Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Spas, steamships and sardines: Edwardian package tourism and the marketing of Galician regionalism

2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 4; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/1755182x.2012.697490

1755-1838

Kirsty Hooper,

Travel Writing and Literature

Abstract From 1901 until the First World War, alongside its principal business of shipping rubber and leather to and from the USA and Northern Brazil, Liverpool's Booth Steamship Company (familiarly known as the ‘Booth Line’) ran a portfolio of highly successful holiday tours to Madeira, Portugal and Galicia. Although this side of the company's business has long been forgotten by business and maritime historians, this paper argues that the company's leisure tours were an important contribution to the early history of British tourism in Spain. In addition, it argues that we should not underestimate the significance of this project for our understanding of Galicia's own history, and in particular for expanding our understanding of the Galician regionalist movement and its relationship with the wider world. Keywords: GaliciaSpaintourismmarketingregionalismindustry Notes 1For example, Eugenia Afinoguénova and Jaume Martí-Olivella, eds., Spain is (Still) Different: Tourism and Discourse in Spanish Identity (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008); Justin Crumbaugh, Destination Dictatorship: The Spectacle of Spain's Tourist Boom and the Reinvention of Difference (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009); Sasha Pack, Tourism and Dictatorship: Europe's Peaceful Invasion of Franco's Spain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 2A 1991 Spanish Tourist Office campaign emphasises the region's mystical qualities, describing ‘Green Spain’ as ‘Spain's Magic Carpet’, and inviting tourists to ‘explore the carpet of green spread out before you and let yourself fall under its magic spell’. 3Tom Hall, ‘The 2004 Hot Spots (part two)’, The Guardian, December 28, 2003, http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2003/dec/28/observerescapesection1?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487 (accessed April 26, 2012). 4Clare Stewart, ‘Hidden Delights in a Place the Tourists Ignored’, The Times, June 28, 2002, 33 (accessed April 26, 2012). 5Natacha Du Pont de Bie, ‘Galicia on a Plate’, The Guardian, February 4, 2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2006/feb/04/travelfoodanddrink.foodanddrink.spain (accessed April 26, 2012). 6For example, John K. Walton and Jenny Smith, ‘The First Century of Beach Tourism in Spain: San Sebastián and the “playas del norte” from the 1830s to the 1930s’, in Tourism in Spain: Critical Issues, ed. J. Towner, M. Barke and M.T. Newton (Wallingford: CAB Publications, 1996), 35–61; John K. Walton, ‘Planning and Seaside Tourism: San Sebastián, 1863–1936’, Planning Perspectives 17 (2002): 1–20; John K. Walton, ‘Tourism and Consumption in Urban Spain, 1876–1975’, in Spain is (still) Different, eds. E. Afinoguénova and J. Martí-Olivella, 107–27; Michael Barke, Graham Mowl, and Graham Shield, ‘Málaga – A Failed Resort of the Early Twentieth Century?’, Journal of Tourism History 2, no. 3 (2010): 187–212; Luis Fernández-Cifuentes, ‘Southern Exposure: Early Tourism and Spanish National Identity’, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 13, no. 2–3 (2007): 133–48. 7 Rexionalismo is generally seen by Galician historians as a transition period between the provincialismo of the 1840s–1880s and the fully-fledged nationalist movement that emerged around 1920. For the definitive account of Galician rexionalismo, see Xusto Beramendi, De provincia a nación. Historia do galeguismo politico (Vigo: Xerais, 2007). For a readable overview of modern Galician history, see Sharif Gemie, Galicia: A Concise History (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2006). 8María López Sández, Paisaxe e nación. A creación discursiva do territorio (Vigo: Galaxia, 2008). 9Gabriel Rei-Doval, A lingua galega nacidade no século XX: Unha aproximación sociolingüística (Vigo: Xerais, 2007). Rei-Doval shows that while 94.5% of Vigo residents interviewed during the 1990s claimed to understand Galician (475–6), only 4.4% used it regularly (506); Kirsty Hooper, ‘Consuming Nationalism? Taste, Language and the Novel in Constitutional Galicia’, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 44, no. 3 (2010): 641–2. 10‘Galicia hacia el turismo. Doctores ingleses en La Toja’, Vida Gallega 8 (August 15, 1909), 15. 11‘The British La Toja Company’, British Medical Journal Supplement: 78th Annual Meeting of the BMJ (September 24, 1910), 306. A brief report from the Exhibition of Food, Drugs, Instruments, Books, and Sanitary Appliances describes how ‘this firm has seemingly undertaken the task of attracting attention in this country to the claims of the Portuguese health resort from which it derives its name’ (emphasis mine; evidently the Galician message had not been transmitted as clearly as its promoters might have hoped!). 12‘El turismo en Galicia’, Vida Gallega 12 (December 1, 1909): 20. 13 El Liberal (Madrid), July 21, 1909. 14‘Galicia hacia el turismo’, 15 17‘Galicia hacia el turismo’, 18. 15For example, the 170 crewmen of the Serpent, wrecked off Cape Boi in 1890 and memorialized by a tablet that still sits alongside Moore's more elaborate memorial in Coruña's Jardines de San Carlos. 16‘Galicia hacia el turismo’, 16. 18 El Liberal (Madrid), October 9, 1909; Vida Marítima, October 20, 1909. 19Pack, Tourism and Dictatorship, 24–6; Juan Carlos González Morales, ‘La comisión nacional de turismo y las primeras iniciativas para el fomento del turismo: La industria de los forasteros (1905–1911)’, Estudios Turísticos 163–164 (2005): 20–4. This included similar state-supported initiatives in San Sebastián (1902), Palma (1906), Barcelona, Zaragoza (both 1908), Tarragona and Cádiz (both 1910), as well as the Marqués de Mariana's Asociación Nacional de Fomento del Turismo, established in Barcelona in March 1910. 20‘Galicia as a Holiday Resort’, The Times, March 5, 1910, 15. Vigo officially received notification of the establishment of the London branch on March 15, as reported in El Liberal on March 16, 1910. 21As listed in Walter Wood, A Corner of Spain (London: E Nash, 1910), 39. 22‘El turismo en Galicia’, Vida Gallega 18 (April 15, 1910), 10. 23‘Galicia as a Holiday Resort’, 15. 24‘El turismo en Galicia,’ El Globo (Madrid): March 21, 1910, p.2. 25‘El turismo en Galicia’, Vida Gallega 18, 10. 28Liverpool Record Office, 387 BOO 2/1 Directors’ Minutes Book (March 9, 1901–March 14, 1916). Entry for Board Meeting of May 14, 1901, 15. 26Liverpool Record Office, 387 BOO 2/1 Directors’ Minutes Book (March 9, 1901–March 14, 1916). Entry for Board Meeting of September 15, 1910, 240, contains the only mention of the partnership to be found in these documents: ‘it was agreed to allow to Hijos de J Barreras, Vigo, 5% (instead of 3%) on all freights and passage money collected at Vigo after October 1st 1910’. This may reflect one positive outcome of the expanded partnership. 27Duncan Haws, ‘Lamport and Holt and Booth Lines’, Merchant Fleets v.34 (Hereford: TCL, 1998); Paul Heaton, Booth Line (Pontypool: Starling Press, 1987). 29Liverpool Record Office, 387 BOO 2/1 Directors’ Minutes Book (March 9, 1901–March 14, 1916). Entry for Board Meeting of January 12, 1903, 72: ‘It was agreed to authorise the expenditure of £100 in advertising the passenger service to Havre, Portugal & Madeira in various railway stations throughout the country’. 30Liverpool Record Office, 387 BOO 2/1 Directors’ Minutes Book (March 9, 1901–March 14, 1916). Entry for Board Meeting of January 22, 1903, 74. ‘Miss Cann’ was probably the sister of W.S. Cann of the Passenger Department. 31Liverpool Record Office, 387 BOO 1/1 General Meetings Minute Book, printed report of the AGM held on Tuesday June 12, 1906, 19–20. 32Liverpool Record Office, 387 BOO 2/1 Directors’ Minutes Book (March 9, 1901–March 14, 1916), entry for October 30, 1906, 173: ‘The arrangement with Mr Grant Richards for the publication of a book on Portugal was reported. The Company take 650 copies at £150, and frank the writer, Major M Hume, through Portugal’. Martin Sharp Hume, Through Portugal (London: Grant Richards/New York: McClure Phillips, 1907). 33Although there is no mention of the commission in the company archive, Jaime Solá's Vida Gallega reported on December 1, 1909 that ‘Mr Booth concibió el propósito de patrocinar la publicación de una obra destinada a dar a conocer nuestro país y orientar bien al turista … Con objeto de recoger los datos necesarios para esto [sic] libro vinieron a Galicia el paisajista Mr Mason y el escritor Mr Wood … La Compañía Booth tomó a su cargo los gastos de este viaje, como ha tomado el cuidado de subvencionar la obra mediante la adquisición de varios millares de ejemplares’ (‘El turismo en Galicia’, 20: ‘Mr Booth conceived the idea of sponsoring the publication of a work destined to make our country known and guide the tourist well … With the aim of collecting the necessary information for the book, the landscape painter Mr Mason and the writer Mr Wood came to Galicia … The Booth Company took care of the travel expenses, just as it has taken care to underwrite the work through the purchase of several thousand copies of the book’). 34 El Liberal, October 9, 1910. 35Catherine Gasquoine Hartley, Spain Revisited: A Summer Holiday in Galicia (London: Stanley Paul, 1911); Catherine Gasquoine Hartley, The Story of Santiago de Compostela (London: JM Dent, 1912). 36Walter Gallichan, Where Trout Abound: The Fly-Fisher in Galicia (London: Everett & Co., 1911). Gallichan was Hartley's husband; they were married from 1901 to 1915 and travelled together to Galicia on several occasions. 37The Booth Steamship Company, Holiday Tours in Portugal and Madeira. Illustrated Guide. 3rd ed. (Liverpool: The Booth Steamship Company, 1904); The Booth Steamship Company, Holiday Tours in Spain, Portugal and Madeira. Illustrated Guide. 6th ed. (Liverpool & London: The Booth Steamship Company, 1913). The Booth Line's own Holiday Tours in Portugal and Madeira (later Spain, Portugal and Madeira), went through six editions between 1903 and 1913. The archive of photographs taken for the original edition by W.S. Cann of the passenger department is held in the Liverpool Record Office. 41Papers of Meakin, Bodleian Library; ‘El tributo de los extranjeros’, La Temporada en Mondariz, June 27, 1909. Meakin's description of Mondariz, which she had not visited, is barely a paragraph long and can be found on p. 355 of Galicia, the Switzerland of Spain. 38Hume's membership was reported in the Boletín de la Real Academia Gallega, vol. 21 (December 20, 1908). 39Annette M.B. Meakin, Galicia, the Switzerland of Spain (London: Methuen, 1909). 40Papers of Miss Annette M.B. Meakin, Bodleian Library, Oxford MS Eng.Misc.d.509. Letter dated April 15, 1909. 42Wood, A Corner of Spain, 47. 43‘Vigo, Galicia's Gateway’ is the title given to a watercolour by Mason that faces p.51 of A Corner of Spain; it would later appear as the frontispiece to Hartley's Spain Revisited, with the title ‘Vigo: Bay and Town’. 44Karl Baedeker, Spain and Portugal: A Handbook for Travellers (Leipzig/London: Baedeker/Dulau, 1898; 1901; 1908; 1913). 45Wood, A Corner of Spain, 63. 46Wood, A Corner of Spain, 66. 47Wood, A Corner of Spain, 100. Wood writes, ‘Baedeker, omnipotent in travel, has missed many things in North-West Spain, or omitted them as being superfluous or unattractive, while details which are published in his masterpieces are at variance with other sources of information. For example, Baedeker states that the population of Pontevedra is 8500, but Murray gives the number as 21,000, a startling and bewildering difference’. 48Wood, A Corner of Spain, 127. 49Wood, A Corner of Spain, 151. 50Wood, A Corner of Spain, 143. 51Wood, A Corner of Spain, 143. 52Wood, A Corner of Spain, 144. 53Wood, A Corner of Spain, 147. 54Wood, A Corner of Spain, 151. 55These photos do not match the ones circulated by the Peinadors’ own publicity machine, so they may be from the archive of the Booth Line's Portugal specialist W.S. Cann. Mason's bold visual version of Mondariz seems to have become the model, also, for a reinvention of the Booth Line's promotional materials for the Portuguese spa resort of Bussaco, which they had been promoting since 1903 through A.S. Forrest's delicate miniatures. Forrest's work featured in the first edition of Hume's Through Portugal and were the basis for the ‘Picturesque Portugal’ series of postcards circulated in 1906 and 1907. From 1909, however, Forrest's paintings were replaced with Mason's in two new postcard series called ‘Sunny South’ series 1 and 2. Mason's painting of the spa hotel at Bussaco strongly resembles his familiar and much-reproduced painting of Mondariz, which may suggest that the Mondariz model and Mason's repertoire of Galician images had achieved some success among customers and were now to be used as a model for future advertising campaigns. Again, the absence of any reference to the project in the Booth Company archives frustrates any firm conclusions. 56‘Galicia ante el turismo’, Vida Gallega 25 (August 31, 1910): 5–16. This, the most substantial account, devotes 12 copiously-illustrated pages to the activities of ‘los periodistas ingleses’. Daily updates were printed in Galicia's major newspapers, including Diario de Galicia (Santiago); El Correo de Galicia (Santiago); El Eco de Galicia (La Coruña); El Diario de Pontevedra; El Regional (Lugo), and El norte de Galicia (Lugo). For an idea of the reporting of the visit around Spain, see, among others, La Vanguardia (Barcelona, July 18, 1910), 4; ‘Los periodistas ingleses’, La Correspondencia de España (Madrid, July 26, 1910), 3 and subsequent reports on July 30 and 31, August 4, 5, and 6; reports in La Época (Madrid) on July 24, 28, 31 and August 2, 3; Nuevo Mundo (Madrid, August 11, 1910); La Ilustración Española y Americana (August 8, 1910); El Día de Madrid on July 27, 28, 29 and August 4; Siglo Futuro on August 3, 1910; La Correspondencia Militar on August 9, 1910. 57J. Harris Stone, ‘Galicia, the Garden of Spain’, The English Illustrated Magazine (November, 1910), 106. 58‘Lugo y los ingleses’, El Norte de Galicia: diario político y de infomación (July 27, 1910), 1. 65Burgin, A Lady of Spain, 88–9. 59G.B. Burgin, A Lady of Spain (London: Hutchinson, 1911), 30. 60G.B. Burgin, A Lady of Spain (London: Hutchinson, 1911), 110. Burgin wrote a second novel based on the trip, The Belle of Santiago (London: Hutchinson, 1911), in which the Englishman Anthony Heron falls in love with Señorita Mercedes ‘beneath the castle walls of Cernadela’, just outside Mondariz, but they are parted by her cruel father and tragedy ensues. 61Burgin, A Lady of Spain, 47. 62Burgin, A Lady of Spain, 47. 63Burgin, A Lady of Spain, 32. 64For example, the events fictionalized in A Lady of Spain are also chronicled in G.B. Burgin, ‘Snapshots in Spain. I. A Fete Day at Mondariz in Galicia’, Daily Express (September 6, 1910). 68Hartley, Spain Revisited, 72–3. Emphasis mine. 66Stone, ‘Galicia, the Garden of Spain’, 112. 67Stone, ‘Galicia, the Garden of Spain’, 111. 71Hartley, Spain Revisited, 95–6. 69Stone, ‘Galicia, the Garden of Spain’, 113: ‘The day I went [to La Toja] from Pontevedra, in a fine Hotchkiss car, kindly driven by the owner, the journey [took[ only one hour, five minutes’. 70Hartley, Spain Revisited, 66. 72Stone, ‘Galicia, the Garden of Spain’, 115. 73Hartley, Spain Revisited, 203–4: ‘I longed to wait in [Betanzos], where there were so many things I wanted to dream of and to see. But progress and patriotism – motor-cars and war-ships – compelled my rushing onwards. Perhaps this explains my mood in the hours we spent at Ferrol, inspecting the efforts of civilisation! … I know that we walked about for a long time, while much information was admirably given by the English engineers who accompanied us. However, I did not listen’. 74Stone, ‘Galicia, the Garden of Spain’, 114. 75Hartley, Spain Revisited, 185. 76Hartley, Spain Revisited, 314. 77Hartley, Spain Revisited, 315. 78G.B. Burgin, Memoirs of a Clubman (London: Hutchinson, 1921), 282. 79Details of the vast majority of these talks and publications remain to be located. Some examples of which we do have knowledge include those reported in ‘Galicia en Inglaterra’, Diario de Galicia (December 8, 1910), 1: Mr Harris Stone's talks at the ‘Bath Literaty and Phical Association [sic]’ on November 4, 1910, and the London Catholic Association on December 12, 1910, and in ‘Galicia en Inglaterra’, Diario de Galicia (December 31, 1910), 1: Mr Campion's lecture and slideshow at the New Library in Northampton on December 24, 1910. 80I have not succeeded in locating a copy of Moody's book, which is mentioned in his obituary, published in the Stourbridge County Express in 1927. 82Hartley, Spain Revisited, 65. Keating's was a widely available insecticide powder, often recommended to tourists. 81Hartley, Spain Revisited, 281. 88Tafall, ‘Los periodistas santiagueses en Londres’, Gaceta de Galicia (December 21, 1910), 2. 83Antonio Tafall, ‘A Londres’, Gaceta de Galicia (December 13, 1910), 1. 84Tafall, ‘A Londres (Abordo del “Lanfranc”)’, Gaceta de Galicia (December 12, 1910), 1. 85Tafall, ‘A Londres’ (December 13, 1910), 1. 86Tafall, ‘En Londres’ (December 14, 1910), 1; ‘En Londres’ (December 15, 1910), 1. 87For example, articles under the rubric ‘Galicia en Inglaterra’ appeared in Diario de Galicia (December 8 and 31, 1910); ‘Santiago en Londres’ also appeared in the Diario de Galicia (December 11 and 13, 1910); the series ‘A Londres’ appeared in the Gaceta de Galicia (December 12 and 13, 1910), followed by ‘En Londres’, Gaceta de Galicia (December 14, 15, 16, 21, 23, 1910). López was also Galician correspondent for the Madrid daily newspaper El Día de Madrid, which published his account of the trip as ‘Gallegos a Londres’, El Día de Madrid (December 16, 1910). 89The book was published simultaneously in English and Spanish versions: Mondariz, Vigo, Santiago. A Guide to the Tourist (Madrid: Rivadeneyra, 1912) and Mondariz, Vigo, Santiago. Guía del turista (Madrid: Rivadeneyra, 1912). 90The National Archives, BT27/802/6. Return of Passengers embarked at the Port of Liverpool. The final Booth-hosted tour to Galicia seems to have been the group of 23 travellers that left Liverpool for Vigo aboard the Ambrose on August 11, 1913. The Booth Line ran their famous ‘1000 Miles up the Amazon’ tours from the 1920s until the 1950s.