Timelines: The Growth of Tourism as Education

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Timeline - Christian Pilgrimage as a Tourism Prototype

26.06.07

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The Grand Tour

03.12.06

The earliest forms of travel for distinctly educational purposes (as opposed to exploration, politics, trade and religion) were what became known collectively in Britain as the Grand Tour. In the relatively peaceful and outward-looking time of the Tudor monarchs it became the practice for young men to be prepared for government and estate management by travelling in Europe.

The earliest were often paid for by Henry VIII or Elizabeth I in order to gain knowledge and experience. They were followed by the sons of the wealthy, often travelling for two or three years and accompanied by an older tutor. France, Italy and other countries lying in a band running towards the Mediterranean were the fashionable destinations as it was considered that these represented the cultural springs of English society at the time.

Other Europeans also travelled, often to the same destinations, exploring their own cultural society at the same time that risk-taking explorers were beginning to make contacts with more distant lands and civilsations.

For the Grand Tourist of the time the journey was by nature a form of higher education based on encounter, experience and interaction. It was entertaining as well as instructive, often a chance to go through the transition to adult responsibilities while relatively protected by tutor and fellow travellers.

In 1789 the French Revolution and the subsequent Napoleonic Wars closed off the continent to most travellers. After hostilities ceased in 1815 people began to make journeys once more, but the growth of organised group travel during the nineteenth century began to replace the classical Tour with shorter visits. The tradition of the Tourist had been formed, however, and by the turn of the 21st century the growth of independent, gap-year travel, often to south east Asia and Australasia, has brought a modern version to prominence.

NB The divisions along the bottom of the timeline try to mark out the context of the developments shown, at least for a western European country like Britain. The Middle Ages, based often on subsistence, small towns and villages and local trade, is an often-used term. The changes of the Renaissance include the starting of scientific enquiry, ambitious exploration and growing scales of trade. Industrial growth includes the industrial revolution and the dominance of a new, technocratic society. The term 'mediatocracy' is one that I use to mark out a society based increasingly on knowledge of all kinds and its sharing within society. As time progressed its ownership and control began to represent an economy in which primary and secondary industries became less and less dominant, and the struggle to obtain and to use information, channelled by a growing range of media, began to define democratic processes ever more.
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Herbarizings

08.12.06

In May, 1620, the London Society of Apothecaries recorded its annual Simpling Day. It wasn't the first, but it is the earliest to be found in the Society's archives.

The Society of Apothecaries was one of the livery companies of the City of London given the right and the duty to train apprentices who would become the pharmacists of the day. It was important that these young men be able to recognise 'simples' - the medicinal plants that provided their drugs for treating the sick. Not only did they need to know the plant, but they had to identify it in its natural setting.

The Society therefore gathered the apprentices at St Paul's Cathedral on herbarizing days. The apprentices had to be up and about at 5 o'clock in the morning and ready for a long day. At their most frequent there were six 'herbarizings', as they were known, between April and September. The first in the season ended with a dinner paid for by the Master of the Society. Another, in July, was called the General Herbarizing and ended with a banquet for the Freemen of the Society - the men who had succeeded as apprentices and who were the only ones allowed by law to practice as trained apothecaries.

The herbarizings took place out in the country with a leader who showed the apprentices where the plants were and taught their names and uses. Some leaders were charismatic, others learned, but poor at preventing outbreaks of misbehaviour: a feature of some teachers through every century, perhaps.

By the 1830s the first railways were stretching out from city centres, opening up more countryside to developers. The time required for the Society to get its London apprentices out to somewhere suitable for teaching about plants was lengthening. In 1834 it was decided the idea had become impracticable and so the herbarizings were abandoned.

Years before, in 1673, the same Society had opened the Chelsea Physic Garden to act as a depository and teaching space for useful plants. It became the practice for a Demonstrator of Plants (paid £10 a year) to stand in the Garden on the last Wednesday of each month to declare the names and uses of the plants on show. The Garden still exisits and is open today as a tourist attraction as well as a specialised botanical collection.

The herbarizings might have gone, but they lasted well over two hundred years and were one of the very first forms of educational travel.

The story is well told in

Allen, D E (1975) The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books
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Promoting the Outdoors: Three 18th century books

15.12.06

Inspiration for a wider set of people to head out into the world came through the printed page. A growing literacy rate moved closely with an increasing publishing trade as one stimulated the other. Three books which appeared between 1719 and 1789 would have an effect on very different, yet related, areas of interest.

"Robinson Crusoe" was the first, written by Daniel Defoe and appearing in 1719. This story of an Englishman marooned on a desert island not only helped pioneer the novel but set going an abiding fascination with islands - usually tropical but not always. It had a strong central character - for a lot of the novel the only character - and a compelling theme, that of survival against the odds. But it was also escapist, as the reader, comfortable at home, could enjoy the exotic location without the problem of having to fight its privations. Defoe's work was followed by others at almost every age: Ballantyne's "Coral Island" and Stevenson's "Treasure Island"; "The Admirable Crichton" by J M Barrie and "Lord of the Flies" by William Golding. There was even a science fiction version called "No Man Friday" by Rex Gordon in 1956 in which the castaway is left, not on a desert island but on Mars. The escapist love of the tropical island is as rich a stimulus to the popular imagination today as it was in years past, and it can be dated from Robinson Crusoe's adventures.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's book "Emile" entered print in 1762. Far less well known by the general public than Defoe's story, it nonetheless has had huge influence, with educational writer John Darling claiming in a 1994 book that all educational theory since "Emile" appeared is just a series of footnotes to Rousseau. The work is a semi-fictional account of a mentor educating the boy Emile through childhood and early teen age, by concentrating at first on emotional development and then upon knowledge. Rousseau is the mentor. He put learning from experience before and above book learning. Much of this experience was to come from the child's encounters with the world through the more immediate environment and those people within it. Emile had to work out his own relationship with those he met, and to learn how to avoid the traps set by city materialism. Rousseau had a powerful influence on writers in the 19th century who would themselves be the inspiration for movements such as scouting and adventure learning.

The third book is a classic of a very different nature. Gilbert White was the curate of Selborne in Hampshire, England. He studied nature closely, recording from 1751 onwards what he observed and the effects of the cycle of the seasons year by year. In 1789 he published "The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne". It was compiled from his letters to two of his friends who were members of the Royal Society. White believed in learning about birds and animals by observing them rather than collecting dead specimens. For many modern writers he was the first ecologist, famous for valuing the lowly earthworm for its place in the living world just as he valued the songbird for its own. The book has been continuously in print since it first was sold to the public, remaining another inspiration to its readers to venture into the world to discover and watch how its wonders unfold.
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Geological Rides

20.12.06

It was often a case of 'excursions as education' in the case of 'geological rides'.

In the early years of the nineteenth century the public was becoming interested in geology. Being able to find, or to buy, fossils and minerals must have been rather like treasure hunting. In the late eighteenth century collections such as those of Sir Ashton Lever which, with over 1,000 fossiles and many other itenms had gone on show to the public in London's Leicester House. Some decades later, in 1829, the Rotunda was opened in Scarborough as a purpose-designed museum devoted to geology and arranged in a systematic way to help explain the story of the Yorkshire coast and its rocks and fossils.

The first, formal field classes in geology in Britain were set up by Robert Jameson, Professor of Natural History at Edinburgh, in 1804. He led excursions onto Arthur's Seat and Salisbury Crags in the city, and longer visits to the Western Isles of Scotland. William McGillivray would copy the idea in Aberdeen in 1941.

Elsewhere, in 1832 William Buckland, the Reader in Geology at Oxford, started Geological Rides. People joined on horseback or in carriages on the London Road and went out to Shotover Hill to hear Buckland lecture. They could buy fossils from local labourers, and refreshments were provided in tents erected for the purpose.

Adam Sedgwick began his Geological Rides in 1835, setting out from Cambridge into the Fens. He gave five lectures during the day, the last being given on the roof of Ely Cathedral on the subject of fen drainage.
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Making Tracks For The Coast and Country

17.03.07

The importance of the invention of railways in the growth of tourism has been widely understood, although sometimes it is air travel that is credited with creation of the package holiday. Equally important to leisure travel is the growth of informal education through the railways. For most people, systematic, formal education for all dated in the UK from the later nineteenth century. There were many earlier schools than the Board Schools which resulted from the Education Acts of 1870 onwards, but they were less comprehensive in every sense. In that overworked and ambiguous phrase it was the School of Life which taught most people and shaped their view of the world. Part of that in the six decades prior to the establishment of universal primary, and then secondary, education, was rail travel.

It was middle-class adults who were affected by the scheduled services first, and they also benefitted first when they used organised group excursions. Children might be included in some of them but it was often the special groups of older people who travelled on these journeys first. A trip to witness a public execution in Cornwall (1838) was a gruesome pioneer. A Sunday School teachers' excursion a rather more wholesome activity followed soon afterwards in 1844. This was to the aspiring resort of Fleetwood on the Lancashire coast, soon eclipsed by Blackpool further south. Thomas Cook's religious foray into Loughborough from Leicester was the origin of his famous company in 1841, but without overnight accommodation it was not itself a tourism package as such. It was only the first of a number of entries by religious leaders into the tourist market. Education - and often, propaganda - was what they were aimed at employing. The exploration of the world through mass travel had begun.
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The Gunnery Camps

27.12.06

In nineteenth century Britain there was nowhere really that was unknown to people. The exploration mode was already moving towards that of ordinary individuals setting out for themselves to see what others had already discovered. Thomas de Quincey camped for nine nights in a tent he had made himself in order to walk from Manchester to North Wales in 1802. John Wilson used a tent on a walking tour in 1815.

In North America, on the other hand, in the great plains and northern wastes of Canada and the western USA there was much still be be seen, at least by settlers of European origin if not for native Americans. They knew their country and they lived with it intimately in a relationship that would not be known or understood by the white man for many decades to come.

The European settlers were moving north towards the Arctic Circle and west towards the Pacific, besides progressing further up the Pacific coast from Mexico and along the sea routes. Driven by reports of adventure and wonders to be seen, even the longer-established communities of the Atlantic coast harboured aspirations of exploration and desires to meet the challenges of the open spaces.

When the United States Civil War broke out in 1861 the news was greeted with an upswelling of patriotic feeling on both sides. As the years went by and the dreadfulness of the war machine ground onwards these feelings became less intense. At the start, however, the boys of a school in Connecticut were keen to march and camp just like the soldiers. Frederick William Gunn and his wife ran what they called the Gunnery School in Washington in that state. They seized the chance to introduce activities that would develop the boys physically and morally. In August of 1861 they took the whole school on a two-day, 40-mile trip to Welch's Point on Long Island Sound. A horse-drawn wagon carried tents and two donkeys were on hand for younger children less able to walk the whole way. On arrival they swam and fished and at night stories were told and songs enjoyed by the light of camp fires. Accounts of the expedition suggest that the Gunns probably held discussions about the causes of the war and the likely outcomes for the country. Similar events were held in 1863 and 1865 and then camps were switched to a site on Lake Waramaug seven miles from the school. Academic subjects were introduced at Lake Waramaug. The camps were finally discontinued in the 1870s, but for some years afterwards, alumni from the school held reunion holidays at the spot. The Gunnery School still thrives, and each year a commemorative hike is made to the Steep Rock Reservation near to Washington, Connecticut.

William Gunn is considered to be the originator of leisure camping in America. Other people developed their own camps of different kinds during the century. One of these was founded by Ernest Balch and some friends on Burnt Island, Squam Lake in New Hampshire. Called Camp Chocorua, it did not have a ready-assembled group of users of the sort the Gunnery School had, but it attracted boys whose parents spent their own holidays in resorts which Balch considered socially less desirable for children. Again, the aim was to develop healthy activities in a well-ordered community. Camp Chocorua lasted only eight years but had a long-lasting influence on many other pioneers of education in the open air, and it and the Gunnery camps sparked off what would become a very active part of the American tourist industry.


Eells, E (1986) Eleanor Eell's History of Organised Camping: The First Hundred Years, Martinsville, Indiana
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The Outdoor Classroom

29.03.07

Under the inspiration of many writers and innovators, the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw ideas develop to take teaching and learning into the world outside the school and home. Some, like the Boy Scouts movement, were aimed at building the individual psychologically and socially. Others were related to academic subjects or a mix of the two ideas. Some important examples are shown here.

Dr Cecil Reddie founded Abbotsholme School in Staffordshire as a place to develop both the minds and bodies of its pupils in pleasant surroundings. Working within a community was important. Reddie had been influenced by Rousseau and John Ruskin and he admired the German secondary schools which emphasised involvement in the outside world. Even so, in an example of a long period of idea-swapping between the United Kingdom and Germany, he in turn inspired one of his teachers, Hermann Leitz, to return home to set up a similar school at Ilsenberg in 1899. Others followed in Germany as Leitz built up his activities.

Robert Baden-Powell counted British and American influences amongst his antecedents when he ran his famous camp for boys from contrasting communities in 1907. Out of that event on Brownsea Island in Poole Harbour, Dorset, came the Boy Scout and Guide Guides, Cubs and Brownies movements which were not outdoor classroom activities but educationally-aimed nonetheless.

Just after the First World War a German educator, Kurt Hahn, was employed as Secretary to the last Chancellor of Imperial Germany, Prince Max von Baden. In 1920 Hahn set up Salem School which also had aims of developing character and self-discipline. Hahn stood against the rise of Nazi control during the early 1930s and in 1932 was forced out, having written to his pupils to say they had to choose between the school's principles and those of the Nazi party. Kurt Hahn fled to England. Two years after leaving Salem he founded Gordonstoun in Scotland. The new school had its own strong blend of personal and social development set in the Highlands communities close to Inverness. The present Prince of Wales would become its most famous (though apparently reluctant) alumnus.

Hahn was to have another achievement in Britain. As the Second world War broke out, Gordonstoun moved to Plas Dinan in North Wales. Sharing a similar concern that had motivated Baden-Powell much earlier, Hahn and Lawrence Holt of the Blue Funnel shipping line began another school, at Aberdovey. This would attempt to improve the mental and physical qualities of boys entering the merchant navy. It was the first centre of the Outward Bound movement. As such it would expand into a series of centres and be used by many organisations anxious to train employees to be self-reliant and successful by using demanding physical and team-building techniques. There is a strong element here that also led towards much more informal adventure holidays, notably through companies like PGL after the war.

The last example of outdoor education shown above is the Field Studies Council which began life in 1947. It has already been the subject of a separate posting. The Council grew out of the observation of the difference between London children and their new neighbours when they were evacuated early in the war to Cambridgeshire. However, its work was not primarily aimed at individuals and human communities but at knowledge about the natural environment. Many field centres were opened and helped in the academic education of thousands of pupils and students.
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Timeline - Children's Museums

06.04.07

The previous posting describes early American museums designed specifically for children. In addition to the Brooklyn Children's Museum and similar elsewhere there were more general museums such as the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry which made sure there were children-friendly displays, even including one of a complex doll's house.

A French example in the Grand Palais was begun in the late 1930s. It was in 1986 that the major Cites des Sciences was opened as part of the development of the Parc de la Villette out of a vast slaughterhouse complex. Two influential science centres, one in Toronto and one in San Francisco, were opened in 1969. Britain's first interactive science centre for children was the Exploratory in Bristol, 'road-tested' from 1984 and a permanent centre between 1987 and 1999. After closure in 1999 it was replaced by the Explore-At-Bristol the following year. Halifax's EUREKA! opened it doors for the first time in 1992.
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Chronology: The Coming of the Guide Book

23.06.07

Early travellers who were not 'on business' - government, military or trading - were mainly pilgrims. Within the Christian world there are records of pilgrims going to Jerusalem late in the fourth century AD at least. They were shown places with biblical associations and some returned with souvenirs such as stones from the hill at Calvary.

Early in the seventh century pilgrims going to Rome were able to buy basic guides - simple block prints showing the route around the main churches. Not until printing with movable type was established in Europe in the late fifteenth century - Gutenberg began commercial work around 1450 in Mainz; Caxton set up in Westminster, London in 1476 - was guide book production feasible, but the market was small, especially as there was only a poor distribution infrastructure. Travellers' guides would only appear much later. In addition, maps and pictures would be very crude compared with what a traveller needed to be useful. It is noteworthy that it was only in 1570, during Europe's great effort to discover other continents, that the first Atlas appeared. Published by Abraham Ortelius and printed by
Christopher Plantin, it contained 53 copperplate maps. Atlases in the early days were productions for wealthy people to have on show in their private libraries, large works of art rather than something to slip into the pocket or even cabin trunk.

In 1699 Joseph Addison set out from England to tour Europe and gather material for a guidebook on its various countries based on the writings of Horace and Virgil. He must have been one of the very first travel writers.

The first English guide book aimed at describing routes to take and what there was to be seen came in 1817-18. It consisted of a two-volume "Tour of Picturesque Rides and Walks with Excursions by Water Thirty Miles Around the Metropolis" and was written and published by John Hassall.

A number of factors came together to create a rapid growth of guide book publishing in the early nineteenth century, which also established some of the key firms in the trade. It was becoming easier to travel - more could afford to do so, the roads were being improved and railways spread after about 1830. The relatively rich had time to travel for leisure and exploring places became a fashion in the wake of the Grand Tour. Steam power, cylinder-printing and typesetting machines were equipping the printing trade far better than before so that large runs of book production were possible, potentially reducing unit costs. Finally, the new railways provided a fast distribution system, not only to bookshops around the country but direct to the rail traveller through station bookshops such as those of W H Smith, whose pioneering news stand was opened on Euston Station in 1848. Passengers wanted something to read, and some wanted books that satisfied their curiosity about the places they saw out of the carriage window.

The great pioneer in guide book publishing was Karl Baedeker, whose books were highly researched and packed with detail, including fine maps on thin, fold-out sheets of paper. In 1829 his first such book was a guide to the town where his press was situated: Koblenz. Britain's main published was John Murray. He produced his first Handbook for Travellers on the Continent in 1836. Murray joined with Karl Baedeker to publish the first Baedeker guide in English, in 1861. It was a book about travelling along the Rhine. France had its great published of detailed guides, too. In the early 1850s Louis Hachette added travel books to his wide range of general publishing. Detail and accuracy were again their hallmark, and later the Hachette company would also enter into joint production with British publishers, this time Muirheads, in 1918 - Muirheads had bought the John Murray imprint earlier.

One other important date: in 1857 the first English book illustratated with photolithographs from nature was published. It was John Pouncey's 'Dorsetshire'.
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