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The Grand Tour
The religious conflicts of the Tudor period contribute a
footnote to day trip history with the first recorded Thames
pleasure cruise - a beano from Abingdon to see some
Protestants burned alive in Oxford. On a more civilised
note young men seeking positions at the court of Queen
Elizabeth I were encouraged to travel abroad to finish
their education in a new form of Renaissance tourism.
In 1608 Thomas Coryate, son of the vicar of Odcombe in
Somerset, walked 2000 miles to Italy.
Coryate’s Crudities
,
became a guide book for hundreds of wealthy young
men. London society was fascinated by all things Italian
and Coryate’s accounts of life in Italy were read avidly,
especially his descriptions of cultural oddities like the
use of table forks, quite unknown in Britain at the time.
By the end of the 18
th
century a “Grand Tour” of three
or more years had become an aristocratic institution and
we find one of the first clearly documented examples of
the payment of tour guides The slang term for the Grand
Tour guide was
bear-leader
taken facetiously from the
travelling showmen who led reluctant performing bears
by the nose from village to village. The bear-leader was
tour guide, tutor, guardian, chaperon and companion.
Later on fashionable young women might make a similar
trip, to Italy at least, with a spinster-aunt as chaperone –
think Maggie Smith in
A Room With a View
.
As time went by pleasure and shopping outstripped
educational emphasis and young men returned with
vast collections of art and geegaws of all sorts. The epic
shopper Lord Burlington built his Thames villa Chiswick
House to showcase his collection of Grand Tour souvenirs.
1066 & All That
The Napoleonic Wars interrupted the custom of the Grand
Tour for a good 30 years, long enough to lead to its
decline as an aristocratic rite of passage. But the conflict
would rekindle a form of sightseeing as old as man - the
battlefield tour. Within weeks of the Battle of Waterloo
in June 1815 visitors were arriving to see the site for
themselves – it was rather grotesque really, a contemporary
account describes how these early battlefield tourists had
to pick their way through the rotting remains of dead
horses. Only two years later J M W Turner visited and
sketched the battlefield at Waterloo to produce his famous
painting of the site. With the long lasting Anglo-French
conflict over travellers returned to the continent with
Waterloo becoming an itinerary stop en route to Brussels.
Before long unofficial guides began offering their services
at the battlefield just as they had done so at all sites of
interest since the beginning of time responding to the
human desire to understand what we are looking at.
The quality of the guides varied hugely. Some like Martin
Viseur who was still handing out his business cards 25
years after the Battle claimed to have been there in 1815.
Others, said
Murray’s Guide
in the 1830s, were charlatans
trading in spurious and gruesome battle relics of human
hair and bone fragments. Just as chancers might have been
flogging splinters of the arrow that did for Harold in 1066
or crossbows from Crecy or longbows from Agincourt.
Romantic Tourism
It was fashionable among the middle classes from
Georgian times onwards to visit grand country houses
when their owners were away by arrangement with the
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The Kettle
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