In February 1929, Evelyn Waugh and Freya Stark documented their flight experiences, documenting their journey from London to Paris. Within the extracts, both writers have a tendency to firstly, explain the reasons for their travel and secondly, to describe their flight experience as a whole. Their narratives contain a lot of flamboyant and perhaps, exaggerated, terminology which is likely due to their feelings of excitement, exhilaration and nervousness. Waugh in particular, in the longer extract of the two, describes the whole journey; describing his belongings, itinerary for the trip, the process of check in and the flight experience itself. Waugh’s journey reflects several transport tourist theories from this decade, as ‘the air service was still very young’ (Waugh, 1982, p.187) therefore, Waugh’s descriptions support the common idea that it was not until ‘the second half of the twentieth century that jet propulsion, wide-bodied aircraft and low-cost carriers helped to create and accelerate mass tourism’, Pirie states in his  article that 1920’s air travel was not available for the masses due to its expense and most flights would have carried government officials (Pirie, 2009, p.49). Other travel tourist theories which will be discussed in relation to Waugh’s extracts will be: early desires to fly, the potential beginnings of ‘tourism’, technological advancements and commercialisation of air travel.

Brave Socialites and Uncomfortable Beginnings

Immediately after World War One, an important decision was made by the British government which essentially kept aviation alive. Planes were not advanced enough at this point to fly in winter months and therefore, as Peter Lyth states: where profits soared throughout the summer, aviation was practically non-existent at the end of the year: ‘summer boom was inevitably followed by a winter slump’ (Lyth, 2000, p.868). Imperial Airways, a government-sponsored  company, advanced the air travel industry from 1923.

Evelyn Waugh’s extract gives a fine example of a product within a growing industry, still under a trial and error process; Waugh uses his descriptions to imply how people would try anything to get the chance to fly: ‘an ex-officer of the R.A.F. appeared in Port Meadow with a very dissolute-looking Avro biplane, and advertised passenger flights for seven and sixpence or fifteen shillings for “stunting”’ this suggests how people were willing to pay small fortunes, to fly in very inadequate post-war aircrafts (Stark & Waugh, 1982, p.188). Despite these stunt flights not particularly advancing ‘mass tourism’ as such, people in the 1920s were desperate for a taste of flying, and it was only the matter of expense of a real destination flight which stopped people from doing so.

In the context of Waugh’s writings, 1929, this was a period of quality advancement for aviation. It saw the beginnings of ‘first-class’ on-board service: The Silver Wing (BBC 4, 2009). This was a period of fortune for those who were affluent, despite the Great Depression, wealthy personnel would pay fortunes to experience the recent advancements in aviation in terms of silver-spoon styled service. The BBC documentary on post-war aviation goes into detail about this growing craze, suggesting it was a government idea to advertise British aviation with the idea of promoting their ‘modernity and technological prowess’ (BBC 4, 2009). Unfortunately, in terms of tourism for the masses, this craze was mainly used by diplomats and government officials; this knowledge is backed up by Gordon Pirie who suggests: ‘the main reason for the relatively small share of leisure air travel by air in the British Empire is probably the expense of tickets’ (Pirie, 2009, p.54). However, as in Waugh’s extract, there were less expensive options of flying: ‘it was not the newest sort because they are more expensive’ this is one of the early beginnings in mass travel and tourism; as technologies advanced, the more recent planes were left behind by the growing companies therefore, more of the masses could begin to experience flight, despite being years behind the wealthy customers (Stark & Waugh, 1982, p.191).

Reasons for Flying and Taking Risks

Evelyn Waugh, more so than Freya Stark obtains the general feeling of excitement for flight through his use of adjectives throughout the extract: ‘excited’ ‘trembling’ ‘fascinating’ ‘clean and bright’, this supports the perception of the masses at this time, Waugh’s experience is one of highs and lows, literally and mentally, he experiences moments of relaxation as they seemed to ‘float along’ opposed by feelings of ‘discomfort’ as he was sick and experienced a ‘headache’ due to testing nature of the flight (Stark & Waugh, 1982, pp.188-192). This mixture of feelings is what Pirie describes as he suggests ‘flying was not just about the balancing of savings and cost, it was about the conspicuous consumption, boasting and thrill’ despite the disastrous end to Waugh’s flight and Stark’s feeling of being ‘dishevelled’, people paid for the experience to boast and tell their friends, which was also a fast way of spreading the desire to fly (Pirie, 2009, p.55) (Stark & Waugh, 1982, p.187). In the next section, the intelligence of companies to take advantage of people’s wish to fly was part of their advertisement, alongside the travelogues of those who sought tourism for the first time.

What came first, the chicken or the egg?

A long-debated question about the symbiotic relationship between transport and tourism is which came first? Did the development of transport lead to a demand for tourism, or did a demand for tourism lead to pioneers creating better transport industries? In terms of the creation of aviation, the small demand pre 1914 was much more insignificant than post World War One, when a thirst for demand came as a result of ‘astonishing technological implications’ through combat (Zuelow, 2015, p.127).

As time progressed, so did aviation. In Waugh’s documentations, he includes the use of Imperial Airways advertisements, one of many posters which captured the imagination of the country (Stark and Waugh, 1982, p.190). Advertisements showing proud-looking, well-dressed businesswomen as the ideal model for flights demonstrated the feelings of aviation at this time. An interpretation drawn from posters such as the one shown in the extract, is that business women who chose to afford the ‘less expensive’ journeys, alike the woman on the flight with Waugh, would see these advertisements and potentially model herself on the affluent business traveller. Therefore, the cheaper and shorter flights could be used by common people like Stark and Waugh who are seeking the beginnings of their tourist life.

Furthermore, in Pirie’s article, he states that despite a complete advancement in long-distance flights, the stopping and starting nature of reaching a far destination was one of the early causes of enlightened tourism: ‘frequent stopping, and overnight halts, helped to make tourists of all air travellers, irrespective of their trip purpose’ as well as this, it is noted that whilst the travellers were on the ground, they would begin to document the places they saw and visited which became early versions of travelogues which would be circulated throughout the country, installing a mass tourist agenda (Pirie, 2009, p.56). From Waugh’s extract, you can gather the sense that he is not particularly driven on the notion of sight-seeing, ‘it was sensible on the stomach rather than the eye’ his focus on the discomforts would have been a common thought for first time passengers who would not have been able to compose themselves to focus on sightseeing (Stark & Waugh, 1982, p.191).

Conclusion

When analysing Waugh’s experience, it is important to see his extract as a whole journey. The sense of preparation, check in, meeting new people, excitement, fear and destination are all themes of what became of the travel holiday. Despite Waugh’s lack of desire for sightseeing or his disinterest in the destination, his accidental participation, in the simplest way of him documenting his experience became the makings of travelogues and spread the mass demand for travel. As aircrafts became steadier, safer and more relaxed air travellers became tourists even in the sense of them viewing the ground below. Pirie states that ‘air tourism was a product of the age before society had been saturated with aerial photography’ which is a perfect representation of the correlation between technological development and mass tourism (Pirie, 2009, p.64). As previously mentioned, the complete acceleration of mass travel did not occur until post World War Two when there was further technological developments which led to cheaper manufacturing of planes, and tourists could travel for destination at affordable prices.

Bibliography:

BBC 4 (2009) High Flyers: How Britain took to the Air. A documentary celebrating the golden age of air travel during the 1920s and 1930s. London: BBC. (DVD).

Lyth, P. (2000) ‘The Empire’s Airway: British Civil Aviation from 1919-1939’. Revue belge de philogie et d’histoire. 78 (3-4), pp.865-887.

Pirie, G. (2009) ‘Incidental Tourism: British Imperial Air Travel in the 1930s.’ Journal of Tourism History 1(1), pp.49-66.

Stark, F. & Waugh, E. (1982) ‘A Trip to Paris.’ In Kennedy, L (ed.) A Book of Air Journeys. London: Collins, pp.187-193.

Zuelow, E. (2015) ‘Bicycles, Automobiles and Aircraft’. In, A History of Modern Tourism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.112-133.

In the winter and spring of 1873 Emily and John Dearman Birchall embarked on a five-month honeymoon trip to continental Europe, which Emily recorded in a diary. Despite the private nature of Emily’s writing (her diary was not edited and published until 1985) sex is strongly absent from the newlywed’s account. Perhaps this is unsurprising. Not only was twenty-year-old Emily a product of the moral strictures of Victorian propriety, to whom overt mention of sexual encounters would have been an anathema, but reference to sexual exploits are themselves atypical in travel writing. As Ian Littlewood notes, ‘The official line rarely tells the whole truth about anything, let alone sex. The story of tourism is no exception.’ (Littlewood, 2001, p.1) That said we do not need to be so accepting of this silence on questions of sex. Edward Brewtnall’s painting ‘Where next?’, painted in the decade following the Birchall’s wedding tour, illustrates how this kind of marital intimacy during travel could be played out; the husband’s possessive arm around his spouse’s shoulder; the luncheon table in disarray; the travel guidebook in the background; and the couple planning their route, perhaps not just for the afternoon, but given the painting’s title, also the rest of their lives. That Brewtnall’s painting is more commonly called ‘The Honeymooners’ makes it an appropriate accompaniment to Emily Birchall’s account.  As with the painting’s imagery, by reading between the lines of Emily Birchall’s diary, we can reveal moments of physical desire and intimacy. I’d like to suggest that there are instances in Emily’s account which mention physical exertion, the ecstasy of particular views and scenery and her obsession with recording food and dining, which are signifiers for her sexual attraction to her new husband, even if they appear far removed from acts of sex themselves. In this discussion I will focus on one specific episode to explore how sexuality could be read into what seems like an ordinary tourist experience.

Travel, sex and intimacy

Helena Michie argues that in the nineteenth century Britons viewed mainland Europe as a terrain where pleasure and passion were to be anticipated.  In the British imagination the very notion of Europe was ‘metonymy for sexualized, if not sexual, experience.’ (Michie, 2001, p. 237) Therefore, despite the Birchalls’ travel under the sanctioned state of matrimony, their wedding tour brought with it connotations of sexual transformation, particularly for Emily, whose sexually-naïve and virginal state on marriage would have been assured as a middle-class Victorian woman. The very concept of the honeymoon was a journey of transformation in terms of status, identity and physical maturity often conducted away from the familiar and the familial environment of home. Added to this is the sense that travel can be a context and facilitator of sexual desire, indeed, Littlewood maintains that ‘the physical business of travel is itself erotically charged’ and British travellers and tourists perceived  that the further south in Europe one went the more Latin and sexually-charged the context became. (Littlewood, 2001, p. 3)

Red letter days on a continental wedding tour

The impact of these southern latitudes on Emily’s inhibitions to write about her experiences can be witnessed in her account of Tuesday 4th February 1873, by which point the Birchall’s had reached the French Riviera. Unlike many of her entries which open with mentions of breakfast, transport or the weather, Emily opened this date in emphatic style; ‘This has been one of the red letter days of my life, having been signalized by a glorious walk, in magnificent scenery, on an absolutely perfect day, and with a most congenial companion. What more could be desired?’ (Birchall, 1873, p. 9) Emily’s sense of euphoria is palpable and her allusion to a ‘red letter day’ marks it as one of those transformative moments which Michie links to the honeymoon. Her choice of words in describing the attributes of her day are also worthy of note; glorious, magnificent, perfect and possibly less enthusiastically, congenial.  Congenial or pleasant seems out of sync with her other effusive descriptions and it is here that we might read Emily being coy about her new husband. Such coyness accompanies a full day alone in each other’s company as the Birchalls undertake a walk between Nice and Mentone, a twenty-mile trip on foot across spectacular costal cliff paths. Not only are they removed from the public social world of the Riviera towns frequented by most tourists, but they dispense with the assistance of their guide Perrini, who had accompanied them from London, and embark on the day’s sightseeing as unchaperoned partners.

Reading intimacy into the deliciousness of a delightful walk

Emily’s description of the walk builds on this sense of herself and Dearman as a unit, underscored by her persistent use of ‘we’ in relating their actions and feelings. References to ‘we started … we found … we ventured … our eyes feasted’ (Birchall, 1873, pp.9-10) reflect what Claire Langhamer describes as marriage’s ‘dynamic emotional connection where personal transformation was a shared project achieved through togetherness.’ (Langhamer, 2013, p. 6) As they follow the steep costal path the Birchall’s are treated to amazing views of blue sea, green islands, rolling hills and snow-topped Alps in the distance; the couple see these vistas not as individuals but, Michie suggests, as part of a joint ‘conjugal gaze’ which commonly appears in the accounts of honeymooners abroad in this period. (Michie, 2001, p. 240)  Moreover, in her details of such views, Emily makes special note of the olive orchards and vineyards which cover the surrounding countryside, both symbolically important in weddings and honeymoons as representations of fertility. In drawing her descriptions of this view to a close Emily pronounces that the panorama is ‘perfectly ravishing.’ (Birchall, 1873, p. 10 – italics mine) 

But the sense of connectivity and shared appreciation of their surroundings is not the only hint of intimacy revealed in this particular extract. Emily’s choice of wording is again significant; ‘delicious  … exhilarating … hot’ are adjectives which also carry connotations of romantic pleasure and arousal. (Birchall, 1873, p. 9) This is highlighted in her admission that she ‘doffed gloves and all doffable garments, and Dearman peeled to his shirt sleeves, greatly exciting my envy of his cool and airy appearance.’ (Birchall, 1873, p. 9) Whilst there’s no suggestion here that the couple removed more than jackets and accessories, even this act of casual semi-disrobing and the visual appreciation Emily pays to her husband bear witness to aspects of attraction and disregard for the sartorial expectations of the Victorian age. This sense of the couple’s playfulness is also echoed in Emily’s reference to ‘an awfully seedy looking restaurant’ in a small village where they stop for refreshment and ignore the niceties which usually accompanied their dining encounters in the best hotels amongst other rich and aristocratic tourist.  (Birchall, 1873, p. 10) Taken together, these small actions compound 4th February as a day of particular frivolity, intimacy and escape for the Birchalls, removed from the public and touristic conventions which beset British newlyweds on honeymoon on the continent.      

Assessing conjugal travel and the honeymoon period

From this discussion it would wrong to conclude that Emily and Dearman indulged in any sexual activity whilst on their long walk from Nice to Mentone, but if we read this diary extract carefully it becomes apparent that Emily’s account of the excursion is redolent with sexual connotations that are bound up with the experience of travel itself. This entry is suggestive of the ‘sustained tone of blissful intimacy’ which Emily sustains in the rest of her account. (Michie, 2001, p. 235) Once the honeymoon was over, five surviving children and an idyllic account of their home life depicted in The Dairy of a Victorian Squire (1983) point to a happy and productive marriage, founded on their five-months wedding tour in Europe.

Writing of another context in which open references to sex, even within marriage, are taboo, that of  Muslim women’s autobiographies, Siobhan Lambert-Hurley has noted that ‘To interrogate a text for silences is a task expected of every careful scholar, and yet it can be marked by serious challenges. How exactly do we identify and then write about something that is not actually there in the script.’ (Lambert-Hurley, 2014, p. 159) Lambert-Hurley suggests that one way around this is to ‘start disentangling what an autobiographer chooses to tell about herself.’ (Lambert-Hurley, 2014, p. 160) Such a task is necessarily hampered by guesswork, but be analysing Emily Birchall’s diary entry for 4th February 1873 alongside other entries, closely attending to her choice of language and situating it in the wider context of travel and the Victorian honeymoon we can come to a fuller understanding of conjugal intimacy abroad.

Bibliography

Birchall, Emily (1873: 1985) Wedding Tour: January-June 1873. Gloucester: Alan Sutton.

Lambert-Hurley, Siobhan (2014) ‘To Write of the Conjugal Act: Intimacy and Sexuality in Muslim Women’s Autobiographical Writing in South Asia.’ Journal of the History of Sexuality 23(2), pp. 155-181.

Langhamer, Claire (2013) The English in Love: The Intimate Story of an Emotional Revolution. Oxford: OUP.

Littlewood, Ian (2002) Sultry climes: travel and sex. Da Capo.

Michie, Helena (2006) Victorian Honeymoons: journeys to the conjugal. Cambridge: CUP.

Michie, Helena (2001) ‘Victorian Honeymoons: sexual reorientations and the “sights” of Europe.’ Victorian Studies 43(2), pp. 229-252.