A N Wilson - Travel sickness

All humanity’s problems stem from its inability to sit quietly alone in one room, according to Pascal – a tiresome figure by my reckoning, but surely he’s on to something here.

The old Second World War question on the poster is a metaphysical one – ‘IS YOUR JOURNEY REALLY NECESSARY?’ No one asks it of the tourists.

One of the most mysterious of news items, on TV every summer, Christmas and New Year, is the sight of miserable families sitting on suitcases at airports as flights are cancelled, or baggage-handlers go on strike. This summer, there were 30-hour queues at Dover. You ask yourself: why on earth did you shell out good money for what you knew would be an unenjoyable experience?

Whereas young families put themselves through the nightmare only once or twice a year, oldies – with all their grey pounds – often have four or five such experiences: of cruises on ships the size of floating factories, all going to places no sane person would wish to visit, or to places which would have been nice before they were wrecked by tourism.

Lucy Lethbridge, a percipient social observer and deep thinker, has addressed herself to the story of Tourists: How the British Went Abroad to Find Themselves.

Enjoyable as her book is, I am not sure she has supplied me with an answer: why do they do it? It isn’t like Dr Johnson and second marriages – it is not the triumph of hope over experience. If you have had two or three holidays, there is no hope left. You know – absolutely know – that the holiday will be an unenjoyable interruption to life. Expensive. Uncomfortable. Boring. Yet, time and again, you sign up for it.

Robert Graves, Majorca’s most famous British resident, settled there in the 1920s. Thirty years later, he was giving a talk on the BBC, complaining about the trippers and comparing young Englishwomen on the beach – he imagined ‘a pretty typist’ as typical – ‘to a plump white plaice on the grill, trying to collect a tan worthy of that tremendous solar male’. He attributed the typist’s sun worship to reading too much D H Lawrence, ‘England’s most fanatical Sun-cult revivalist’.

Graves’s broadcast – amusing if you realise polite men do not speak about women like that any more – is typical of our snobbery about tourism. We – if ‘we’ happen to be anywhere on the face of the globe – are there because we are discerning travellers, whereas the others are the mindless ‘tourists’.

It is certainly hard not to think that Thomas Cook, the Leicester bookseller, and the other pioneers of modern tourism did much to spoil the world. One of Cook’s earliest coups was to transport 65,000 people to the Great Exhibition in 1851. ‘Hurrah for the trip, the cheap, cheap trip!’ was his motto.

Soon Sir Henry Lunn, a Methodist lay reader, was following Cook’s bandwagon, pioneering cheap European travel. Their genius was to invent an activity that was completely unnecessary – tourism – and almost never enjoyable, and to sell it to a huge public as the most desirable thing in life.

It is interesting that the Lunns, the Cooks and others in the early ‘travel industry’ were ranting preachers, and one wonders if there is a connection between the promises of their misleading, colourful brochures and the hope of a sunlit, blue- skied afterlife, peddled from their pulpits.

Lucy Lethbridge is a good guide to the whole story. She has read everything there is to read on the subject. She has a breezy tolerance of the ‘British know-nothings’, blundering over formerly beautiful sites with their guidebooks and their ignorance of European languages and culture.

She sees it all as a natural extension of democracy. Watering places, spas, Italian cathedral cities and French ports which had previously been visited by the rich on grand tours could now be reached easily by rail and by Mr Pooter.

Most such modern tourists, from the beginning, were inspired by an incoherent restlessness, which was not exactly explained. You might say we all need to escape our humdrum existence, but surely existence itself isn’t humdrum – it is holidays that are the boring bit.

Moreover, tourist are – and were, from the beginning – persuaded to visit places in which they have no obvious interest. Look at the blank, unhappy expressions on the faces of those led round cathedrals or stately palaces, being fed usually inaccurate and always dead boring accounts of the abbots, kings and such who once walked there.

Likewise, people went to spa towns with no desire to take the waters. So why did they go? The Morning Paper for Sophisticated Classes noted in Baden-Baden in 1830 that, of the 8,000 to 10,000 who traipsed through the town every year, only 2,000 used the baths. (Lethbridge is especially funny on water cures and hydropathy.)

Equally, she is kindly, and amused, when describing the quest for the picturesque which has been drawing us to ‘beauty spots’ all over Europe, from the early Romantic travellers with their watercolour boxes to the present.

‘Is that the famous volcano?’ asked Hester Lynch Piozzi of a friar in Naples, gazing across the bay. ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘that’s our mountain which throws up money for us by calling foreigners to see the extraordinary effects of so surprising a phenomenon.’

One strand of the story that surprised me was the number of do-gooders who saw (more or less indiscriminate) travel less as the chance for some fun, and more as an opportunity for moral improvement.

We meet the Rev Samuel Barnett of the Toynbee Travellers Club in the East End of London, afraid that the working classes were going to spend too much time enjoying themselves at home on their ‘hobbies’. To be canary-fanciers or tulip-growers, happily at home, was of no use to the canon, who wanted them to swarm round the Uffizi and learn about art before returning to their uncomfortable pensioni. Surveys taken afterwards showed most of them had found Florence a grave disappointment.

The Holiday Fellowship in Sydenham hosted visitors from all over the world, and the Youth Hostel Association had, by the 1930s, more than 3,000 hostels in Europe.

As Lethbridge points out, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were especially favoured tourist destinations. Dachau concentration camp was popular. One young English cyclist, Robert Dummett, wrote home approvingly to say that the tourists had been given lunch in the same room as the prisoners who were ‘wasters, social undesirables, Jewish profiteers and riff-raff’.

Fifteen years later, caravanning was all the rage. Some 75,000 social menaces in Britain alone were clogging the roads – presumably Mrs Margaret Beckett among them – while the rest of us had apoplexy behind the wheels of our cars, crawling behind them up the A9 to the Highlands.

Sunbathing, fresh air, a change of scene … by 1953, Lethbridge tells us, two million Britons were holidaying abroad. By 2000 it was 30 million.

The truly mysterious thing about tourism is that it makes almost no one happy. Very few people, having been conventional enough to spend money having a holiday, will admit that they have not enjoyed it.

Yet, year after year, we nearly all indulge in this completely unnecessary activity. As it steadily – and, in some places, such as Venice, rather rapidly – wrecks the world, we all claim it is not only a vital part of economic life, but also such jolly fun.

Lucy Lethbridge’s Tourists: How the British Went Abroad to Find Themselves is published by Bloomsbury (£20)