Victorians & Edwardians Abroad

The Beginning of the Modern Holiday

Neil Matthews

• Publisher: Pen & Sword History
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781473886261
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Victorians and Edwardians abroad: the beginning of the modern holiday reveals a story never told before: the early years of one of Britains leading modern travel agencies, the Polytechnic Touring Association (PTA). Created in 1888 within Britains first Polytechnic, the PTA was an emblem of the era. It served a growing mass of middle-class and lower middle-class consumers, who found for the first time that they had the time and money to take extended holidays, often abroad. This book explains the creation of the Polytechnic and the PTA, charting the expansion of the travel agency into continental Europe and beyond.Victorians and Edwardians abroad uncovers the recollections of those who went on Poly holidays before 1914: how they experienced the journeys, what they did when they reached their destinations and what they thought holidays should be about. For all the serious strictures from their social betters about the educational and improving aspects of travel, PTA holiday makers enjoyed themselves: liberating pork pies from train carriages, annoying foreign policemen and even beating the German Emperor to the last horses in town. Letters, articles and diaries of Poly holidays reveal a penchant for fun, even naughtiness, not often associated with the Victorians and Edwardians. Also included are a selection of postcards, photographs and promotional items from the PTA archives. Victorians and Edwardians abroad is a fascinating glimpse into holidays as they were, just over a hundred years ago.

Chapter 1

Introduction

All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own, and if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.

(Samuel Johnson, Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, 1775)

The modern history of holidays for the British people is, perhaps surprisingly, one of the aspects of travel and tourism on which historians have written relatively little. Certainly travel in its widest sense has a long, rich and varied heritage as any reader of Herodotus, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales or the tales of Sir John Mandeville or Marco Polo – or, for that matter, of Samuel Johnson and James Boswell – will know.

Major motivations for travel have included pilgrimage, commerce, exploration and colonisation, sometimes in combination and not always initiated by the British. Witness, for example, two key events of 1735: a French expedition to attempt to confirm whether the earth was a (Cartesian) perfect sphere or a (Newtonian) spheroid with flat poles; and the publication of The System of Nature by Carl Linnaeus, a Swedish naturalist, which tried to classify all plants into one system.

Nonetheless, the British have traditionally played a central role in many accounts of continental and global travel over the centuries. The obvious example of this was the network of European journeys known as the Grand Tour, especially from the late eighteenth century onwards, as the upper classes sent their sons abroad for a mixture of reasons, which Jeremy Black has summarised as ‘social emulation and a viewpoint of foreign travel as a means of education and particularly of social finishing’. The wealthiest might go as far south as Italy, with less affluent travellers staying in France and the Low Countries, some venturing to Germany and a relatively small number sampling the delights of Scandinavia and Russia. The view of foreign travel as beneficial had not always been generally shared: James Boswell’s father thought that ‘there is nothing to be learned by travelling in France’. After the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the Grand Tour took on a different flavour, with the educational benefits being a less significant motivator by then. Literary pilgrimages and an appreciation of landscape had become important factors; the latter as part of a wider trend in which the Romanticism of Goethe and Wordsworth’s poems and Schiller’s plays were prominent. Tourists looked out for the ‘picturesque’, literally something that would look good in a picture. Later still, they would seek out the ‘sublime’: the rough, dark, vast, powerful, infinite face of nature which terrified and captivated at the same time.

Travelling through Britain and abroad also came to acquire a reputation for one specific benefit; it could improve your health. The therapeutic advantages of mineral waters have been well known as far back as the Roman era. Over time, medical opinion advocated cold bathing as a care – sometimes regardless of the mineral properties of the waters. Crucially for the development of tourism in Britain, Dr Richard Russell’s 1752 book advocated the internal and external use of seawater, in the same way as spa waters. The coast had greater capacity than spas, ‘large enough to absorb all comers, and social homogeneity mattered less’ as John Pimlott put it. By the mid-nineteenth century, most of Britain’s spa resorts – Brighton, Bath, Cheltenham, Hastings, Scarborough, Ramsgate, Margate – were by the seaside. Easy access from main population centres was crucial – Brighton, according to Thackeray, was ‘London plus prawns for breakfast and the sea air’ – and Blackpool and Southport benefited from direct rail lines. The quality of sea air also assumed significance as a perceived benefit for health. By the mid-nineteenth century, as more of the middle classes holidayed at the English seaside, their social superiors went further afield: to Scotland, Ireland and the Continent. They sought health benefits in Switzerland for example, where cure houses and sanatoria might deal with tuberculosis (also known as consumption). The British started to arrive in greater numbers from around 1875 and played their part in developing Switzerland as a mecca for winter sports. The Tourist Association of Thun stated in 1900: ‘Ways must be found to compensate people of quality for having to suffer the presence of the disgusting masses.’

Much of the existing historical research and writing relates to a relatively small and wealthy proportion of the population, but some progress has been made regarding travel and tourism for the majority of the British people. The survival of archive material relating to Thomas Cook, some dating back to the mid-nineteenth century, has enabled various authors to chart the history of that remarkable company and its eponymous founder, all the way back to the historic train journey between Leicester and Loughborough in 1841. Thomas Cook’s importance in widening the availability of foreign holidays – especially to that most protean category, the middle classes – has been well acknowledged. Recent research has helped us to learn more about the emergence of holiday camps during the twentieth century, especially under Billy Butlin and Harry Warner before World War II and then after 1945, when they offered affordable and accessible holidays to an over widening range of working people. Eventually, the innovations of coach and air transport and the gradual recovery from the deprivation of wartime coalesced into what is generally called ‘mass tourism’ (probably in the late 1960s, though a firm consensus on exactly when this fabled era began is elusive).

Even so, the picture is far from complete. Between the Grand Tour and ‘mass tourism’ – between 1830 and ‘Club 18–30’, we might say – much is still unknown. Information has not survived in such volume for other travel agencies as it has for Thomas Cook. We may, for example, never know that much about Henry Gaze, whose firm boasted ninety-four offices worldwide by 1890. The campaigner and editor WT Stead wrote about Gaze in the same category as Cook in the 1890s – as substantial and well-established companies. Gaze’s sons were, it seems, less capable, or perhaps less fortunate than him in business; the company was bankrupt by 1903. It is, in part, the lack of information on Gaze and other companies that exaggerates the significance of Thomas Cook. Recent researchers have stressed that the original Thomas Cook (1808–1892) did not necessarily invent the railway excursion all by himself, or organise trips to the 1851 Great Exhibition for nearly as many people as has been supposed.

This book is a modest attempt to contribute towards filling the gaps in the overall picture. Its main focus is one of the most enduring and successful travel agencies of the late Victorian and Edwardian era: the Polytechnic Touring Association (PTA) and its parent institution, the Regent Street Polytechnic.

The story of the PTA has lain untold until now in the archives of the University of Westminster – the institution that the Polytechnic eventually became. To trace the Polytechnic’s role in the creation of the PTA, we can follow its gestation through the accounts, minutes of the governing body and other committees, membership applications and correspondence. As the PTA grew, it generated brochures, leaflets, guidebooks, memorabilia and other promotional material. Through the pages of the Polytechnic’s in-house magazine, we can follow the evolution of the tours both at home and abroad; the Polytechnic’s management promoted the tours and Polytechnic tourists reported on them. Private letters and diaries provide further insights into the tourists’ views and experiences. For comparative purposes, it is also useful and revealing to look at the records of other travel agencies such as Thomas Cook, the Co-operative Holidays Association, the Holiday Fellowship and the Toynbee Travellers’ Club; at the memoirs of key figures from the burgeoning travel and tourism industry; at earlier histories of the Polytechnic and its leaders, and at coverage of the tours in contemporary magazines and newspapers.

The Polytechnic and the PTA were born into a tumultuous time, as the effects of long-term industrialisation and urbanisation changed England forever. For some, this offered new opportunities for ‘white collar’ working in particular, as well as more leisure time and the temptations of new hobbies and new transport technologies – the personal (bicycles) and the collective (cheap train travel). But this was not a time of unalloyed liberation – far from it. The continuing prevalence of religious observance – whether or not it demonstrated genuine faith – and the seemingly unshakeable power of ‘respectability’ led Victorians to order and codify their pleasures in many cases, with organised sport a prime example. Holidays themselves came within the ambit of ‘rational recreation’, as many perceived them to have serious restorative and moral purposes.

By the late Victorian years, Thomas Cook had already shown how a new type of travel agency could bring foreign holidays to at least some of the rising and aspiring middle classes – as well as those already comfortably well-off – with time and money to spare. Where Cook led, others eventually followed; with Henry Lunn’s various companies, the Co-operative Holidays Association and the Toynbee Travellers Club most prominent. And, just as the Toynbee Travellers Club emerged from an educational association in the shape of Toynbee Hall, so the PTA was a by-product of the creation and growth of England’s first Polytechnic. Inspired by its founder and first President Quintin Hogg, and shaped and led by him and his chief lieutenants Robert Mitchell and JEK Studd, the Polytechnic was a blend of club and classroom for young men (and later young women), whose success persuaded the government to set up other bodies in emulation.

As Hogg’s Polytechnic established itself, travel was part of its fabric from its early days. Hogg himself was a regular traveller overseas, with numerous business interests to develop, while other Polytechnic members moved abroad to new lives in the USA, India and elsewhere. Teachers at the Polytechnic led tours to Germany and to France with varying degrees of success. This general interest in travel turned into a more organised Polytechnic programme in the late 1880s. Robert Mitchell was a key figure; in 1888, he created a ground-breaking tour of Switzerland for boys from the Polytechnic’s day school and he later arranged the purchase of chalets at Lucerne, which became more closely associated with the Polytechnic and later the PTA than any other destination. While that 1888 trip entered Poly mythology as the origin of the touring operations, the series of Polytechnic groups, which visited the Paris Exposition the following year were, in some respects, just as significant. The idea to visit the event came from the Polytechnic’s French Society, emphasising the educational motivation (and the reports of the visits in the Polytechnic’s in-house magazine gave an early taste of Poly attitudes to foreigners’ and the French in particular).

From these beginnings, a programme of Polytechnic tours began to take shape, with Switzerland and Norway the most popular foreign destinations, followed by Paris – though more adventurous Poly holidaymakers could go to Madeira or even the USA (for the Chicago Expo in 1893). In parallel, with its origins in Hogg and his wife’s philanthropic sharing of their holidays with others, the Polytechnic also created a programme of trips within the UK and holiday homes for use by its members, students and poorer members of the local community. The holiday homes and UK tours sprang up first in southeast England, reflecting the Polytechnic’s London location, but quickly spread through the British Isles as far as Jersey, Scotland and Ireland.

Crucially, the tours were profitable, providing much-needed funds for an institution that regularly ran annual deficits and relied on external grants and the generosity of Quintin Hogg to survive. While it is not possible to be definitive about the ‘typical’ Polytechnic tourist, it seems the success of the tours came from tapping the emerging and expanding sectors of office-based and professional workers – although a variety of ‘respectable’ people including vicars, magistrates and local councillors were willing to offer personal testimonials about their experiences on Poly holidays. The tours attracted customers from around the British Isles and from international organisations such as the Young Men’s Christian Association of North America. They also gained favourable press coverage in praise of the Polytechnic tours’ aims and contrasting them with ‘regular commercial agencies’. The most famous of these ‘regular’ agencies, Thomas Cook, complained at government level about the unfair commercial advantage that they felt the Polytechnic tours enjoyed – though, it seems, to little effect.

RL Stevenson famously ventured that ‘it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.’ We can discover whether this axiom applied to Polytechnic tourists by examining the accounts they gave of their outward journeys, especially in the Polytechnic’s magazine, but also in letters and diaries. In those pre-air travel days, the challenges of crossing the Channel brought some predictable problems, with seasickness being a regular theme. However, if the accounts are to be believed (and the Polytechnic was presumably publishing them for promotional purposes) the outward trip was enjoyable for most. The tourists occupied themselves, and entertained other holidaymakers and locals, with displays of marching and singing, among other activities.

Once they had arrived, the tourists normally found ways to make the most of their holidays. Not surprisingly, the reports of shorter trips, such as day trips to Boulogne, give a frenetic flavour of holidaymakers dashing from sight to sight, keen to make every moment count. The most popular destinations, Switzerland and Norway, offered the chance to escape a workaday urban existence for a short time, as the tourists explored mountains, glaciers and waterfalls among many natural attractions. Whether a few days or a couple of weeks, Polytechnic holidays enabled the tourists to tick off as ‘done’ the sights they hoped, and were expected to see a form of obtaining, as it were, cultural capital. Stopping on Sunday for a visit to the local church or chapel was a prominent part of many accounts of Poly tours. However, while the tours’ origins in educational motives continued to be reflected in what the tour reports mentioned as part of their itineraries, there was plenty of evidence of what one writer called ‘a capacity for enjoyment’. Tourists could outwit foreign emperors, annoy German police officers and even get roped into taking part in local cricket matches.

Enjoying their holidays was one thing: but what did Polytechnic tourists think of ‘abroad’, and the people they encountered there? Their reports of the tours took their cue from the contemporary geopolitical and diplomatic context, with the British Empire close to its zenith and attempting to preserve its position as the principal world power of the time (and the Polytechnic, of course, was based in London, heart of the Empire.) Neither Switzerland nor Norway were serious military or political rivals, but the French certainly were. Perhaps in reaction to this, Polytechnic travel writers took a distinctly superior attitude to their cross-Channel neighbours, portraying Parisians as lazy, uncultured nuisances who would attempt to con them out of their hard-earned money, and French people outside the capital as living in a previous (and hence less threatening) age. Poly tourists enjoyed making an impression on the locals, and travel reports frequently mentioned the ways in which Swiss or Norwegian people greeted them in friendly fashion. Both nationalities gained praise for being honest, industrious, friendly and unlikely to swindle the tourists out of money. Nearer home, travellers to Ireland found the experience a little unsettling, preferring to focus on their own activities such as fishing and hill climbing instead of engaging in discussions with the politically ‘sensitive’ Irish. Compared with travel accounts in the magazines of other travel organisations such as the Co-operative Holidays Association or the Toynbee Travellers Club, Polytechnic travel accounts conveyed a distinctive ‘Poly view’ of the rest of the world.

Above all, what was the purpose of travel and holidays? As you might expect, the answer varied depending on who gave it. One significant forum for reflection on this subject was the regular series of ‘reunions’, which the Polytechnic held for those who had been on specific tours. While the reports of reunions sometimes referred to the educational advantages of the tours, other benefits gained more prominence: the opportunity to refresh oneself, a chance to escape the pressures of modern life, sociability, good fellowship and simple pleasure and enjoyment. While other organisations might stress the possibility for contact with foreign fields to increase international understanding and reduce the risks of future wars, relatively few Polytechnic travel writers seemed to take this view. As the Polytechnic expanded its tours and holiday homes programme, allowing non-members and non-students to join them, the question of how accessible the tours were for members and students became a subject of some contention. The Polytechnic liked to promote itself as pioneering affordable travel, but some members of its community complained that the tours were increasingly unaffordable and inaccessible for the very people they had originally been set up to serve. Occasionally, Hogg and the other Polytechnic leaders even faced accusations that the tours detracted from the institution’s main works.

The final two chapters of this book bring the Polytechnic and PTA story up to the brink of war and give a glimpse of what happened afterwards. The PTA became a company limited by shares in 1911, although its links with its parent institution remained close; its owners were Mitchell, Studd and Quintin Hogg’s son (Quintin having died in 1903), its offices remained on Polytechnic premises and its articles of association pledged it to help the Polytechnic. Switzerland remained the principal destination for PTA tours along with the UK and continental Europe, for over 16,000 tourists a year.

The advent of the First World War temporarily halted the PTA’s progress. After 1918, it had to adapt to a changed world, in which holidaymakers were more likely to travel to southern Europe, to follow the sun, and in coaches and motorcars as they began to supersede trains as the most popular methods of getting there. JEK Studd’s son Ronald became Managing Director and steered the company through challenging times, retaining Switzerland at the heart of the portfolio. Promotional materials stressed the importance of personal service, comfort and value for money, with less emphasis on the educational benefits of travel. Ronald Studd remained in charge until well after the Second World War, by which time the popularity of holiday camps in the UK, the development of affordable air travel for foreign holidays, and a slow rise in the amount of paid leave for many working people were combining to bring new opportunities and challenges. In 1962, an aviation entrepreneur acquired Poly Travel (as it was known by then) along with another firm, Sir Henry Lunn Ltd, leading to the eventual creation of a famous travel brand: Lunn Poly.

However, the most innovative and exciting times for the PTA were its early days, as the emerging travel firm helped to send increasing numbers of Victorians and Edwardians abroad. The early history of the Polytechnic, the PTA, and its tourists, forms a tantalising bridge between Victorian ideas of rational recreation – the idea, broadly, that leisure was there to improve you and to ‘recreate’ you for work – and more modern notions of the purpose of leisure and holidays. While the official channels of the Polytechnic often professed fairly traditional views on how holidays should benefit its customers, the customers themselves sometimes had different ideas. Our conventional ideas of our Victorian and Edwardian forebears are of serious souls but these tourists, in their own way, are closer to us in their enjoyment of holidays than we might imagine.

Chapter 2

The Birth of the Polytechnic

The late Victorian era into which Quintin Hogg’s Polytechnic was born contained multitudes and contradictions. Confidence jostled with insecurity; prosperity sat side by side with deprivation; belief co-existed with doubt.

From an economic point of view, industrialisation continued to drive urbanisation and changes in job patterns. While the population of England and Wales rose by sixty per cent between 1851 and 1891, the number of agricultural labourers fell by almost forty per cent, due chiefly to the attractions of urban employment.

While the last quarter of the century witnessed a general economic depression in the agricultural sector, greater prosperity in the rest of the economy offset this decline....

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 The Birth of the Polytechnic
• Chapter 3 Early Poly Travels and the Origins of the PTA
• Chapter 4 The Business of Touring
• Chapter 5 The Outward Journey
• Chapter 6 Being There: What the Tourists Did
• Chapter 7 Meeting Jean le Foreigner: What the Tourists Thought
• Chapter 8 The Purpose of Holidays: A Modern Note?
• Chapter 9 Conclusion: Independence and War
• Chapter 10 Afterword
• A Note About Money
• Selected Bibliography
• Plates