Now listen again to Lesley Morris and Wendy
Johnson's interview while you check the transcription of their
interview below.
PRESENTER:
The first ever package
holiday took place on July 5th 1841. It was an
away-day to Loughborough from Leicester. A
train was chartered for its passengers to
attend a religious festival. The whole trip,
for 570 people, was organised by a then
unknown man, Thomas Cook.
Lesley Morris has
written Package Tourists about the
origins of the package tour. Wendy Johnson is
author of a book about famous women
travellers, Wandering Women. Lesley,
have people always travelled or did it really
only start in the nineteenth century?
LESLEY MORRIS:
Oh no, they always
travelled but the difficulty was that people
only really went for reasons of war, or for
business, or on a pilgrimage. I mean, there
are records of 15th century women going off on
pilgrimages and more or less going by
themselves, but it was incredibly difficult to
do apart from that.
PRESENTER:
Wendy, some of the women
that you've uncovered did make extraordinary
expeditions early on.
WENDY JOHNSON:
They did, yes. There
were the great British women travellers, like
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who went off to
Turkey in 1716, thereby scandalising society;
or Lady Hester Stanhope, who wandered round
the Middle East, describing herself as 'Queen
of the Desert'. But I think it all began back
in the 4th century when an abbess from Spain
went to what she called 'right to the other
end of the earth' – it was in fact to
Jerusalem – it was, as Lesley said, on a
pilgrimage. But, erm, once she was there she
became the most enthusiastic tourist: she took
an excellent guidebook with her, er, which was
the Bible, and she engaged a rather
enterprising tour guide, who took her round
some of the famous places mentioned there. She
did all the usual things that a tourist would
do even now.
PRESENTER:
And Lesley, how did
package travel take off after this
Loughborough experience? – which I suppose
wasn't really a package holiday, although it
was the first charter ...
LESLEY MORRIS:
Mmm, the first charter, yes. Well, in
fact Thomas Cook organised excursions after that. He took
tourists to Scotland, he took them to the seaside resorts,
and he had this belief that the earth was there for people
to enjoy. And he really believed that. So the working man
could go, if he paid money into the working club, and he
took wife and children and all the rest of it.
But it wasn't until about 1855 that we
have a record, when Mathilda Lincoln went on a trip to
Germany and France and Belgium and then - she went with her
brother and two sisters - and she records in her diary that,
er, many of her friends thought it was far too adventurous
to go to countries that were not under the British flag. But
she said that 'we could venture anywhere with such a guide
and guardian as Mr Cook, for there was not one of our party
who did not feel perfectly safe when under his care.'
And from that time on, package tours
began to take off. There weren't, er, many of them and it
must have taken, well, quite brave women to go, I think - I
think most of them were waiting to get married - but they
went, sometimes with relatives, and gradually they began to
travel more and more until eventually most of the package
trips of the late 19th century were women, in fact
travelling by themselves.
Thomas Cook respected women travellers
actually, for their courage and determination. For example,
in the 1890s, with the, the great cycling craze, he actually
promoted cycling trips for women, single women. As long as
they took a friend with them they could go off to Europe
cycling, which, was er, pretty daring when actually you
couldn't go shopping by yourself, you had to go shopping in
London with a companion in those days.
PRESENTER:
There were also independent women
travellers at this time, weren't there, Wendy – apart from
the packages, I mean?
WENDY JOHNSON:
Mm, yes. Lesley was saying a lot of
Cook's tourists were ladies who were waiting to get married.
But a lot of the independent travellers were women who had
decided that probably they were too old to get married. They
were the unmarried daughters who had done their domestic
duty and when their parents died, they had perhaps received
some money and they had little else to do at home, so why
not go abroad? And that's what they did, in great numbers.
