"Canaletto in Venice"

The Canaletto exhibition at the Queens Gallery in London closes tomorrow. Fifty paintings and 150 drawings made by him in the 18th century for the British Consul in Venice, Sir Joseph Smith, were acquired by King George III. Visiting it yesterday was like seeing a show within a show. The theatrical ambience of the Queens Gallery, part of Buckingham Palace, was one. The beautiful interior setting contrasts was the rather drab formality of the secure, windowless classical-style Palace annexe. The staff at the exhibition are very friendly, polite and helpful. The galleries are of the highest quality - as they should be - and the exhibits stunning. Besides the Canalettos there are other paintings, such as Winterhalther's huge prtrait of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert with their children in the 1840s. In a side room glass case is the diamond tiara worn by the present Queen in her portrait on postage stamps. It made an everyday image connect with the reality of the treasure.

The exhibition, and the accompanying guide by Martin Clayton called Canaletto in Venice illustrate not just the artistic skills of a man who could draw beautiful straight lines free hand, but the way in which he manipulated reality to enhance the pictorial experience. Of course, all artists do, when they select and interpret people and places for their canvases. What seems surprising about Canaletto's works is the ways in which at the same time they appear accurate, representational art, and are yet products of propaganda. The introduction to the exhibition points out how the artist defined Venice for the world. The captions to the works comment on how he altered perspectives, changed relationships and proportions, added and subtracted buildings and architectural details and even - quite openly, in drawings called capriccios, brought together unrelated parts of the Italian landscape to create attractive and impressive vistas.

The paintings are not very large - many somewhere about 50 by 80 centimetres - and at first sight they have almost a photographic quality. But since the painter does select, arrange and express shape and form according to his or her own interpretation, the outcomes are effectively propagandist. The lesson for the tourist is to take the promotional material for your chosen destination with a large pinch of salt, and wait until you go when you can do what only tourism allows you to do - see for yourself.

Beyond the End of the Pier Show

Over the years the so-called heritage industry has come in for a fair bit of stick, and often quite rightly. Making lots of money from tatty and misleading excuses for historic attractions is not one of humanity’s better occupations. Turning bits of the past into saleable commodities has brought down the wrath of many a critic who sees it as breaking some kind of eleventh commandment: “thou shalt not reduce thy culture to mere commerce”. Oddly, running an antique shop doesn’t wind up those critics in the same way, perhaps because they buy their household treasures in them regularly.

In the 1980s there was a spate of books on heritage, from David Lowenthal’s knowledgeable study The Past Is A Foreign Country, through Patrick Wright’s On Living In An Old Country to Robert Hewison’s The Heritage Industry. One of the favourite examples quoted by critics like Hewison was Wigan Pier. This canal side group of buildings includes a former mill with a steam engine, a shop and a café, and The Way We Were, an evocative presentation of the Lancashire town’s past – mainly pre-world War I. There is also Opie’s Museum of Memories. Close to them is Wigan Pier, not like the Blackpool version, but a simple tipping arrangement by which railway wagons could empty loads of coal in to barges. George Orwell referred to ‘Wigan Pier’ in the 1930s as a kind of joke which began in the music halls of the north. The modern attraction is built around the joke – not a real pier, but still something for which the town was known.

The Way We Were is not a museum but a presentation. So it doesn’t qualify for intellectual status as a collection of artefacts. It’s partly theatrical. It tells stories. Some of the stories can – oh, woe! – be considered Nostalgia. And, of course, that is To Be Regretted – at least by some of the critics. When the Wigan Pier attraction opened, with the usual heavy promotion, it began to associate Wigan not with coal mining and cotton mills but tourism, and a general occupation of Looking Back.

Now, I happen to agree that that can be stifling if not also made to be part of some effective future development strategy, but it might well be that you have to create the one in order to open the way to raising resources and enthusiasm for doing the other. It might also be the case that the stories told are all along the lines of “it was better in the old days when people cared for each other and you could go to the pictures and buy a fish and chip supper and still have change out of half-a-crown, then you could sing community songs in the back street before a quick burst of Morris dancing with your neighbours”. Which is about a daft a view of history as the one that says all the mill owners were tyrants and exploited the poor mill workers – when they weren’t having it away with the nearest cotton-spinning comely wench before knocking down another row of hovels to extend t’mill. Truth lay somewhere in between the two extremes, with elements of both and a lot more that is often forgotten.

Robin Wade and Pat Read designed the narrative displays of The Way We Were and they knew what they were doing. The visitor entered a bright and cheerful display at first-floor level. The scene was of Lancashire holiday makers arriving at the seaside after a train journey, to sit on the beach and walk on the pier. Actors in suitable clothes of the period mingled with the visitors, playing the part of, for example, a quack doctor selling patent medicines. Which, I suspect, would be recognised straight away as a bit of the ‘exploit the poor workers’ category of history rather than nostalgia. The visitor then climbed down a flight of steps into a dark, dingy area. This was a representation of a coal mine. Men struggled in the dangerous conditions to mine coal. The contrast between this and the previous display was strong. It helped to show just why, released for a day or two from such toil, the Wigan people headed for the coast with its bright and cheerful vulgarity, rowdiness and fun.

Of course, just how each visitor interpreted the scene depended on them and their own viewpoint. They might have seen real, honest mining that helped supply coal to power the mills and warm the houses. They might have thought of how improved regulations, health services and insurance, and better education, helped overcome such conditions. Perhaps these visitors would take the view that these conditions were bad, but would breed men who could go out an achieve better communities out of their own efforts, rather than getting drunk, shooting drugs and mugging old ladies.

It raises the fact that many debates about the good or bad of heritage-based tourism omit two points almost entirely. The first is that television, novels and films are often all guilt of misrepresenting history one way or the other. Shakespeare was a propagandist, often inaccurate and frequently romantic, but he is still considered the greatest dramatist we have had. Jane Austen has provided more popular costume dramas than most people, full of great houses in which fashionably dressed people take polite conversation together, gossip, dance stately quadrilles and fall headlong in love with that bloke in the lake. Life wasn’t like that for most people – but it was for some, and the underlying human motivations and interactions were found at every level and corner of society. Shouldn’t a tourist attraction like The Way We Were be looked upon as a piece of theatre, not beyond a proscenium arch, not just in the round, but even all around the folk in the audience, who can walk through and even interact with the performers. Shouldn’t the judgement be based on how well it is done, how well it succeeds in illustrating aspects of the past in a theatrical sense? We don’t worry that stage or film sets are not “authentic” – they are there to help tell a story, and the audience is pretty able to understand for itself that it’s only possible to make an approximate stab at creating an accurate ambience of former days.

Second, any teacher would give his or her eye-teeth to move beyond the whiteboard, story book and slide show into a three-dimensional world with real people, working machines, the smells and sounds of the past, and the ability to ask questions of the performers who their school class will meet. Are we supposed only to rely on reading books and seeing boring objects in museums? Let’s remember that the Wigan Piers of this world are attempts to get closer to the reality of what life used to be like, and that they work by adding their version of history to a whole range that visitors have been accumulating from TV, cinema and novel, plus the efforts of the classroom teacher over the years. After all, in the old days I could spend half-a-crown on fish and chips, then go to the pictures out of the small change and still get only an hour and a half of black and white propaganda about how the British Empire brought civilisation to the world. Personally, I’d rather have Wigan Pier.

Volunteers and Tourism

As the new main season for tourism gets under way there are thousands of volunteers around the country who have polished up their prose and project work on behalf of tourism. This is an industry which has a high reliance on unpaid workers who supply attendants, desk staff, guides, administrative help, research work, heavy labour and untold other jobs to support community activities. From the National Trusts of each UK country down to tiny local attractions, all of them in the not-for-profit sector, they are the people who underpin a whole sector of the industry: except that 'industry' is a very misleading term. Tourism is a whole set of industries plus a whole range of other activities which have quite different raisons d'etre from those of the commercial organisations.

They are also often hidden from view - which is odd for people who are (the National Trusts again being the obvious example) the main points of contact for visitors. Most of tourism management text books and journals pay scant regard, if anything at all, to their existence. Yet recruiting, training and managing them is an essential occupation for so many managers. You can't treat a person who is giving up their time free to help you in the same way that you can someone who is employed. Yet their quality is often what makes a visit memorable.

I can recall an incident thirty years ago this year in a National Trust shop in the south west. We were the only people in the shop except for a young couple with children at the counter. My wife and I happened to be hidden behind tall display shelves. The other visitors had been asking questions and commenting on the property, a well known historic house. After they left the two volunteers at the counter began to discuss them in disparaging terms based on their customers' quite inoffensive, but slightly 'different' behaviour. "They weren't our kind of people" said one volunteer to the other. It didn't seem to bother them when they found out there were still other customers in the shop, or that they were giving the National Trust a condescending image.

Another example of what seems to be a characteristic problem has been noticed more than once - indeed, it seems almost unavoidable unless training levels are of high standard. In most historic houses which use volunteers it's almost impossible to get around without each room attendant delivering their particular little speech about the furniture and fittings to every visitor. no matter how hard you try to avoid eye contact and to move smartly around, they'll get you. It's fine if you want the talk, but the idea that anyone might actually want to wander round absorbed in their own thoughts is almost an affront to the volunteer's adopted role - especially if they're bored.

It's an area which demands more attention. So many of them have skills and attitudes which are of the highest standard, so it's not surprising they want to use them to the full. Let's understand and manage them accordingly.

Work in Progress Web Site

My associated web site, with longer articles and photo essays, now has these pages, which can be accessed by clicking on "My Web Page" in the list to the right of this section:

A Social Club Outing By Train in 1935: How to do Scotland in 30 hours flat.

Chicago - Tourism Re-Imaging: A closer view of an iconic city.

Going Dutch: Presenting the past in the Netherlands.

Keukenhof - Business is Blooming: Using tourism to promote an industry.

A View of Italy for the City: Trentham Gardens revived.

A Case Study in Heritage Management: A curious tale of misleading publicity.

Creating Colonial Williamsburg: A critical study of an American icon [book review].

Perfection in Paradise: The Eden Project's recipe for success.

Prague Tourist Shows: Outstanding showcase attractions in the city.

Escaping from Slavery: The US National Underground Railway Freedom Centre.

There are also five short essays about tourism as education: Lost Horizons; Crossing the Divide; The Beckoning Horizon; 3D Media, and A Positive Role

Plus a number of background conference papers around these themes, and many photo pages connected with the Tourism Management course activities at Leeds Metropolitan University.

Travelling back

Recently I taped the memories of a 93-year old relative, in what I might call the fifth of an occasional series. Now confined to a care home and reliant on other people to take him out and about, Jack's memories are keen of days when things were different. Very different.

One of the oldest memories is of walking to the woollen mill where his mother worked at a loom, and being allowed to wait, watching the belts and pulleys driving the machinery from the great steam engine, until his mother finished work and could take him home.

When he was fifteen and living in West Yorkshire as he has done for most of his long life, his dad ran a fish and chip shop. Being quite successful, dad invested £100 in a new car. This was the late 1920s, with few vehicles on the road. My uncle taught himself to drive, and so did his father, though dad wasn't very competent. It was decided that they would drive to Devon on holiday, taking a small caravan. With their son in the back and luggage stowed, the parents set off with mixed feelings. Dad wasn't sure of his driving skills and mum was quite sure he hadn't got any. Within half a mile climbing up the Ainleys they collided with a horse trough. Mum was all for turning back: they would never get to Devon, nearly 300 miles away, at this rate. But her son was ready for the challenge. "I'll drive", he announced, and did.

All went well for most of the journey. They stayed overnight in the midlands and then pressed on. In Devon they found a farmer willing to allow them to stay in his orchard, and enjoyed their holiday, though the memories there are fading for Jack. What stands out is an incident on the return journey when the radiator was boiling dry, somewhere near Exeter. They asked a someone at a house for water, which was readily supplied. Then a policeman appeared. "Who's driving?" asked the constable, seeing Jack filling the radiator. "I am", replied junior, showing his dad's licence. "How old are you, sonny?". Jack remembers that he said 16, which he thought was the legal age. "You be careful on the road, lad, and get along" was what the officer had to say on the situation. They got home without further problems.

Jack spent his life in the motor trade - not surprisingly, perhaps - except for service with the Duke of Wellington's Regiment that took him to Belgium, Holland and Germany. After the war, married and with a daughter, most holidays were taken in Blackpool. The military experience in Europe had, however, opened up a taste for travel in Jack, though not one that his wife shared. She was happy, though, to let him go on short trips on his own and booked through a local agency that took him back to the contient. He remembers going back to Amsterdam, staying in a hotel overnight next to the flower market, and on another occasion getting in to France.

One other encounter with the tourist trade was that of his father, who, some years before the famous car trip to Devon, had left wife and child at home and gone to Calgary in Canada where he found a job as a janitor in a small hotel, and did well enough to rise to become its manager. There had been some talk of his family moving out there to join him - a brother had emigrated earlier - but dad decided to return home, and did so for good.

Jack's long life had taken in many events and experiences: the memories that stayed clearest have included those of the brief travels taken by him and his family thanks to the motor car on the one hand and war time service on the other.

The Last Vaudevillian, the Lost Medium

I have been watching Jeffrey Ruoff's 1998 video called "The Last Vaudevillian" once again. The subject is John Holod, an American who travels the USA in a mobile home during the winter giving talks illustrated by travel films that he has shot in the summer. Ruoff, who teaches at Dartmouth college, regards John Holod as the last of his kind, the individual who goes in person to speak to an audence and to show films. At one time there were many itinerant enertainers who travelled the roads giving lectures and showing films or slide shows. Holod is seen using his own low-key brand of humour to speak about places most Americans will never go, such as Cuba under Fidel Castro. Holod went, and has the footage to prove it. It's a fascinating insight into the way in which an audience received information on foreign places and added another shade of opinion to their store of knowledge. In the video, people from his audiences are seen speaking about why they like his shows: they listen first-hand to someone who has travelled to places they may never see; one refers to it as vicarious travelling.

It is a reminder that there aren't many studies of the travelogue to be found, or documentaries about the genre on TV. Dan Cruikshank's series based on a Land's End to John O'Groat's film from the 1920s by Friese-Greene is currently on the BBC. Channel 4 has shown early films by Martin and Osa Johnson, the American adventurer/film-makers of items like "Congorilla", some of which is toe-curlingly condescending about African tribes in the 1930s. They also showed work by Armand and Michaela Denis, also filmed in Africa, much more sensitive but still with a rather dated attitude.

The earlier examples were cinema films, later versions being made as TV series by the Denises, Jacques Cousteau and of course David Attenborough. The TV material was mainly to do with wild life, however. Cinema audiences awaiting the main feature were treated to newsreels, travelogues and 'Look at Life'-type films, often produced and paid for by opinion makers working to a clear agenda through which they set out their own interpretation of what the world was like. They came from both ends of the political spectrum - the American Lowell Thomas to the right and the British Humphrey Jennings to the left.

John Holod is in the tradition of the Victorian magic lantern lecturer (the American vaudeville relates to it). Cinema travelogues and later the TV travel show must have had strong influence on not only the tourist's choice of destination, but also the general world viewpoint held within the community, reinforced by whatever opinions were being put forward by their teachers in school. Many films sponsored by companies like Shell and Unilever were available from libraries like Guild Sound and Vision for use in schools. Public relations staff from tourist attractions and some operators still go out, rather like John Holod, to speak to any audience - Rotarians, Womens' Institutes and the like - who will have them. It seems to be that film travelogues and public-speaker performances are both under-researched and underplayed within academic and media institutions alike.

Seeing for Themselves

Children from a Staffordshire secondary school on a field trip in 1964. In the 1950s and 60s such children from that area, depending on their age, might have visited Crewe locomotive works, a Lotus shoe factory, Wedgwoods or a scientific glass manufactory. Some took part in national land use surveys. Geology (as here) and geography trips were common, depending on the school and the teachers' enthusiasm for them. These children were being taught in a tradition which went back at least to James Fairgrieve's ideas about extending the classroom into the surrounding area. For at least some of these children, the enthusiasm that they undoubtedly gained from the experience they had was carried on into adult life. The tourism trips that they then made were enriched by a better understanding of the places and people that they met.

That was my own experience, for which I'm for ever thankful to the teachers who organised excursions for us in our classes. I would welcome comments from anyone who felt they gained similar benefits.

Tourism's Missing Link

Martin Jacques, in a Guardian article last week (“Knowledge of countries acquired through tourism often consists of little more than the whereabouts of the beach”: 17 April) put his finger on what I would call the missing link of tourism. By this I mean the potential that tourism has towards promoting global understanding, but at the same time the frequent failure to link the visitor and the visited together in a meaningful way.

As a university teacher of tourism management who worked for twenty years in not-for-profit, community-based tourism, I join with a group of colleagues trying to counteract this failure. We would love to see visitors link more with the communities within destinations, but the tourism industry has other priorities, and it works within a political culture that sees creating wealth and prosperity as the main jobs to be done.

Two aspects of post-war life in Europe and elsewhere have led to this state of affairs. First, modern package travel opened up dozens of business opportunities for travel companies, hoteliers and attractions. Second, the decline of older forms of manufacturing was met with the simplistic notion that tourism would be the perfect answer to the economic problems that were caused. Both have been widely criticised by commentators, and rightly so, as being superficial concepts, but the critics themselves have generally stayed on the sidelines.

There have been very few positive views of tourism expressed recently of the kind held by people like the late Swiss writer Jost Krippendorf, who saw plenty of opportunities so long as the right steps were taken. It’s much easier to earn a few quid as a critic, but much harder to suggest alternatives based on positive, integrated management approaches. It has taken the best part of forty years to get people to accept the idea of environmental sustainability and apply it to travelling. How long will it take to re-orientate tourism to something approaching social and cultural sustainability as well?

The pilgrim, the Grand Tourist, the excursionist of the industrial world, were generally out to discover something beyond their immediate experience. Thomas Cook, T A Leonard, Henry Frame, Quentin Hogg and others from the nineteenth century had visions of how to help people do that. In the twentieth century leaders like Richard Schirmann and Kurt Hahn in Germany, and Baden-Powell, Francis Butler and Jack Longland in Britain helped to develop diverse reasons for travelling which had self-development and interpersonal understanding at their core. The USA had Fisher Harris, Lewis Miller and much later, Freeman Tilden.

It’s not to say that there hasn’t been a growth in travelling away from the resort-based or coach-bound tourist. Special interest tourism is one of the expanding areas identified by the industry. Sadly, that label sums up the problem – having an interest in the people and places visited is seen as niche marketing, a relatively minor way of making money. Yet all tourism is based on some form of special interest, even if it is focused on the beach and the bar. What needs to be done is to build on that.

The pioneers mentioned above shared another perspective in their varied ways – that travel was, in Cook’s phrase, a way in which “to unite man with man”. In the USA Miller wanted everyone “to be all that he can be - to know all that he can know”. Tilden wrote in the 1950s about the importance of communicating about people and places with those visitors who encountered them. His views remain crucial to any debate about the blight or the blessing that tourism can build.

Yet mention these ideas to those politicians and business leaders in the industry – and, dare I say it, many of those training future tourism leaders – and you can see their eyes glaze over. At best they will murmur something about social responsibility and sustainability. The huge industry that is tourism today needs better leadership than that. It needs to understand, develop and manage the encounters between people and places with stronger visions and strategies.

Invitation to View

My 'home web page' has short articles and papers plus lots of photos connected with my teaching at Leeds Metropolitan University. Use the link in the sidebar to the right - "My web page".

The link to Google News leads to pages of current tourism news as well as wider general news.

Setting Out

Welcome aboard. This blog is about travel, tourism, the media and education - but mainly about discovering the world through all those activities. Plus a few. It's personal, but it's based on working experience in different ways with all of them. By somebody old enough to add a few grumpy comments to what will otherwise be all sweetness and (I hope) light.

Wait and see!