The Rest Is History - 222. Victorian Holidays

Episode Date: August 18, 2022

The birth of guide books, resorts, and the package holiday. In the second episode in our holidays series Tom and Dominic drill down into the story of Thomas Cook, package tours, and nightmarish German spa treatments. The third holidays episode, 'Sun, Sea and Sex', will be out on Monday, followed on Thursday by the final episode in the series, 'Roman Holidays'. Show notes: Tourists: How the British Went Abroad to Find Themselves - Lucy Lethbridge Join The Rest Is History Club for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. Or, if you're listening on the Apple Podcasts app, you can subscribe within the app in just a few clicks. We began in a perfect fever to strain our eyes for Rome. And when, after another mile or two, the eternal city appeared at length in the distance,

it looked like, I am half afraid to write the word, like London. That was Charles Dickens in his brilliant account of a travel across the continent, Pictures from Italy. And Dominic, maybe come back to Pictures from Italy because it's, well, it's so Dickensian, it's full of all his kind of comedy and energy. uh the tradition of british tourists going abroad and basically deciding that uh you know all these kind of wonderful places and cities um remind them of home is a noble tradition is it not um it is indeed i think willie morris will be doing that later in this episode right um so because this is the middle of aug the middle of August, it's the traditional time for people to go on holiday. We thought that we would do a series of episodes on the history of holidays. And in the first part, we were looking at the 18th century, the Grand Tour, much more aristocratic

way of going on holiday, because basically you have to be incredibly rich and well-connected for it to be possible. But Dominic, we've come now to the 19th century and we ended yesterday's episode with Lord Byron going to Waterloo and musing in a kind of gloomy and profound way, putting it up into poetry, all that kind of stuff. But in fact, I mean, he was absolutely not the only person going to the battlefield of Waterloo was he uh not at all battlefield became a kind of one of the first great centers of tourism it was absolutely so um i think that the figure is that uh there are there are about 600 british visitors a day were arriving in in paris or in brussels they're sort of in the aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo. They're very excited to see all the bigwigs who are making the peace,

but particularly keen to go and see the battlefield. So obviously they're going on boats. They go inevitably to Brussels and they have parties, just as people were doing before the battle itself happened. But then the extraordinary thing is, even as the battlefields are still littered with the sort of body parts of thousands upon thousands of British, Prussian, Frenchmen, you know, the flower of Europe,

people are pouring over the battlefields for souvenirs. So the most famous example is Walter Scott. Walter Scott and his son, John, they go to the very farmhouse, which is called La Belle Alliance, where Wellington and Blucher had met in the sort of aftermath of Waterloo. And there are already people staying in this farmhouse straight away. Wow, I didn't know that. Yeah, they're just basically people that immediately want to go and stay there and walter scott buys uh some armor from a dead frenchman

so the people there are basically flogging the the body parts and the sort of relics it's not tourism is it but they're also flogging them to yorkshire farmers to use as fertilizer to use fertilizer yeah exactly I mean that's slightly the quest for fertilizer is it's a it's more industrial than than holiday based but yeah they they buy the Scots buy this um uh this armor which they take back to Abbotsford to their sort of to their sort of manorial seat um to exhibit and obviously people have done that actually ever since so when i was in um mostar in bosnia about 10 years ago there were stalls selling uh bullets may and shells that had been made into pen holders and things of that ilk yeah and that sort of ghoulishness

i mean it's always been there so i mean we're jumping ahead a little bit but um during the boer war before the boer war was even over our travel agencies and we'll be talking about the birth of travel agencies in a little while they were advertising tours of the boer war battlefields while the war was still going on which just seems extraordinary well could we um could we just pull the camera back a bit so we we've talked about how the end of the Napoleonic Wars, suddenly it's like a kind of cork popping out of a but I was very relieved to read it by someone who really knows her stuff, which is Lucy Lethbridge, who has a brilliant book that's just come out called Tourists that I knew we were going to be doing this subject. And I saw a review of it in the Times and it was kind of effusive and went and rushed out, got it. And it's so good. And I know you've reviewed it for the Sunday Times. I've reviewed it myself, Tom.

I've reviewed it for the Sunday Times. I think it's an absolutely wonderful book because it's a look at the 19th and early 20th centuries and the invention of mass tourism. Basically, I guess you would argue by the British. And it covers everything from souvenirs and guidebooks to sort of travel agencies and sexual misbehaviour and holiday camps and the whole kind of panorama. It's a really, really fun read. Yeah, it's very funny often, but also kind of, you know, very compassionate, brings all kinds of

different travel experiences alive. It's a fabulous book. So Lucy Lethbridge, tourists, can't recommend it highly enough. And Lucy, if you're listening, we apologize for the fact that an awful lot of what's going to follow derives from your wonderful book. Well, it's a great book. And actually, one of the points that she makes is that actually, for most people, their time off work actually declined for a lot of the 19th century. So, you know, she gives the example of Bank of England holidays. So there are actually far fewer Bank of England holidays in the 1830s. So that's why bank holidays. Yeah, bank holidays.

And there had been 100 years earlier. And for people who are working in the massively expanding kind of factories and shipyards and mines and so on they don't get holidays so the holidays that we're talking about for a lot of this until certainly until the second half of this of today's episode they are there i guess they're middle class holidays i mean that's the difference with the grand tour the grand tour is the the elite and now you've got a middle a sort of white collar middle class who are aspiring to join them but But Dominic, I don't want to bring up the Christian angle, but I'm going to, because obviously a holiday is a holy day. And if you're Catholic, you have loads of holy days. So the kind of shrinkage of holy days that workers can have is an index of Protestantism. And we talked in the first episode about how basically the first grand tourists are Catholics going on pilgrimages. So do you think that that sense Britain has of itself

as an industrious, Protestant, non-papist country, there is a kind of slight tension there. I mean, maybe they're trying to kind of reinvent the wheel a bit. So they're having to invent the idea of holidays because the traditional Catholic notion of a holiday has gone. They're having to invent the idea of foreign trips because the idea of pilgrimages has gone. Do you think that's, do you think there's anything in that? There's a bit in that. I mean, I think, I'll tell you where you might claim to see a sort of Protestant ethic. And that's the idea of holidays being good for you.

You know, holidays being, we talked in the Grand Tour episode about the foundations of the Grand Tour and the idea that it would be kind of ethical to go on a Grand Tour. Yeah. You know, the idea about travel broadening the mind and all that sort of thing that we're so familiar with. And also, of course, the idea that it is literally healthy. That, as we discussed last time, going to the beach and drinking loads of seawater might make you better. And I think that is woven through today's episode as well. The idea that your mental and physical health will be improved by going on holiday. And that's a way, I think, maybe for people not to feel guilty. And it's also a way for people to lobby

for working men and women to get holidays too, to say, actually, in the long run, you'll have a more healthier and more productive workforce if you give them a week off, or if they get, as we'll talk about later, a wakes week where they can go to the seaside. Just returning, as is my wont, to the religious angle. One of the things that I had not appreciated until I read Lucy Lethbridge's book was just how deeply religious many of the great foundational figures in the history of tourism were. And the most famous of all, of course, is Thomas Cook, who was a Baptist. Very high-minded, very frugal, teetotal. And yet this, you know, he seems the most unsuitable person basically to have invented the package tour,

which is what he does. Yeah, which is basically what he's doing, exactly. And the package tour is invented, I learned from Lucy's book, in 1841 when 500 people in Leicester want to go to Loughborough to attend a temperance meeting. It's so brilliant.

That is how Benidorm and the dentist's chair. And this is the kind of little acorn from which that mighty oak of debauchery and drunkenness will come. It's a hilarious juxtaposition, isn't it? That everybody who's getting wasted in a club in Magaluf owes it to the temperance movement of the 1840s. And so they all have to get from Leicester to Loughborough. And so what Cook does is he mass books train tickets. So trains have made this possible. And so he gets a discount. And they go there and they arrive.

And it's great. The whole occasion is a great success. And Cook raises this cheer. One cheer more for teetotalism and railwayism. So I hope that, which I shall certainly be raising when I go on my holidays this summer. I get to see you in the clubs of Ibiza now, Tom. You're leading, leading the revelers. One cheer more for teetotalism and railwayism i mean i think it's

it's it's it's forgotten its roots in that but but that is um you know so thomas cook is i mean he's a very earnest man isn't he he is um he's he's an absolutely classic sort of victorian like the sort of you know the quakers behind the chocolate industry and so on yeah um he was as you say he's a baptist from derbyshire uh his wife is a sunday school teacher he works as a wood turner but also as a kind of pre-evangelical preacher and he has this idea of temperance you know of this sort of temperance tourism that you'll you'll get the trains temperance meetings and i guess the other thing that really makes his name is the taking people to the great exhibition so the great exhibition is is 10 years later 1851 and he basically books tickets for 65 000 people

to go down to london um and they get there so they get they get their accommodation as well so they get to stay in kind of temperance hotels and they get their entry tickets to the exhibition. And you can completely see how, well, two things. One, this is impossible pretty much before the birth of the railways. Yeah, so hooray for railwayism. Hooray for railwayism, exactly. But also there is a kind of improving idea to it, that you will get to see the nation's capital,

you will get to see the nation's capital, you will get to see the great exhibition and the marvels that industrial Protestant capitalism has brought you. And you can sort of also see why, you know, even at this point, there are rivals. So there's a guy a little bit later called Henry Gaze, who organizes railroad trips. I'm not sure whether there's the same degree of him. And he's a congregationalist, actually. So there probably is the same degree of temperance, enthusiasm. Christianity at the heart of everything, Tom. Well, and of course, then tensions start to arise when in 1855, so that's what, four years after Great Exhibition,

the first foreign trip is organized to Paris. And Paris, of course, is a hotbed of uh catholicism and bad behavior and bad behavior generally um and cook even once he starts organizing trips to italy and spain and you know absolute sinks of papery um he is having i mean he kind of issues warnings to stout protestants doesn't he um warning them to watch out for priests and superstition and all this kind of stuff. And he's still offering discounts to teetotalers and Baptists. Well, the funny thing is that actually, clearly, in a way that we now have completely, well, I suppose people do behave badly, don't they, in churches and things,

sometimes when they go abroad, they wear inappropriate clothes or whatever. But there is amazing stories about people going to St. Peter's in Rome and having picnics during mass. See this? They have, they take picnic hampers into St. Peter's during mass

and they have champagne and they, because, and I don't, and presumably this is, they just think, oh, this is all superstitious rubbish. You know,

who cares? Let's have a picnic. Yeah, so it's not like Ian Paisley going on holiday, is it? I mean, they just think, oh, this is all superstitious rubbish. You know, who cares? Let's have a picnic. Yeah, so it's not like Ian Paisley going on holiday, is it? I mean, he's not, they're not kind of doing it. Or do you think they are making a statement of their proud Protestant contempt for it? Do you think they would do it? Well, they wouldn't do it at home, would they? I don't know.

I mean, do they just think it's all right? I don't know. I think they just think, I think it's that curious thing that anyone who's ever been on holiday as part of a group so the sort of stag party or the sports tour tom which you of course do is the is the classic example of that i've been on a sports tour to saint peter's there you go we played the vatican you played cricket in the vatican didn't you yeah we played we played cricket in saint peter's square uh and we had to do it very quickly before we got stopped by the police so yes it's very similar the italians if they were doing this podcast might tell a different story about your cricket tour they might see it in a very different light yeah they might say this is actually worse

behavior than the champagne quaffing picnickers but it was but i don't think so because we then went on we met the pope so he'd obviously forgiven us yeah that didn't happen but you see that was well that's your you know in the podcast, we were talking about Boswell, James Boswell meeting Rousseau and Voltaire. And I asked you if you had ever done anything like that. Me, of course, meeting Boncho Todorov from the Bulgarian Football Union. And you said you hadn't done that,

but you did because you met the Pope. Yeah, but when I say meet the Pope, there were about kind of 4,000 people who were meeting him as well. It was all in St. Peter's Square. I mean, it wasn't a kind of, oh, hello, your holiness. No. It wasn't a cricketing audience.

No, only two of us, Sebastian Foulkes, Peter Frankopan, they got to meet him. So they were the millords and we were all the kind of humble retainers who had to stay behind. Yeah, we lurked in the background. Tom, that's such a tragedy

because you, of all people, I mean, you'd have had so much to talk about. You could have told him about your book and all that sort of thing. I'm afraid that's the tragedy because you of all people i mean you'd have had so much to talk about you could have told him about your you know your book and all that sort of thing i'm afraid that's the kind of reflection of the invidious class structures that it is well talking of invidious class structures so there's obviously an enormous amount of snobbery um from the sort of the i suppose the grand tour class towards the people who are going on the cooks tours and this is the point at which you start to see people using words like, they say there's a horde, there are swarms, there are a mob of tourists,

they don't know how to behave, they don't know, you know, people are mocking the sort of the people who take up. People talk about cook's circus, I think. And that sort of sense of holidays becoming something that are absolutely freighted with kind of social stratification, social prejudice. I think you get that from the mid 19th century. Isn't that also, so going on the Grand Tour, you're supposed to already know everything. You're supposed to know your Latin and your Greek and your classical antiquities and all that kind of thing. But if you don't have that absolute kind of background in it,

then you're going to need advice, aren't you? And I loved learning from Lucy Lethbridge's book that the publisher of what is widely thought to be the first guidebook was also the publisher of Byron, John Murray. So John Murray, who published Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, is a great poetic account of, you know, a doomed romantic figure crossing a Europe of ruins and romantic bandits is also, you know, John Murray is also publishing what she called Mariana Stark, which was published in 1820 travels on the continent. I love her list of what you need so you need pillows blankets

pillowcases mosquito nets towels tablecloth napkins traveling chamberlock pistols pocket knives carving knife and fork a silver teapot ink powder pens razors straps and hones needles thread tape worsted and pins a, a medicine chest with scales, weights, an ounce and half ounce, measures for liquids, a glass, pestle and mortar, tooth and hairbrushes. And I could go on because the paragraph is enormous. When I was writing my most recent history

of post-war Britain, so it's about the early 1980s, I kicked off by looking at American guidebooks and what they said about Britain. You know, the sort of Fodor's guide and the Let's Go guide to Britain in 1980, 81. And they're hilarious. And I think guidebooks and what they said about Britain, you know, the sort of Fodor's guide and the Let's Go guide to Britain in 1980, 81. And they're hilarious. And I think guidebooks and phrasebooks are often fantastic, this first guidebook, that she understood that the underlying default position, even of the open-minded tourist, was of suspicion and

fearfulness. Stark told her readers their fears were understandable, and then brusquely how they might overcome them. Have you seen the phrase books? So there's a phrase book, an English Italian phrase book from 1828. And at the top of the list of useful phrases, he has hurt, he bleeds. Do not weep, it will soon be cured, but it is a scratch. But also, I am ruined, I shall be scalded. Poor little creature that I am, where can I hide myself? She also cites one from 1874, which I thought had the best of the lot. The carriage is near the precipice.

One of the wheels is off. The axle tree is broken, which is very Italian. That hasn't changed because this is one from the 1960s, the Let's phrase book. So if you're traveling to Italy, these are the phrases. Look out. Be quiet. Leave me alone. I should call a policeman.

I urgently need an ironmonger. Well, unchangeable. When would you require that final phrase? I should call a policeman. I urgently need an ironmonger. Well, unchangeable. Where would you require that final phrase? Anyway, so yeah, you need the guidebook. You're obviously suspicious of the food is another thing. So you don't really hear a lot of that from the Grand Tourist, but you start to hear that a lot in the 19th century.

And of course, later on with packaged tourism in the 20th century. So you get all these people who talk about the sort of greasy ragus that they're being given in Italy and people who say they're only going to subsist on boiled eggs or something. I mean, that's a very kind of 1960s British attitude. But that's there right from the beginning, isn't it? It is. And it was also in travelogues that you get the first mentions of pizza so people going to we talked in the last episode about people going to um to naples to naples yeah so 1843 a travelogue describes a pizza as a sort of cake made from flour lard eggs and garlic and then its next mention is in the gourmet's guide to europe 1903 lieutenant colonel nathaniel

noonan davis he sounds like a spandered fellow is he a fan do you know what he calls a pizza The Gourmet's Guide to Europe, 1903. Lieutenant Colonel Nathaniel Newnham Davis. He sounds like a spattered fellow. Is he a fan? Do you know what he calls a pizza? He says it's like a kind of Yorkshire pudding. He does sound a tremendous chap. Eaten either with cheese or with anchovies and tomatoes, which is true because he's basically describing either pizza margarita

or a marinara, two great neapolitan pizzas but a yorkshire i mean how else would you quite tempted to do that the yorkshire pudding with anchovies oh no there was a brilliant pub in cambridge actually in the 1990s that did uh yorkshire puddings with chili stuffed with chili giant yorkshire pudding stuffed with chili con carne anyway this is not sure about that this is is a massive tangent dominic i think we should have a a break fairly soon but before we do that because we i know that you want to go on to talk about spars so we talked about bath didn't we in the first episode but um we did it turns out that german spars are a kind of different league but before we do that can i just could i just return to dickens's pictures from Italy and give you a breakdown of what he describes?

Yes. Okay. So he goes to Avignon and he visits the rooms in which the Inquisition used to operate. And Dickens gets a guide who had a mysterious hag-like way with her forefinger when approaching the remains of some new horror, looking back and walking stealthily and making horrible grimaces. So that's a very popular thing isn't it still it's going to see sites of torture suffering all that kind of thing i love that when i go on holiday yeah well dickens actually goes he sees a guillotining um so when he gets when he gets to rome um he actually watches it and he's clearly absolutely fascinated by it. He goes to Leghorn, which is what the British called Livorno. Not many years ago, there was an assassination club there, the members of which bore no ill will to anybody in particular, but stabbed people,

quite strangers to them, in the streets at night for the pleasure and excitement of the recreation. So that'd be fun. That's, you know. Well, yeah, but you don't join if you're a tourist, do you? I mean, you just have to live in be fun that's you know well yeah but you don't join if you're a tourist do you i mean you just have to live in fear of that i mean clearly dickens quite fancy yeah but it's um there's a kind of there's a passage he gets to piacenza and he writes sitting on this hillock where a bastion used to be and where a noisy fortress was in the time of the old roman station here i became aware that i have never known till now what it is to be lazy.

Because Dickens is famously, I mean, he's not a man who's ever lazy. But it's so typical of him that he's feeling lazy. He has to get out his notebook and write it down. That is very Dickensian. But it's also quite a Taurus thing, isn't it? That in a way, I mean, it's kind of Instagram. You can't enjoy a beautiful view

unless you've taken a photograph of it and posted it. Yeah. It's not real unless you've documented it. It's not real unless you've written a postcard, as was, or now you've photographed it, Instagrammed it, whatever. And it's absolutely typical of Dickens that the day after he has discovered what it is to be lazy, he's off again. It's such a delight to me to leave new scenes behind and still go on encountering newer scenes. And that, again, is absolutely part of the tourist experience to this day for going on a tour around.

I mean, the stereotype is the American or the Japanese tourists, isn't it, for Europeans that they turn up in today's. If it's Monday, it must be Paris. Yeah. So Dickens is kind of blazing a path there. He is indeed. That people will follow. You can never have yeah so Dickens is kind of blazing a path there he is indeed that people will follow you can never have too much Dickens

we will leave you with that and when we come back we will go to German spas let us plunge into those murky waters after the break Tom

see you in a minute I'm Marina Hyde and I'm Richard Osman and together we host The Rest Is Entertainment it's your weekly fix of entertainment news reviews reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club.

If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is History. We are on holiday, specifically we are on holiday in the Victorian period. And Dominic, we are heading off to Germany, aren't we, to enjoy the waters? Yeah, so in the last episode, Tom, we talked about the Grand Tour. The list of destinations that people went to, there were some of the very familiar big names from today, so France, Italy, but there are also some that are perhaps a tiny bit more unfamiliar. Not that many people go to Switzerland anymore for their summer holiday. And British tourists are notoriously reluctant to go to Germany on holiday, which is actually a huge break with tradition and with history.

Because in the 18th and 19th centuries, Germany was a colossally popular destination for British holidaymakers. And you went to Germany for the same reason that you would have gone to Bath or to Brighton in the 18th century. So you go there partly for the social scene but also you go because of your your health so spa tourism is a massive industry in the 19th century and you were talking before the break about Lucy Lethbridge's book tourists brilliant brilliant book which I heartily recommend to all our listeners and she has the most wonderful chapter in that book about um the popularity of all these awful sounding German spa towns. So there's a bloke, so a bloke in 1844 writes a book called Quacks and Quackery. And he says, a gang of crafty adventurers thrive richly upon English credulity and chuckle in

their sleeve at English stupidity. And what he's basically talking about are all these hundreds of spas across France and Germany which come with huge numbers of doctors. So I guess when people go to a spa today, there's not a doctor present, is there? I mean, you don't have a kind of medical consultation. No, I've never been. Have you ever been to a spa? No.

No, I've never been to a spa. What do you do? Do you kind of drink hot water? No, I just lie in the i just lie like a beached whale in their pool um well you know my wife has treatments of various kinds you know i thought you had to drink hot water no not i'm not talking about going to like a german star spa i'm talking about going to some fancy hotel you can't suddenly switch gears and i wasn't thinking about those kind of spas i was was thinking about the German ones with medicine balls.

No, no, no. Obviously, I would never go within 100 miles of such a place. Cures for corpulence. Well, you know what Lucy Lethbridge says about the German spas. There were bespoke treatments for every conceivable affliction with physicians on hand claiming every specialism. There were bone doctors, worm doctors, wind and water doctors. Treatments on offer included radioactive mud, sweat grottos,

sal de pulverisation, gas injections, and percussion douches. Have you never craved for a percussion douche? What is a gas inject? I mean. Well, I don't know i think they would i think they would put gas into into your eyes ears and other orifices they can't be injecting gas into your veins i mean i can't be healthy they would here we go uh i'm reading from lucy lethbridge's book and many spas including marion bad and bohemia there were gas baths while the patient

sat in an enclosed tub into which warm warm or cold gas was piped from below one or two even had specialist gas baths for eyes and ears where gas was injected via a small quill would you enjoy that no so they would cover you in sand that's another big another big thing um then they had these sort of communal pools and she says of these pools they were absolutely disgusting people would compare them with mulligatawny soup because they were because the spa waters were sort of you know they were strangely colored anyway but obviously you're sharing it with a load of germans a load of i mean and and british visitors too and you'd also drink the spa so you drink the same water that you'd bathe in

so that was that was what i was homing in on that's what i know about these spas is that you the drinking is disgusting i would never do that i mean that's derented do you want a patient at barden described do you know what he compared the spa water there with? He said it tastes like the washings of a gun barrel with a dash of rotten eggs. Nice. Yeah, okay, so a whiff of sulphur. It's got to be warm. It's got to be sulphurous. It's got to have sloshed over a lot of corpulent bellies.

That's my sense. It has done. How about this? I'm just reading bits. This book is so infectious that I'm just reading bits out now. At Carlsbad, drinkers were even advised to wipe their teeth with stale bread or sage leaves to remove the mineral incrustation. I mean, imagine going to a spa and being told, here's some stale bread to wipe your teeth

after you've bathed in mulligatawny soup and had a gas injection in your eye. Do you know, the First World War, not all bad, if it put an end to that kind of nonsense so some of these places obviously are still tremendously popular so i mentioned baden davos okay but that's in switzerland so that's a mountain resort isn't it so that's slightly isn't that slightly kind of later and classier uh well i think these german resorts are often are considered very classy so they'll have the kind of casino they'll have a grand hotel and they'll she's the most famous isn't it of all

because obviously it's the role it plays in the second world war but they're kind of old but the sense i have of of davos is that um the idea that mountain air is good for you is a kind of later a later idea just on vichy if you're you're going to be forced to go back in time and go to any 19th century spa, Vichy is the one to go to because at Vichy they banned salad because it gave you acid and made you drink wine and eat cheese. So that's a very kind of French provincial take on the spa. Well, no wonder Petain chose it then.

Exactly. There's a bloke called Dr dr spengler and he goes to davos in the 1850s not the famous spengler the decline of the west no no a different man uh and he says gosh this seems terribly healthy and he opens his spa there and robert louis stevenson goes there in 1880 he's dying isn't he so the whole kind of consumption thing so that goes back exactly and his doctor stevenson's doctor actually seems quite a decent fellow he put him on a diet of red meat lots of wine and milk and told him to work no more than three hours a day and that sounds i mean that sounds great

and and stevenson actually he hated it he went home he said uh and you know what he really objected to he objected to the scenery he said monotonous and monstrous yeah which is demented because davos you know you go for the scenery so that is an interesting point is people's people's relationship to scenery so obviously that is culturally determined because famously through the middle ages up until what is it petrock goes up a hill i goes up a mountain people are not interested in the rugged grandeur and sublime perspectives provided by the Alps. But then something changes. And I guess it's the romantic sublime, isn't it?

It is the romantic sublime. And the sort of, I suppose, you have the picturesque, don't you? And we talked about that a little bit with the Grand Tour. And then the sublime, the glories of nature. And to some extent, that has never left us. Byron famously goes to Switzerland as part of his grand tour, you know, on his 1816 trip, a flight from England, where he writes, you know, Mary Shelley writes Frankenstein.

Byron writes more of Childe Harold. And he is very, very upset when he is posing moodily on a mountain and a group of English tourists come up and start saying, oh, it's lovely nature. Yeah. And he goes off into a kind of massive aristocratic hissy fit about this. And that's very much a constant. What he should have done, Tom, is he should have gone to Iceland

because that's where you really go for the glories of nature and to get away from it all. So people start going there in the mid-19th century for precisely this reason, because everywhere else has become too crowded. So just one, I know that Lucy Deathbridge writes about this, but again, I'm so sorry if we just quote, but she has this fabulous quotation from Augustus Hare

in 1854 on the Matterhorn. I'm very glad to have seen it, but if I can help it, nothing shall ever induce me to see it again. Oh, wow. But I often feel like that about places I've been on holiday. Don't you? You go and see something, you think, that's nice, I can help it, nothing shall ever induce me to see it again. Oh, wow. But I often feel like that about places I've been on holiday. Don't you? You go and see something you think, that's nice, I've seen it, but I'm not going to see it again.

Do you know, I... I mean, I felt a bit like that, a little bit like that about Disney World. I don't think I'd ever confess to myself that I felt like that about a beautiful mountain. Right. But you're probably right. Okay. Because actually, I've been to Iceland,

and I slightly felt that about Iceland. Did you? I think Iceland is brilliant. I mean, I'm glad to have seen it it i'm glad to have seen it but i i'm not sure i'd go there again to see it if you see what i mean well people started going to iceland i mean it's very famous because it's in a way we're going to be doing a couple of podcasts on jr r tolkien um in a few weeks aren't we and william morris's trip to iceland and his obsession with the Norse myths and with the kind of spirit of the North, that leads ultimately to Tolkien and The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. So no Icelandic holiday, no Amazon Prime series. Anyway, that's by the by.

But that is another trend, isn't it that again is absolutely uh a part of the contemporary travel industry that you're always looking for the next place the next the place that has been undiscovered that is isn't spoiled that um you know you go further and further afield and people were doing that in the 19th century so when people went to italy people would go and see demonstrations of pasta making where italians would be making pasta in a way that they no longer made pasta. Right. So they were just doing it to keep the tourists happy. So pasta making had become mechanized just in the same way that now if you go to, I don't know, Mexico or something in villages or Peru, people will be doing their traditional

weaving. But I mean, that's not how most Mexicans and peruvians spend their time or indeed the kind of clothes they wear the classic novel and when i say novel i really mean film because i always think of it in terms of the film is um room of the view yeah of course and that's that's the so the grand tour does have a kind of longevity because all the people who are doing it's become much more feminized i think at the end of the 19th century early 20th century so young women will now go to italy and if you read particularly americans so henry james's books are all about um aristocratic well not aristocratic rich american heiress is going to daisy miller um yeah or uh they all die of malaria and things millie feel in um in the wings of the dove or something they're all they're all going to sort of venice

or rome or florence are you a fan of um a room of the view the merchant ivory i haven't seen it for ages okay so it's reinforced his book absolutely one of sadie's favorite films uh merchant ivory's adaptation of em forster's Room of the View. Was it Lucy Honeychurch goes to Florence and she's accompanied by her kind of companion, isn't he? Maggie Smith, who's absolute pain, brilliant, brilliant performance. And she meets Eleanor Levish, who is a novelist with romantic dreams of Italy. And Lucy Honeychurch, a.k.a. Helena Bonham Carter.

A.k.a. Helena Bonham Carter. Yeah. Is rather sulkily going around with her baedica. The baedica is the German guidebook. It gives you away. The German guidebook. And Eleanor Lavish says, throw away the baedeker yeah and talks about you know what the uh the true italy is only to be found by patient observation and then um lucy

goes off and has a fling with julian sands the world's worst actor yes nature beauty i love you astonishingly good film let's hope he's not listening to this podcast, Tom. No, I think he'd accept it. That he's a bad actor. He's the worst actor ever. Is he a worse actor than Jason Connery? Yes. The second incarnation of the Hooded Man and Robin of Sherwood? Yes, he is.

I urge you to watch Room of the View and watch him try and emote. I love you. Okay, fine. I mean, it's astonishingly bad. Worse than me. One last note on William Morris going to Iceland. I had promised you that I would tell you what'm astonishingly bad. Worse than me. One last note on William Morris going to Iceland. I had promised you

that I would tell you what he thought of Iceland. He thought Iceland generally was brilliant, but he didn't like Reykjavik. He said, not a very attractive place, but better than a north country town

in England. So that kind of thing of always having an English comparison. But, so he came back to England from Iceland and somebody said to burn jones his mate burn jones what's morris like um and uh burn jones said oh he's

awful he's come back smelling of raw fish and talking of iceland more than ever and people in iceland you know what they thought of morris they remembered him as a man who just went around talking about his strong views on probate and income tax that's odd i thought he'd be going on about all the um the elves because you know the great thing about iceland no clearly not he was just talking about his tax return i don't know whether this is a story that iceland has just held gullible tourists but that they are legally obliged when they're building a road to check that they're not going through a place where elves live so you'll be going on a perfectly straight road and then they'll kind of go around on a curve because uh there's the elves are living there so yeah it's a great country i've

heard that um but i think icelanders tell that story in order to you know in the same way that i don't know uh the italians would make pasta in the 19th century they do it because they know the tourists love to hear it yeah that's my suspicion my suspicion. But if anybody from Iceland is listening and could let us know whether people in Iceland really, you know, is road building really affected by whether elves are in the way or not? Okay, that's on. We've gone completely off piste.

We've gone completely off piste now. Let us get back to holidays. So obviously, all this period, most people are not going on holiday abroad because they can't. They can't afford it. They can't afford the tickets to get the boat train. But they are going on Sundays and things because the railway, they can do day trips.

Or if you work in an English sort of mill town or industrial town, you may get a wakes week. And the wakes week is when the factory owners will clean the factory and sort out all the equipment and basically service all the equipment. So you get a week off, the whole town, effectively. Oh, right. So like an inset day at school. Like an inset day, like an inset week. Yeah. And they will all go to the seaside.

And we talked a little bit about the seaside before with Brighton and stuff in our last podcast but seaside resorts are a real 19th century story and actually do you know where the world's first true sort of seaside I mean we did talk about Brighton but the world's first seaside spa resort was Tom spa we'll give it away it was to the Germans again.

So this is a place called Heiligendamm on the Baltic coast in Mecklenburg. And this was founded in 1793 by the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg. I was swimming in the Baltic only this summer, and it was very bracing. I have to say. Did you feel healthy for it? Did you drink it? I did.

I didn't drink it. No. Although the Baltic's not very salty. You could gl plug it down drink it yeah i could set up my own um my own spa with gas injections dominic sandbrook's spa yes pleasure island my pleasure treatment yeah um so there's a big thing up in germany in 19th century germany for, for sort of seaside spas. There are all these islands. There's Rügen and there's Usedom. There are all these places.

If you ever read Thomas Mann's book, Buddenbrook's brilliant novel, actually, about a German family, they're always going to Travermunde, which is near Lübeck. And actually, even if you go there now, they have this particular style of architecture called resort architecture, lots of lovely white buildings, sort of slightly clapperboard-ish, but very ornate. And you can imagine, we often say on this podcast,

if you could go back in time, what would you be? I mean, the idea of being a sort of Prussian general. Oh, you'd be a general, not a bourgeois. I'd be a bit of both, actually. I'd be a retired general who's now a bourgeois factory owner. Yes. And you'd be old enough not to have to fight in the in the first world war precise well and that that raises the issue of um would my children be fighting the first world war so that's and actually you know

what's going to happen to my grandchildren so it's becoming a bit of a troubling scenario now but maybe i can in an alternative reality i can coax germany away or maybe i can do the thing i've always wanted to do which is to strike a lasting ang Anglo-German alliance against the French. And I'll do that in my spa resort. Maybe in this alternate reality, the Kaiser does wear the right shoes. Well, we'll be coming to the Kaiser a little bit later. So the Germans have resorts. Also, Tom, the Americans have resorts. So you know the name of the first American resort? No. See, this is shameful because first the name of the first American resort? No. See, this is shameful because I actually sent it to you in the notes before this episode.

I've drawn back the curtain there for the listeners. So they they see the full horror of making this podcast. It's a place called Cape May in New Jersey. Cape May. Cape. No, Cape May sounds like it's clearly a person. I was going to say Cape May sounds like a kind of actress. Yeah.

It's Kate. Kate May could be a relative of Theresa May. Anyway, listen, it's Cape May, and it's in New Jersey. And you can go there initially from Philadelphia on a stagecoach. But then people start going after the War of 1812 in steamboats. And they have boarding houses and hotels and all these kinds of things. And Cape May still very much has been in decline, I believe, because basically nobody goes to New Jersey on holiday anymore.

But it still trades as America's first seaside resort. I'd like to go. Well, you should. I'd really like to go. Yeah, I'd like to go to new jersey and do the sopranos trail so i could okay abraham lincoln went to cape may so well he's good enough for abe honest abe exactly abraham lincoln did not however go to florida and florida is the big seaside story obviously so that was set up by a man called henry flagler who was a standard oil

baron and he built railroads in Florida. And he basically created, the first place he created was what they, I believe they pronounce St. Augustine as a sort of big resort, and then Miami and Palm Beach and all these kinds of places. And, you know- And when is California becoming a- Well, California, I don't think California becomes an attraction. California is too far, isn't it? I mean- Well, not if you're in California. Well, California, I don't think California becomes an attraction. California's too far, isn't it?

I mean... Well, not if you're in California. No, obviously, I mean, people are going to the beach if they're in California. But, I mean, East Coast Americans are going, you know, to... If they're not going to New Jersey, they're going to Florida on Henry Flagler's railroads. When is, I don't know, all the famous beaches in California, when are they starting to be colonized? That's a very good question. I don't actually know the answer.

I'd be interested, maybe our listeners can, because obviously the heyday of Californian beaches really feels like the 50s and 60s, doesn't it? Yeah. But people must have been going to the beach before that. But talking of beaches, since we are British, Tom, it would be remiss of us not to mention the most glamorous resort of all,

the great town of Blackpool. So Blackpool was nothing before the arrival of the railways. So there was a stagecoach from Manchester and Halifax to Blackpool in the late 18th century. But then there's a branch line that is built in 1846, and then Blackpool just goes through the roof so people go on these wakes weeks they're basically at the week off from the mill because they're refitting all the equipment so they just the whole town will basically get on the train

and pile into blackpool for the week and just ride donkeys and laugh at musical comedians and they build piers and they the blackpool is is a real trend i mean now the temptation for a lot of people in britain is to laugh at blackpool but they are the they're the first town in the world to have all electric power um they have electric street lighting they have the illuminations again it's kind of vegas it's it's blazing a path for vegas oh. Blackpool has the world's first electric tramway. It has the largest, when the Blackpool Tower was built in the 1890s, I think it's 1894, it is the largest, the tallest building in the entire British Empire.

They have the Pleasure Beach, and they have the first wooden roller coaster in Britain in 1907. And Blackpool is getting millions of visitors a year so people who are you know working class visitors people who have previously been shut out of holidays because of things like wakes weeks because of more paternalistic employers and things i mean they still have no statutory right to a holiday but they're going in absolutely colossal numbers well i will be going next year to blackpool yeah on holiday so my friend jamie and i we uh last last year we um we did this thing where we just went in a straight

line across britain and next year we're going to go from suffolk to blackpool in a kind of straight line so we're going to end up in blackpool so looking forward have you been to blackpool recently i've never been to blackpool see i have been to blackpool although sadie was born there was she and i filmed in blackpool um we may have listeners from blackpool. Although Sadie was born there. Was she? And? I filmed in Blackpool. We may have listeners from Blackpool, so I'm weighing my words carefully. It's probably not the top of my list of holiday destinations, to be quite honest with you. Well, I'm looking forward to it. I should be interested to hear what you make of it.

Hopefully, you'll be able to share your views with the listeners. Dom, our producer, is putting a note in the chat that says, Pleasure Beach in Blackpool, the original Pleasure Island? So the Pleasure Beach was built in 1896, Dom, and this tremendous amusement park and very, very popular, part of the reason why so many people went. But, Tom, we've almost reached the First World War, haven't we? We have.

The First World War began with a lot of people on holiday. So the Kaiser, very much a friend of the rest is history, slightly implausibly, a regular guest star on this podcast. He was on holiday for much of the July crisis running up to the outbreak of the First World War, which to me always sort of completely gives the lie to the idea that the Kaiser had in a sinister... Was he not on holiday in, was it Norway? He was, he was in the fjords. He was in Norway, because I think I have seen there was some kind of weird chair he had. The Kaiser's chair.

The Kaiser's chair. And I think he was sitting in it when the news brought to him of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. No, he was in Berlin when that happened. But maybe some news was brought to him. I'm imagining it then. But Britain is on holiday as we slide into war. So there's a bank holiday, Monday the 3rd of August. Lots of people are playing.

It's the oldest cricket festival in England, Tom. The Canterbury Cricket Week. I don't know what that is. I mean, typical continental plot, isn't it? To start a war when the cricket festival's on so surrey are playing nottinghamshire at the oval massive crowds uh the windsor and eton regatta never such innocence again yeah well i think we should end with that larkin poem because it's the it's the bank holiday the third of august um the previous

night the kaiser has sent an ultimatum to Belgium, saying we want free passage. The Belgians are clearly going to resist. So basically, Britain is on holiday. But in Westminster, the politicians are meeting, and it's the very next day that Germany invaded Belgium

and Britain declared war on Germany. And with that, Tom, the podcast, this episode of The Rest Is History must come to an end. But shall we end with that Larkin poem? Why not? Since it's all about holidays. Well, not only that, but we are recording this on the 100th anniversary of Philip Larkin's birthday. So it seems an entirely fitting tribute.

I have it in front of me. And for once, I will read it in my own voice rather than a ludicrous other voice. Here we go. 1914 by Philipilip larkin those long uneven lines standing as patiently as if they were stretched outside the oval or villa park the crowns of hats the sun on mustached archaic faces grinning as if it were all an august bank holiday lark and shut shops, the bleached established names on the sun blinds, the farthings and sovereigns and dark clothed children at play called after kings and queens, the tin advertisements for cocoa and twist and the pubs wide open all day. And the countryside not caring, the place names all hazed over with flowering grasses

and fields shadowing doomsday lines under wheat's restless silence. The differently dressed servants with tiny rooms in huge houses, the dust behind limousines. Never such innocence, never before or since, has changed itself to past without a word. The men leaving the gardens tidy, the thousands of marriages lasting a little while longer. Never such innocence again. Goodbye. Bye-bye.

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