Welcome to this episode of Light Travels, following two young women on a journey through the south of England in 1936.
Today we holiday in search of sun, sea and fun. Cars, trains and planes are the elements of holidays. But they obscure the essentials; the food we eat, the water we drink, the electricity and petrol that fuel our travel.
In coming posts, I’ll look at those elements, at where and how tourists using youth hostels in 1936 got them and how they used them.
Hilary Hughes loved food. Her appetite was never dainty. At West Wellow, high on the open Wiltshire hills, after a day of constant rain, she ate a “marvellous supper [of] fish and chips, stewed plums and custard, coffee, bread and butter, and our old favourite lemon curd.” [1] After which she loosened her belt and stretched her legs.
Food obsessed Hilary. She listed what she ate on her tour of the New Forest in 1936: hazel nuts, milk, sardines, chocolate, omelettes, rolls, “tons” of butter, lemon curd, coffee, cornflakes, more rolls, eggs, shredded wheat, chops, potatoes, plums, custard, raisins, more bread, fish, chips, another omelette, and “meat”.
She grumbled when she didn't eat enough. “[B]reakfast was nothing; a pint of milk, left over bread rolls, butter, lemon curd, coffee and cornflakes.”
Hearty
Food was important to another young woman on a walking tour in Derbyshire. Jane Ash listed the food she ate too: “eggs and potatoes bought from a farm”, and “a hearty breakfast of eggs, bacon, coffee and marmalade”. [2]
She noticed local food, “some north country food … better than fruit bread but not quite a Christmas pudding. Whatever it was it was appetising.”
Unlike Hilary, a schoolgirl, Jane and her friends were on holiday from their jobs - Jane worked at Portsmouth docks - and they could afford to buy meals along the way at cafes, restaurants and hotels.
Polite
Beside the river Dove at Ilam they ate a “‘hostel packed lunch’ … a ham sandwich, a salad sandwich, bread, butter and cheese, and a piece of cake” with several cups of tea brought down to the riverside from a nearby cottage.
They ate a”polite” lunch of “delicious salad and ham, fruit salad and cream, finishing with coffee and cakes” at the Church Hotel in Edale.
Jane’s tastes, if polite, were as hearty as Hilary’s.
Good shops
None dieted. None were slimming. Cycling and walking did that. They all ate bread, meat, eggs, butter, potatoes, milk and cream. Eggs and milk made custard.
Without fridges or freezers, they shopped constantly. Apart from postcards and a comb, to replace one lost, none of them shopped for what we might call “leisure”.
Shops were few. They used local shops and stores. Some of the food would have been canned, prunes for example. Most must have been fresh and local - eggs, bread, milk and potatoes.
Half day
There were no 24 hour supermarkets. Arrangements went wrong when shops closed for half days or none could be found. Occasionally they skipped a meal because they never came across a shop, cafe or restaurant where they could eat.
They relied on small shops at youth hostels. “[T]hese hostel stores are good” Jane Ash commented, good enough to supply provisions for hearty meals, milk, bacon and eggs, coffee and marmalade at some.
Self catering
Youth hostels provided another essential: kitchens where they could provide meals. They were sometimes rudimentary, sometimes no more than a bench where cooking could take place.
Cooking required culinary skills. Hilary and Jane had none. They relied on their companions, Hilary on Margaret who knew “a lot of cooking”, and Jane on Maisie who did “the best part [of] the cooking but we laid tables and did the odd jobs…”
Others were not cooks at all. FJ Catley of Bristol survived on baked beans which he heated for his supper on the occasions when he mentioned supper. At other times he went without supper and went to bed hungry.
A natural obsession
Food was limited but some were already considered ethics, already suspicious of food supplies, beginning to eat with care.
Jane met a man she called “nuts and raisins…”, “a food faddist”. He lectured her on insulin and milk. A vegetarian in another diarist’s account of Christmas at a youth hostel, ate nut loaf while everyone else feasted on goose.
Neither Jane nor Hilary and their friends wasted food. They had very little and no way of keeping the little they had fresh. Everything they had they ate. Everything they had they bought fresh each day.
Local
Today we understand “tourism can spur agricultural production by promoting the production, use and sale of local produce in tourist destinations”. [3]
But Hilary had nothing like that in mind. Her obsession with food, as a teenager riding a bike for miles, was natural. She ate what she could when she could.
She didn’t mention world hunger. She didn’t eat the view, or eat local.
Triumph
With no decisions to make about sourcing food, and whether to eat organic, they ate what they could when they could, and none of it came with plastic.
As tourists we rely on the same essentials as everyone else. If we’re to become better tourists we’ll have to do so in the midst of general improvements. Sustainable tourism can’t be isolated from wider sustainability in society. Tourism only reflects the way we live.
In Winchester, Hilary “searched for milk. It was a pretty hopeless search as it was early closing day, [until] at long last we discovered a bottle full in a little shop and carried it home in triumph.”
Theirs was a waste free tourism where every morsel and crumb was treasured.
Notes
Image, cooking in a youth hostel kitchen, courtesy YHA Archive at the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham. Y050001-Goudhurst 10.
1. Hilary Hughes, Collection of holiday hostelling log albums Y691019 and all following quotes attributed to Hilary.
2. Lilian Ash, Holiday Log: account of early hostelling adventures in the Peak District, August 1934 Y600038-3, and all following quotes attributed to Lilian.
3. UNWTO sustainable tourism goals.