Gossip: I'm Britain's stingiest dad - and proud of it

As we walked into Disneyland Paris, passing intimidating soldiers with automatic weapons slung across their chests, my wife Dinah cast me a  pleading look.

Behind us on the wall was a sign depicting a uniformed man in a peaked cap searching a bag, beside the words: ‘Thank you for not bringing in food.’

I dropped my voice to a conspiratorial whisper. ‘Relax,’ I said. ‘No one’s going to strafe us with machine-gun fire for smuggling in sandwiches. Just act normally.’

Therein lay the rub. This was normal for my family.

Our children, Phoebe, eight, and Charlie, six, had stood unquestioningly in the car park outside as I’d strapped baguette halves to their legs under their shorts.


They’d loosened their trainers for me to secrete wrapped slices of ham and cheese inside, and handed over their baseball caps and Pac A Macs without comment to be filled with apples and yoghurts I’d swiped from the hotel breakfast buffet.

I gave them an encouraging thumbs up as the queue inched forward. ‘We’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘Just keep walking.’

You may well ask why I’d subjected them to this charade — but have you seen the price of food at Disneyland? It’s six euros for a measly sliver of pizza and seven for a simple croque monsieur.

Then there are all the drinks and ice creams on top. And I, quite simply, refuse to pay that.

I’m a frugal dad, you see, quite unashamedly so. Don’t get me wrong — we’re far from hard up. We live in a large semi in Hove, East Sussex. I drive a new VW Passat, and Dinah and I both earn good money as writers. It’s just if I see an opportunity to save pennies, I jump at it.

I couldn’t help but identify with David Ashcroft, the £12 million National Lottery winner, who was in the papers last week. Some 16 years after he won, he’s barely spent a penny — leading him to be dubbed the thriftiest lottery winner in Britain.

Like him, I keep my hands firmly on my money. It’s my way of cocking a snook at the system. But, most importantly, it’s with savings like these that we’ve been able to fund our idyllic life over the years, taking the children on months-long odysseys around Europe, ‘living off the land’ and making memories they will treasure for ever.

I get my frugality from my mother Ann, who still makes me look like an amateur.

Despite the fact we lived in a big converted windmill in Buckinghamshire and my dad, Sir David Hatch, earned an impressive salary as head of BBC Radio and had his own chauffeur, Mum acted as if she was broke until the day she died.

She, in turn, blamed her ways on her own mother, raised as she was during rationing after World War II.

Her penny-pinching was legendary: if we didn’t eat something, it would reappear in a subsequent meal. She was particularly intent on not wasting baked beans, and they cropped up in all sorts of dishes.
I found five hidden under chicken breast in one Sunday roast.

Plates, mugs, toys were always glued back together. Furniture too. ‘I am the head of BBC Radio!’ Dad would shout, as cracked crockery appeared at meal times. ‘We can afford a new plate.’

But we never had anything new. She cut our hair with bacon scissors to save on the barbers, Dad’s included.
A lot of the food carried what we joked was the brand name ‘Mum’s’ — meaning it was a cheaper home-made version of something in the shops.

Mum’s Burgers were made of cheap mince that would be shamed by horsemeat today. Mum’s Stew was an excuse to tip leftovers into a saucepan and boil them to oblivion.

After Mum discovered rhubarb growing wild in the garden it became virtually all we ate. Mum’s Rhubarb Fool, Mum’s Rhubarb Tart, Mum’s Rhubarb Crumble, Mum’s Rhubarb Stew... OK, I’m kidding, but I wouldn’t have put that past her. I’d watch her walk the length of the High Street in the rain to save 2p on a lettuce.

She was so thrifty that when her tooth fell out she stuck it back with superglue to save on dentist bills.
She even took in ironing. For 20 years she spent several hours a day in a blue boiler suit with ‘Ironing Lady’ stencilled on the back,  working through piles of laundry in our kitchen.

Sometimes she’d make my dad collect it in his chauffeur-driven Rover. He’d turn up at houses in the village in his suit and tie after a meeting John Humphrys and the Today programme team to pick up crumpled pants. ‘Your mother keeps my feet on the ground,’ he’d tell us.

Although he never dared admit it, it embarrassed him at times, especially if Mum greeted his celebrity friends such as John Thaw or Sue Lawley in her boiler suit.

I’d probably have rebelled and become profligate if it wasn’t for what happened just before my mum died of cancer in 1997. She was very frail. It was one of the last times she managed to leave the house and  she took us to the pub for a family meal, an unheard of extravagance.

At the end of it she presented my brother, sister and me with folded up cheques for £20,000 each. It was all the money she’d banked over the years from ironing at £5 an hour. My Mum had saved every penny to give us a head start in life.

After she died, for a time Dad went on a spending spree. One weekend he bought a hot tub, an Armani suit, had his hair cut at Vidal Sassoon and spent £2,000 on wine. I went the other way and became more like Mum.

It’s still going strong. My son’s drawn wheels on it and eats dinner in it as if he’s at a drive-thru.
This thrift is also perfectly suited to what I do for a living. Each year we rent the house out and take the kids on a huge summer-long adventure that I write a book about.
This year I wrote Road To Rouen about our 10,000-mile, three-month road-trip round France.
Before this, Are We Nearly There Yet? was about the five months we spent driving 8,000 miles around England, visiting virtually every town and city in the country.
To go on these adventures as a  family is an incredible privilege, but we have to make sacrifices.
While we’re on the road I swipe pens, hot chocolate sachets, soaps, toothpaste, bubble baths and hand lotions  from hotel rooms without shame.
Every morning at breakfast, we gather our lunch. I snaffle bread, cheese, yoghurts, cake and fruit, plus the napkins to wrap it all in.

Globetrotting: The Hatch family save money wherever they are - whether that's at home or holidaying in Paris
I even take golf putters and balls with us. If we rise early enough, we can sneak onto crazy golf courses and play for free.

Lucky for me, Charlie’s short for six. Three years old is usually when children start to pay at French visitor attractions, so to lower his age, I wheel him into places in the buggy that I bring on holiday.

He is banned from talking until we’re through the turnstile, and there’s always a reward if he agrees to hold a teddy bear or suck his thumb.

And we’ve not been caught in Disneyland — yet. Our last trip did try Dinah’s patience, however, when I ferreted in her handbag for the crisps I’d slipped in there.

‘You hid them IN MY BAG? Without telling me?’ she shouted.

‘The best drug mules don’t even know they’re drug mules,’ I told her.

In fact, while she’s spent most our married life exasperated at my  frugality to the extent that she circumvents it by pretending new clothes she orders from the Boden catalogue were ‘given to me’ by a friend, slowly she’s coming round.

I was pleased to see her pouring the apple juice my son hadn’t drunk back into the carton the other day, an old trick of my mum’s.

And Phoebe seems to have taken on my mantle. She gets £1 pocket money and last week told me she was saving it up to buy ‘my wedding dress, Daddy. From the toy shop’.

Mum would be proud.