Mail Online

TAKE OFF!

Suffering holiday blues? What better way to lift your spirits than with this exquisitely witty history of how going abroad became a national obsession

KATHRYN HUGHES

Tourists: How The British Went Abroad To Find Themselves Lucy Lethbridge

Bloomsbury £20 ★★★★

What is it that we seek for?’ wondered author and intrepid traveller Lady Mary Herbert in 1865. ‘We Englishmen and Englishwomen who, year by year… are seen crowding in Folkestone and Dover steamboats with that unmistakeable “going abroad” look of travelling.’ The answer, according to Lucy Lethbridge in this delightful book, is that, throughout history, most Britons who travel abroad have been looking for reassurance that they would have done far better to stay at home.

Consider the evidence that Lethbridge has assembled. Victorian traveller Katherine Fry reported finding the countryside between Dunkirk and Calais ‘flat and uninteresting, a good deal like the fen country about the Isle of Ely’. Albert Smith, somewhat bizarrely, said the steeply wooded banks of the Rhine brought to mind Highgate Hill in North London. Yorkshire-born travel diarist Thomas Beswick thought Lago Acquato ‘a pretty lake and it rather reminded me of the Mere at Scarboro’. Even that inveterate traveller Charles Dickens admitted sheepishly that, at first glance, Rome looked like ‘I am half afraid to write the word – like LONDON!!!’

Lethbridge’s witty account of the Englishman and woman abroad begins in the 19th Century when higher wages, burgeoning rail networks and paid leave meant that thousands of middle-class people could, for the first time in their lives, take off for Europe in August. Those who were unsure of themselves could sign up with Thomas Cook, the Midlands businessman and fierce teetotaller who passionately believed that it was possible to have fun in the sun, or at the top of a mountain, without being plastered.

Cook’s clientele consisted mainly of earnest types taking two weeks off from their jobs as schoolteachers and office clerks in order to broaden their minds and lift their souls, rather than, heaven forbid, enjoy themselves at the bar.

Further up the social scale, health-seeking became one of the main reasons for going abroad. Lethbridge shows how a string of spas sprang up in middle-Europe which promised to mend broken spirits and consumptive bodies. In addition to physicians who swore by stiff breezes to cure wheezy lungs, there were bone doctors, worm doctors, wind and water doctors. The water doctors were particularly insistent that nothing was healthier than being wrapped up in damp sheets and left to chill, like a waterlogged mummy. Alternatively, a brisk rub-down with damp hay was on offer.

There was, though, another kind of life going on in these spa towns, a sly, rebellious transgressiveness that refused to pay lip service to the virtues of selfdenial. At Baden in Germany, for example, the barrister Alexander Innes Shand thought the cure far less interesting than the pleasure of the casino and the freedom from convention that surrounded it: ‘I daresay the Baden waters are good for something, though I never came across any friend who drank them… but what I liked about Baden was the double life you could lead.’ Part of that double life involved looking for any luscious – and rich – young lady who might be tempted into marriage. At a stroke, gambling debts would become a distant memory. Thomas Cook and his tea-sipping clientele would not have approved.

Nor would the higher grade of British travellers who headed for places such as Egypt,

Athens and Rome to see for themselves the ancient civilisations that they had studied at Eton and Oxford. Instead of being plunged into an ecstatic scholarly daze when they reached the archaeological sites, many Britons were appalled by the plebs who had got there first and spoiled them. The poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, for instance, so loathed the American tourists he encountered while wandering round the ruins of Lebanon that he described them contemptuously as ‘shop-boys’ and ‘beasts’. They should be kept at home,’ he declared, ‘for they have no business in these ancient lands.’

What Scawen Blunt neglected to point out was his fellow upper-crust travellers were equally capable of disgracing themselves.

Lethbridge tells tales of otherwise lawabiding Britons who thought nothing of chipping off a bit of ancient stone to smuggle home in their pocket or, even worse, of carving their initials into an ancient monument just to prove that they had been there.

Set against this cultural vandalism, the cheerful vulgarity of a postcard with its ‘Wish you were here’ message sent from a crowded beach and with a faint whiff of Ambre Solaire started to seem positively authentic.

Lucy Lethbridge has written a glorious romp of a book, expertly researched. She has skilfully marshalled her teeming cast of British eccentrics as they tiptoe into foreign parts. For anyone stuck in an airport, or sitting it out on a staycation, this is an inspired choice for your holiday reading.

Books

en-gb

2022-08-14T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-08-14T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://mailonline.pressreader.com/article/282888029469571

dmg media (UK)