A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain (34 page)

Maidenhead itself is too snobby to be pleasant. It is the haunt of the river swell and his overdressed female companion. It is the town of showy hotels, patronised chiefly by dudes and ballet girls. It is the witch’s kitchen from which go forth those demons of the river – steam launches. The
London Journal
duke always has his ‘little place’ at Maidenhead; and the heroine of the three-volume novel always dines there when she goes out on the spree with somebody else’s husband.
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Though a certain notoriety hung about the town until the Second World War, Maidenhead was rapidly to lose its Victorian and Edwardian appeal. Most of the surviving buildings along its riverbanks are in the red-brick, Queen Anne revival style of the latter nineteenth century, attesting to the swift arrival of fashion, and its comparatively swift departure.

While the countryside could provide amusement when the weather was pleasant, those in search of more reliable sunshine, or wider horizons, went abroad. The wealthy had always been able to do this, though Europe was also a destination for the genteel poor. Britain was so expensive to live in for those attempting to keep up appearances that
numbers of families or individuals gave up the struggle and moved to cities or countries where their means would go further. One such place was Deauville in Normandy, a popular summer destination for English summer visitors but also home to a permanent expatriate community. Similarly Dresden, capital of the German kingdom of Saxony – the ‘Florence of the Elbe’ – had so many British residents that three English newspapers were at one time published there. Other groups could be found all over Europe and beyond, merging with those fellow countrymen who travelled for health reasons in search of drier climates in which to spend the winter. It was the English who created the French Riviera. Their enthusiasm is thought to have begun with Tobias Smollett, the eighteenth-century novelist whose
Travels through France and Italy
(1766) was a bestseller. By the decades following the Napoleonic Wars, increasing numbers of Britons were settling in the region. One early enthusiast was Lord Brougham, who built a chateau in Cannes in 1836. By that time several resorts – Cannes, Nice, Menton – were being developed with funding from him and from his wealthy compatriots, and Cannes already boasted a
boulevard des Anglais
named in their honour. By 1862 there were almost 500 British families in the area, and by 1900 there were almost 100,000 visitors a year from the United Kingdom. These included even the country’s ruler, for Queen Victoria made an annual visit during the last years of her life. (The Riviera was fashionable only during winter, and not until the 1920s would summer visits be popularized by the likes of Ernest Hemingway, who could not afford to live there during the high season.) Two types of people went to this part of France: the wealthy and the sick. The climate was recommended by British doctors to those suffering from tuberculosis. It had not yet been discovered that the Alpine air of Switzerland was more favourable for this (a
migration of British invalids in that direction would characterize the later part of the reign), and in the meantime a sizeable community of doctors, invalids and their relatives grew up there.

For those with a bent towards gambling and the necessary social standing, the casino at nearby Monte Carlo was in operation by 1857 and grew into the principal gaming centre of Europe. In less than a quarter of a century it had made such huge profits that the local ruler was able to absolve his subjects from paying any taxes. It at once gained a reputation for high stakes, raffish behaviour (the Prince of Wales was an
habitué
) and suicides among the unsuccessful. As one English observer wrote just after the end of the century: ‘When a gambler has become bankrupt at the tables of Monte Carlo, the company that owns these tables will furnish him with a railway ticket that will take him home, or to any distance he likes, the further the better, that he may hang or shoot himself anywhere save in the gardens of the casino.’
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The resort was widely condemned by the press in Britain, but it nevertheless became an important part of Victorian expatriate life.

For the middle classes, opportunities to travel abroad remained very limited until the spread of the railway. This altered almost overnight the habits and expectations of millions, for within a single generation – from the thirties to the fifties – Continental Europe was brought within reach. It was in the middle of this period that an enterprising Englishman changed the nature of travel for ever.

Thomas Cook was a Baptist and a temperance campaigner. One day in 1841 he organized a train to transport a number of his colleagues from Leicester, where he lived, to a temperance meeting at the nearby town of Loughborough. The excursion was a success, and Cook realized that there was potential in the notion of arranging journeys for others. Not only did
passengers have greater pleasure in travelling when someone else had dealt with all the arrangements, the railways were willing to offer more favourable rates when block bookings were made in advance, and they could also schedule trains to suit the passengers.

Within four years, Cook was organizing regular trips with the Midland Railway, providing outings to coastal resorts. A decade later he ran an excursion from Leicester to Paris. His ambitions kept pace with his accomplishments, and the next year – 1856 – he began his ‘Grand Circular Tour of the Continent’. He meticulously planned these journeys, reconnoitring in person the routes and the places to be visited, and then accompanying the tourists. Italy, a country that had long fascinated the British, was an extremely popular destination. Cook, as a teetotaller, was often dismayed by his passengers’ fondness for local wines, which he assumed – often with justification – would have unfortunate effects on their digestion. In one of the more bizarre quotations to emerge from the Victorian era, he pleaded with them: ‘Gentlemen! Do you wish to invest your money in diarrhoea?’

The railway and the steamer opened central Europe to the British in the middle decades of the century. The Rhine was filled with Anglo-Saxon tourists, the castles, cathedrals and hotels on its banks echoing to the sound of their language. Armed with guidebooks from the German firm Baedeker, which have been a ubiquitous symbol of tourism ever since, they were known for their noisy confidence and their perpetual complaints – about the food, the beds, the weather, the cost of things, the rudeness of locals and the lack of cleanliness. They colonized Switzerland in the sixties, and they poured into Italy,
familiar to their countrymen since the Grand Tour a century earlier, and now treated as an extension of the Home Counties.

Travellers of this sort were not confined to Europe. By the end of the sixties, the empire of Thomas Cook had reached the Middle East. In 1869 he was a guest at the opening ceremonies for the Suez Canal. He was not alone. A multitude of British tourists were also there, brought by his company. In the same year he hired two paddle-steamers and began running excursions to the pyramids. Egypt became almost his personal fiefdom, for he gained from the Ottoman ruler the exclusive right to run excursion boats on the Nile. With this monopoly went a palpable sense of power. He was nicknamed ‘Field Marshal Cook’ for the armies of native workers he employed as porters, messengers and guides. He was also referred to as ‘the real ruler of Egypt’. He was certainly able to influence events there, for he loaned a number of his vessels to the British Army, which used them to transport troops and supplies upriver in the attempt to relieve Gordon at Khartoum. In 1899 he launched the first of a fleet of luxurious paddle-steamers that opened a new chapter in river-cruising, and the Nile had by this time acquired the nickname ‘Cook’s Canal’.

The British descended on Egypt, in their thousands, for several reasons. The country’s history and culture were of course a source of fascination, and appealed to the Victorian desire to combine leisure with improvement. The warm, dry climate was beneficial for those suffering from consumption at home, and numerous Anglo-Saxons developed the habit of spending winters there. A further inducement was the fact that being abroad gave Victorians a certain licence. Young people of both sexes were able to behave with greater freedom than could be found within the tight strictures that governed them at home. At a hotel in Cairo or Alexandria – as in Interlaken or Biarritz – it was much easier to meet strangers who, at home,
might well consider one unsuitable. No matter what the differences in station or in income, one had after all something in common: the experiences of travel. Victorian novels are full of instances of embarrassment caused by holiday friendships that cannot be pursued at home. They are also replete with stories of ‘adventures’ – flirtations, often passing but sometimes serious – that women enjoyed with strangers. For men, a tour in Egypt gave frequent opportunities to help young ladies on and off camels or donkeys, or to assist them up the sides of pyramids. For both men and women, this was not the least among their reasons for wishing to travel.

Britain’s dominance in Egypt, begun when Disraeli purchased control of the Suez Canal and continuing when the country became a protectorate, was a further encouragement to tourists, who could enjoy the protection of British arms amid exotic surroundings. Because the country remained volatile, however, military adventure was sometimes an inducement. The prospect of a naval bombardment and the landing of troops prompted this advertisement in
The Times
on 7 March 1885:

Advertiser proposes to hire a steam yacht and join her at Alexandria, and proceed thence to Suakin at once, in order to WATCH the OPERATIONS AGAINST OSMAN DIGMA. Would be glad to hear of three others willing to JOIN and share expenses. Time required about six or seven weeks, and total expenses probably £300.
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Cook and his employees took much of the uncertainty – and therefore the stress – out of foreign travel. Smartly uniformed company staff escorted tourists to, or met them at, their destinations. They arranged hotels, restaurants, guided tours and – where necessary – medical treatment. This made it
possible to spend weeks abroad without needing to speak to a single foreigner, and created the prototype of the modern ‘package tour’.

Cook’s empire continued to expand. He devoted much of the year 1872 to a trip around the world, scouting new routes and destinations. The company opened offices in Calcutta and Bombay, and with them arrived the whole paraphernalia of agents, native staff and chartered vehicles. Cook’s tours then spread to East Asia, and it was soon possible to circumnavigate the world with them.

By the mid-eighties tourists could visit any continent. Each of the huge mail-carrying steamers that plied, with clockwork regularity, between Britain and America, Asia and Australasia could carry hundreds of passengers, and onward travel once they arrived was becoming easier. From 1885 it was possible to make a week-long journey across Canada on the Canadian Pacific Railway, and the Australian outback also became a destination for trippers. The western American frontier was not considered ‘closed’ (i.e. settled and civilized) until 1890 – in other words, places that were still ‘wild’, and possibly haunted by bandits and armed natives, were already on popular tourist routes. Just as today, there were complaints that mass travel had made the world smaller, taken much of the adventure out of going overseas and filled the hotels and monuments of the globe with undesirable fellow countrymen.

At the start of the reign the traditional English ‘sports’ – hunting, shooting and fishing – went on as they always had. In addition there were ‘games’, cricket and football, the former well organized. Its rules had been codified in 1788, and it was played by eleven-man sides. Football, on
the other hand, was a generic term for numerous forms of scrimmage that might involve scores of players – the male populations of rival villages or entire forms of schoolboys. Such rules as existed usually referred to local circumstances. Few moves were unacceptable; injury was taken for granted and was almost universal. In each of the great schools at which football was played – Winchester, Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Charterhouse, Shrewsbury – a different version had developed, based on local geography and conditions and with its own rules, terminology, scoring and even size or shape of ball. The Rugby game, famously ‘invented’ in 1823 by William Webb Ellis, a boy who (as a memorial plaque at the school announces) ‘first took the ball in his arms and ran with it’, was taken up over subsequent decades by so many other schools and clubs that it gained a permanent hold throughout the country and beyond. Even those schools that proudly kept their own version of football came grudgingly to accept the Rugby game and to let it share their playing fields.

England had initially had no monopoly of games. Tennis had come from France, and was played in England, at schools and universities, from the fifteenth century. Cricket may also have originated across the Channel as a game played by peasants using a curved bat and a wicket made from sticks. The Celtic countries had their own bat-and-ball games, shinty and hurley. One of them, golf, had been played in England – as a very minor activity – for centuries (it is thought to have been introduced from Scotland by James I), though it did not become popular in the south until the later nineteenth century.

At schools, whether ‘public’ or otherwise, pupils amused themselves with the usual playground games and with the rolling of hoops. This was often done competitively – one hoop, or several simultaneously, requiring considerable skill to manoeuvre. As cricket developed in the later eighteenth century,
schools that were within reach of each other began to compete in the game. Eton played Westminster in 1786 – the first such inter-school fixture – and began playing Winchester a decade later. These contests were not officially approved, and the teams, supporters, venue and subsequent result had to be hidden by both winners and losers from the authorities. When discovered, those involved were usually thrashed or otherwise punished, a situation that continued until, in the 1820s and 30s, some headmasters gradually accepted the advantages of organized exercise. Despite official disapproval, however, games had steadily increased in popularity, and the school athlete had already become the hero that he has remained.