Carry On Abroad!
Despite the oddity of two-pronged plugs, the hidden dangers of continental loos and a fear of drinking the tap water, we Brits finally learned how to...
BOOK OF THE WEEK TOURISTS by Lucy Lethbridge (Bloomsbury £20, 320 pp) ROGER LEWIS
AlThough I am perfectly happy to mingle with our European neighbours — in the sherry bar before the bullfights; in the Excelsior hotel, Naples, after the opera; in an Alpine chalet, yodelling with Tyrolean minstrels; in the oyster restaurants of Brittany, ordering the third bottle of Muscadet — I’m aware many of my countrymen aren’t so mad keen.
long before Brexit — in 1947, for example — a comment frequently made by an older person was, ‘I don’t want to go abroad, never have’. Putting matters into a patriotic perspective, people used to remark categorically, ‘good old England. Keep your money in this country, I say’.
These quotations are found in lucy lethbridge’s Tourists, where the chief theme is our reluctance to enjoy foreign parts.
holidays are a relatively new idea — statutory bank holidays were only introduced in 1871 — and sallying forth into an alien culture, if only for a week or so, required military planning. Travellers were advised to take their own bedsheets, mosquito nets, towels, chamber pot, pistols, pocket knives and a medicine chest.
‘Women should wear sturdy veils and green spectacles when travelling,’ ran the advice in Victorian days. It was generally to be expected that bottom- pinching Johnny Foreigner would be insolent, drunk and stinking of garlic.
Indeed, my late Aunty Marion was so startled to have her bottom pinched in Majorca, she went back three times. ‘Those of a nervous disposition’ should expect to have fits, especially when exposed to foreign germs. It was never wise to drink the water.
Then there were continental lavatories — tourists were expected to squat and balance over a vile hole ‘and hope nothing came up and bit you’.
No matter how lovely the Mediterranean landscape, ‘foul smells overpower the orange blossom’. As lethbridge shows, ‘defective drainage’ and the stench of sewage was a particularly British obsession, more so than that other worry, finding a decent cup of tea.
What with all the insects — repelled by covering the entire body with butter and turpentine; all the folk dancing; the two-pronged plug and ‘continental quilts’ (the down-filled mattress later caught on as the duvet, but was a puzzle at first); let alone the complexities of visas, passports, foreign currency and exchange rates — it is no wonder the ordinary family preferred Butlin’s in Skegness, where a holiday camp had opened in 1936.
Those individuals wanting galleries, churches and museums, however, found their saviour in Thomas Cook, born in 1808, whom lethbridge calls ‘the founding father of the modern holiday’.
his descendants developed the business plan, which was to block-book railway tickets ‘on the cheap’ and devise allinclusive excursions.
THE first, in 1855, was to Paris. Within a decade the company was responding to 50,000 enquiries annually. ‘ Everything is organised,’ exclaimed a Cook’s customer. ‘ Everything is catered for. one does not have to bother oneself with anything at
all, neither timings, nor luggage nor hotels.’
Cook’s tourists were typically provincial sorts wishing to improve themselves, clerks, schoolteachers, people who wanted to go cycling or hiking, filling their knapsack with ‘a bottle of brandy and a dozen hardboiled eggs,’ to sustain them as they ascended Mont Blanc. It was Thomas Cook & Son who commissioned an electric railway to take visitors up to the crater of Vesuvius.
On the heels of the tours came the phrasebooks. ‘Do not weep, it will soon be cured, it is but a scratch’; ‘I shall call a policeman’ — useful things to know in French, German, Italian and Spanish. But what occasions would call for ‘My wheelbarrow is broken’ or ‘I urgently need an ironmonger’? The British abroad are an odd mob.
Mass tourism has been dire for the environment and local ways of life. Venice is sinking. Creating artificial snow at ski resorts guzzles fuel. The once unspoilt Balearics and fishing villages of the Costa Brava were bulldozed in the 1960s and 1970s for concrete high-rise hotels, all-youcan-eat buffets and round-the-clock pubs selling draught beer.
Economy Class air travel and guaranteed sunshine brought the Butlin’s and Pontins crowds to the beaches of southern Europe, where they could be found ‘lying like a heap of pigs’.
I’ve been porcine many a time in Rhodes, plastered in suntan lotion. Lethbridge is correct to say everything about the classic package holiday is enshrined in Carry On Abroad, set in the resort of Elsbels where, after the high-jinx, ‘the coach returns everyone home to Britain, there to dream of the same thing, same time, next year’.
When Sid James asks after the crumpet, Charles Hawtrey, who in an earlier scene drinks suntan lotion, says innocently, ‘Oh, I don’t think they’ll be serving us any tea’.
Enjoying kitsch, I for one find nothing offensive in the commercialisation and merchandising opportunities — novelty ashtrays, keyrings, fridge magnets, tea towels, shells, meerschaum pipes and artificial trinkets, such as ‘a working model of a guillotine’.
The times I’ve returned from the Mediterranean with a straw donkey under my arm, though for some reason it is politically incorrect for me to wear my pink wicker sombrero, which in point of fact I purchased in Butlin’s, Minehead.
WHERE once everyone had a Kodak camera and wrote postcards — in 1903 somebody said ‘in ten years Europe will be buried beneath picture postcards’ — now the norm is the digital image ‘delivered by a smartphone snap in seconds’.
Friends and family keep in touch with each other moment by moment, as if they aren’t actually apart.
My only disagreement with Lethbridge is I don’t think tourists and holidaymakers are the ones who are ‘coarse grained’ with ‘vulgar manners’. Those culprits are the expatriates, who have imposed their ‘ smalltown prejudices’ on to Normandy, the Dordogne and Andalusia particularly.
Traditionally they had their own clergymen, lending libraries, cricket clubs and newspapers. Today they run their own ghastly ‘Irish’ bars, refuse to learn the local lingo, look down on the indigenous population and behave as arrogantly (and defensively) as I imagine the British did in India or Malaya, during the last blast of our Empire.