My love affair with tourism You Lucky People

Chapter 1
Falling in Love

In 1953, at the tender age of 8, I fell in love – twice. The lovely Janet Fairly-Clarke was the object of my warmly tender intentions in Country Dancing. But the travel industry became the real focus for my dreams. To be precise, I visited the Polytechnic Travel Agency (much later to be the Poly in Lunn Poly) and acquired a full-colour promotional map of the Rhineland, one of a set published by the German National Tourist Office covering the whole of Germany like a jigsaw. Forget the “ReveilIe” , Tit Bits” and the “News of the World” this was the real stuff and I was in rapture. The thought of going to the Rhine, taking people there, being a part of the nascent industry of tourism switched me on. I was like an immature addict dropping acid – the universe was exposed. I loved the whole idea, the new worlds that would open, the opportunities for escaping drab post-war Britain for amazingly colourful and exotic foreign parts enthralled me.

Tourism was a major topic of conversation in our home too. My Dad, Fred Tjolle, was a train driver, secretary of his union branch, very popular with his mates and with a family in Belgium. He seemed the logical choice to organise a darts match for his fellow workers in Ostend – an enjoyable way for railway workers to use up their free passes. Well, one thing led to another and before you could say “Travel Industry” the old man swapped his two allotments, his push bike and his overalls for a smart suit, a carnation and a taste for cigars, lobster and gin and tonic – at 39 he became a tour operator.

After a year or so cycling to work in his overalls, cycling home, changing, and taking tours to Belgium, his “Guvnors” gave Dad a year’s leave of absence from driving a train. Our little suburban Victorian terraced home now became the international headquarters for the “Jolly Party Continental Tours”. Posters were liberally displayed in the windows advertising “(no) Tours to the Moon” (the printer’s idea), and Dad talked Tommy Trinder into endorsing his product – “You lucky people going on a Jolly tour!”, he said in the ads. Business and money rolled in.

Then, as now, the travel business was about hype and escapism. My old man, like the many larger-than-life characters who followed, had found his metier. The public wanted an escape from boring Britain. Who better to provide it than someone demonstrating their own escape from a humdrum life.

You’ve got to give it to the old man. He’d had no business training and he’d never worked in an office. The nearest he’d got to commerce was his love for gambling on the horses, an enthusiasm he shared with his Dad. Since a very early age, he’d spent time on racecourses, studying the form, associating with racing people and making well-considered bets. My Dad was a lucky gambler, a bet rescued a pre-honeymoon Belgian holiday with my mum when he was in his late teens in the thirties, and his Belgian connections provided a win serious enough to start the travel company. Apparently a Belgian jockey friend had said to Dad in Ostend after Lavandin had won the Prix de Boulogne “Freddie, put your house on it for the English Derby”. Freddie did. At nine to two he won a small fortune. Enough to start a business in fact.

Anyway within a year of Lavandin’s notable victory the Jolly Party Continental Tours was rocking on to better and greater things. My Dad, as I said, had no business experience, but from a marketing point of view he was doing all the right things. He had created a branded product in a niche market – railway people with free passes and “Privilege Tickets”. He had a database – never mind that it was just a big book in which names and addresses of enquirers and bookers were entered in his flowing copper plate longhand. He had a target market and a lot of goodwill from previous travellers. At least twice a year a mailshot was effected – different coloured sheets of paper each with a different tour were collated, inserted in envelopes, addressed by hand and posted to the database – all the family joined in. The leaflets went out in January and September and the bookings came in – in February and October. Simple and very effective.
Jolly Party Continental Tours’ holidays were certainly good value, but costed to make a profit. The deal was simple – you got an 8 day (7 night) full board Belgium France and Holland tour staying in Ostend for £19 including the transfers to and from the hotel, half day excursions to Meli Park and Dunkirk, Bruges and Sluis, full day excursions to Brussels and Middleburg., the hotel cost £7 for 7 nights, the tours and transfers, operated by the local coach company cost £6, the old man put on a margin of £6 and got a gross margin of 32%. The customers booked in their droves and the money kept rolling in. Everybody loved it. The clients loved the tours. The suppliers loved the business. The old man loved the prestige and the money and the opportunities for enjoying himself. Magic.

Every Monday evening from May to September, Dad went out to have a drink or two. He’d make a little “Pub Tour” around Bristol. It came to be known in the family as “Jolly Monday” and, although you’d never be quite sure where he was, you’d be pretty certain of the state in which he’d return. All tours departed on Tuesday and the old man personally escorted them to Belgium so possibly he was saying goodbye to all his old friends in case he wasn’t going to come back. Who knows? In any case, by Monday night he was always out of his head.

He never missed a Tuesday, though, and these followed their regular schedule too. The taxi came in the morning at about 8 (although he drove a train, my father never learnt to drive a car) and took him to Temple Meads station. A superb breakfast on the train presumably settled his stomach and set him up for the day and he got a taxi to Victoria. Passengers were met outside the “Golden Arrow” bar at Victoria Station, given their reservations, ticked off on the list and despatched. Time for a few drinks and something to eat before joining the group for the journey to Dover and a couple more snifters on the train. All officials were kept in order and onside by the liberal dispensation of alcohol, bonhomie and the handshake transferring the folded ten bob or fifty franc note. On boarding the ferry, Dad would go straight to the First Class Bar, where he’d hold court and quickly be joined by the ship’s purser and ticket collectors eager to enjoy the fun and collect their dues. Four hours or so later, on arrival at Ostend, the purser would come to collect Dad to make sure he got off the front of the ship with the first privileged group. Coaches were waiting at the ferry terminal to take the passengers to the hotels, and once they were boarded, Dad would pop off for a drink or two before beginning his rounds.

The passengers stayed in a number of hotels in Ostend. Not very sophisticated by today’s standards but certainly very good value. The £1 a night per person that the old man paid got a bed in a clean room (single or double) with linoleum floor and central heating and full board with packed lunches when on full day excursions. Breakfast was “Continental” – weak tea or freshly-brewed coffee, rolls, butter and jam. Three course lunches and dinners usually consisting of a home-made soup, or hors d’oevres, English-style main course, and a pudding. Packed lunches usually consisted of sandwiches, the inevitable hard-boiled egg or two a bit of fruit.

Anyway, the old man liked making sure everybody was happy and having a drink with his mates. To make sure everybody was happy, he would visit the hotels immediately after the passengers had arrived, pay the bill for the accommodation and have a drink or two with the hotelier. Then, he’d go out and have a few drinks.

The World Exhibition was unveiled in Brussels in 1958. Amongst other exhibits, the Atomium was created, to this day the major architectural landmark on Brussels’ horizon. Expo 58 marked a surge in public interest and tourism to Belgium. Jolly Party Continental Tours, offering a £10 weekend and a £20 week was in the thick of it. Never mind “V” forms and strict currency controls, my Dad had the answer. Sterling was paid in the UK and the foreign currency content of the tour was paid on the ferry to Belgium. Dad recruited his bank manager to assist and they spent their time from Dover to Ostend collecting cash from the clients which they stuffed into big holdalls. By the time they arrived in Ostend the holdalls were bulging and the passengers were ready to rock. Thirsty work.

Literally thousands of tourists were taken to Brussels by my Dad that year, railway groups, school groups, nurses groups, private groups. Everybody wanted to see this first of the high-tech world exhibitions and explore the exotic continent and Fred was the man to show them – “You lucky people!”. Ostend, just two hours or so from Brussels was the base. We stopped at the Sandcarpet cafe – (with its work of art in sand) for refreshments, toilets and to collect commission on the passengers’ spend. On to the Expo for the day and back to Ostend for the night’s revels.

So what was Ostend like in the 1950’s, and why did we all love it? Like my Dad, since I was very small, I’d spent all my holidays in Belgium. Not at first in Ostend – far too upmarket and expensive – but in the villages of Dixmuide and Wareghem where my grandfather’s family lived. Grandfather Gustave (“Charlie” to his friends) had been a wounded Belgian soldier invalided to the West of England during the First World War, stayed in England, fathered my Dad and didn’t want to go home. So we all went there for holidays instead. It was another world. My first Belgian experiences were of staying in Wareghem with relatives or Dixmuide with relatives who owned the local hotel – Les Voyageurs.

What an experience for a kid in the late 40’s and 50’s. These people in the villages were simply different. Life was clearly tough but it was not the same sort of tough that we had. My mum had had to go out cleaning to supplement Dad’s wages and probably she was good at it. In the Flemish villages where my family lived, they made cleaning into an art form. Gleaming stoves in the middle of tiny rooms, polished floors, and covered furniture – my great auntie had even won the “Best Kept Cottage” competition in Wareghem two years in a row! These people talked different, they looked different, their interests were different (who’d ever heard of cycle and pigeon racing?) they dressed different and in particular, they smelt different (a warm musky smell like malted butter biscuits that I remember to this day). My Dad liked pubs, so he often met old mates in one of the local cafes and they’d drink a “pintje” or seven, but visiting the cafe was seen as extravagant by my relatives so, often, Mum and Dad and Gran, my sister Marita and I would progress from house to house drinking a tiny glass of licquer in each. Dixmuide and Wareghem were no more than an hour away from Ostend by car, but even if they’d had a car to take them, my Flemish relatives wouldn’t have been interested in going there. Far too extravagant, but just right for us, the post-war “loadsamoney Brits”.

I guess you’d describe Ostend as a Belgian version of Bournemouth. Quite upmarket and genteel. Ostend had a posh, exclusive casino, a thermal bath, a Cathedral, a racecourse, a superb promenade complete with a pier and plenty of parked Porsches, a fishing harbour with restaurants, lots of cafes and a marketplace with bandstand. It had amazing ice cream shops, tearooms serving extraordinary cakes, a park with a lake and motorboats-to-hire, chips, tomates aux crevettes, grenadine, interesting looking people, strange sounds and something that felt and looked to me like freedom.

As I said, in these first few years of post-war tourism, my Dad brought small groups of railwaymen to Belgium to play darts with Ostend cafe teams. Now, I’ve always been prone to embarrassment, and these people embarrassed me, even though I liked them – and, after all, they were our source of income and standing. The customers possessed a kind of tourism chauvinism which I’ve now come to understand is endemic and not only practised by the Brits. The host country is always, in the tourists eyes, less substantial than the country the tourists come from. From the Brits’ point of view, “they” didn’t know how to make tea or a good breakfast, their money was “funny” (the post-war Belgian coins were described as “washers”), “they” were all a bit “poofy”, the local food and sauces were “messy”, and the beer was “weak” and “gassy”. The Brits, whatever their humble origins, also had a proprietorial air – after all we’d only recently rescued them from the Germans albeit with assistance from the Yanks. The Brits came because it was a good laugh, they could drink all day and night, they could use their strong pounds, it was cheap and they could brag to their mates when they got home. There were a few arguments and fights but generally the Belgians kept their mouths shut and served the beer with grace, after all, they wanted the money.

As British mass tourism to Ostend developed, the local small entrepreneurs spotted opportunities. Establishments like the “Cosy Corner Cafe – tea like mother makes it” sprung up. “Guinness” and “Double Diamond” signs became ubiquitous, a “British Ball” was instituted at the Casino, and at Jackie’s marketplace cafe the band became adept at leading the audience singing “There’ll always be an England”

By 1958, Brits were coming to Ostend in their hordes. I was 13 and it was wonderful. I’d was helping in the business now and school was going badly – I don’t think that there was much competition. I’d been pretty much exposed to all the benefits of tourism – flocks of envious tourists (some quite young, attractive and fanciable), nice things to eat and drink, status, money. The net effect was tourism ten, school nil. Winter evenings were to be spent stuffing envelopes, summers in Ostend-paradise-on-Earth, schoolwork fitted in between.

My next summer holiday started with my school’s trip to Bavaria, by train via Ostend. Imagine my pride when a local hotelier boarded at Ostend with a specially-prepared chicken dinner so I wouldn’t get hungry on the overnight journey, even more street-cred. Bliss. The next morning, in the couchette cabin, as the sun rose, I looked out of the window as we chuffed into fairyland. I was simply captivated by all the beauty. I saw green meadows studded with alpine flowers and crossed by little streams, deep valleys and soaring mountains, dinky chalets with geraniums popping out of every windowbox, clean cows (complete with bells) grazing in the fields, onion-domed churches, lederhosed-cladded farmers, dirndl-draped farmers wives. All stuff that, by now, I must have described in a thousand different ways. I truly thought I was dreaming, I couldn’t believe that such beauty could exist.

Back to Ostend to work after my holidays (I was 14 by now after all), I spent the rest of the summer learning the basic lessons of tourism in a busy resort. First step was to learn to smoke and drink like the rest of the industry. Smoking was no problem – after all I’d been doing it since I was 8, I just had to choose a local brand that suited me. St Michel were very good, came in 25’s without filter in a flash paper packet and were cheap plus they made me seem even more local for my customer interface. Drinking was a bit more difficult, even in Belgium a 14 year old serious inbiber was a little frowned upon, got over that problem by changing my age. From now on. in Belgium, I was a heavy smoking and serious drinking 17 year old – quite part of the local tourism community.

It is a fundamental and unchanging tourism rule that tour operators can never make sustainable money by sending people on holiday. Tour operators simply do the basics, they create the holidays, do all the research, haggle with hotels and transportation companies. Tour operators then fight amongst each other to get the “Best deals for their clients” – to deliver the most product for the lowest prices. Effectively this means he who has the slimmest and most dangerous margins, and/or he who has screwed his suppliers below the ground gets the most clients. The operator then writes and designs brochures and advertises his “Brilliant” holidays. A few telephone calls, a letter, a booking form and a cheque later, it’s the tour operator’s job to get the clients to the resort, to disburse the money that he’s been looking after and to take responsibility for any screw-ups.

The action really begins when the ingenue tourist reaches the resort. Resorts, generally, have a limited season. That means a limited period of time in which to make the money that’ll keep everybody happy for the rest of the year. Tourists are really welcome. They’ve done their part and shopped for the best tour, now they’ve exhausted (or left at home) their commercial perceptions with their inhibitions but they’ve brought their wallets and they want – and think they’re entitled to – a great holiday which usually means spending as much as they can afford and often more.

So what do tourists mean to a resort? Tourists mean money. At the beginning of their holiday, they’re taken from their secure homes and delivered to a resort that they’ve probably never been to before. To spend. Now, the tour operator probably talked to the tourists a couple of times before they booked, and a couple of times after. The total interchange can last for up to an hour – max. The resort hotel sees the tourist every day as does the resort rep (often a local). Local shopkeepers, bus drivers, guides, cafe owners and a multiplicity of local others have more of a long term relationship with tourists than the tour operator ever does. All this is added to the fact that however self-reliant tourists are in their home towns, when they are on holiday, they’re dependent. Given all that available and unprotected money, and the need to make as much as possible before the season ends, it’s understandable that tourists are screwed – often in more ways than one.

Successful resorts are efficient money-making machines in which every small entrepreneur – and I include resort reps and guides in this category – play their well-rehearsed part. It’s good for everybody, the tourist enjoys their stay and the local services make a wad of dough. The tour operator who thought he was in charge of the game – after all the tourists are “his” clients – has now fulfilled his purpose in the resort’s evolutionary process. As far as the resort is concerned, he’s delivered the tourists complete with money – job done. The balance between resort and tour operator would change over the succeeding years, but the basic process would always remain the same.

So, in Ostend, I went to the port each Tuesday with the transfer coaches to meet the clients (scanning the passenger lists first to see what I could glean from the Miss’s names), meet Dad and take the clients to the hotels. There were frequent hotel overbookings in the high season and often I trooped around from hotel to hotel with a little group of tourists to find them beds. No threats of legal action, no complaints, the clients were pleased to get a nice clean bed and a continental holiday – after all, this was 1959!

Each week the clients were different but wherever they came from, whatever they wanted they got basically the same. As in every resort, all the operators do their excursions on the same day – just in case they need to consolidate and each summer week for the next three years went something like this:

Tuesday evening arrival. Make sure that they’ve all got beds. After dinner they’ll all take a drink at their hotel, Make sure they’re all seen and chat them up a bit, particularily any attractive female young person. Maybe they’d like to go out for a drink, to one of the nightclubs perhaps.

Wednesday was free. This is their chance to have a really good look at Ostend and spend a little money also the chance for a local guide to sell them a night out or an extra excursion for cash (known as “Black” in the trade).

Thursday was yet another foreign country. A whole day trip to the market in Middleburg – a chance for the Dutch to get at the money. The customers would all trip on the coach at 8 complete with packed lunch – sandwiches, possibly a boiled egg and fruit, and relax to enjoy the day. The guide (often me) or driver’s commentary would start on the outskirts of Ostend – hamming up the foreign accent and trotting out a few unimpressive facts (unimpressive unless you were a tourist of course). Down the coast, past Zeebrugge (the U Boat pen and the mole), Blankenberghe (pass) and the the casino and the millionaire’s residences at Knokke. In no time at all we would be at Breskens, refreshment stop – free coffees and tips for the driver and guide. On to the romantic ferry (well I thought it was and I’m sure the clients did) to Flushing (Vlissingen to the locals) on the island of Walcheren. Main stop of the day was the market in Middleburg. Here, shopping and spending opportunities abound. Cheese, tiny clogs, little Dutch dolls, Delft windmills, lace – plenty of things that would be worth nothing in two weeks and would be extremely collectible in fifty years. Eat your sandwiches with drinks at the recommended cafe (more freebies and tips for the crew) – afterwards you can take a picture with a nice big Dutch lady in National costume – for a fee of course. Personally, I loved the market for one thing – smoked eel, just peel the skin off and suck the flesh – magnificent. And the Dutch beer of course.

Back to Breskens for the afternoon entertainment. A big beerhall and a mechanical band, oompah marionettes playing real Dutch music, what could be better at teatime? The customers satisfied and our bellies and pockets full, we’d drive back along the coast to Ostend, dinner and the night-time entertainment. Good night out…tomorrow’s just an afternoon tour. The White Horse Inn – “in t’Witte Paard”, “au Cheval Blanc” provided a riotous night out for the clients. More oompah bands, you could have glasses, big glasses, big glass mugs or enormous steins of beer. These were expensive, even for the British and they had to be told that they didn’t have to pay to get in , but they paid over the top for drinks …what? They always enjoyed themselves, the moreso because they’d been initiated into another quaint continental custom. If they’d gone upstairs into the Weinstube they could have had expensive wine too, but this would have been a step too far.

My favourite day, Friday. Why? French cheese and white wine in Dunkirk and great big ham sandwiches and big, big hot Belgian waffles with cream at Meli Park – all free, and plenty of booze. So, we’d get the passengers on and usually I’d sit on the coach’s engine to give a “commentary”. We’d leave after lunch, down the Belgian coast past Mariakerke and Middelkerke to the border with France, stop for a drink at the border cafe – it’s probably still got the same sign up “NO TOILETS WITHOUT CONSUMPTION” – and nip down to Dunkirk centre. Never the most appealing town in the world, but in those days many of our passengers had left there before – in a hurry, in 1940. So, it was interesting to point out the shell marks in the walls, and they liked coming back in a completely different guise. A few glasses of wine and some cheese and garlic sausage in a cafe, little walk around, another country done. It’s off to Adinkerke.

Mr Florizoone is one of my tourism marketing heroes, in my view one of the greats, if there was a tourism marketing hall of fame – and there should be – Mr Florizoone should be in its top ten of “Great Pioneers from whom everybody learnt”. Mr Florizoone (sorry, Mr Florizoone’s bees) made honey. Great honey, in fact. Mr Florizoone and his family put the honey into jars and sold it. Mr Florizoone’s customers liked the honey, very much, as they should – it is very good honey as I said. So far so good, nice business. Now the basic principle of marketing development, one that should never be forgotten is… “Sell new products to your customers, sell your products to new customers”. I don’t suppose that he had a marketing degree, but like most of the post-war marketers, Mr Florizoone knew exactly what to do and he had panache and flair (and a wonderful product!). First, Mr Florizoone branded his product – “Meli Park, he called his establishment – French for honey “Miel” – geddit? I imagine Mr Florizoone in his new product department (Like Charlie’s chocolate factory). Here, Mr Florizoone developed a range of honey products that defied belief. Honey with Royal Jelly, honey without, honey sweets, runny honey, firm honey, medicinal honey preparations, Royal Jelly tablets, and my personal favourites…chocolate honey and honey cake among many many more Florizoone-branded honey-derivated delicacies.

So what about selling Mr Florizoone’s honey-delicacies to new markets? This was Mr Florizoone’s master-stroke. He created a park entirely devoted to honey and to the tastes of those that liked honey. – Meli Park, – Disneyland with a purpose and big-time attractions to draw the tourists.. Lovely gardens, wonderful musical tableaux of classic fairytales, floodlit musical dancing fountains and an amazing variety of opportunities to buy an incredible array of honey products. The new markets came to him in their droves. I loved all of the honey-stuff and learnt that Cinderella is Puttefatte (in German), Ashputel (In Swedish), Cendrillon (in French) and Cenerentola (in Italian). I still love the honey.

Why was Mr Florizoone’s coach park always full of coaches? Two basic reasons. He gave the customers a good deal – they loved the park and the honey, and he really looked after the coach drivers and guides. So, after Dunkirk, we’d show up at Meli Park for the rest of the afternoon. The customers were despatched to explore, we’d hive off to the “Chauffeurs Room” in the restaurant. We’d get a pot of quality coffee or a beer, a ham or cheese open sandwich (a thick slice of fresh bread with a thick slice of ham) and a waffle with icing sugar and fresh cream. These were called waffles plus we were in Belgium, but they bear absolutely no relationship with the things sold as “Belgian Waffles” in UK 2006. They were feather light, as big as two paperback books put together, sprinkled with icing sugar, and just warm enough for the cream that you spread to melt in each little recess. They melted in the mouth like sugary, creamy, delicious gossamer. See, Mr Florizoone always delivered quality – even when he was giving it away. Then we played mini-golf and had a beer or two. Back to Ostend.

Early departure on Saturday for Brussels. All ready and set with the packed lunch, on to the coach and away up the motorway. Motorway in 1959? Hitler’d built it. Not much by today’s standards but something really different at the time, and, renewed and upgraded, very effective in getting all those people to Brussels for the Expo 58. First stop, the Sandcarpet Cafe. Works of art in coloured sand plus coffee, tea and beer, then on to Brussels. Park the coach and walk them to the Grand Place “As you can see, the tower is not quite in the middle of the building…when the architect saw it, he jumped off the top” amazing what people can believe. More to the point it’s time to walk to the highlight of the morning…the Manekin Pis. Little statue of a naked, cherubic little boy on the corner of a little street. Peeing. It’s what people want to see, still. What an industry the Mannekin Pis has created. Photographs, models, a museum with its 250 costumes. Tourists buy Mannekin Pis corkscrews (yes, you can imagine where the corkscrew part is!), dolls, chocolate, biscuits, bottles, postcards the lot. You name it, the Mannekin Pis has endorsed it for over 400 years. “You wouldn’t go to Paris without seeing the Mona Lisa would you? Why go to Brussels without seeing the Mannekin Pis?”Guides with flags/umbrellas/whatever held high leading long lines of camera-clad people to the Mannekin Pis. It’s what tourism’s all about.

Lunch and a few beers, here’s where I discovered Trappist Ale, and it’s off for a quick tour, a panoramic view of Brussels and the Atomium before we’re off again…to Ghent.

Now, to me, in those days, Ghent meant one thing…coffee in the Radskelder – the cellars of the belfry. I guess people wandered around, and I certainly told them about the wonderful sculpture of the “Merchants of Ghent” as we came into the city, but not much else, they liked to have their tea, you see. I’d have a wander in the very close vicinity and a drink. So, it took some 40 years, yes 40 years before I realised what an extraordinary city Ghent is. I guess that the customers we took there then never did. On to Ostend for dinner and a night out. Again.

Sunday was delightful always, and to be perfectly honest, a dream Sunday for me has still got to be a nice breakfast, a bit of a wander, lunch and then an afternoon to Bruges. We’d usually go to Sluis first, chance to shepherd the passengers into the “Chosen” souvenir shop to stock up on much-needed little dolls, lace and Delft, little musical windmills that lit up, snaps with traditional locals, buy some Advocaat or Cherry Brandy (enormous delicacies in those days), stroll down the canal, see the windmill, board the coach, off to Bruges – the first and only “Venice of the North”.

The customers loved Bruges, they always did and they always will. Yes of course, it’s a World Heritage site, yes of course it’s got loads of churches, museums and wonderful art treasures, yes of course it’s got stunning architecture created during its colourful historic past, but it’s got much, much more than all that. In my view, Bruges has got nearly every trump in the tourism suite and, over the years, it’s played them all extraordinarily well.

The two to the 8 of Bruges trumps…are “Special Interests”,

In the travel industry “Special Interest Travel” is seen as a powerful magnet for tourists and a real money-spinner. Even to the extent that people are paid to sit around and create special interests where none exist, – think of darts festivals for instance – another example of a tourism consultant making money for his clients.

This is how it works… find a particular place where you only get gingham mice – sell trips to see them to the “Gingham Mice Lovers” brigades around the world. Niche product, niche market in today’s jargon – the nicher the better! Result… the “Gingham Mice” fancier not only gets a trip for his money but also they get to follow their addiction too…and they’ll pay more for it. It all gets a bit dodgy when you make your own gingham mice – but hey-ho that’s tourism for you – “Quality tourism” it’s called, quantity money it makes. Bruges has got lots of Special Interests, at least enough to count from 2 to 7 trumps. Just look at the list of potential clients – History buffs (you don’t get more Middle-Aged-Important than Bruges), religious pilgrims (the Holy Blood in the church of the same name is said to liquify every 10 years), lacemakers (a growth industry), beer drinkers (seriously, there’s one cafe in Bruges with over 200 types of beer), architecture enthusiasts (Just look at the Step-Gables) , art lovers (there’s even a Michelangelo Madonna and Child here), antique hunters (Bruges’ antique shops are stuffed with expensive old things and the flea markets are incredible), even chocoholics (believe me, there are more chocolate shops per square metre in Bruges than anywhere else in the world, if there aren’t Bruges chocolate-making courses for bored housewives in their hundreds now, you can bet your life there will be). Enough? Enough to ensure a steady flow of quality money, that’s for sure.

The nine of trumps is…visible history,

People like looking at history. Although learning about history is generally a complete No No, the general public love history facts and stories and they like to be where it happened. Often not to feel or look or indeed see, but to pick up stories and take pictures, go home and retail them to their friends. Also one of the greatest facets of tourism is right there at the top of Dr Maslow’s “Heirarchy of Needs” – self actualisation. This translates to the following statement “We went for a trip to Bruges, it’s very historic you know – would you like to see the pictures we took – bet you didn’t know we were into history did you – we loved it!”. This actualises the speaker in his or her own mind as a lover of all things historic. Lovely – one step up. Also, visible history, in particular the sort that Bruges has, creates a fairytale atmosphere – just like the films – with knights and fair damsels and alchemists and witches and things. Except you’re in it, that fairytale world, just where it all happened. As all the theme parks have discovered, fairytale worlds draw in the clients.

The ten of trumps…Bruges is quaint, walkable and compact.

You can pack a great deal into half a day in Bruges. You can see the canals (can’t miss them in fact), you can walk over romantic bridges, you can see boats in the water, you can see delightful outdoor cafe’s with colourful awnings, you can bump along cobbled streets. You can get it all in a very reasonable period of time without missing a lot of the superficial stuff. That’s very satisfying to the tourist. “Been there, seen it, done it” and back onto the coach. Bruges “Drill-down” potential means that there can always be more, too, if you want to look deeper on a second or twenty-second visit.

The Jack of trumps…there are a lot of things to do in Bruges

This fulfils two very important tourism-industry needs – a) provide the tourist with a fully-satisfying visit – a real experience that they can go home and tell their friends about, and b) provide earning opportunities for the locals. So, in Bruges you can take a canal boat trip (with commentaries in numerous languages), you can tour by horse drawn carriage where you’ll get blanketed-up and trotted about, you can visit lace-making factories staffed with dinky old ladies who must have been damsels in those olden days – and who’ll sell you lace with a fervour, you’ll have opportunities to see and hear the Carillon bells. Enough. Until the next time.

The Queen of trumps…There are plenty of things to buy.

Tourists, generally, want more than snaps as proof of their visit. They need souvenirs too. Yet another opportunity for self-actualisation here. So, you’ll find the whole range of Bruges souvenir-tat readily available on each and every tourist-street corner. Plenty of Manneke Pis’s for the “Bucket and Spade Brigade”, nice bits of “Hand Made” lace for the ladylike ladies, mass-produced prints and watercolours for the artistically-leaning and Bruges chocolates for everyone. Now it’s “Been there, seen it done it AND got the “T” shirt!”

The King of trumps…close to lots of places

Now, if Bruges were in the depths of Outer Siberia it would have very few tourists and a very small tourism industry. That may seem a crazy statement, but the availability of people-capable-of-spending is critical to the equation. There are places all over the world with just as much, perhaps more, potential than Bruges – they just haven’t been able to hack it…yet. Prague is a classic example. It was always just as glorious, but inaccessible. As soon as it became “Close” twelve million tourists a year. There are many, many more glorious destinations just waiting for the tourism spotlight to shine on them. Bruges was just lucky. The spotlight shone there first, and it’s stayed…why? Because Bruges has played its ace trump very, very well.

The Ace of trumps…looking after the tourism asset.

Managing the tourism asset is critical in the equation, there are so many people to be pleased and needs to be satisfied that it is very difficult to steer a course that provides a sustainable flow of tourists …and money! Even if you have all the trump cards, you can still screw it up – bigtime. Just imagine Bruges after the first 50 years of mass tourism. It could have a multi-national in every prime site. McDonalds, all the Espresso Bongo’s, Holiday Inns and many more. Yes, they’re there, but they’re either outside of the city heart, or they’re tasteful and attractive – and they’re not there in force. Bruges could be full up with tourist coaches and open-top busses – resulting in traffic chaos. It’s not, they’re kept outside, and cars are provided a big underground car park within walking distance of the centre. Why have the burghers of Bruges taken an up-market attitude to tourism developement? Because they’re not stupid, and they want up-market tourists providing up-market money for their own homegrown entrepreneurs. Many a tourist city could take a leaf out of Bruges’ tourism development attitude.

So, the tourists get a quality experience, the locals get quality money and quality opportunities

Back to Sunday afternoon 1959 and we’re bowling along back to Ostend. “Sing Something Simple” is on the BBC radio and we’re all joining in “Goodnight Irene, Goodnight”. And it will be.

Sunday night in Ostend. Monday free and “Big Night Out”, the whole process will start up again on Tuesday.

Just in time for the 1961 season, I got thrown out of school. At 16, complete with three “O” levels, a smattering of French, Flemish, German and Italian, a nice pointy Italian hairstyle, a sharp shiny mohair suit and a gold identity bracelet the world was my oyster. I was ready for action!

By now things had moved on a bit in our little business. An office had been rented, staff had been employed and Dad had got everybody nice bright red blazers to go with the little badges that all the clients had to wear. New tours had been inaugurated. You could go to the Rhineland, Nice and Monte Carlo, Switzerland, Paris, or Amsterdam – all, naturally, via Ostend.

My tourist-life had filled up with characters too… tourism-industry archetypes

The Hotelier

Roland was 38, complete with a lovely blonde wife, three small sons, a big house , a Triumph TR2, a pretty – and wayward – French mistress with her very own bordello – and the Grand Hotel Georges V in Vlaanderenstraat – Ostend.

At the tender age of 14 (oops 17) it was decided that I was to learn the trade by working for my Dad in Ostend, meeting the passengers, guiding the odd tour and generally making sure that everything was OK. Where was I to stay? Somewhere pretty cool, I hoped – and where was cooler than in the attic of the Georges V, stamping ground of my mate and glamorous role-model Roland. So, from the summer of 1959, and each summer for the next few years, my continental residence was a garret in the centre of Ostend – heart of the action! My nights were spent on the razzle or working in the hotel bar, my days were spent on daytrips with the customers or drinking coffee with the hotel staff. Getting up was my biggest problem, but that was solved by the hotel chef Ted – a dour Belgian who spoke perfect Yorkshire English and slaved away in a sweaty basement kitchen. Ted devised the multiple wake-up process. First he’d knock on the door, five minutes later he’d throw me out of bed, another five minutes he’d wake me up on the bedroom floor and so on.

Here I learnt how a tour hotel works and it’s a pretty simple equation – captive audience + lots of spending money = a good life for all.

Roland used to charge my Dad a quid a night full board for each passenger. That quid had to pay for the room, continental breakfast (rolls, jam, butter, coffee or tea), three course lunch (soup, main course, pudding – or packed lunch on tour) and three course dinner. Even when a quid was a quid this was tight, the lease had to be paid, the laundry accomplished and the hotel cleaned and repaired. So how did Roland make the money to keep a mistress and a sports car? Extras.

So, you want Eenglish breakfast (eggs, bacon etc)- five bob. A Stella in the bar – five bob. A whisky and soda (illegal in Belgium then – ten bob. Breakfast in bed – two and six and so it went on. Holidaymakers buy the basics cheap, they then deliver themselves as a captive audience to everybody in the resort. In his hotel, Roland had a monopoly. Plus, this is where you first learn that the tour operation itself is pretty low in the holiday food chain – the holidaymakers actually expose themselves and their soft underbellies (purses) to the hotelier!

The guide

Although I’ve met thousands of Sacha’s since, dinky little Sacha Ravinsky will always be my archetype guide. Sacha was certainly better educated and much more cultured than the rest of the motley mob of tourism hanger-ons. To start with, he spoke half a dozen languages fluently, he had a real interest in music and history and came from a distinctly upmarket background. So why was this tubby, scruffy little 40 year old waving his flag in the midst of definitely lower-class tourists who would take the piss out of him at every opportunity and call him “Slasher” to his face? Was he writing the definitive work about Kant, a great symphony or choreographing a supreme work of dance (surprisingly, he’d been a ballet dancer once) and just trying to support himself in the meantime? Well he should have been doing all of those and more, but he wasn’t. He was earning his living and devoting his resources to being a poor, downtrodden tour guide. Desperately trying to make sure of his commission at the souvenir shops and living on free meals from the restaurants. Educated, emotional, somehow disenfranchised, part teacher, part joke, part philosopher, wholly disgruntled and downtrodden, Sacha administered to his groups with no deference whatsoever.

Yes OK there were flash tour guides of that era, earning lots of dosh and getting their ends away with lots of their passengers. Even in the ‘50’s , tales of randy “Loadsamoney” guides and couriers were hitting the tabloids with unremitting frequency – earnings of £500 a week and more were frequently reported. But these were mainly svelte geezers chaperoning American tourists “Doing” Europe with more money than sense – the real money and the amazing party for guides in the tourism industry came later.

The coach operator

Coachies, whether drivers or owners, are the Chippendales of the Tourism industry. Macho to a fault, they drive and run their vehicles with a certain panache that seems to beguile their female passengers with absolutely no respect for class, age or type. I’ve seem dour, prim, elderly schoolmistresses aching with passion directed at ugly, crude drivers. I’ve seen gorgeous, sophisticated women falling desparately for ineffably boring, louche uneducated coach proprieters. In what world is the feat of steering a coach with your beer-belly – hands in the air – a come on? When on a coach, lovely ladies seem to enter the world of the hen party, and the driver’s the pole-dancer.

In Ostend, Roger Ramoudt and his brothers were the kiddies. They owned Ramoudts Coaches, they brought the coaches to the party and they were going to drive them. Dark, sleek, mustacheiod, and swaggering the five brothers could have been mistaken for bit-players in a Spaghetti Western. They’d leap into the saddles of their red-and-blue Leyland Tiger Cub Jonkheeres and whisk you away to foreign lands, today Adinkerke, tomorrow Cologne, and then…who knows?

Rather like the airline industry, the machochism of the coaching business has never failed to amaze me. You can buy a superb bit of printing gear for rather less than you can buy a coach and you can charge a much higher hourly rate for printing. There are no real seasons in printing, your machine is dead cheap to run compared with a coach – and it’s not out in all weather and prone to client abuse and accidents. So, if you wanted to make money, why not get into print? Simple…you can’t paint it in flash colours with your own name on it, you can’t drive it around and you can’t pick up birds!

The local tourism tyro

OK, Ostend had been hosting foreign guests for centuries before the 1950’s, but hitherto they’d all been posh.. The “Mijnheers” and “Mijvrouws” had come to Ostend to try the thermal baths and bathe in the sea in the specially-constructed bathing machines. A little horse racing, a promenade along the prom a turn in the Casino was sufficient for their needs. And, although they spent plenty of money, there weren’t very many ABC1’s then. So, when the first waves of mass foreign tourism hit Ostend, the locals understood the game, but not the new players. At first.

There were, of course, hotels and restaurants. Quite a few of them, in fact. They’d been used to catering for pre-war domestic tourists and during-war foreign tourists, mainly from Germany and mainly in uniform. The domestic market had dried up – they were too busy with re-construction to spend the little money they had, and the foreign uniformed tourists had been defeated and had gone home to reconstruct their own country. The only real market available was over the water – the triumphant Brits, eager to re-bond with their Belgian cousins they’d so recently liberated and to bask in a little hero-worship and sun-on-the-beach.

So, what do you need for (mass) tourism? Basically accommodation and transportation and a bit of marketing; you’re there. Tell the hoteliers that you can get them business, negotiate rates with a few coachies, rent some coaches yourself, brand the product , make friends with the embryo foreign tour operators to get their business and before you can say “Nello Maertens”, you’re the local tourism tyro. You’ve called your company “Ostend Travel Service” so’s nobody has any doubts about where you are, who you are and what you do and you’re in control of the game. For a surprisingly long time. The local tourism providers trust you because you’re one of them, the foreign tour operators like you because a) you sort out their on the spot problems and b) you look after them very well.

Nello was young and attractive and quickly powerful. He established an office right in the centre of things beside the Cathedral, leased hotels and coaches, trained and uniformed guides and quickly captured and held the marketplace. Who wouldn’t be impressed and/or envious? There were to be Nello’s all over the world – maybe he sold the franchise and training scheme!

My Dad – the Tour Operator

My Dad’s first introduction to tourism came around 1928, when he was 10, taking his holidays with his Dad’s family in Dixmuide. Never heard of Dixmuide? Well, it was pretty famous at one time. Slap bang in the middle of the First World War, Dixmuide was razed to the ground – the inhabitants mostly took off to the South of France and came back when the war was over to rebuild their village exactly as it was, complete with medieval market square. You couldn’t tell the difference. Then the tourists arrived for battlefield tours, they could see the “Trench of Death”, Hills “60” and “62”, the Ypres Salient, and various other notable sights. They didn’t come in their thousands, but in a big enough trickle to provide some reasonable remuneration for the locals and the local lads. So the old man saw that tourism existed – and that it could be a profitable occupation.

In the early 1950’s, a few years after the Second World War, my Dad was working as a railway driver, one of the benefits of which occupation was a limited number of free continental rail passes. Seeing the potential (free travel + cheap accommodation), he organised a few of his colleagues to go to Belgium to play darts and have a good (and cheap) time. Calling his group the “Jolly” Party, they all went, they all played darts with Belgian teams for cups, they all enjoyed it. Dad made some money, he enjoyed himself, so he repeated the exercise, again and again. Pretty soon he had a business – and a market – railwaymen with free passes.

Working on the classic marketeer’s formula (to expand, you sell your product to a new market, and you sell new products to your market), he expanded both his product range and he entered a new market. By 1956, new tours were being sold using Ostend as a bridgehead (Rhineland and South of France) and a new market entered – the general public. Advertisments were placed in the mass media.

Then came a stroke of luck. Dad met Tommy Trinder, a very well liked comedian of the day. Dad liked Tommy, Tommy liked Dad, and he was kind enough to endorse the Jolly Party Continental Tours in the form of a photograph, which appeared in National Press advertising. Tommy’s catch-line was “You Lucky People” – ideal as an announcement in a travel ad. As far as I know, Tommy did it as a kindly gesture, it was a very generous act, and certainly boosted business substantially. Jolly Party Continental Tours was on the road! And the old man became my archetype tour operator.

Like many, many after him, Tour Operator Tjolle followed a path that began with recognising the tourism opportunity, continued by being able to convince others to believe his vision, then promoting and marketing like stink to create the necessary critical mass. He never went into a bar, hotel, restaurant, indeed any establishment, without leaving brochures, he nurtured his relations with the press, he grabbed any opportunity he saw to promote his brand. He just loved to deliver things that he enjoyed to others, but eventually, his enjoyment got the better of him and he went bust in 1967 cos he hadn’t paid Roland’s bill.

My love affair with tourism
You Lucky People

Chapter 2
The Birth of Mass Tourism

Well, there I was, as usual on a summer Tuesday lunchtime, sitting on Victoria Station, underneath the clock, by the Golden Arrow Bar, in my posh red Jolly Party blazer. Waiting for another bunch of customers to arrive. What would they be like this week? Then she hove into view. Red suit, pencil skirt, tight little buttoned jacket with a tiny fur collar, nearly shoulder length straight black hair, face like an Egyptian dolly, heavy make up around almond eyes. Tall and skinny. Looked like an exotic ballerina. WOW. I was introduced to her. “Chan’, Anthia “Daisy’ Day …off on holiday with her Mum – my Dad’s secretary’s sister. “That bloody Geoffrey (Dad’s secretary’s son)”, I thought, “Got this lovely thing all to himself – he must have snapped her up by now”

By the time evening came, I’d dispensed with the Mum and had Chan to myself. The pre-programmed seduction process involved a lot of drinks in a lot of cafes and the result was usually the same. Drunk girl in my bed, horrendous next day. Anyway, it didn’t work this time, either she had willpower like iron or she had a head for the drink or both. Any which way, Chan drank me under the table, but yes she did come to my room where I found myself sleeping on the floor with her hand in mine. And, yes, the next day we both felt pretty bad.

Back in Bristol, I pursued Chan remorselessly, if drunkenly. Eventually, I managed to propose to her sober and eventually, she accepted. We were to be married a week before my 20th birthday.

“No way” or whatever the expression was then, was I to be allowed to marry while I didn’t have a real job (real job = working for someone other than my Dad). All the cool dudes worked in Advertising in the 60’s and so would I.

Walter Pearce Advertising was rather a Dickensian company, certainly for the 1960’s. Based an a large Victorian house in a leafy, upmarket part of Bristol, WP’s main business was regional dealer advertising for a farm machinery company and “Situations Vacant” for the local hospitals.

The company was divided into different one, or two man “Departments”. The one Account Executive backed up by Mr Ron dealt with the client or two. The Media buyer bought the space in the selected publications. The Art department (Mr Lucas and his friend) designed the ad. Copy was supplied by our copywriter. Blocks were ordered by the Production Department (Stuart from Newcastle) and sent to the papers. I worked in the Voucher department and helped check that the ads appeared. To get a rise, I had to brave one of the two Pearce brothers “Mr Ron” or “Mr Brian”. Usually Mr Brian, who was the gentler and most shortsighted (with perennial newsprint on his nose from close reading). Mr Brian would look up myopically from his paper at the request and nod. Often an extra five or ten shillings would appear in my paypacket at the end of the week. Before long, I’d stepped up the ladder and was entitled “Classified Advertisment Executive” and married on the breadline salary of seven pounds ten shillings a week, rather less than my Dad would spend on a round of drinks.

Anyway, I learnt a lot while I was at WP, when the advertising industry was rapidly changing from a short-sighted, black-nailed group of Ragged Trousered Philanthropists to a sharp-suited bunch of media-hypesters. I spent long hours on an IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising) course at Bristol College of Commerce. Here I learnt soon-to-be-forgotten skills like what “Hot Lead” was made of, what a ‘Compositor’ did and upcoming trades like ‘Media Buying’ and ‘PR’. I also had great times perfecting my skills at ‘Three Card Brag’.

I learnt all about the techniques of print and production and the ethics of advertising (yes, there were some once!). Certainly I learnt enough to know that advertising agencies weren’t worth the space that they bought on commission.
I made my contribution – titles on all the ads I bought were to be in very hip bold lower case. But the job had enabled me to get married and now I was married, it was time to re-join my chosen profession and first love.

And I learnt three big lessons in leisure marketing which stood me in good stead for the next few years..

Up the Apples and Pears
Once upon a time there was a Somerset pear farmer called Ralph. Often there was a glut of pears and he couldn’t sell them all, so they went to waste or were used in ‘Perry’ – the pear version of cider. Perry had the advantage that it kept longer than fresh pears, so, stored in big bottles it could be regarded as an asset rather than a waste. However, Perry was time and trouble to make and, indeed, to sell. It tasted OK, but didn’t have the macho image that cider benefited from. But, after a while, Ralph’s stocks of Perry built up to the point that warehousing was a problem. Something had to be done before Somerset ran out of bottles.

Enter Marketingman. “Tastes nice” said he, but I couldn’t drink a whole gallon of the stuff even if it is only one and threepence.” “C’mon” Said Ralph “I can’t make it any cheaper, the bottle costs nearly that much”. “No” said Marketingman, but we could make it much, much, much more expensive! I mean, who knows about this stuff?” “Not many people, but a few farmer’s wives drink it.”. “Let me think about it, Ralph.”

A couple of days later Marketingman returns, flipchart at the ready. “Right, we put it in pretty little 12ml bottles with some silver foil over the neck and we charge the same amount as for a gallon – by my reckoning that’s about 100 times more than we currently make – the extra profit will more than pay for a bit of rebranding. We’ll brand “Babycham” as “Champagne Perry” and we’ll get the rights to Bambi and put her on the label – that’ll drag the ladies in! Plus a bright little tune.

So, the very first premium drink was born, made millions and satisfied a major public desire for a bit of luxury after years of austerity, not very different from the package holiday industry.

Steak and sherry for the masses

Bristol was my birthplace and my home for the first 20 or so years of my life. A major port and merchant city, full of commercial history and with a mercantile attitude, Bristol was, and is, the birthplace of many ideas that made, and reflected, a little social history.
For some hundreds of years, Bristol was a major port for the fortified wine trade. Sherry and port were imported into Bristol from Spain and Portugal in their hundreds of barrels, and drunk in the many historic inns.

Aldo, Frank and Marco Berni were brothers, in the restaurant trade. Eventually Marco established his own restaurant in the heart of the city, close to the historic St Nicholas Market. Aldo and Frank went a different route. In 1955, they’d purchased the Rummer – an old port-side inn. And they were about to do something historic. The Bernis popularized the British classic 1950’s upwardly mobile menu of Prawn Cocktail, ‘T’ Bone steak and Black Forest gateau, washed down by a ‘Rummer’ of historic sweet sherry. The formula was a world-beater and soon Frank and Aldo were buying up inns, old and newer, as fast as they could. You knew exactly what you were going to get – there were no surprises at Berni’s – the concept was strong.. Powerful words sold the product – inn, steak, sherry, prawns – all premium products. And, yes, you could certainly get your Babycham at a Berni Inn.

What are you going to do with all those camps, Mr Butlin?

Here’s a story of supply being spun a little to fulfil demand. After the second world war, and the years of austerity people wanted to have a good time and enjoy themselves a bit. Sitting around having a drink of Babycham, and going out to a Berni Inn for a steak supper only went half the way. People wanted hedonism, they wanted to go on holidays where anything went! But, they didn’t have much money and there weren’t any cut price package tours to the sun available.

The Ministry of Defence, however, had a few assets on hand that may be able to fulfil the public’s requirements viz army and navy establishments in beautiful locations near the sea and with basic accommodation for lots of people.

Enter Billy Butlin, a Canadian showman who’d established an amusement park empire throughout the United Kingdom and, pre-war, had run a couple of 2,000 – bed holiday camps, at Skegness and Clapton. “Have the army and navy camps Mr Butlin, make our people happy, you’ll make a lot of money and eventually, we’ll give you a knighthood – you’ll be Sir Billy, and we’ll be forever in your debt.
So, the uniforms changed, red coats for the staff and anything they wanted to wear for the inmates (sorry guests). Dancing instead of square bashing. Fun and frolics replaced routemarches, sex instead of discipline, beauty queens took the place of RSM’s. What a transformation – it’s freedom and nearly time for the holiday boom to begin.

The 1960’s saw the birth of advertising and marketing as a real force in the world and poor old WP took a death blow when all their key staff were offered double salary to work for a local fast-moving competitor. Bye bye Mr Ron and Mr Brian, hello Mr Spin.

I always found Avonmouth rather homely. I’d walk from our basement flat in Clifton every morning to the bus stop in Hotwells, just by the River Avon. The bus ride down the picturesque Avon Gorge (always reminded me of the Rhineland, even if there wasn’t much water in the river) took me to Avonmouth village, and James & Hodder, just by the entrance to the dock. Like a great many shipping agents, James & Hodder had to arrange for the repatriation of crews to their home ports as part of their service to the shipowners. Plus, at the time, it was fashionable for middle class Brits to cruise on dirty old banana boats so J&H had lots of people asking them how to do it. Hey Presto, James and Hodder Travel was born. And, as I knew more than most about the travel business, I’d become its Assistant Manager.

Short, barrel-chested, ebullient, colourful rough and ready Hugh, the James & Hodder manager, left me to it from my first day when he swanned off to the bookies. He had other things on his mind – the fate of the favourite in the 2.30 currently his most pressing concern. So I learnt a lot at J&H very quickly – I had to! I learnt to take bookings for package tours, to issue airline, rail and bus tickets – and how to account for them. I learnt to arrange and book itineraries (mainly for Greek seamen traveling home via the direct Orient Express, or through Italy and via Brindisi and Patras). And to write stroppy letters to tour operators after customers had had their holidays ruined. I learnt how to drink at travel cocktail parties and to enjoy ‘Educationals’. In short, I learnt how to be a travel agent!

For some reason my dissolute Belgian-Coast lifestyle had abated somewhat, so I was just about capable of holding my own in a business where no-one knew anything much. One minute I was arranging for groups of aggressively drunken Danish seamen to fly home to Copenhagen. The next minute, I was trolling around church halls with a portable cine-projector and reels of cruise films to show to potential customers (we were nothing but up-to-the-minute then!).

My boredom was abated by the company’s best client, a local port agent who supplied stevedoring services. How I envied the flamboyant Mr Pruett and vicariously enjoyed his lifestyle. He’d push off on holiday in his Bentley with his beautiful young wife and family and a pack of our travel vouchers in his glove compartment, I’d stay at home to relish the accounts as they arrived, with completed vouchers for us to pay on Mr Pruett’s behalf. The vouchers and their accompanying invoices told a tale of lavish extravagance on trails from Paris’s George V Hotel to the South of France and beyond. Champagne breakfasts, exotic meals, cash advances for gambling, they were all neatly annotated and invoiced and provided ample ammunition for my daydreams. Poor old Mr Pruett, his travelling cost him his company. When his extravagant use of J&H vouchers cost more than the stevedoring services he provided, they had his company to pay the bill.

But Mr Pruett was a traveller of the past. This was the very beginning of the package-tour era and unheard-of destinations were beginning to emerge. Cheap sun, cheap booze, cheap sex, cheap thrills, cheap holidays for the masses spawned a surge of activity to profit from the boom.

Tour Operators popped up all over the UK equipped with glossy brochures and telephone lines, reservations systems and ‘key and lamp’ units. Lyons Tours came from Lancashire and took you to the Costa Brava for 19 guineas for a week. Cosmos, financed by a Swiss travel agency, started a massive European programme from a Surbiton front-room. Friendship Tours (“to be a friend is to have one” – Emerson!) and Pegasus took you to Holland. Apal-See Spain took you to, well Spain. CIT took you to Italy, Wallace Arnold took you by coach, usually all the way. Lewis Leroy Holidays took you (Mr Leroy’s “Voyageurs”) everywhere with their big brochure. Then there were a clutch of others, Global Tours – owned by the powerful GUS – Riviera Holidays, Lunn Poly, Frames, Blue Sky, WTA (the Workers Travel Association), Galleon Holidays, Universal Sky Tours, were all to have a later incarnation. Railwaymen with free passes (my dad’s marketplace) were catered for by Martin Rook (queues all the way down Ebury Street as soon as the brochure came out) and Panorama Holidays. The middle classes were dealt with by brochures with a lot of white space, nice pictures, posh covers and good names, Wings, Lord Brothers, Wright Brothers and Horizon Holidays were top of my list. Thomas Cook looked on paternally.

They all looked so professional, the brochures, that is. Good enough to eat. Guaranteed sunshine and good nights out with the chance of a “pull”, an ensuite shower and toilet, and the travel, all for a couple of week’s wages? Amazing. The only thing that could spoil it was messy foreign food. Well, it’s got to be worth a try hasn’t it? Gosh, the brochures looked good, and the prices looked even better. The clients flooded in with cash-in-their-hands to grasp their places. Business boomed.

And, of course, I knew a little bit about it. I remembered Ted, the chef in the George V Ostend saying to me “Valere, every week they bring 40 people, not 35 or 45. Every week 40. And they pay. On the dot. Top prices. Wallace Arnold. Now, that’s reliability”. And my mate Eike drunkenly pushing me onto the hotel steps and telling me “I’m working for this company. They’re going to be really BIG all over Europe – Cosmos, they’re called. AND they’re paying me top money” “Oh yes Ted, oh yes Eike, heard it all before – it’ll pass. Not.

People forgot that there had never been a travel industry before, apart from Thomas Cook and a few toffee-nosed agents. Where would all of these people creating and selling holidays have got their experience from? Well, the wartime pilots (one or two of those) knew about flying planes, the odd hotelier (one or two of those) knew how to look after the customers, and the London taxi drivers (hundreds of them) had the unique combination of transportation, negotiating skills customer service and Chutzpah! Just imagine an industry dominated by taxi drivers and their mates apart from the taxi industry. The travel business of the 1960’s.

And nobody got to work out just why these holidays (to Spain, principally) were quite so cheap. I’ll let you into a secret. They were cheap because of two reasons. The first, because tour operators are inherently gamblers, always willing to work on dangerously thin margins, They lived on adrenaline, not profit!

The second, and probably more important and sustainable reason is that, since the 1960’s, governments have seen tourism as a very attractive industry. High employment, loads of hard currency, spin-offs into other industries and good PR. “Oh” thought Franco’s Spain “How can we get a slice of this cake – even a BIG slice of this LOVELY cake?”, “Interest-free loans to build hotels?” BIG Tax incentives” “Anything?”. “Let’s do the lot.” “Think about it, not only do we get a tourism boom with high employment and lotsa hard currency, but also we get a building boom AND while they’re drinking our Sangria (and paying for it) they’re not thinking about horrible politics or human rights are they?

So Spain fuelled the 1960’s tourism boom with the tour operators and airlines piling in for all the fun of the fair.

And quietly, the World Bank was making a little play on the tourism roulette wheel. In 1966 its first investments were made in Tunisia, Morocco and Indonesia, within 10 years some $600m would have been invested and the World Bank money will have built Bali. Ironic or what?

Three tour operators utterly stood out from the crowd in the UK. Horizon Holidays had been operating rather upmarket inclusive air tours for years, their speciality – quality and service at a mid-market price. Horizon had a loyal middle-class client base and they were to build it significantly over the years. Clarksons Holidays had been operating day trips to Holland for Womens’ Institute groups and entered the package holiday market with a bang – then left it in the same way!. The Travel Club (Upminster) gradually increased its database of happy customers over many years and are still in business today. The antelope, the hare and the tortoise, who got there in the end, but who had the most fun?

Upper-crust for the middle classes

Everybody always loved Horizon. Apart from anything else, they were posh, they were reliable, they were there before anybody else AND there were never any complaints. Vladimir Raitz’s Horizon Holidays had pioneered the air inclusive tour with its inclusive tours from Southend Airport to Corsica in an ex RAF DC3 operated by BKS (Barnby, Keegan and Stevens). Two flights a week in 1953 operating two week inclusive tours to the sun for less than £40. Cheap it may have been, but this was no typical package holiday and the passengers were certainly not mass-market.

Horizon were always professional tour operators operating for a professional market. They did it well, they didn’t stint, they were well loved by their clients and the trade. The Marks and Sparks of the travel business. You could depend on Horizon. So why did they sell out to Court Line? Because, usually the big boys win – for a time!

Cheap holidays for the masses

By the time their first brochure hit the travel agencies all the holidays had been sold and year after year the Clarksons phenomenon got bigger and better. The fuel for their success was cheap prices and lots of clients, ultimately tens of millions provided fodder for the Clarksons machine. Clarksons pressed all the right buttons at the right time and their enthusiastic young staff taught the whole industry how to do it. Practically nothing has changed in the package-tour business since then. Vertical integration? Clarksons did it first. Time charter of airplanes? Clarksons did it first. Mass marketing? Clarksons did it first. Cripplingly low prices and 50p per person margins? Clarksons did it first. Long haul cheap holidays? Clarksons did it first. Build your own resort? Clarksons did it first. High pressure excursion and insurance sales? Clarksons did it first. Cruises? Clarksons did it first, even the buzz-phrase of the 2000’s – Dynamic Packaging (lots of profit from extras). Clarksons did that first too!

Building on their stable base of Women’s Institute air and coach trips to the Dutch Bulbfields – DC3’s again!, Clarksons, led by Tom Gullick launched their first full colour package tour brochure to the travel trade. For a few years, it sold out as soon as it hit the counters. Then came the frenetic development of the company and its carryings. Court Line became Clarksons holding group and we saw the Court Line fleets of airplanes and coaches (pink!), the Court Line hotels in the Med and the Carribean, the Court Line-owned ground handlers, Even bills were computer-generated. What a phenomenon.

A colourful, attractive, fabulous, fast moving, acquisitive, ground-breaking organisation, to be true, but, at the end of the day, when Clarksons went bust their only fundamental asset proved to be their staff (the only bit they couldn’t mortgage). And Clarksons staff were the legacy that the company left to the travel business after its demise in 1974. The Clarksons’ macho mind-set, purveyed by ex-employees proved inescapable and unopposable. So company after company followed the lemming-route, hoping to do it bigger and better and ultimately collapsing. The addictive mix of wafer-thin margins, high volume, low wages, mass marketing and vertical integration has made the travel business unsustainable to this day.

Sensible, Sustainable, service

The Travel Club (Upminster) Ltd was, and is a legend. Quality holidays, reasonable prices, good service since 1936. Diligently managed. Everything that a travel company could and should be. They always dealt direct with their customers. Harry Chandler, the boss, was a trade figure. There are a few companies just like the Travel Club in the industry, they hit it on the button every time and they make a profit, year after year after year. Everybody thinks that they have some hidden extra. The fact is that they have something missing. Hubris? Greed? Avarice? Testosterone? Bullshit?

It’s hard to believe now, but I had my 21st birthday and my first wedding anniversary at the beginning of 1966. Can’t remember a party, can remember sitting with a pint on my birthday in the Royal Hotel next door to the office in Avonmouth. By the end of the year, I was out of it, Hugh had been given the sack (they’d found out that his gambling had been financed by the company), I hadn’t been offered his job and I’d got myself another one in London. Wow.

Before I left J&H, I took part in a few trade “Perks”. Educationals. Opportunities for young women and men in the travel business to learn more about the product they were selling, and each other. Opportunities to network involving traveling, drinking and all the other stuff that young men and women do together. Plus, build life-long bonds, enmities and rivalries.

Friendship Holidays (“To be a friend is to have one” – Emerson) offered me a few days educational in Valkenburg. I remember flying from Manston to Maastrict in an elderly Invicta (Stevens and Kennard of BKS fame) DC4, in very choppy weather with lots of screams and howls every time we plummetted through the air after hitting air pockets. I remember talking to the big and avuncular Jo Niemans the proprietor of Friendship in Maastricht. I remember fancying the guide. I remember drinking a lot of Dutch alcohol – and that was the total of my Valkenburg learning.

The educational to Southampton to see a Union Castle ship (gin and ginger ale, cruises to South Africa, a showing of “Goldfinger” and a liaison with a travel clerkess from LEP travel were the sum educational total of this trip).

Finally, the visit to Rimini, on a SAM DC6B which involved a great deal of booze, six course Italian meals and memory loss. But they all came in handy in later years.

They told me that there had been 300 applicants for the job and that I was the youngest and they’d given me an interview because of the letter I’d sent and they’d given me the job because they liked me and thought I’d fit in.

I guess they must have liked me. I’d been interviewed for the job by Ron who was a sort of English Consigliore (business advisor) to Saintseal. Having sold Saintseal a Kalamazoo accounts system, they must have liked the cut of Ron’s, very Home Counties, gib and had taken him on as a consultant. Anyway, I’d made a variety of claims in my letter of application, including having learnt Italian. This was quite true, as a 14-year-old loving all things Italian, particularily the haircuts and the suits, I’d spent some time learning Italian from my gran’s friend, Miss Rogman. This was great. The only problems being that a) I wasn’t a very good learner when distracted, b) I was completely distracted by the only other member of the class being a stunningly, gorgeously beautiful 19-year-old and c) Miss Rogman’s principal teaching methods were conversations conducted entirely in Italian and sending me off to read the whole of Dante – the Paradiso, Purgatorio, Inferno AND Vita Nuovo, – story of my life

None of which was up to the job when Ron, not being able to speak Italian himself, asked a lovely female member of Saintseal’s staff to check my Italian language skills. Possibly she liked me, possibly she didn’t like Ron. At least she didn’t let the cat out of the bag and departed smiling.

So, I got this letter to confirm my appointment as “Domestic Travel Manager” at Saintseal Travel from Dr Fabbri. Even I knew that ‘Dr’ didn’t mean a medic, it probably meant that he a was Swiss academic. Pretty far from the truth, in fact. Dr Fabbri was Sicilian, born in Tripoli, the ex London representative of the Banco di Roma and the current representative of the Banco di Sicilia. So, a very smart, erudite, upmarket, cosmopolitan, international banker with a little bit of Sicilian spice and sharpness! Anyway, the letter confirmed my salary – at £1,200 pa pretty reasonable, my removal expenses – some £200, and my expenses – basically unlimited

Saintseal Travel, 122 Buckingham Palace Road, London SW1. What an education. What an opera. What a cast. I will always be grateful for the best, and the kindest, and the most colourful education in travel and tourism that anybody could possibly have had. For a tourism glamour-struck impressionable 21 year old, Saintseal was simply all my dreams come true. Plus, they doubled my salary. Plus, they gave me unlimited expenses. I was in a heavenly job in a heavenly place with heavenly prospects.

Dr Fabbri and “Nanny’ (at 24 a whole 3 years older than me, and a close-cropped, very Nordic Northern Italian)) ran the company from twin desks on the 1st floor, overlooking Buckingham Palace Road and Gorringes departmental store opposite. ‘Ran’ meant Nanny screaming hoarsely on the telephone, at visitors, at Dr Fabbri beside him and at anyone who came in, in English, in Italian, in French, any other language that came to hand, or a combination of all. ‘Ran’ meant Dr Fabbri shouting back at Nanny when he cared to and negotiating with his variety of telephone callers using a larger variety of manipulative methods than Nanny’s croaking shouts.

I was positioned downstairs at the back of the shop, within full hearing of the top volume tirades above. Frightening to a 21 year old from the provinces, however sophisticated he thought he was. Anyway, I got used to it all after a while, not speaking the variety of languages in use, I didn’t know what was going on anyway. If I had known, who knows what I’d have thought!

It was 1966 London. World Cup year in England. Saintseal had thought that, under the managership of Edmondo Fabbri (bit of synchronicity there?), Italy was an invincible football team. So much so that they’d booked out the newly built skyscraper London Hilton Hotel for Italians to stay when they came to see Italy winning the World Cup final. Unfortunately for Saintseal, Italy never got as far as London, having been kicked out of the World cup by North Korea in Liverpool. Unfortunately for Saintseal, I did get as far as London. Also, that Easter, thousands of Columba Easter cakes had been over-ordered by Saintseal – so we all had plenty to eat anyway.

It’s my view that Italians have by far the most understanding of the tourism business of any race. First of all, they have a 2000 year plus history of tourism, outbound and inbound. Let’s face it, the Romans were the first European tourists and, the Grand Tour for European Aristocrats consisted mainly of Italy. Secondly, Italians have an ability to entice and romance people into doing things and going places – obviously that’s why they’re such good lovers. Thirdly, they really understand how important food and hospitality is. Fourthly, when they say “Yes, you can book a double room for the 24th at 1,000 Euros, you know that the chances are high that, come hell or high water, they will deliver. And fourthly, and possibly most importantly – they know how to bend the rules just sufficiently to make money without completely capsizing the boat.

Saintseal Travel were an Incoming Tour Operator (what’s now known as a DMC, or Destination Management Company in the trade). And a Bucket Shop (cheapo ticket agency). And, with my arrival, a Travel Agency – the ‘Domestic’ part of my title referred to the market rather than to the destination.

The incoming side was easy. Once a year Nanny booked some flights, packed his suitcase, stuffed a few thousand dollars in his wallet and a few thousand brochures into his briefcase and pushed off around the world. It’s nice to have a network (in Nanny’s case it was principally Italian Americans and Italian Italians) to do business with. And the business rolled in from the USA, South America and Italy and other marketplaces. All coming to London. Only the best was good enough. Great.

Additionally, Dr Fabbri’s sharp intellect had worked out a little ruse with the government. At the time, manufacturing industries who exported were supported by the “Export Credit Guarantee Department”, ensuring that exporters were not exposed to bad debts and therefore found easy 50-80% upfront finance for their operations. “We’re exporters too” said Dr Fabbri. “We want ECGD cover as well”. And he got it. Next stop Barclays!

The bucket shop was a little more difficult, remember, in those days you couldn’t just charter airplanes and sell seats. Licences had to be applied for, and if you were an ordinary Joe (not a state airline like BEA, BOAC or Alitalia), you simply didn’t get them granted. NO, NO, NO. The only loophole was if you could book special flights for what was called “Common Interest Group Travel” or “Inclusive Tours” or “Student Travel”. That’s why esoteric organizations like “The Trowbridge Cage Birds Society” were formed – so that their members could get the benefit of buying special price seats on specially-chartered flights. Even in the case of “Inclusive Tours”, the arrangement had to include the flight, hotel accommodation and transfers and the price had to be in excess of the comparable scheduled flight charge. In the case of “Student Travel”, the flight organizers had to be a recognized student body and the passengers had to be “Bona Fide” students.

That’s why STB (Student Travel Bureau), operated by Saintseal Travel, became the London office of CRUEI (Centro Italiano Relazioni Universitarie Estero) – a organization fully appropriate to arrange flights and issue student cards for students traveling to and from Italy. A counterpart organization in Italy handled the Italy/UK sectors. Consequently British students and Italian chefs, waiters, churchgoers, nuns, office workers, firemen, priests – provided they were “Students’ – became able to buy tickets from London to Milan or Venice for about £8 and to Rome, Naples or Palermo for about £10 one way. Costings were simple – if the flight was half full one way it broke even. Full one way it made 100%. Full both ways 300%. Bet Ryanair would go green with envy. It’s no wonder there was a lot of dosh floating around Saintseal.

And, if the students etc couldn’t afford the flights, they could go by train. Weekly STB trains were organized from Victoria Station, with guides, at special group rates.

It was all so easy to sell. At the time you’d have to pay up to 4 times the prices on a scheduled flight, double on a train journey – so there was a price advantage. Most Italians in the UK were either practicing Catholics, or certainly knew a priest or two. All you had to do is to make all the UK Italian priests know about the flights and the prices. Job done. Queues in Saintseals (sorry CRUEI’s ) shop in Buckingham Palace Road fistfuls of pound notes in their hot hands.

All these passengers fuelled the rest of Saintseal’s business too. Even if they were real students, the incoming flight passengers needed things. Transfers, accommodation, meals etc – all the things that Saintseal’s incoming department did. Good. More profit.

And that was where I was meant to come in. Inclusive tours – more services to an already captive audience. More profit for Saintseal.

So, I worked away at the back of the shop with my secretary/assistant Gillian. A motley variety of people worked behind the counter (mainly Italian-speaking) and between me and them was the till. The till was operated on a very simple mechanism. Somebody gave you money, you issued a pink receipt (and often a ticket) and stuffed the money into the till. You wanted money for anything, and you took the money out of the till and put in a yellow ‘Please Pay’. At the end of the day, it was simple to tot up. Receipts minus please pays = cash in till. Great. And great for me too. If I needed any money for expenses (unlimited, remember), I just took it out of the till and put in a please pay or two. My expenses were pretty high, they had to be otherwise I wouldn’t have been doing my job properly and, I certainly wouldn’t have been drinking enough!

Unfortunately, the please pays combined with my drinking were to be the fatal flaw in my relationship with Buckingham Palace Road.

John, a posh and attractive young sports car driving Brit from Godalming looked after the cash and worked up in the attic with Jean Pierre (even more British than John). Jean Pierre was company secretary and a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. He spoke at least 12 languages fluently. JP’s tour guide career had been impaired by his speech impediment because his major employment was on coaches with mixed-language groups. By the time JP had explained “Big Ben’s” history in Spanish, French, Italian, German and (Yes!) Mandarin and had a few long stutters, the group was already at Buckingham Palace. Anyway, JP ultimately was a true and very kind friend to me, a real gentleman, lost in the days when 4 hour boozy lunches were going out of fashion.

The second floor was where it all happened. My arch-rival Eugenio, ran the STB with his cohorts there. Eugenio was common-rated with me in Saintseal’s hierarchy, had the deepest voice I’d ever heard, was wholly macho, paranoid about homosexuals (in his view a decadent 1960’s London phenomenon), and worked obsessively hard. Eugenio needed a holiday – in Italy preferably “Where there were no queers!”.

Others floated in and out of the offices, a squad of smart young expensively-educated Italian girls worked for Eugenio, Dr Fabbri and Nanny pa-ing and networking – Gillian, who was much more English uptight but very kind, did for me. Bob, an Italian whose accent was a combination of pure Golders Green and Milan swanned in and out with high level emissaries he’d just driven from the airport. Mr Levy, who ran the branch in Paris (just by the Place Vendome) frequently flew over for lunch, where he taught me to mix olive oil with gorgonzola cheese. The counter, and the chartered trains, were staffed by friends and friends of friends doing it for the money, the fun and the chat.

The shop was always full and very noisy. Customers shouted at the part-time staff, gesticulated at tickets, shook their fists, waved their hands and involved anybody within hearing. The part-time staff shouted back.

It was all great fun, and then we’d go out for coffee, lunch or a drink or dinner. Coffee was taken next door at the Alpino, one of a very smart little chain of Italian restaurants – the coffee was always perfect. Lunch was taken at the Alpino – always delicious and expensive. Drinks were taken at the ‘Bag of Nails’ – next door to the Alpino. All the Italians liked a drink. I liked drinking. And, if we were still there working in the evening, Nanny would take us all to Tiberio – a posh restaurant in Curzon Street where I learnt to order courses one-by-one, after the previous had been consumed.

And, we were at the centre of things. Down the road worked my arch enemy Andrea who worked for Chaim and who saw that his travel agency’s (Anglo South American) prominence was now been threatened by this jerk from the sticks (me!). Andrea disguised his voice (not very well as it happened) and harassed me on the phone. He stuffed aggressive notes through my letter box and tried to stare me out when he saw me. But poor old spotty, diminutive Andrea couldn’t do threat very well, it wasn’t his thing. Unusual for a Venetian – who usually seemed to have learnt the art of delivering blood-curdling threats from kindergarten. Maybe that was why Andrea was in London.

Further down the road were my mates at Wasteels (a Belgian Travel Agency populated by Italians and run by Benny). Wasteels had all the proper licences , IATA (International Air Transport Association) British Rail, the lot. This meant that they could compute fares and issue tickets at full commission direct to the public. In fact most of their business came from other agencies like ourselves, splitting the take. They did trains too and their speciality was Italians, the same as us. So, we were rivals. But we did our own charters so we were in control of the product and, because we generated our own incoming business we were rather more upmarket. Plus, however technically perfect the Wasteels staff were, they were paid much less than we were. They were the travel agency sweat-shop, we were the tour operator whiz-kids. It’s easy to imagine how much resentment this could cause – but, miraculously, it didn’t. Wasteels had their queues of Italian workers, stretching for 100 yards or so towards Victoria Station keeping the ticket-writers busy. Enough energy was expended in fulfilling the customers and the bosses needs to waste more with petty rivalries.

We met in the Windsor Castle. Roy, very macho and gay (not an oxymoron, even in the 60’s) drinking pints, Angelo a dapper, smart Venetian trying hard to quaff his half and me, attempting (usually unsuccessfully) not to finish my pint first. All in the local travel business – Angelo managing Wasteels air department, Roy managing Galleon Holidays (an old-established tour operator) and I working for Saintseal. The queer Brit, the hardworking Venetian, and the overpaid Englishman setting the world to rights almost every lunchtime.

And there was a world to set to rights. England had beaten Germany in the World Cup 4-2, Italy had been beaten by North Korea. It was lucky that Angelo had eschewed interest in football (being a Venetian after all) or he’d have got an even bigger ragging. Good ol’ Harold Wilson was negotiating with Ian Smith about UDI (Unilateral declaration of independence for Rhodesia) on board HMS Tiger. From Angelo’s point of view it was just another example of all the Commonwealth’s peoples being subjects – he, after all was a citizen (of Venice). Barclays Bank had introduced the Barclaycard (as Roy said, another opportunity for the lower classes to get into debt). Cassius Clay had beaten our lovable Henry Cooper – although Henry had nearly got him in trouble. And the Krays were in the news again. Closer to home, Laker Airways had just been formed.

We all knew Freddie, not in the personal sense, you understand. But, as the swashbuckling MD of British United Airways (based just round the corner in Stag Place), we took a proprietorial interest in Freddie and his doings. Freddie had been a paid up member of the travel industry for a long time – indeed from even before it started. Ever heard of the Berlin Air Lift, the beginning of the air package tour?

In 1948, the USSR blockaded West Berlin which was then occupied by the Allies (France, USA, UK). As West Berlin was landlocked, there was only one thing for it – to supply this city of approximately 300,000 inhabitants by air. During the 14 months of the blockade, there was an aircraft landing every couple of minutes. Naturally, the Allied forces didn’t have quite enough aircraft or crews to maintain such an operation, even after the 2nd World War – so “Come in Commercial Airlines”. Thousands of aircraft and crews cut their teeth on Berlin and the “Dakota” (Douglas DC3) was the workhorse. Dozens of budding entrepreneurs and fledgling airlines came into being to service the Berlin Air Lift and Freddie was one of them. And when it stopped, what were they all going to do? Wait for the air package holiday to take off of course!

By 1966, Freddie found himself at BUA in Stag Place, as Managing Director. BUA was a mainly scheduled carrier providing a little competition for the state-owned BEA and BOAC. Laker Airways, which Freddie now started was not at all so upmarket. Whereas BUA had begun by operating ex-airlift Dakotas and DC4’s they were now flying beautiful 2 year old long haul VC10’s and new shorthaul BAC 1-11’s, Laker started with a couple of reliable prop-driven Bristol Britannia’s- old but economical. His idea was to take advantage of the package-tour business by providing air transportation to the operators. A low margin and relatively risk-free business servicing a growing marketplace. How sensible. What a good idea. What a reasonable formula. No hubris? Little greed? No testosterone? No bullshit? How boring, so, just 5 years later Skytrain was born, the first “No Frills” carrier. You could take your own sandwiches to New York on a flashy DC10 for less than £100 – now that was exciting!

So, I’d got my feet relatively under the table at Saintseal in 1966 and through the winter. Brixton, where we now lived (and Chan worked), was easy to get to from Victoria. My city life revolved around SW1 (the Bag of Nails) and WC1 (The Marquess of Granby – mine host Ken Gamgee), with a few excursions to Soho for nights out at the Dolce Notte and the Dolce Vita. Time to relax and enjoy ourselves. The next spring, we decided to have a holiday. To Italy, of course. The flights were free, but I liked trains, so we got a Saintseal flight out to Italy, had agreed to meet Angelo (from Wasteels) in Venice and were to get the train back to London via Germany.

Nothing was ever going to prepare me for “La Serenissima”, particularily with the company of a Venetian, passionately in love with Venice. We only had a day and a night, but, in that short time, I was completely captivated. No, I didn’t miss the sensational architecture, the stunning vistas, the romance, the food, the wine and the music, the Rialto, St Marks, La Fenice and so much more. But, for me, Venice had one big plus. Venice was, and is, the world’s enormous, living, thriving centre of excellence, school of practise and library of tourism and Angelo was my well-qualified guide.

So, you see a glass factory and think “Don’t those glasses and those chandeliers look wonderful”. We went to one of the glass factories in Murano (the one that Angelo had worked at) and met the salesmen, found out how they worked, how much they made, who they bribed, what hotels and tour companies they worked with – fascinating.

So, you see a gondola serenely skiffing along a canal or a launch surfing imperiously over the waves and think “How delightful, no cars”. We met the gondoliers and the launch captains – how can they possibly command such high fees?

So, you see those musicians at Florians playing little serenades to the café guests and think “What style”. We meet the waiters and check what they get for tips in the winter and the summer.

You see, everybody who wants to makes money from tourists. Tourism industry resort operatives can make a great deal of cash and even more in favours. Harvesting the tourism spend is a good life, if you know what you’re doing.

You want to find out all there is to know about tourism. Then visit Venice with Angelo and keep your ears and eyes wide open. Venice is the BIG one and so it should be. After all, Venice is where modern-day tourism was born. Don’t believe me? Let me take you back 900 years or so, to the 4th Crusade.

At the turn of the 13th century King Richard of England, and Philip of France (a couple of tour operators if ever I saw one) decided that it would be a good idea to have a crusade, so they sketched out their itinerary and requirements. Given the fact that they were looking to take a lot of people, they’d need a lot of boats to get to Constantinople (trains and planes not having been yet invented, and walking being too long). Where could they find all these boats? Venice, of course. Plus Venice was en route for both the French and the British groups – and not too far for the peasants to walk to and the knights to ride to.

Next step, pop off to Venice to arrange the hardware – well, a group of six contractors from France and England went to see the Doge of Venice (Henry Dandolo) to make the arrangements.

As a result of the contractors’ negotiations, this is what Henry Dandolo said -” We will build transports to carry four thousand five hundred horses, and nine thousand squires, and ships for four thousand five hundred knights, and twenty thousand sergeants of foot. And we will agree also to purvey food for these horses and people during nine months. This is what we undertake to do at the least, on condition that you pay us for each horse four marks, and for each man two marks”
Pretty reasonable, eh?

In fact the crusaders couldn’t come up with all the dosh upfront, so the Doge arranged a “Travel Now, Pay Later” scheme, on the basis that the invaders would sack Constantinople and pay the Venetians for the travel arrangements out of the proceeds.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that the first general purpose travel agent – Agostino Contarini started up in Venice in the 15th century. Agustino offered, quite naturally, a tour to the same places the crusaders visited – the Holy Land (after all, the basic logistics had been put into plase – hadn’t they?). The “AC Tours” Holy Land package included:

Transportation
Accommodation
Two hot meals a day
A complete tour of the Holy Land
Guides
Fees, tolls and bribes
All for just 60 golden ducats per person

I’d had a couple of “Near Misses” with Nanny and Dr Fabbri, generally starting with my going missing with a wodge of wedge from the till, and ending with my returning rather the worse for wear. The bosses were pretty incredulous, I guess that this sort of thing just didn’t happen in Italy. Anyway, that’s probably why they gave me the benefit of the doubt. That, and Chan asking elegantly for them to keep me on. But, my days were numbered. Just before my departure, however, Saintseal became the proud owner of Pegasus Holidays.

Pegasus was a very small tour operator with a boss (Chris – an ex-naval officer) and a staff member or two. Its product was a limited range of beach holidays in Holland – well, that, in itself is a pretty limiting factor. Apart from hardy Dutch, there never was a big demand for holidays in Scheveningen , Noordwijk or Zandvoort – even if you could pronounce them. Big, modern, soul-less hotels, Dutch food (yuk), enormous empty beaches (why, one asks) and the bracing North sea wind – not exactly what you’d call ‘Holiday Paradise’ and certainly not up to Tossa de Mar for 20 quid or so. Anyway, surprisingly enough, Pegasus had a business, unsurprisingly, they wanted to sell it and, surprisingly Nanny and Dr Fabbri wanted to buy. Maybe it was something about Nanny coming from Northern Italy and Dr Fabbri liking the ‘Winged Horse’ emblem. Saintseal bought Pegasus and I was meant to help. I still have absolutely no idea why. Eventually, Pegasus became Saintseal’s above-board tour operator, specializing in holidays to the Caribbean before it went bust leaving Nanny the proud possessor of an hotel in St Lucia.

John Bloom had achieved fame and success and a great deal of money by selling washing machines. In the 1950’s washing machines were expensive and John Bloom sold them cheap. The idea was that the more he had made, the less they would cost him and the less he could charge. Still not cheap enough? Offer a really cheap one then get your salesman to switch-sell to one a little more expensive. Obviously, the alternative of sevice-guarantees wasn’t available in the 50’s. Within seven years, John had run out of millions of people to buy his machines and had gone bust, but not before he’d started another get-rich-quick scheme. Cheap holidays for the masses. In Bulgaria.

Here’s how it worked. The Bulgarian Black Sea coast was warm and sunny and littered with modern functional hotels. Why? Because Bulgaria was a communist country and part of the Soviet bloc. Communist organizations sent their best workers on holiday, not to Spain, naturally, because Spain cost hard currency. Holidaying at home, or near to it was better, and cheaper. Bulgaria was the worker’s choice.

But, Bulgaria wanted to buy nice, expensive western things and didn’t have any nice expensive western money to buy them with. There were two alternatives – barter – you get some Bulgarian wine and we get some jeans, and sales for hard currency direct (we don’t care how much as long as it’s hard). Enter J. Bloom you sell me hotel accommodation and food, I’ll bring you millions of clients that you can proselytise at and, I’ll give you loads (well, some) hard, very hard, western currency. Don’t forget John Bloom was a salesman, so he wouldn’t forget to sell the Bulgarians the “Benefits” rather than just the “Features”. So, he’d have said “ Our holidaymakers will Love Bulgaria and they’ll have a wonderful time. So, they’ll go home and tell all their friends how beautiful Bulgaria is, how good Bulgarian food is and how fantastic Bulgarian wine is. They’ll love you all and they’ll buy your food and wine and holidays. You’ll be made – and popular!”

The Bulgarians fell for it, and soon Zlatni Pyassatsi was “Sunny Beach”, Slunchev Bryag” was “Golden Sands” and Drouzhba and Varna were Drouzhba and Varna. The state airline, the aptly named TABSO was contracted for flights from the UK. Holidaymakers in their thousands piled in at £59 for two weeks full board and all the yoghourt you could eat. Then Rolls Razor went bust.

As far as the Bulgarians were concerned, this was a disaster, they liked this game – hard currency for nothing that cost them anything, and good PR. It was great, and they didn’t want it to stop. Luckily, the Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society came to the rescue and, with Balkantourist, the Bulgarian state-owned tourist organization, formed Balkan Holidays to satisfy the demand for Bulgarian holidays created by Mr Bloom.

Balkan Holidays was located in South Molton Street, W1. Not exactly a proletarian mecca, but at least comfortable. The first brochure was created with the unmistakable dancing Bulgars and the unbeatable lead-in £59 price on the cover. Obviously, they needed a travel specialist Independent Travel Manager. Obviously, by now I was being given my marching orders from Saintseal and needed a job. Jean Pierre (the Saintseal company secretary) knew Tim (a communist fellow-traveller and Balkan Holidays general manager) and the deal was done. The job was to be mine. No matter that I knew little about Bulgaria, Romania or the rest of Eastern Europe – I was the professional and they liked me!

A politically-oriented company, run mainly by commies who did their marketing as much through their UK Marxist friends as through the media, and yet had a product that was extremely commercial, and in the heart of the West End, and in the vortex of political machinations, and with me as Independent Travel Manager. What could be more interesting?

The product was very simple. We’d chartered weekly flights to Varna (for Golden Sands) and Bourgas (for Sunny Beach), we sold off some of the seats to other operators and kept the rest for ourselves. We also had access to the TABSO (Bulgarian-Soviet Transport Aviation Corporation) scheduled prop-jet Illushin airliner which flew most days from Gatwick to Sophia with connections to other destinations in Bulgaria and onward. Further, there was a non-stop coach from Ostend all the way to Sophia and on to the resorts run by West Belgium Coach Company, it took around 72 hours – you don’t have to believe it but it’s true. We had allocations at the hotels and on the flights and we put them on little cards, stuffed in slots on a carousel on top of a big desk in a back room – the reservations department. We all had key and lamp units, the tour operator’s basic tool, where we could answer half a dozen calls at a time take reservations and put ‘em on cards in the carousel.

The reservations department was managed by Barry (we thought he was gay because he cooked a lot, and never came in until 10) and staffed by Len (a red-haired Jewish Marxist Balletomane who queued outside Covent Garden Opera House all night), Anna who was mid-European, yummy and engaged and Claire – a classic bright sixties beauty with a shorter daily miniskirt.

I dealt with anything too complicated to be handled by the reservations team like “I wanna go to Poland, Romania and Czechoslovakia in that order with a short stay in Paris – it’s got to be done in a week, I don’t like flying and I must take the dog”. By the way, my budget’s £15 for me and the wife” – fairly standard stuff in the travel industry.

The company was managed by the fellow-traveller Tim (Jean-Pierre’s friend). And the overall boss in charge of direction and political connections was Moscow-educated Georgi. Bald, chubby, mid-European Peter, the bookkeeper, lived up in the attic and complained all day that London wasn’t like Vienna. Plus, he moaned at me for taking constant subs.

Marketing was relatively simple. Once a year we produced a brochure (with the dancing Bulgars and the lead-in price, dates, destinations, etc) and I produced an independent one – with Poland, Romania etc. We booked ads in the papers and sent brochures to travel agents – the usual stuff. Then we pushed off to rustle up the Marxist bookings through Marxist routes – ie very leftie union officials (there were lots then) and organizations proscribed by the Labour Party as being communist-infiltrated. My personal favourite was the Anglo-Bulgarian Friendship Society which specialized in folkdancing and political forment.

It was a intriguing atmosphere, good food and booze outside in swanky South Molton Street. Political and trade machinations inside. Most afternoons Georgi had long, smoke-filled meetings with commie mates in the back room. This involved my “Organising” vast amounts of really strong coffee and coke – the Slivova (Plum Brandy) was provided by Georgi and the meetings usually finished late in the day. And it wasn’t just the drinking that was damaging my marriage, I’d fallen in lust with Vivien, a delightful little long-haired commie who determined to cook me cholent in her Hampstead council flat.

Naturally, my finances were also suffered from the move – no “Please pays” at Balkan, but TABSO came to my rescue, providing me with a lovely stock of tickets to write and sell at whatever price I wanted. This could have been a goldmine. Tabso was a scheduled carrier, flying from London to Sophia direct, and a member of IATA (International Airline Transportation Association). As usual, in those times, the only airlines that were permitted to operate a route were the national carriers of the originating departure points. So, in the case of London-Sophia – British Airlines (BEA in 1968) and Tabso.

God knows how much British Airways charged for a standard economy return flight to Sophia – hundreds of pounds, probably and as far as the regulators were concerned – so did Tabso. The only concession major carriers like BEA made was the ITX fare – a special tour-basing fare that had to be included in an inclusive tour arrangement (including flights and accommodation) and not sold separately. The ITX fare to Sophia was about £117!

Plus, Tabso had their own route network, based on Sophia, which included Greece and Cyprus – how many Greek and Greek-Cypriot restauranteurs were there within a ticket’s swing of South Molton Street? Bloody hundreds! So, when funds dropped, I traipsed all over London selling cheap tickets and drinking Retsina and Ouzo.

Throughout the trade, of course, I sold ITX tickets at ITX rates, but nobody bought apart from T Cook, down the road in Berkeley Street – the toffs of the travel trade. What a pity, thought I? Although Tom didn’t become a hero of mine until later on, you couldn’t but have respect for him – he was the travel business after all.

So, one lunchtime, I walked out of Balkan Holidays front door shouting “I’ll be back after lunch” “No you won’t” said Len “You’ll be back sometime this afternoon, pissed as usual”. Determined to outdo Len, I popped into the Marquis of Granby, went on a bender with Ken, the landlord and somehow woke up in Ostend the next day. Breakfasting at a café, I said to Ken “Beer?” “Why not” replied Ken, “If we don’t practice, we’ll never become alcoholics!”.

Within a week, of my return to London we packed our bags and left. London had become far too dangerous – this was just one of a number of incidents involving large amounts of alcohol, a few drunken suicide attempts and at least one serious scar as a result had tainted my hedonism. At least we had family in the West Country where I was better known.

I’d had a rough ride in the big city, completely my own fault of course. Too much drink and lack of moral fibre. But, I’d learnt a great deal, met some fascinating people and made a lot of friends. I was getting to understand how the nascent travel business really worked and who made it all happen – I still loved it.

My love affair with tourism
You Lucky People

Chapter 3
Holidays 2U

So, we made an ignominious departure from London in a hired estate car with our friend John (from Saintseal) at the wheel and all of our goods and chattels in the back. We’d managed to get a furnished flat in Downend, Bristol and fairly quickly, I got a job in Bath on a weekly wage of £22 – the going rate for a travel agency branch manager. The job wasn’t spectacular but it paid the rent (or it would have done if it hadn’t been earmarked for more colourful uses – like the local pubs and clubs). But, for once, I felt a bit at home.

It was certainly difficult not to feel at home in friendly, beautiful, faded, eccentric Georgian Bath and soon, we were lucky to manage to rent a tiny flat in the centre of the city. At £5 a week, it wasn’t a fortune and it was on the third floor but it was close to the river and had views of the hills beyond, and the pleasure gardens beside the building. It even had a splendid address – 12 Georgian House, Duke Street, Bath – what could be more evocative of Bath’s former glory?

The job didn’t last, I made sure of that. I guess I was never that interested in being a travel agency manager now I’d been a tour operator and I was useless at the job. Add to my incompetence my absences for little snifters, my morning hangovers, my inability to account for my expenses and my penchant for teeming and lading with the firm’s money to finance my excesses – in all it presented a picture of the employee from hell. It’s amazing that it took so long for them to get shot of me, but get shot of me they did. Apparently, they could cope with my dishonesty and my unreliability, but not my incompetence and I left under a cloud.

I was in debt, without a job, in danger of losing my home and my long-suffering wife, my friends and family had given up on me and I was without any prospect of recovery when I did something completely uncharacteristic and my life changed. In a Bristol pub, I was “Looking for a job” and spending the last of a little borrowed money when I failed to finish my drink before returning to Bath to face the music. I guess I’d simply given up my hope of a notable drinking career and determined to try living life instead.

As it happened, I was very lucky indeed and, it appears, for once blessed by my Guardian Angel. Not visiting pubs and clubs, it seemed, had many benefits. I had more time and, at least some money, And I was in Bath. So, what’s so special about Bath, why did I find this city so incredibly, delightfully attractive?

On the surface, in 1969, Bath was a sleepy little market town with some former glory and some hot baths (a geyser of boiling water streaming up from way below) Bath was friendly and a little eccentric, rather like the little old ladies and old gentlemen who, together with the a fine quota of upmarket hippies and provincial-families-who’d-never-lived-anywhere-else formed the bulk of the local populace. All the Georgian architectural jewels had acquired a dull dirty brown coat over the years and the Roman Baths held a monthly “Roma Orgy” – for local families to think they were doing something naughty. There was a sedate ball each week in the Pump Rooms for local young men to meet local young women. Get the picture? Comfortable, provincial, faded, Bath chair boring. But, nonetheless, Bath was a happy and gentle place to be.

Underneath this comfortable exterior was a very different picture. For over 3,000 years, Bath had regularly been a grade 1, class A international tourism destination. When I saw the sunshine reflected off the golden stone in the Abbey Churchyard, I knew Bath had something very special and she would attract and keep attracting tourists for millennia to come. Bath may have been sleeping when I arrived, but you could be sure that she would awake again to tourism glory.

Once upon a time, in our Celtic days, water was magical and its springs were guarded by Goddesses. The particular Goddess who lives in Bath is Sulis – the Goddess of healing and therapy and well-being, cursing and curing. It is said that Sulis presides over all hot springs and it is her presence that makes the springs hot and healing. She takes her name from the Gaelic “Suileath” meaning wise, all seeing and far sighted. It is said that she represents the depths all people must plumb in their journey to light, health and happiness.

Anyway, so the legend goes, in Celtic times, in the London area, there was a king called Ludhudibras and he had a son called Bladud. Well, old king Lud was quite well off and he only wanted the best for his son so he sent him off to Athens to get a degree. Naturally, Bladud enjoyed himself plus he was a bright student – which would you fancy – staying at the centre of the Greek Empire where everything was happening – feasting and drinking and games, or coming home to boring old England where they only ate pork? But – 11 years later Bladud got ill so he had to come home. “My God” they said when he arrived – “You’ve got leprosy – you’ll have to be shut up for the rest of your life” So Bladud was imprisoned.

Well, our story wouldn’t be a story unless Bladud had escaped. And, of course, he did. Wandering about the land as a prince in disguise until he got hungry and needed a job. Now, the ancient Celts were very fond of a bit of bacon and pig farms were all the rage – always looking for extra staff. Bladud found a job as a swineherd on a pig farm in Swainswick, a few miles from soon-to-be-Bath. As was the custom, he was lodged with the family, which consisted of mother, father and blind but beautiful daughter (Grace, would you believe) who naturally fell in love with Bladud.

One day Bladud is herding his swine close to the steaming marshland habitat of the Goddess Sulis. Being exalted animals, the pigs take Bladud to the Goddess’s location and he notices that the pigs like rolling in the hot mud. Not only do they like it but it appears to do wonders for their complexions. Thinks Bladud – “Maybe this mud will stop my fingers falling off” And, of course it does” “Gosh”, says Bladud, “Maybe this hot mud will make my beloved Grace see, too” And, of course, it does. Now both hale and healthy the couple marry and Bladud goes on to become king – and the father of King Lear – but that’s another story. What an endorsement for Sulis’ powers. Bladud was a real example of plumbing the depths and coming back to life. Happy and ready to bring all that Athenian feasting in Bath, which, of course, eventually, he did. It is said that Bladud established Bath as an early university town dedicated, of course, to Sulis.

The above story may, or may not be factually true. What is certain, however, is that the Druids worshipped water and hot springs were extra magical. They would certainly have believed that Bath had a strong power and well worth a visit. Avebury, Stonehenge and Glastonbury plus dozens of other Celtic religious sites are all very close to Bath – within at most a hard day or two of walking. It is very easy to believe that many thousands of Celts visited Bath to make acquaintance with the Goddess and be cured and/or enlightened and that Bath, even in those days, was a significant tourism destination.

What we do know, for sure is that In the middle of the 1st century AD, the Romans arrived in Bath complete with their Goddess of Wisdom – Minerva – expecting her to take over as she had in many other Roman conquests. As it happened, this was not to be, Minerva got together with Sulis and the result was Sulis Minerva. The Romans started building their great baths and temple at the sacred hot spring soon after the Conquest. They named their city Aquae Sulis and soon transformed the Celtic druids’ grove into one of the major therapeutic centres of the Roman world. Bath became the scene for feasts, orgies, baths and games the major Roman social events. The Romans revered the spring just as the Celts had done and by the 3rd century AD its stunning temple and luxurious baths were attracting pilgrim tourists from throughout the Roman world. Then the Romans pushed off and Bath’s tourism figures dropped again for 400 years or so until the Saxons arrived.

Well, the Druids had a temple for Sulis at the hot springs and the Romans had built a temple to Sulis Minerva. Naturally, the Saxons didn’t want to be left out – in the Saxon Poem “The Ruin” they wrote ‘Wondrous is this masonry, shattered by the Fates. The fortifications have given way, the buildings raised by giants are crumbling. The city fell to earth.’ If there was power here – the Saxons wanted it too, so a grand monastery was built using as paving stones the Pagan sacrificial altar. As its lands increased, the monastery became rich and powerful, so powerful that the first king of all England (Edgar) was crowned on the site in 973. So, even though the baths had been ruined, Bath again became a pilgrimage site – now for Christian spiritual rather than Pagan physical health. And the tourists rolled in again – for another few hundred years.

Even the Norman conquest hampered Bath’s tourism trade only for a short while. Although Bath was razed to the ground, it was soon sold to a Norman Doctor- Churchman- entrepreneur – John de Villula – for the substantial sum of £500 of silver. Instituted as the Bishop of Bath, de Villula set about recreating Bath in typical grand Norman style. A massive cathedral (at 100 metres long one of the largest in Europe) was built between the hot springs and the river. De Villula also extended the monastery which, by now, was widely renowned for its scholarship. Most importantly, de Villula combined Bath’s Spiritual attractions with its therapeutic ones by ordering the baths refitted and he built several treatment centres in the city – ready to attract both pilgrims and the health market. But, of course, the whole was eventually destroyed through neglect.

Until 1499, when Bishop Oliver King, on a visit from Wells, had a dream with a message. And the message -“Let an olive establish the Crown and let a King restore the Church”. And so he did. The “Lantern of the West” – with its 52 glass windows, and the last of the English Perpendicular Gothic churches was built as the Bath Abbey – beside the Baths, of course. The Baths were restored and by the middle of the 17th century, Bath was firmly established again as a tourist destination. Modern visitors were keen on the spiritual stuff, and the water-therapy, but they needed something more – so land south east of the Abbey was made into a bowling green and east of the newly-refurbished Kings Bath was made into five Real Tennis courts. Bath’s tourism infrastructure was also increased with the addition of accommodation in the west of the city and even the Abbey Church House, Westgate House and St John’s Hospital turned over rooms and almshouses to visitors.

Then it happened. King Charles II and his wife Catherine of Braganza visited to “Take the Water” – plus he legalised gambling. Bath was made. Quickly adding gambling to the pilgrimage/therapy/sports mix Bath could now attract even more visitors and use the Royal endorsement.

By 1703 when Queen Anne visited, Bath already had the therapy, the religion, the gambling and the multiple Royal endorsements – major tourism draw cards. Now, what she needed was more infrastructure and massive promotion. Beau Nash was your man

Into the ‘decayed’ country town that was Bath at the start of the 18th century, walked the wigged adventurer and dandy ‘Beau’ Richard Nash. A drop-out from Oxford University, the army and the law, Beau Nash earned his money as a gambler and immaculate socialite. With Queen Anne’s visit to Bath, Beau Nash saw his chance to make a fortune and influential friends. Quickly, Beau Nash arranged the finances, the contacts, the builders, the architects and, most importantly the entertainments and the social calendar.

Bath was to make the very most of its assets – its baths, its Celtic history, its golden stone, its proximity to London, its gambling and sports and its Royal credibility. Bath was to create new assets – wonderful architecture, pleasure gardens, great balls and entertainment and a comprehensive social calendar. So, when “Tout le Monde” visited Bath – everybody else would have to come. If you wanted to meet anybody, a visit to Bath would be a social imperative, reasoned Beau Nash. Bath was ready to become 18th century upmarket Disneyland and much more.

Just imagine what Bath was like at the peak of its tourism success. All the “Great and the Good” were there (and the not-so-great and the not-so-good). Why? They were attracted by an integrally-co-ordinated tourism vision. Fantastic architecture in shimmering golden stone, amazing balls and entertainments in glorious surroundings, sublime hospitality and service, the best of food and accommodation, fabulous pleasure gardens, unique spa-therapy with naturally healing hot water and mud, Celtic and Druid esoteric connections – and a social calendar that meant that you missed not one moment of pleasure nor one opportunity to met someone interesting or notable. Plus, fancy a little pleasure on the darker side, a little nefarious connection? It was all possible in Beau Nash’s Bath. Bath simply provided the total 18th century resort experience. It’s no wonder that Bath’s population grew by tenfold (from 3,000 to 30,000 inhabitants) in 100 years and Bath rivalled London as the 18th century place to be seen. Finally, Bath was usurped by Regency Brighton and by Victoria’s reign, Bath was again a quiet country town.

The Druids, the Romans, the Normans, the Saxons, the Georgians and the New Elizabethans have all flocked to Bath and, for a hundred years at a time at least, Bath has revelled in tourism glory. Why? Bath’s major tourism attractions are simply its (supposedly healing) hot waters, its religious significance and its proximity to power centres. To a greater or lesser extent each succeeding tourism inflow has been augmented by extra facilities, by better infrastructure and by effective marketing. Only the Romans and Beau Nash really exploited Baths assets and now it’s waiting for the next big tourism inflow.

There is something else, of course. There is the indefinable magic that grips you when you visit the city, faded, but still powerful. Perhaps it’s something magical, something that we can’t quite fathom? Go to Venice or Rome, Athens or Cairo, Bruges or Barcelona, Amsterdam or Dubrovnik, Cochin or Bangkok, Istanbul or Zanzibar, Prague or Paris, Ochrid or Ostend– the same magic is there too. Maybe it’s the tourism destinations’ Goddess calling you!

Here I was in quiet, comfortable, friendly town that disguised its beauty and power perfectly. Bath was a top class tourist town with no tourists. For me it was paradise!
In my busted state,I didn’t think that I could get another job in the travel industry, so I got a job selling vacuum cleaners from door to door. That lasted a week.

Having failed again I responded to an ad for encyclopaedia salesmen. I was interviewed brusquely by an enthusiastic, foul-mouthed, tall, gangly Irishman called Olly. “Why did you leave your last job?” said Olly “Because they said I was incompetent” said I. “Well you can’t be fucking incompetent at fucking everything can you” Said Olly “Remember you judge yourself by what you think you’re capable of doing – others judge you by what you’ve already done – Emerson”. “You can start tomorrow”.

It was dead easy to make money selling encyclopaedias if you followed the rules. Wander round a shopping centre with a clipboard. You’re looking for a young female parent with a male baby from 6 months to 2 years old. Pounce. “I’m doing an survey for an educational supplier on parents with babies, do you think that I could interview you and your husband at home please. “Yes” was usually the response. Sort out time and date (today). Make sure husband will be at home. Check the age of the baby and its name. At the end of the day, check the addresses, you’re looking for new council estates (yes there were some in 1969) and new private estates. Get 10 appointments. That evening do six appointments, that means deliver the script memorised word for word. You’ll get 3 sales (worth £10 each to you). Work 5 days a week and you’ll make £150 a week. Good money. But make sure you say the script word for word, make sure that you go for the specific target audience – or you’ll lose it. I didn’t do too badly.

Eventually, I became a team leader which meant that I got commission on my team members’ sales. It was my first people-management job. And what it taught me is that bright, self-centred people can be a problem. They frequently couldn’t understand that adding their own “Spin” did not work. They often knew better. “10 year old boys are better than ones from 6 months to 2 years” Bullshit “Lots of people think girls need it more” Bullshit “I don’t say the script exactly because my own words are better” Bullshit. And every other excuse you could find. It was amazing. You’d get naïve 17 year olds who did what they were told for the first week and made money. After that they knew better and didn’t make money. Week after week after week after week..

And I found a guru. Would you believe Dale Carnegie of “How to Win Friends and Influence People” fame. This book taught me everything I needed to know about selling and I put it into practice. I realised that from then on my sales technique would be harnessed simply to identifying and fulfilling needs, whether it was only to put a point of view or make a massive sale. I was a salesman!

Nine months to the day after I’d stopped drinking, I’d become a proud father. Adam changed my way of thinking. Finally, I’d arrived and had a family to be responsible for. A new job was called for, with a secure wage, not just commission payments, like the encyclopaedia selling. I managed to get a job selling rental contracts for telephone answering machines with a company called Shipton Telstor. Travelling all over the West Country suited me, I loved the holiday resorts and the small businesses that I sold telephone answering machines to.

But the travel business called again and by 1971, I found myself behind a desk staring at the phone in an ex-antiques shop in Clifton, wondering what to do. My old friend Stephen, the antique dealer, had provided me with the shop, and the desk, and the phone in the belief that I could produce some business and some profit with which to pay him some rent. Practically the only sales lead I had was my mate John (who’d driven us back from London). Now John worked in the London office for a very interesting company called “$5 a day tours” based in the USA and a subsidiary of a major USA guide book company “Europe on $5 a day” run by the famous Arthur Frommer.

$5 a day tours’ London office was in Belgravia, and their basic function was to contract and organise Frommer’s programme of London Theatre trips. The company brought thousands of tourists to London from all over the USA to enjoy London and its theatres on these inclusive tours. Included in the price were the flights, transfers, hotel accommodation, a sightseeing tour or two, and theatre tickets. And it was cheap – hence the thousands of tourists! Why was it cheap? Bulk buying and the usual travel business machismo. The London office’s job was to contract the London ground arrangements cheap and to look after the passengers. A tall, brash Dutch American – Hans – was in charge, and John worked for him. Hans was a travel business philosopher – “Problems, I love them, they’re the only reason we’re in the travel business – without them everybody would book their own trips”. And Hans was a great contractor, he prided himself on the top hotels he could get for very little money. The flights were cheap too – booked on what were called C-BIT fares (Contract Bulk Inclusive Tour) on scheduled flights. At least the USA was then the land of free enterprise and the clients were getting serious value.

My idea was to sell $5 a day customers an upmarket tour to the West Country – that we (now Unicorn Travel) would organise. The American tourists would enjoy a superb 3 day trip, visiting Marlborough, Bath, Wells, Glastonbury and Salisbury , seeing stately homes and staying at a nice hotel in Bath. £12.50 including all meals. We employed very posh guides (mainly Stephen’s upmarket mates) and the customers got a great deal. But we weren’t making enough money – yet, so we tried to sell a stake in Unicorn to Sparkes Coaches, the coach company who we’d contracted to carry our passengers, and I found myself working there.

In 1971, the Traffic Commissioners controlled the Bus and Coach Industry. In this era of free competition, the situation would be scandalous. Then, if a coach company wanted to advertise and operate any route or trip, they had to apply for permission. And when they applied, their application was objected to by all the potential competition. So, if you wanted to operate a trip to, say, Paris for a weekend, anybody who was licensed to operate Paris coach trips would object on the grounds of diminution of their business, even the Railway companies, who had transport licences, and potentially the airlines, would object. This, of course benefited nobody, not the travelling public, not the tourism industry, not the innovative, efficient coach tour operator. Only the licensed coach tour operator had the necessaries to operate tours – and only if they wanted to and at a price that they wanted.

So, coach companies regarded licences as capital, they bought companies for licences, they bought licences from companies. Their focus was the licence, not the business which, of course was stagnant.

Like many coach companies, Sparkes was champing at the bit. A nice fleet of coaches, a number of contracts to take children to school and workers to work at knock-down rates and a couple of licences. And one big success – Sparkes had designed a series of inclusive Sunday day trips which they sold to the big companies whose workers they took to work. You could choose a day trip to Dartmouth and Totnes, including breakfast, a cream tea and a river cruise, or a visit to London’s Petticoat Lane, with breakfast, a tour of London and a cream tea at Windsor amongst other opportunities. These tours sold in bulk – they had to, the only way they could be operated under the current legislation was to “Closed User Groups” in other words employees only had to hire a full coach. But they did. My last act at Sparkes was to get them a load more business for day trips by visiting their local big companies

Roger and John, the owners, were very kind to me, but, eventually they hit hard times and I had to go. Unicorn was back in action and I rented office accommodation in Bristol’s Park Street to sell coach day trips to big companies. Plus a new product – a weekend to the Wieze Beer Festival – back to Belgium again!

We had an operations manager (Roland, a schoolfriend and ex-coach driver), a sales manager (Gordon), an admin manager (Blandine – a friend’s French wife) and an accounts manager (Phyllis), all we needed was a takeover to make the business really cool. So, we merged with a Bucket Shop. Very with it! Called Mornington Air Services (God knows why – Mornington Crescent perhaps?). Anyway, John ran it together with a very sexy operations manager called Jenny.

OK, so what’s a bucket shop? In the 1970’s airlines’ prices were regulated. They had to sell their tickets at the prices that had been authorised – and no less. That’s great, everybody knows where they are, don’t they? But, if an airline had bad load factors on a route, the temptation to ‘Dump’ tickets was severe. And, in my experience, there wasn’t an airline flying that didn’t surrender to the temptation. Let’s face it, a flight seat is a more perishable commodity than fruit or veg. The minute the flight’s departed, the seat is worth precisely nothing. So, where did the airlines dump specially discounted tickets? Bucket Shops, of course, the top rung of which were usually called “Consolidators”. Every airline had its pet consolidator or two or three. Usually the same nationality as the airline, the consolidator could buy tickets at discounts up to 90% if the time was right or the route was bad. The consolidator would then pass on the tickets to his or her contacts down the Bucket Shop route. The customer got a ticket with the full fare on it and paid, maybe, less than half that fare. Bucket Shops were shady and often located in colourful areas like London’s Soho – but they were great fun and patronised by “People in the Know’.

My favourite Bucket Shop/Consolidators were Odyssey. Based in Kensington High Street in a smart big first floor office suite Dotty and Peter and their staff juggled calls on their key and lamp units, selling tickets and buying tickets. It was a fascinating atmosphere and they certainly looked like they were making money until they disappeared without trace.

Our first travel trauma happened in September. We’d managed to get 300 people to book on our first trip to the Wieze Beer Festival. Great. And we’d applied for a licence. Great. And we’d been refused. Not so great. The upshot was that we had to deal with a coach operator that had a licence to go to Wieze. And who could name his price because he had the licence. In the event, we dealt with a company from out in the sticks, who, obviously had a pick up out in the sticks, the pick up time was midnight – out in the sticks. Great for rival coach operators who took to pushing our passengers into the ditches. Anyway we got them all there, more or less intact.

But, where was “There”. Well, the Beer Festival itself is held in a village called Wieze, right in the heart of Belgium, but with no hotel accommodation of course (villages generally don’t). So we had to get some accommodation that was cheap and good. Brussels was very good but not at all cheap, Ostend was good but not cheap, Blankenberghe, down the coast from Ostend was not so good (at that time the hotels catered more for schoolkids with multiple-bedded rooms) but very cheap. So it was Blankenberghe then. We used a variety of hotels for our 300 passengers.

The trip could have gone alright, even after the battles at the pick-up point, if we’d managed to complete the rooming lists in time and get them to the hotels some time prior to the passengers arriving – (the hotels didn’t have telex machines, unfortunately). As it happened, this wasn’t possible, and I had to try to get to the hotels with the rooming lists, at least an hour or so before the rooms were needed. The taxi I got from Calais didn’t want to travel very fast and so, in fact, I arrived after the passengers. It was a very sad sight driving around Blankenberghe and seeing small disconsolate groups sitting on their suitcases in the streets. It was lucky that it was a fine day. It was unlucky that I had to give substantial refunds to the passengers.

Anyway, at the time it was reasonably easy to get lots of people to go to Paris for Easter if you charged reasonable prices. It was, however, absolutely impossible to get reasonable hotel accommodation in Paris at any sort of price at Easter unless you’d booked a couple of years in advance – this, of course, I didn’t know. We had another 300 or so people booked for coach trips to Paris at Easter, so I pushed off to Paris 8 weeks or so in advance to achieve the impossible. Staying in a small hotel in the Rue Lafayette, I walked all over Paris, looking for hotels for Easter and drawing blanks, day after day after day.

Finally, I discovered Beauvais. Not Paris, but close – say an hour or so down the N1. Beauvais had lots of little hotels because of the airport (remember Lydd-Beauvais?), good prices. Problem solved – well, more or less. I had developed a real love-hate relationship with Paris, after a week I’d also developed a bad leg, and had lost at least 2 stones, I looked so ill after all that walking that the hoteliers took pity on me. Thank God, I drove to Beauvais.

So, we decided that coaches were a problem and planes were reliable. It was so lucky that we’d merged with the Bucket shop who, specialised in flights and had connections with airlines. We put our transportation arrangements out to contract with a variety of airlines. Yes, you did need a licence if you advertised, but, of course, we didn’t – we dealt with closed groups – this, at least, we’d learnt.

God, it was wonderful to see the times on the quotations. Like “Depart BRS 07.00Z arrival LBG 09.15”. They looked so impressive and certain. And the prices were OK too. On the surface at least, everything seemed so much more controllable.

It’s good to deal with someone who knows what they’re doing isn’t it? Invicta certainly did, they’d been around since the travel business was a baby – they knew all about it. Plus, they had their own airport – Manston in Kent an ex RAF airport with a big runway. Just a hop, skip and jump from the continent. After all they’d done lots of high-density operations in the past including big bulbfields operations for people like Friendship and Clarksons. Ideal, of course for Wieze. Coach to Manston, flight to Ostend, coach to Wieze etc etc. Flights, of course were much more reliable than British coaches all the way! Weren’t they?

Sorted. OK, off to Belgium to sort out the ground arrangements with Willy. Willy was a typical Belgian in the travel business. Big and moustachioed, well-dressed and avuncular, a good eater and drinker, and, naturally a linguist with at least Flemish, French, German, Italian, Spanish and English to his credit. Willy was a Mister Fixit for foreign tour operators. There’s a dozen Willy’s in every resort.

The form was as follows. You told Willy you were coming. Willy arranged a room for you (complimentary of course) and, the next day, Willy took you out for lunch, naturally at a seafront restaurant selling the very best seafood. “Just a little for me”, he’d say “I’ll only have a snack”, there followed a long conversation about Willy’s “Snack” with the restaurant owner. “Maybe I’ll have a little something before the snack”, Willy would say. “I think you should have the prawns grilled in garlic to start, I’ll have a couple too”. And so the meal would start. “A little taster, compliments of the owner” “Ooh, our prawns in garlic and parsley! Could we have some more bread?” “I see you’ve got the Dover Sole meuniere and frites, I’m only having a snack, a little bit of turbot, so, I think I could manage a few of your frites – they’ll bring another tray anyway” “And dessert?” “A ‘Dame Blanche’? (Vanilla icecream with hot chocolate sauce) “That’s too big for me. I think just a little Crème Caramel”.

We’d discuss business over coffee. A little bit of haggling and the meal and the deal would be done. So, Willy would get on and book the hotels and the coaches that were necessary for our trips to Wieze. Ostend hotels this time, they were a bit more expensive but well worth it after the Blankenberghe affair.

The Wieze Beer Festival was a great bit of marketing. For many years, the Belgian Coast was busy in July and August. If the weather was good, you’d get people in June and September too, but, it was hardly high season and couldn’t command very good rates. In September, there was a lot of availability, and in October, the place was empty.

The Belgians are famous for their beers. They make a lot of beer and a lot of different types of beer. I know a café or two that have more than 300 different types of beer on their menus. That’s because the Belgians drink a lot of beer, and they like it. When I say drink a lot, I mean drink a lot, I don’t mean get drunk a lot. The Belgians drink beer because they enjoy beer, not because they like to get drunk.

In Munich, every October, there’s an event called the “Oktoberfest”. It’s a beer festival and it attracts tourists from all over the world to eat sausages and grilled chicken and pork and drink beer and sing and dance. There’s a fairground too, with a big wheel, and visitors have a great time.

“So, why not have a Beer Festival in Belgium, just like the German one but with Belgian Beer, not German? And sausages and chicken and pork, and a fairground, and singing and dancing? Lots of tourists will come and we’d fill the hotels on the coast. We could do it at Wieze, which is a village and a brewery, and they’ve got a field that we could have the festival in. The British would love it – they like drinking beer like us.” Said the Belgians.

And it was successful, if you counted the money and the numbers. But the Belgian mistake was inherent in the belief that the British “Like drinking beer like us”. The sort of British people that came on cheap coach tours to Wieze, often just wanted to get drunk and frequently cause an affray. Thousands of people were attracted to the image of everybody enjoying themselves and having a good time but disappointed by the event itself.

At the time of Wieze, you’d find wandering British drunks all over Belgium who’d forgotten the hotel, street, town they were staying in. We never brought back the same number as we took and spent much time pouring oil over troubled waters. Week after week after week, I’d listen to the battle stories from the guides “I was just helping her out of the coach and put my hand out for a tip – she was sick in it!” They threw out all the TV’s from the rooms – and they certainly aren’t pop stars!” “The club wouldn’t let them in unless they had ties on so they cut up the curtains in the rooms” “He nicked a glass ashtray and then went on the slide – it smashed and there was blood everywhere” etc etc etc. It didn’t stop us taking thousands and thousands of people there though, until the brewery decided to close it down.

Anyway, beer festival time 1972 was great. We managed to get thousands of passengers to book. We managed to get them all, more or less, to Manston. We managed to get them all to Ostend and to Wieze. The only problem came on the final day, Most of the customers didn’t like one of the hotels so they took unilateral action and the hotelier had followed them to the airport to get back all his cutlery, linen and curtains that they’d stolen and already checked in as baggage.

For flights, we did deals with everybody. But in particular, we dealt with Invicta, who had a great deal of history. They were owned and run by Keegan and Stevens, the people who flew the first package tour (to Corsica for Vladimir Raitz’s Horizon). And – they’d flown me from Manston to Maastricht in their DC4 in 1964. Now they were flying big 146 seat jet-prop Vickers Vanguards.

We were always after “Empty legs” where the flights for the inbound passengers were pre-sold leaving the outbound passengers flights available. In other words a group from Paris had booked flights to London on Friday night, and back from London on Sunday evening. For a UK airline to operate these flights, they had to fly out empty on Friday to pick up the French and back empty on Sunday after they’d dropped them off. Leaving two sectors empty.

And we got an empty leg, but the other way round – we got the leg from Paris to London. No problem, after all I knew about incoming travel when I’d worked for Saintseal in London. All we had to do was to set up ground arrangements in London, and find a French group to fill the flight. So, off to Paris I popped to see the British Tourist Authority who, I hoped, would help me find a French co-operator.

This trip resulted in a co-operation with a company called “Sepi Voyages” who dealt exclusively with “Commitees d’Entreprise. Fascinating. Sepi dealt with groups only from works committees. Apparently every French company who employed over 50 staff had to start a works committee AND provide it with money for good works for employees – including trips. What an opportunity for a tour operator – I stored this in my mind very successfully.

The weekend trip to London was a sellout. It should have been, at 100ff (about £10) including hotel and transfers – it was a steal. We paid really low prices for the hotel accommodation, rock-bottom prices for the transfers and almost nothing for the flights. Everybody even made a little bit of money. Naturally Sepi wanted more of this good thing. Naturally, so did we.

By now, I’d got over my bad experience walking around Paris looking for hotels and I’d come to love the city. Almost every week Blandine and I would take the night ferry from Victoria Station, have some dinner on board and arrive at Paris Gare du Nord after early breakfast the next morning. Time now to get to the Place Vendome to have coffee with the posh lads (Jim and James) at the British Tourist Authority. Then lunch in les Halles (an important occasion involving at least four courses) with Jacques and Pierre from Sepi. They loved Blandine, she was so French and tough. But it was Sepi who taught me how to do business in France. Never give an inch! And, when I did, Sepi were all over me. Back in the evening (after early dinner of course!) on the Night Ferry again.

I’d fallen in love with Paris years ago. When I was 14, my favourite author was Georges Simenon, I was besotted with his stories and I so wanted to visit the Paris of Maigret which I knew inch by inch from his books. My dad thought that my going to Paris was a good idea too and so did Harry, the owner of the Hotel Winston in Ostend. Harry was an elderly gourmet and he wanted to go to Paris to eat, dad said that I could go with him. “Pas de probleme” said Harry, my son Georges can look after the hotel and Valere can come with me at the end of the season.

The trip with Harry had started well, at least we stayed in the Rue Rochequart in the Pigalle, a well-known Maigret haunt. And then it went downhill. All Harry wanted to do was to eat rich meals on his list of restaurants. All I wanted to do was to smoke Gaullois cigarettes and look cool. The combination of hours and hours of strange food in crowded smelly restaurants and French cigarettes made me feel perpetually sick. But, luckily, the experience didn’t put me off Paris.

The thing about Paris is that it’s another tourism Goddess city and tourists will always visit. Who first populated Paris? The Celts. Where’s the Notre Dame placed – right on the ancient Celtic centre of power.

Paris has visual history in abundance. Stand in the Notre Dame and you can feel the power of this incredible place. Walk across the Isle de la Cite and you can visualise those accursed Capet kings organising their massacre of the Templars. Visit the Louvre and you can imagine Leonardo bringing his Mona Lisa there. Look at the Place des Vosges and you can see the horse-drawn carriages driving round this exquisite architecture.

The Notre Dame was where it hit me. To be honest, I was looking for a bit of peace and quiet – the last thing you should look for in a major tourist attraction. It was crammed with people taking photographs to take home with them. Legally “stealing” a bit of the place to examine and hoard in their sitting rooms. And I was sad. To really feel the place, you need to sit and see and hear. So the tourists lost, the pictures couldn’t give them anything they needed.

Now, taking advantage of an opportunity was one thing, setting up an opportunity to take advantage of is something a little bit more complicated, as I was to find out. It was easy enough to arrange the flights: Luton/Paris/Luton on Friday afternoon/evening, Luton/Paris/Luton on Sunday afternoon/evening. And, it was easy enough to arrange the hotel accommodation in London, and Sepi took care of the accommodation in Paris. Keeping the price low was critical and that meant that we had to have a 75% load factor to break even. At these prices it shouldn’t be difficult, should it? It was difficult. We could sell as many Paris-London weekends as we wanted, but London-Paris? Not a chance. Even for a tenner a weekend, would you believe it?

We were good at getting business, but often it wasn’t as easy as it looked to operate, Take the France v Wales rugby match of 1972. I’d given my friend Joe’s son, Ben a job to help out in the office. Although he was only 17 at the time, Ben was to look after the passengers and go with the trip to make sure that everything was OK. After all, Ben was a real rugby enthusiast and I felt he would do a good job. There shouldn’t have been a problem. Anyway, Sepi were looking after the tickets and all the ground arrangements (including the hotels) so there was little to do except make sure that the customers got what they were entitled to.

As it happened,the group were entitled to tickets to the match after all, that was their principal reason for flying to Paris. Sepi had ordered tickets, but there was some mix up on the day. The new stadium was smaller than the old one and there were fewer tickets it appeared. Not enough for all of our group of Welsh rugby supporters. Luckily I was on the end of a telex machine, so when I got the message, I replied “Can’t they find a café with a TV?. This didn’t go down particularly well. Plus, of course, you don’t know precisely who’s on the other end do you? So, when I slagged Sepi off for messing it up, I got an abusive message from them.

Of course, the group was drunk. That didn’t help. In the end, they went around Paris causing a commotion and then we brought them home. Wales had lost. I learnt never again to do a sports group of any type.

The stars of the show were the day trips. Isn’t it silly how something small turns out to be something big so simply? One day, I was visiting a big company, Fry’s the chocolate people at Keynsham. The idea was that they should offer their employees the opportunity to go on a Sunday day trip to London which we would organise. The trip would include a full cooked breakfast en route (egg, bacon, sausage, beans, toast, marmalade and tea or coffee), a visit to the Petticoat Lane Market, a guided tour of London, a visit to Windsor, a cream tea and a visit to a pub to round off the day – all for £3. Not bad eh? Frys would offer this trip to their employees through their sports and social club. And my contact, the social organiser, said to me “Do you think that you could print some for me to hand out please so that people can book easily?” Naturally, I agreed. So I knocked him up a few hundred leaflets, he handed them out and got a hundred or so people to go on the trip.

What a good idea. I could now print leaflets for every contact who wanted to organise a trip. They’d distribute the leaflets and take the bookings. It made life much easier, no longer did I have to depend on my customers to describe the trips, I could do it better, and more factually. It was a much more effective sales method.

Gordon was great, he’d been my boss when I was selling telephone answering machines. Gordon loved driving around in his car and selling things, so I sent him off to see companies and sell day trips to Petticoat Lane and to Dartmouth. OK, but not fantastic, we got hundreds rather than thousands of passengers.

Then, one day, Invicta approached me with an interesting offer. They were doing a job in Cologne which meant that they had availability for a flight from wherever we wanted. Essentially, the flight could go out to Cologne early in the morning and back in the evening. The price was cheap and we could do a day trip. I did a few figures, it would be expensive – £14.50 for a day. The trip would include the flight from Bristol, a coach and steamer trip of the Rhine and lunch plus a winetasting. I wasn’t sure that it would work but was persuaded by Invicta that it was worth a try. I put an ad in the local paper and by lunchtime it was sold out.

Naturally more day trips followed. A day to Venice cost just £16.50 and included breakfast on the flight, a vaporetta trip through the canals to St Marks Square, a guided tour of Venice , lunch by the Rialto Bridge and, naturally a visit to a glass factory. A day trip to Nice and Monte Carlo for £16.50 included a drive down the Corniche and lunch in Nice. Finally, a day trip to Switzerland included a flight to Basle a visit to the Lakeland and, of course, lunch. They were superb days out and attracted a devoted clientele who travelled again and again.

But the company wasn’t in very good financial shape. Basically, our overheads were too high and week after week, the Paris operation was draining resources. The friendly bank manager took to wandering around at night to see what was in Stephen’s window. He was a nice man, and would be very comforting in our interviews, but clearly wasn’t very hopeful about my business acumen. “I think about you, you know, Tjolle” he’d say “I think about where you’re going to go on your day trips next. Would it be Egypt – a quick trip there and a walk around the pyramids? But you’ll have to put some money in the account before the 17th or I’m in the hot seat – I’ll have to report it you know.” And he’d lean back in his seat behind his big desk in his big office, look at the ceiling and say “How are the kids by the way?”

On the whole, life wasn’t too bad, though. If we had day trip flights operating, I’d get up early and drive round to where Ben had slept the night before. I’d get him out of bed and drive on to the airport for 7am ish. I’d frequently pick up my dad on the way and he would act as a guide on the trip as well as Ben. The passengers would be checking in at the Dan Air desk, they’d fly off to their destination and I’d often stay for a cup of coffee with Edwin, the Dan Air station manager, before going off to start work at the office.

‘Dan Dare’, as Dan Air were known by all and sundry in the trade, was a pretty relaxed airline, by 1972 they were operating a small fleet of Comet 4b’s, very, very thirsty British airplanes – apparently with enough power to land on just one of their four engines. Although they had some scheduled business – the reason they had an office at Bristol – their main business was tour charter flights and big operations like the ‘Hadj’ which they operated from Berlin – and made a great deal of money from this intensive flying programme.

My big event of 1972 was the birth of my second son Robin, who I mistakenly registered as Edward Robin. Anyway, it was a welcome break to come back to Bath on a summer afternoon, make some tea in our little flat and take it down to the Parade Gardens below, to drink with my little family whilst listening to the band.

By 1973, things had got very difficult and I knew something had to be done. The Paris trips had been draining us of money week by week. We’d got in very deep with the airline and owed them quite a lot of money. They clearly didn’t want to lose the money, but, just as much, they didn’t want to lose the business. We had to talk.

Naturally, Invicta were prepared to do a deal. It’s a common practise in the travel business for a supplier to take over a client so they’d keep the business rather than lose it. So, finally, we got to an arrangement that looked reasonably sensible. Invicta would write off their debt and put in an amount of cash so that other creditors would get 25% of their debts. Invicta would take over our company. This was subject to the agreement of the majority of the creditors.

Then Invicta suspended their operations. Apparently they were in financial trouble too! Eventually they were taken over by European Ferries, a big ferry and port company, so the deal was on again. We quickly re-arranged our flying programme, consolidating flights so that we could have the best load-factors and wrote to the creditors and the passengers. We were in business.

Tuesday 10th April was a beautiful spring day, a superb day for a day excursion to Switzerland, which is where our passengers were going. Ben and my dad were on the flight and I was at the Avon Rubber Company at Melksham when I got the call. Jim, Invicta’s operations manager was on the telephone “OP’s come down, don’t worry Val, she’s a tough old bird” Jim was referring to G-AXOP, the airplane carrying a full load of 139 passengers and 6 crew to Basle that day, including my Dad and Ben. Numb, I drove back to the office in Bristol.

There was already a group of reporters and cameramen outside the office, I made my way through them and leapt up the stone stairs to the first floor. I rang Chan to tell her as much as I could. All we could do all day and night was to answer the constantly-ringing telephones. After initial optimism about numbers of survivors, as the day drew on, the picture slowly became terribly clear – the majority of the passengers and crew had been killed. As far as who, precisely, had survived, we simply didn’t know yet and so could give little succour to distraught friends and relatives of passengers. The press pestered, wanting details of survivors and people to interview. The telex machine chattered away with questions and condolences.

The situation was harrowing, it was the biggest disaster to affect the Bristol area since the last war. The passengers were mainly from Women’s Institutes and mothers groups from Mendip villages, the crash tore into the heart of the little countryside communities. The grief was palpable.

Stephen arrived in the evening, sitting himself in the corner, unable to do anything, but tacitly offer his support. Through the night we answered the telephones, able to offer little to the panic-stricken callers. Acting like automatons, we couldn’t afford yet to come to terms with the immensity of the situation.

Miraculously, I heard that my father and Ben had survived. Apparently, they’d both been sitting in the back of the plane when it hit a mountainside in a heavy snowstorm. The tail section had broken off in the impact, the majority of the casualties were in the front section. 108 of the 139 passengers had been killed and 4 of the 6 crew.

There was now a mass of organisational work to be done, to assist those that had been affected by the crash. An operations centre was set up in the beautiful Mendip village of Axbridge, at the heart of the affected communities, and I went to work there to help. There was much work to be done, the survivors had to be flown home, undertakers had been commissioned to organise the repatriation of the remains and relatives needed to visit survivors still in Switzerland.

The RAF flew the majority of the survivors who were prepared to fly back to Lyneham, where their PR Officer organised a press conference. The remainder of the survivors made their way back overland. Then I attended the funerals in the little country villages. The disaster had affected thousands of people, the sorrow an anguish of this traumatic event would never go away. I had no means to deal with this event, so enormous and unpredictable. There would be no closure. I had to go back to work.

The final day trip in the series was to Venice from Bournemouth. Ben’s father, my friend Joe, had decided that he’d take Ben’s place on the flight to support me. We were to go together with the group.

British people are amazing – they never seem to panic. When the inflatable gangways pushed out onto the tarmac and we were ordered to evacuate the aircraft people chatted amongst themselves. “I thought I could smell petrol, dear” said one old lady. Anyway, it appeared that there had been a bomb threat by telephone, and as soon as the plane had been searched, we were cleared to go.

What an amazing outing. Arriving at Marco Polo airport on a glorious early summer day, we took a vaporetta ride to St Marks Square, time for coffee before our guided walking tour. Lunch was arranged, just by the Rialto Bridge, watching the gondolas go by – how romantic can you get? Then we went to St Marks square again to visit the Trevisan Glass Factory.

Now, it’s pretty easy to lose your passengers in Venice. No busses parked outside, lots of crowds around. So, before we went into the glass factory, Joe organised a passenger-count. St Marks is neatly divided into painted squares, so, when each passenger was counted, they had to move forward one square. Simple – and it worked.

Looking out of the window onto St Marks square, I noticed all the pigeons suddenly take off in a cloud. Minutes later, the square became silent as the people moved too. A whirlwind was on the way, it passed through St Marks in a torrent of rain and squal, and it was gone. The people and the pigeons returned and St Marks was back to normal.

Now time to take coffee with the Trevisans. The passengers had had a good time and bought some nice things. “Now Signori, we need to talk about the commission” said the younger Trevisan “We don’t pay commission” said Joe, while I sharply kicked his foot. The Trevisans paid us nearly £150. Not bad for a couple of hours guiding. That evening, we watched the thunderstorms over Venice as we flew home.

I was now working for Invicta and, after commuting daily to their offices in Piccadilly, trying to reorganise the daytrips programme, we settled on setting up an office in Bath. Our new programme was launched from two floors in Milsom Street where we had a lot of fun but didn’t do much business.

It was 1974 and I was really treading water, Invicta offered me the opportunity of a transfer to their base in Kent, but I didn’t really want to leave Bath and was made redundant and the offices closed.

I simply didn’t know what to do but Joe had said that, if I wanted to stay in the travel business he’d help. In the event, we decided to set up a company together, after evenings spent discussing possible names and activities, we settled on calling the company Land Travel because that’s what it would specialise in – travel by land.

I had a great deal of support from the staff, and they helped me set up the company in Joe’s sitting room. We were to concentrate on operating Sunday day trips by coach to Petticoat Lane. The trips were to be sold by telephone to groups from the sports and social clubs of companies North and West of London.

Joe and I drove around together getting coach companies, restaurants and guides organised to deal with our clients. We planned the tour of London. We set up our sales and accounts systems and got nice little leaflets printed. Then, every day, we got on the telephone together, sharing the one telephone on the dining room table.

Within six weeks, we were taking between 10 and 20 coachloads to London every Sunday from all over the North of England. They’d leave early in the morning, stop off for a full English breakfast at the Blue Boar Services at Watford Gap and then off to the Mansell Street Coach Park at Petticoat Lane. Time for shopping at Petticoat Lane market before they’d do a tour of London with a London guide. The clients would see all the main London sights before they were taken to Woburn Abbey for their cream tea. Finally, they’d stop at Crick for a few pints before rejoining the coach for a sing-along on their way happily home – all this for less than £3.50 – and we made a reasonable profit.

The day trips to London were going well, people loved them, we had absolutely no complaints, and, unusually for a tour operator, we had loads of letters of compliment – which we put up on the wall. Now to do something a bit more complicated! We arranged weekend trips to take place in the autumn- to Paris and to the Wieze Beer Festival, would you believe?

Joe’s dining room became a little cramped for all this activity so we started looking around for proper office premises. We found the ideal offices slap bang in the heart of Bath, the 1st, 2nd and 3rd floors of a café in the Abbey Churchyard. Right opposite the Pump Room, the Abbey itself and the Roman Baths.

Even though we were on the outskirts of the travel business, we couldn’t but be affected by the outside world. In 1974, the train drivers were on strike, UK unemployment was over 500,000, inflation was 16%, the oil price had quadrupled in a year and was now $12 a barrel and more importantly for us Court Line folded, shaking the travel industry and the buying public.

The Court Line debacle had lessons for us all – hubris was and is the scourge of the travel industry. Personally, I’d promised myself not to over-reach, I’d thought a maximum of 40,000 passengers a year would fulfil our needs and let us give our customers the service and care we wanted.

But Court Line and Clarksons had taught us so much, their staff were the whiz-kids of the travel business. How had it happened?

Basically, Court Line was a shipbuilding and transportation company operating 11 BAC 1-11’s and 2 wide-bodied Tristars, and some very smart coaches. Court Line provided flights for Clarksons and had over-exposed itself to them, Clarksons then had 25% of the UK inclusive tour market. Clarksons was on the point of going bust (they were losing money hand over fist), which would mean that they couldn’t pay Court Line what they owed them (millions and millions of pounds) and it looked like Court Line would lose the Clarksons business too.

So what do you do when you’re overexposed to your major client who hasn’t got any money? Well, Court Line managed to get Shipping and Industrial Holdings, who owned Clarksons, to give them the loss making company together with £6million. “Phew” I bet the executives of Court Line thought “We’ve managed to pull it off, not only have we ensured our future business but we’ve got a cool £6m to boot.

You know, however much in debt they are, tour operators have usually got quite a bit of money in the bank. Plus, everybody likes an operator. The operator owns the customers after all, the operator directs where the customer is going to spend money. The operator has the power. When Court Line looked at the bank balance and the list of hotels and resorts that wanted Clarkson’s business at almost any cost, they must have thought they were on to a good thing.

What would be the next most sensible thing for Court Line to do? Evaluate Clarksons and make sure that it was profitably managed? Or think that they’d come up with a brilliant new idea to make easy money and play it for all it was worth? You’ve guessed it. Court Line bought OSL who owned Wings, an upmarket operator who just had lines on their brochure cover not scantily-dressed beach babes. Court Line bought ATLAS and then Horizon Midlands. In February 1974, obviously fed up with acquiring companies for their life-blood, Court Line attempted to get at the life-blood direct without bothering about the company by acquiring the passengers and goodwill of Horizon (Vladimir Raitz’s pioneer of package holidays) and Four S Travel (not so much a pioneer, more a suggestive play on words). Obviously, it didn’t work for a number of reasons:

Reason 1 Clarksons, the biggest of them all, probably never made real money. Owned by a medium-sized old-established group of shipping brokers, at the beginning they were probably content to operate tours and give a few people jobs just so they could look at the bank balance.and borrow a bit when they needed it. When the company got bigger, it would have excused itself by saying it was searching for critical mass – in other words “Jam Tomorrow” After all, it was dominating the UK travel industry and that had to be worth something. And, of course, there was the safety net – the company could always be sold for something. Shipping and Industrial Holdings had to give away Clarksons with a £6million “Dowry” but that was small change in view of Clarksons’ power and liabilities.

Reason 2 You may buy the company but you can’t be sure you can buy the customers and they, after all, are what you want. Holiday buyers are notoriously fickle, you have to have an absolutely cast iron Unique Selling Proposition to make them stay.

Reason 3 Tour operators actually like being tour operators. Most of them like the freedom and power they enjoy. If they’re making a profit too, there is no reason for them to sell, whatever they say. The only way to get a good, profitable tour operation is to pay way, way unsustainably over the odds.

Reason 4 You can’t buy a tour operator in a vacuum. You really have to know what you’re buying and what’s going on around your target company. Let’s face it, the travel business is made up of not so hungry people who buy companies and hungry people who are prepared to steal them, your business, your passengers – anything they can get. Harry (Goodman) was very, very hungry in 1974. He laid in wait in his executive jet and when he saw the writing on the wall, he pounced. Teams of contractors were jetted out to resorts to buy Clarksons/Court Line hotel contracts, teams of salespeople were brought in to get travel agents to switch-sell. Court Line’s business was being dismembered before it had hit the ground. And Intasun, Harry’s company made an enormous leap into Clarksons’ place in the trade, in more ways than one!

So the chaos of 1974 provided the basis for a shakeup and a rebirth of the travel industry

Tags: 1960's, birth of tourism, holidays, mass tourism, tourism