for a new boss.