The British Abroad Since the Eighteenth Century, Volume 1

Travellers and Tourists

Xavier Guégan, M. Farr, X. Guegan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781137304148
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137304155
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This book considers the British travelling beyond their isles over the last three hundred years, and through a range of interdisciplinary perspectives reflects on their taste for discovery and self-discovery both through the exploration – and exploitation – of other lands and peoples.

Part I

Classes of Travel

1

British Tourists and the Beaches of Europe, from the Eighteenth Century to the 1960s

John K. Walton

The contribution of British demand to the growth and nature of seaside tourism elsewhere in Western Europe is undeniable. It is far from being solely a product of the later twentieth century and was much in evidence from the beginning. This chapter examines the role of the British in the rise of coastal tourism in modern Europe, from its eighteenth-century origins to the transitional 1960s, beginning with the domestic experience. This was an important influence, directly and at various removes, on subsequent developments on the European mainland. After outlining the growth of coastal tourism within and beyond Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this chapter examines the nature and influence of the British tourist presence in European coastal resorts. It begins with the English Channel and the north German coast in the late eighteenth century, passes through the Edwardian and interwar British presence in coastal Europe (especially on the Atlantic coast and in the western Mediterranean) and the ways in which these experiences fed back to influence British seaside practices, and examines the passion for Mediterranean sunshine that came to the boil in the post-Second World War generation.

The English origins of seaside tourism

Seaside or coastal tourism in the modern world is an English invention.¹ It spread from Northern England through much of coastal Europe, and (eventually) most of the rest of the temperate and tropical world, mutating in response to specific cultures and conditions, often to the point where its original roots became unrecognisable. Meanwhile, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, England and Wales developed a dense and complex network of urban coastal resorts, the scale of which was challenged only in Belgium.² These important truths are not widely acknowledged because the demand for seaside holidays within Britain has always been overwhelmingly domestic, leaving its history almost invisible to the rest of the world, while British governments have failed to recognise the economic importance of seaside tourism.³

These initial statements require qualification. The Romans had their version of coastal tourism, which went into eclipse with the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, although its influence on eighteenth-century European elites should not be underestimated.⁴ The positive re-evaluation of coastal landscapes and cultures in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, alongside the new appreciation of mountains, was a Western European phenomenon. Dutch visitors to Scheveningen from the mid-seventeenth century were enjoying the seascapes, and the peculiarities of local buildings and society, before the commercialisation of sea-bathing got under way in England.⁵ Seaside holiday industries built on (or developed alongside) long-established popular sea-bathing calendar customs on many European coastlines, and in different cultures, including those of North Africa and the Middle East.⁶ As with mineral water springs or ‘spas’, the commercial development of sea-bathing under professional medical direction was the product of medical entrepreneurship, as the emergent profession captured and exploited popular practices and covered them with a lucrative ‘scientific’ veil.⁷ The idea of the therapeutic (and prophylactic) sea as medical resource trickled upwards from popular usage to elite medical counselling, before trickling back down through society to an eventual reincorporation of the working classes.⁸ Meanwhile, the appeal of coastal locations broadened beyond the search for health and cures, and the nature of bathing practices and the use of the beach was also transformed.

This happened first in England. Across Europe, few coastlines before the 1960s could challenge the Victorian and Edwardian seaside resort systems of Kent, Sussex, Lancashire and North Wales for intensity of development, density of summer holiday traffic and size of leading individual settlements, the most obvious contenders being the French and Italian Riviera, the Adriatic littoral and especially the Belgian coast.⁹ But once the spread of sea-bathing had passed beyond immediate British influence, developments were increasingly mediated through intermediary coastal cultures, so that, for example, French sea-bathing practices were the immediate influence on northern Spain’s Atlantic coast from the second quarter of the nineteenth century.¹⁰

It is safer to specify that the modern and commercial organisation of sea-bathing originated in England in the early eighteenth century, to be exported to the European mainland from the late eighteenth century, following a variety of hybrid paths thereafter which led further and further from its origins. Its development marched in step with the first Industrial Revolution, and was part and parcel of it, rather than being in some simplistic sense caused by that complex set of processes.¹¹ There is debate over exactly when and where seventeenth-century medical interest in the value of cold bathing stimulated formal facilities for sea-bathing, but it was in Northern England in the early eighteenth century, at Liverpool, Whitby or the established coastal spa resort of Scarborough.¹² Liverpool, as in other parts of the Lancashire coast, had popular sea-bathing traditions, which persisted alongside the early development of the medical and commercial model. This formed part of a European pattern of quasi-magical customary practices, on Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts, in Wales, Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal and Italy, usually at Assumptiontide in mid-August. They were probably built on pre-Christian observances, as similar customs on the coast of what is now Tunisia might suggest.¹³

By the 1730s, sea-bathing brought the nobility, gentry and emergent middle ranks of English society to several coastlines. Early developments in south-eastern England call attention to London’s role in generating fashionable demand.¹⁴ By the late eighteenth century, London tradesmen and their families were making holiday in Margate, and Blackpool was attracting Lancashire lawyers and manufacturers.¹⁵ Such developments were widespread before the railways arrived from the 1840s onwards. Already in 1851, when the European seaside was still in its infancy and few Britons ventured to foreign beaches, the British census report identified coastal resorts and spas as the fastest-growing category of towns during the conventional heyday of the Industrial Revolution.¹⁶ Railways reduced journey costs in time, money and (usually) discomfort, enabling middle-class families to stay longer at the coast. Cheap excursion fares democratised access to the beaches, and working-class rail ‘trippers’ became almost ubiquitous, long before they were conceivable in the rest of Europe.¹⁷ Upper-class British sea-bathers took refuge in more socially select European locations.

The commercial British seaside

The roots of the commercial seaside were English. Wales and Scotland followed later in the eighteenth century, Ireland later still. England led the way in commercialising the coast, closely followed by Wales. Subsequent developments in Ireland depended heavily on English landowners and visitors promoting polite and controlled visions of coastal landscape, while the demand for sea-bathing in Scotland remained almost exclusively domestic.¹⁸

English developments are essential to understanding coastal resort history. British schoolchildren may still learn every detail of the rise of manufacturing industry in the eighteenth century, but the bathing-machine, that key innovation in the privatisation and commercial exploitation of access to the sea, is either ignored or relegated to a jocular footnote. This fourwheeled horse-drawn carriage, with its canvas ‘modesty-hood’ to conceal the bather while facilitating controlled, confined access to the sea, was as essential to the early development of commercial sea-bathing as the spinning jenny was to the cotton industry. Whether Benjamin Beale of Margate should be regarded as the James Hargreaves of the seaside is a moot point, but the crucial decade was the 1730s.¹⁹ The bathing-machine fitted perfectly into the medical takeover of sea-bathing, with its emphasis on brief, regulated exposure to the waves, on therapy rather than pleasure. It enabled modesty, which became essential to the building of a decorous, respectable seaside image, and profits, by making respectable access to the sea from the beach conditional on its hire. The bathing-machine regime, which segregated the sexes while preserving modesty and imposing privatisation and commodification on the therapeutic use of the beach, became synonymous with the rise of the British coastal resort. The prevailing assumptions about sexual respectability and control also applied in most of continental Europe, although the bathing-machine itself did not ‘travel’ well. English visitors to continental resorts soon began to remark on the variety of bathing practices and conventions, which might involve the use of cabins, the active employment of stalwart men to dip respectable ladies, the use of cords to cling to for stability and security, and even the playful mingling of the sexes in the breakers.²⁰

The early English seaside holiday borrowed its social institutions from the inland spa. The beach was visited briefly, if at all, to satisfy medical requirements: sometimes the comfort of indoor sea-water baths was preferred. Resort social life took place on dry land, though the sea became an attractive object of the visitor’s gaze. Established maritime activities became exotic attractions for the ‘anthropological gaze’ of the curious, as had long been the case at Scheveningen.²¹ The beach became a site of pleasure and even play, as paddling and even swimming (a scarce skill into the twentieth century) were enjoyed alongside the controlled regime of the bathing-machine. Middle-class children, often minded by servants, were increasingly in evidence. Enduring Victorian traditions developed, which became integral to conventional, affectionate representations of the British seaside holiday: donkey-riding, ‘shrimping’, sandcastles, beach cricket and open-air entertainment through the itinerant ‘German’ band, Punch and Judy show, blackface minstrels and later pierrots.²²

Many such pleasures were specific to the coast, and the rise of the pleasure pier from the 1860s onwards reinforced the identity of the tourist seaside.²³ The ‘pleasure palaces’ of the larger Victorian and Edwardian seaside resorts became centres of more orthodox entertainment. There was nothing to match this great efflorescence of investment in popular entertainment – built to last and based on the popular capitalism of limited companies – anywhere else in Europe.²⁴

These unique features of the English seaside were based on a huge expansion of popular, including working-class, demand between the late nineteenth century and the First World War. It took a very long time for similar popular holiday practices to extend to other European countries. Despite assertions to the contrary, Thomas Cook was never an important player in this market: his initiatives did not extend to seaside trips, which were provided mainly by regional and local operators. Nor were Cook and his firm ever great, or distinctive, promoters of the European seaside.²⁵ By the First World War, England and Wales counted more than 140 seaside resorts, with around 1.6 million inhabitants, whose growth had been accelerating over the past 30 years. Scotland and Ireland had much smaller numbers, and lacked really big resorts. But nowhere in Europe could match the sheer scale and social range of developments on the popular English and Welsh coastlines.²⁶

The British systems of popular seaside holidaymaking survived strongly, but not unchanged, into the 1960s and early 1970s. The social structure of the seaside holiday market was already shifting by the later nineteenth century, as growing numbers of the aristocracy and gentry, and then of the comfortable, status-conscious middle classes, began a long process of summer relocation to more ‘select’ (and cosmopolitan) European beaches. The British role in the development of seaside holidays and coastal resorts in Europe will now be examined.

Exporting the seaside: Beginnings

It is one thing to chart the spread of British holidaymakers across European destinations: it is even more difficult to assess the British contribution to European cultures of coastal enjoyment. Different coastlines and countries developed their own seaside manners and customs, from the practice of sea-bathing and the use of the beach, to the architecture of coastal pleasure a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Series Preface
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Classes of Travel
• Part II: Europe
• Part III: The Empire . . .
• Part IV: . . . and Beyond
• Index