Working-Class Organisations and Popular Tourism, 1840–1970 by Susan Barton (review)

Holidays were matters of continual contestation and negotiation between workers, bosses, and the state in the long process of modern industrialization. By the early Victorian period most of the traditional holydays of religious and seasonal provenance had been extinguished, leaving no more than Christmas Day, Good Friday, and a day or two at Whitsun as sanctioned major holidays. These were supplemented by the Sabbath and a good deal of voluntary absenteeism, notably on St Monday, a well-chronicled extension to the Sabbath in ironic recuperation from the weekly rush to market of artisanal and small workshop production. Together with other more spontaneous, often rowdier breaks for folk sports, race days, elections, local fairs, or public executions, all such occasions were threatened by the punitive discipline of factory production, restrictive legislation, and modern policing. Gradual relief came in the 1840s with the legislative reduction in working hours followed by the institution of the Saturday half holiday as part of the modern weekend, le weekend Anglais of international export. The Bank Holidays Act of 1871 added a completely secular day off in August to the remaining holydays, extended beyond bank clerks and shopkeepers to become a nationally recognized break. Lancashire textile workers had become accustomed to help themselves to an annual summer holiday during Wakes Week, acknowledged by the more enlightened employers as legitimate leave that refreshed rather than debilitated their workforce. Here time off became time away in trips to newly developed seaside resorts facilitated by the new railway. It was the railway that funneled a million or so workers from across the country to London’s Great Exhibition in 1851. As Susan Barton argues, this was the first modern package holiday and the spectacular debut of popular tourism, whose subsequent history she tracks through to the mass exodus of “Brits Abroad” a hundred years later. Whence the initiative, the organization, and, crucially, the funding for these modern folk migrations?

In this well-crafted monograph Barton charts the extensive role of Victorian and later working-class collectives in promoting the cause of holidays for the people. Securing mutually recognized time off without employer reprisals was one objective, but securing funds for time away became more urgent as travel and longer stay accommodation became an increasingly common expectation. Workers in traditional employment did not expect to be paid for time off, amassing holiday money on the eve of major breaks with extra hours and more intense labor. This was called bull week, a feverish episode that reproduced the spasmodic pattern of pre-industrial production. Friendly Societies, trade unions, and similar organizations in the dense undergrowth of working-class pub and club land pioneered more incremental provision in year-round or ad hoc holiday and excursion savings schemes. Also prominent in the cause were temperance societies concerned to eradicate the excessive drink and whoopee that characterized the traditional worker released from labor and impeded the necessary improvement of his class. Membership of the various organizations came predominantly from the better-off, more respectable fractions of the working class who contrived their own independent practice of “rational recreation,” the prescriptive, would-be educational formula of middle-class leisure reformers (98). At the same time the growing excursion traffic, of which the Great Exhibition furnished an encouragingly numerous and orderly example, demonstrated the new market potential in popular tourism and leisure services. It was on the strength of his early success with temperance excursions in the 1840s that Thomas Cook turned travel entrepreneur in direct competition with workers’ cooperative agencies, part of a process that was to turn leisure into an industry, converting its subjects into consumers rather than partners in its production.

Holidays with pay as a modern entitlement was a later achievement. Here as elsewhere Barton is instructively sensitive to traditional values in working-class culture that complicated the push for radical change in the fraught contract between capital and labor. Manual workers...