Abstract
This chapter examines how the Great Western Railway promoted its rural destinations to different groups of consumers. The company did not sell a commonplace countryside, but used photographic advertising to offer different visions intended to hold particular resonance with certain interest groups. Medcalf shows how the company honed a picturesque image, and created a fantasy land of historic destinations infused with legend. In the interwar years, as anti-modernism became a popular consideration, the company constructed a timeless village world where rural labour and traditions still thrived. As the company reached out to a popular market, it experimented with a more peopled aesthetic, but even as it built up a more glamourous image, the GWR ensured that these still observed country codes.
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- 1.
Alun Howkins, Reshaping Rural England: A Social History 1850–1925 (London: HarperCollins Academic, 1991), 2.
- 2.
John Taylor, A Dream of England: Landscape, Photography and the Tourist’s Imagination (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 17–18.
- 3.
Holiday Haunts (London: Great Western Railway, 1906), 1.
- 4.
Donna Landry, The Invention of the Countryside: Hunting, Walking and Ecology in English Literature, 1671–1831 (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 19.
- 5.
Malcolm Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760–1800 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1989), 4; Taylor, A Dream of England, 90–120; Cara Aitchison, Nicola MacLeod and Stephen Shaw, Leisure and Tourism Landscapes: Social and Cultural Geographies (London: Routledge, 2000), 74–75; John Gold and George Revill, Representing the Environment (New York: Routledge, 2004), 133–34.
- 6.
David Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London: Reaktion Books, 1998), 25.
- 7.
Jan Marsh, Back to the Land: The Pastoral Impulse in England, 1880–1914 (London: Faber, 2010), 7.
- 8.
John Taylor, “The Alphabetic Universe: Photography and the Picturesque Landscape,” in Reading Landscape: Country-City-Capital, ed. Simon Pugh (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 181.
- 9.
Aitchison, MacLeod, and Shaw, Leisure and Tourism Landscapes, 74.
- 10.
Great Western Railway Magazine, October 1904, 167–70. (GWRM hereafter).
- 11.
Robin Lenham, “British Photographers and Tourism in the Nineteenth Century,” in Visual Culture and Tourism, ed. David Crouch and Nina Lübbren (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 94.
- 12.
The Railway and Travel Monthly, July, 1912, 8–14.
- 13.
The Railway and Travel Monthly, July, 1913, 1–8.
- 14.
“Do Railways Believe in Advertising?,” GWRM, April, 1913, 102–03.
- 15.
Holiday Haunts (London: Great Western Railway, 1910).
- 16.
Martin Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit (2nd edn., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 5–6.
- 17.
Fred Inglis, “Landscape as Popular Culture,” in Reading Landscape: Country-City-Capital, ed. Simon Pugh (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 197–213.
- 18.
Gold and Revill, Representing the Environment, 201; Alan Jackson, Semi-detached London; Suburban Development, Life and Transport, 1900–39 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1991), 170; Howkins, Reshaping Rural England, 97.
- 19.
Holiday Haunts (London: Great Western Railway, 1906).
- 20.
The modern concept of the romantic gaze is closely associated with John Urry’s influential work, The Tourist Gaze, which addresses the ways that tourists perceive their surroundings and how this attention is directed by resort advertisers. Amongst a taxonomy of appeals, Urry argues that the ‘romantic gaze’ describes visual imagery used to communicate a destination’s solitude, privacy and a semi-spirituality. See John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure Travel in Contemporary Societies (1st edn., London, 1990); John Urry, The Tourist Gaze (2nd edn., London, 2002), 45.
- 21.
The National Archives, ZPER 38/6, Great Western Railway (London): Lecture and Debating Society Proceedings 1908–1909, meeting of 5th November 1908 ‘Experiences of Railway Photography’ by Harold Cooper, 1–10. The poem was published in 1775.
- 22.
GWRM, December, 1924, 468.
- 23.
Meaning burial chamber.
- 24.
Nina Lübbren, “Toilers of the Sea: Fisherfolk and the Geographies of Tourism in England 1880–1900,” in The Geographies of Englishness: Landscape and the National Past 1880–1940, ed. David Corbett, Ysanne Holt, and Fiona Russell (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 31–46.
- 25.
Peter Howard, “Artists as Drivers of the Tour Bus: Landscape Painting as a Spur to Tourism,” in Visual Culture and Tourism, ed. David Crouch and Nina Lübbren (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 115.
- 26.
Keeping in mind, of course, that the company likely reproduced the better reviews.
- 27.
GWRM, April, 1904, 49.
- 28.
Gold and Revill, Representing the Environment, 201.
- 29.
“Photography as Applied to Advertising,” The Advertising World, November, 1906, 538.
- 30.
The Railway and Travel Monthly, April, 1913, 310–11.
- 31.
The Advertising World, December, 1905, 76–78; October 1906, 450; The Railway and Travel Monthly, April, 1913, 310–11.
- 32.
Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991), 8.
- 33.
Jeremy Burchardt, “Rurality, Modernity and National Identity between the Wars,” Rural History 21, no. 2 (2010): 147; Howkins, Reshaping Rural England, 2.
- 34.
Matless, Landscape and Englishness, 26.
- 35.
Matless, Landscape and Englishness, 25.
- 36.
See Peter Miles and Malcolm Smith, Cinema, Literature & Society: Elite and Mass Culture in Interwar Britain (London: Croom Helm, 1987), 40–56.
- 37.
Baldwin was closely associated with the GWR. His father, Alfred, had been a director of the company from 1901 to 1905 and chairman from 1905 to 1908, and Stanley himself held a directorship from 1908 to 1917: Alan Bennett, ‘The Great Western Railway and the Celebration of Englishness’, (Unpublished DPhil thesis, University of York, 2000), viii.
- 38.
Alexandra Harris, Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (London: Thames and Hudson, 2010), 173.
- 39.
Harris, Romantic Moderns, 174.
- 40.
Alex Potts, “‘Constable Country’ between the wars,” in Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity: National Fictions Vol 3, ed. Raphael Samuel (London: Routledge, 1989), 161–66.
- 41.
“Landscape and Letters,” The Times, November 16, 1933, 17.
- 42.
Howkins, Reshaping Rural England, 2; Jackson, Semi-detached London, 170.
- 43.
Michael Heller, “Corporate Brand Building: Shell-Mex Ltd. In the Interwar Period,” in Trademark, Branding and Competitiveness, ed. Teresa Da Silva Lopes and Paul Duguid (New York, 2010), 202–09.
- 44.
Sean O’Connell, The Car in British Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 150–58.
- 45.
Karin Hiscock, “Modernity and ‘English’ Tradition: Betjeman at the Architectural Review,” Journal of Design History 13, no. 3 (2000): 204–08.
- 46.
Gold and Revill, Representing the Environment, 138–40.
- 47.
Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque, 7.
- 48.
Holiday Haunts (London: Great Western Railway, 1925), 633.
- 49.
Howkins, Reshaping Rural England, 8–26.
- 50.
S.P.B. Mais, The Cornish Riviera (London: Great Western Railway, 1927), 52.
- 51.
S.P.B. Mais, The Cornish Riviera (London: Great Western Railway, 1928), 5.
- 52.
“Take a “Kodak” with you,” The Daily Mirror, June, 23, 1923.
- 53.
S.P.B. Mais, Do you know North Cornwall?: My Finest Holiday (London: Southern Railway, 1927), 3–4.
- 54.
Christopher Bailey, “Rural Industries and the Image of the Countryside,” in The English Countryside Between the Wars: Regeneration or Decline?, ed. Paul Brassley, Jeremy Burchardt, and Lynne Thompson (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2006), 136.
- 55.
Mais provided material for Holiday Haunts, books on Devon and Cornwall, and numerous press announcements: Roger Wilson, Go Great Western: A History of GWR Publicity (Newton Abbott: David St John Thomas, 1987), 30.
- 56.
Harris, Romantic Moderns, 208.
- 57.
Cardigan Bay Resorts: Aberystwyth to Pwllheli (London: Great Western Railway, c.1920s).
- 58.
Holiday Haunts (London: Great Western Railway, 1927), 25 & 197.
- 59.
Jeffrey Hill, Sport Leisure and Culture in Twentieth-Century Britain (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 77–79.
- 60.
Marsh, Back to the Land, 6.
- 61.
Holiday Haunts (London: Great Western Railway, 1909).
- 62.
The Great Western Railway: Hotels and Catering (London: Great Western Railway, 1925).
- 63.
Allen Warren, “Sir Robert Baden-Powell, the Scout Movement and Citizen Training in Great Britain, 1900–1920,” The English Historical Review 101, no. 399 (1986): 377.
- 64.
Charles Mowat, Britain Between the Wars, 1918–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 512.
- 65.
Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, “Building a British Superman: Physical Culture in Interwar Britain,” Journal of Contemporary History 41, no. 4 (2006): 596.
- 66.
Camping Holidays (London: Great Western Railway, 1924).
- 67.
GWRM, May, 1927, 204.
- 68.
Wilson, Go Great Western, 99.
- 69.
Matless, Landscape and Englishness, 98.
- 70.
Matless, Landscape and Englishness, 69.
- 71.
S.P.B. Mais, Glorious Devon (London: Great Western Railway, 1934), 40.
- 72.
The Hiker’s Mystery Express No 1 (London: Great Western Railway, 1932).
- 73.
“The ‘Hikers” Train,” The Times, March 26, 1932, 7.
- 74.
In July 1932, the Southern Railway attracted 1400 ramblers to its ‘Southern Railway Moonlight Walk’ at Chanctonbury Ring: Alan Tomlinson and Helen Walker, “Holidays for All: Popular Movements, Collective Leisure, and the Pleasure Industry,” in Consumption, Identity, and Style: Marketing, Meanings, and the Packaging of Pleasure, ed. Alan Tomlinson (London: Routledge, 1990), 234. In its sales publication, the SR advertised ‘Conducted Rambles by the Southern Railway’ at a special fare. The SR also recognised that rambling was increasing popular, ‘no doubt as a reaction to the mechanical age’; Hints for Holidays (London: Southern Railway, 1939), 943.
- 75.
Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, “The Making of a Modern Female Body: Beauty, Health and Fitness in Interwar Britain,” Women’s History Review 20, no. 2 (2011): 300–01; Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, “The Body and Consumer Culture,” in Women in Twentieth-Century Britain, ed. Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska (Harlow: Longman, 2001), 188.
- 76.
Matless, Landscape and Englishness, 70–73.
- 77.
Matless, Landscape and Englishness, 71.
- 78.
Camping and Hiking Holidays (London: Great Western Railway, 1933).
- 79.
Hugh E. Page, Rambles and Walking Tours in the Wye Valley (London: Great Western Railway, 1938), 7.
- 80.
Alfred J. Brown, Moorland Tramping in West Yorkshire (London, 1931), 2.
- 81.
GWR, Glorious Devon (London: Great Western Railway, 1934), 5.
- 82.
Matless, Landscape and Englishness, 66–68; Alun Howkins, The Death of Rural England: A Social History of the Countryside Since 1900 (London: Routledge, 2003), 72–73.
- 83.
Andrew McRae, British Railway Camping Coach Holidays: The 1930s and British Railways (Stockport: Foxline Publishing, 1997), 28.
- 84.
Camp-Coach Holidays: Novel and Economical Camping in Comfort (London: Great Western Railway, 1934), 1.
- 85.
Camp-Coach Holidays: Novel and Economical Camping in Comfort (London: Great Western Railway, 1934), 5.
- 86.
Wilson, Go Great Western, 101; Bennett, ‘The Great Western Railway and the Celebration of Englishness’, 15.
- 87.
National Library of Wales (NLOW) GB 0210 MAXSER, F 151–300, Letter from Dewar to Fraser, 14th June 1939.
- 88.
Holiday Haunts (London: Great Western Railway, 1939).
- 89.
Holiday Haunts (London: Great Western Railway, 1940).
- 90.
“Photo or sketch?,” Advertiser’s Weekly, July 16, 1936, 104.
- 91.
Scott Lash and John Urry, Economies of Signs and Space (London: Sage, 1994), 138.
- 92.
Ian Ousby, The Englishman’s England: Taste, Travel, and the Rise of Tourism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 5.
- 93.
Raymond Williams, “Between Country and City,” in Reading Landscape: Country-City-Capital, ed. Simon Pugh (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 7.
- 94.
Matless, Landscape and Englishness, 64–66.
Bibliography
Unpublished Archival Sources
National Library of Wales (NLOW), GB 0210 MAXSER: F /1-593, Correspondence and papers, 1929–1968, relating to Maxwell Fraser’s publicity work for the GWR (including Holiday Haunts 1929–1962).
The National Archives (TNA), ZPER 38/6, Great Western Railway (London): Lecture and Debating Society Proceedings 1908–1909.
Sales Publications and Guidebooks
Holiday Haunts. London: Great Western Railway, multiple editions.
Camp-Coach Holidays: Novel and Economical Camping in Comfort. London: Great Western Railway, 1934.
Camping and Hiking Holidays. London: Great Western Railway, 1933.
Camping Holidays. London: Great Western Railway, 1924.
Cardigan Bay resorts: Aberystwyth to Pwllheli. London: Great Western Railway, c.1920s.
The Cornish Riviera. London: Great Western Railway, multiple editions.
Glorious Devon. London: Great Western Railway, 1934.
The Great Western Railway: Hotels and Catering. London: Great Western Railway, 1925.
The Hiker’s Mystery Express No 1. London: Great Western Railway, 1932.
Hints for Holidays. London: Southern Railway, 1939.
Mais, S.P.B. Do You Know North Cornwall?: My Finest Holiday. London: Southern Railway, 1927.
Page, Hugh E. Rambles and Walking Tours in the Wye Valley. London: Great Western Railway, 1938.
Printed Books
Brown, Alfred J. Moorland Tramping in West Yorkshire. London, 1931.
Periodicals and Newspapers
Advertiser’s Weekly
The Advertising World
The Daily Mirror
Great Western Railway Magazine
The Railway and Travel Monthly
The Times
Books and Journal Articles
Aitchison, Cara, Nicola MacLeod, and Stephen Shaw. Leisure and Tourism Landscapes: Social and Cultural Geographies. London: Routledge, 2000.
Andrews, Malcolm. The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760–1800. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1989.
Burchardt, Jeremy. “Rurality, Modernity and National Identity Between the Wars.” Rural History 21, no. 2 (2010): 143–50.
Gold, John, and George Revill. Representing the Environment. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Harris, Alexandra. Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper. London: Thames and Hudson, 2010.
Heller, Michael. “Corporate Brand Building: Shell-Mex Ltd. In the Interwar Period.” In Trademarks, Branding and Competitiveness, edited by Teresa Da Silva Lopes and Paul Duguid, 179–96. New York, 2010.
Hill, Jeffrey. Sport Leisure and Culture in Twentieth-Century Britain. New York: Palgrave, 2002.
Hiscock, Karin. “Modernity and ‘English’ Tradition: Betjeman at the Architectural Review.” Journal of Design History 13, no. 3 (2000): 193–212.
Howard, Peter. “Artists as Drivers of the Tour Bus: Landscape Painting as a Spur to Tourism.” In Visual Culture and Tourism, edited by David Crouch and Nina Lübbren, 109–24. Oxford: Berg, 2003.
Howkins, Alun. The Death of Rural England: A Social History of the Countryside Since 1900. London: Routledge, 2003.
———. Reshaping Rural England: A Social History 1850–1925. London: HarperCollins Academic, 1991.
Inglis, Fred. “Landscape as Popular Culture.” In Reading Landscape: Country-City-Capital, edited by Simon Pugh, 197–213. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990.
Jackson, Alan. Semi-Detached London; Suburban Development, Life and Transport, 1900–39. London: Allen & Unwin, 1991.
Landry, Donna. The Invention of the Countryside: Hunting, Walking and Ecology in English Literature, 1671–1831. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
Lash, Scott, and John Urry. Economies of Signs and Space. London: Sage, 1994.
Lenham, Robin. “British Photographers and Tourism in the Nineteenth Century.” In Visual Culture and Tourism, edited by David Crouch and Nina Lübbren, 91–108. Oxford: Berg, 2003.
Light, Alison. Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars. London: Routledge, 1991.
Lübbren, Nina. “Toilers of the Sea: Fisherfolk and the Geographies of Tourism in England 1880–1900.” In The Geographies of Englishness: Landscape and the National Past 1880–1940, edited by David Corbett, Ysanne Holt, and Fiona Russell, 29–64. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002.
Marsh, Jan. Back to the Land: The Pastoral Impulse in England, 1880–1914. London: Faber, 2010.
Matless, David. Landscape and Englishness. London: Reaktion Books, 1998.
McRae, Andrew. British Railway Camping Coach Holidays: The 1930s and British Railways. Stockport: Foxline Publishing, 1997.
Miles, Peter, and Malcolm Smith. Cinema, Literature & Society: Elite and Mass Culture in Interwar Britain. London: Croom Helm, 1987.
Mowat, Charles. Britain Between the Wars, 1918–1940. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955.
O’Connell, Sean. The Car in British Society. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998.
Ousby, Ian. The Englishman’s England: Taste, Travel, and the Rise of Tourism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Potts, Alex. “‘Constable Country’ Between the Wars.” In Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity: National Fictions Vol. 3, edited by Raphael Samuel, 160–86. London: Routledge, 1989.
Taylor, John. “The Alphabetic Universe: Photography and the Picturesque Landscape.” In Reading Landscape: Country-City-Capital, edited by Simon Pugh, 177–96. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990.
———. A Dream of England: Landscape, Photography and the Tourist’s Imagination. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994.
Urry, John. The Tourist Gaze: Leisure Travel in Contemporary Societies. 1st edn., London, 1990.
———. The Tourist Gaze. 2nd edn., London, 2002.
Walton, John K. The British Seaside: Holidays and Resorts in the Twentieth Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000.
Warren, Allen. “Sir Robert Baden-Powell, the Scout Movement and Citizen Training in Great Britain, 1900–1920.” The English Historical Review 101, no. 399 (1986): 376–398.
Wiener, Martin. English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit. 2nd edn., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Williams, Raymond. “Between Country and City.” In Reading Landscape: Country-City-Capital, edited by Simon Pugh, 7–18. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990.
Wilson, Roger. Go Great Western: A History of GWR Publicity. Newton Abbott: David St John Thomas, 1987.
Tomlinson, Alan, and Helen Walker. “Holidays for All: Popular Movements, Collective Leisure, and the Pleasure Industry.” In Consumption, Identity, and Style: Marketing, Meanings, and the Packaging of Pleasure, edited by Alan Tomlinson, 221–41. London: Routledge, 1990.
Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Ina. “The Body and Consumer Culture.” In Women in Twentieth-Century Britain, edited by Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, 183–97. Harlow: Longman, 2001.
———. “Building a British Superman: Physical Culture in Interwar Britain.” Journal of Contemporary History 41, no, 4 (2006): 595–610.
———. “The Making of a Modern Female Body: Beauty, Health and Fitness in Interwar Britain.” Women’s History Review 20, no. 2 (2011): 299–317.
Unpublished Works: Theses
Bennett, Alan. ‘The Great Western Railway and the Celebration of Englishness’, Unpublished DPhil thesis, University of York, (2000).
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Medcalf, A. (2018). In the Country. In: Railway Photographic Advertising in Britain, 1900-1939. Palgrave Studies in the History of the Media. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70857-7_3
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