Open Writing

These days most people are travelling more often and much further than they did half a century ago.

Travel back in mind fifty years. The long, devastating Second World War had recently ended. Many European cities were all but bomb-blasted ruins. Berlin and London had been mercilessly battered by air war.

Air travel for tourists was non-existent. What planes there were had been soaring in the sky, not engaged in pleasurable journeys but hell-bent on raining down destruction and death.

Even before that war started in 1939 travelling abroad for holidays was only a dream for the average person. Wages were too low, and some people could not even afford to take a week’s annual holiday to one or other of Britain’s coastal resorts. Only the upper and well-off middle class could enjoy the delights of visiting other countries, which was done at what we consider these days as a snail’s pace.

The travel agent Thomas Cook established in 1897 had no competition. They arranged what were known as Grand Tours to Europe and other countries offering interesting sights to see. The well-heeled Oxford and Cambridge University students, ‘toffs’, sallied forth on these wonderful journeys paid for by their indulgent, affluent parents.

Fifty years is just a blink of an eye, or so it seems to me in my older age, but I am amazed by the rapid growth in the travel industry. It has been phenomenal, particularly in regard to holidays abroad. The increase in salaries and the development of air travel have enabled the majority of people to experience what used to be available only to those with hefty bank balances. With the arrival of plastic credit cards, one can now take off without paying for it on the spot.

Thomas Cook these days has a lot of competition; in all town centres many travel agents are very busy booking holidays abroad for ordinary people.

Prior to 1994 other countries could only be explored by sailing or flying, due to Great Britain being surrounded by sea. In 1990 when rumour of a possible railway link between London, Paris and Brussels circulated, there was a lot of opposition to this proposed project.

Personally, I was opposed to the doubters; my feeling was ‘Let’s do it!’ Rail travel holds a special appeal for me because my late father was a locomotive driver for the long-extinct London, Midland and Scottish Railway. His free family passes used to enable us to travel the length and breadth of Great Britain.

At that time we youngsters used to wonder why our school friends did not go away on holidays the way we did. A few of them sometimes enjoyed a day trip to Blackpool ¾ many of them not even that.

These were the depression years of the 1920s and 30s. Poverty in Lancashire was a soul-destroying hardship with no social service benefits, no family allowance. And families were usually large with little or no birth control help available. It was a painful, miserable struggle for survival.

The link across the English Channel became operative in 1994, meaning one could now travel abroad, not just above the sea but below it by railway.

My daughter used to live a ten-minute walk from London’s Waterloo Station. She and I were amongst the first passengers to board Eurostar. It was a breathtaking, memorable experience. In three short hours we had left my daughter’s home and found ourselves leaving the train in the heart of Paris.

The rail tunnel across the Channel takes about 25 minutes to cross, and as we entered it the thought of all that sea above did cause a bit of apprehension. But that was soon dismissed. Holding back emotional tears I silently murmured, “Dad, you would never believe this!”