Oberammergau

2010 sees the Bavarian village of Oberammergau take centre stage with its production of its famous Passion Play.

The event dates back to 1634 when the villagers first performed a Play in the cemetery alongside the local church as a thanksgiving for sparing their community from plague deaths. The village planned to perform their play every ten years, but the 1674 event was delayed until 1680 and ever since the it has usually been performed in the 'zero year', with certain enforced exceptions such as 1940 and the delay of the 1920 event until 1922.

There have additional 'years' too. A special performance was given in 1815 as thanksgiving that followed the fall of Napoleon and in 1871 there was another thanksgiving performance for peace at the conclusion of the Franco-German War. Other exceptions have also been made in centenary years, such as 1934; a year that marked the last performance until after World War II.

Admission fees to the Play were first made in 1790 and package arrangements have been a feature since the 1870 event.For 1880 a new theatre was built and the following event in 1890 had the benefit of much easier rail access.

British tour operators have been organising packages since at least 1880. In 1900 George Lunn first took passengers to the event, backed by a series of small ads on the front page of the Times. The cost of tour combining the Play and the Paris Exhibition was 14 Guineas (£14.70p). By 1930 over 5,000 visitors travelled on packages organised by the Lunn organisation (brochure cover depicted left), as capacity was increased thanks to a further new enlarged auditorium, a far cry from the original 17th century performances in the local cemetery.

The Great Eastern Railway also recognised the potential of Oberammergau and ran small adverts in The Times for the1900, 1910 and 1922 events extolling the virtues of its links via Harwich and Hook of Holland to corridor trains to Munich. However, by 1922, competition was hotting up.Thomas Cook were appointed official ticket agents by the Oberammergau organisers and a number of other organisers appeared on the scene. Among them were Dean & Dawson (then owned by the Great Central Railway), the Church Travellers Club based in Chelsea, the British Touring Club and a Miss Bishop who offered four weeks in the Dolomites including a visit to Oberammergau for the substantial sum of 79 Guineas (£82.95p) and claimed to have been organising "private social tours" since 1900.

The Times of 12th May 1930 reported that four-fifths of the audience at the 11th May opening performance was either English or American, claiming "the ceaseless buzz of conversation in English made the mountain village resemble a popular seaside resort in July or August".

Lunn were again at the forefront in 1934 and their 1934 brochure boasts of expertise gained from organising visits to the 1900, 1910, 1922 and 1930 events and refers to the local representative, a Miss Barbara Walton, said to be resident in Oberammergau for seven years. The 1934 brochure must also be most unusual, if not unique, in having on page 3 an extract from a letter written to Miss Walton by His Grace the Archbishop of York, William Temple (later Archbishop of Canterbury) following his visit to Oberammergau as a Lunn passenger in 1930.

The 1934 event also brought in new operators from the WTA (Workers Travel Association) based at Transport House with a network of agents in Co-operative Societies right across the UK whose brochure (depicted below) had colourful cover typical of the mid-1930s travel posters.

The 1934 tours also included options to travel by air to either Cologne or Basle with onward travel by rail. Other options in the WTA programme included a 'knapsack tour' with an emphasis on walking in the area and accommodation based in private houses or, whilst in Oberammergau, dormitories with mattresses! One of these knapsack tours was on offer at £15/10/- (£15.50p) for 15 days, a similar length tour from the Lunn Company cost £24/19/6d (£24.97p) - a huge outlay for the ordinary working man in 1934.

The popularity of the Oberammergau Play was not diminished by World War II. The first event in 1950. Frames main programme for that summer shows a lead-in price of £22/18/6d (£22.93) for a six day arrangement but refers its readers to a special Oberammergau brochure. By 1960 Blue Cars was offering a variety of tours combining the Play with stays in several Austrian resorts with prices typically about £35 for a 10 day tour using rail couchette travel via the Hook of Holland.

As the UK package holiday market enjoyed rapid expansion in the late 60s and 70s, the demand for both seats to the Play and local accommodation far outstripped supply and reservations were being solicited two years before the event as evidenced by the Cosmos Coach Tours brochure from 1978 (shown right). Cosmos was planning up to 13 tours and expecting to take 20,000 passengers to the 1980 event using coach, rail and air travel. No indication of cost was given but registrations were being taken backed by a £5 refundable registration fee.

For British visitors the 2010 event will take place against the backdrop of a much devalued Pound against the Euro. However, this has happened before the 1970 event took place not long after the Wilson devaluation of the late-1960s and the infamous 'V' Form foreign currency allowance. It appeared to have little effect on demand for Oberammergau's unique event.

The Austrian Southern Railway and Opatija

It is easy to forget throughout the Victorian era one of the strongest powers in Europe was the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. The very same year of Thomas Cook's first temperance trip to Loughborough marked the establishment of the Sudbahn. 

By 1858 the Sudbahn was in private ownership and despite forming landlocked Austria's key link to the Adriatic, it fell into financial difficulties.It was rescued by Frederick Julius Schuler (1832-1894) who by 1878 was its Director. Schuler recognised the climatic advantages of Abbazia on the Istrian Peninsula and its potential to be turned into a leisure destination for the affluent of Viennese society. The poster depicted (right) dates from about 1910. Photogrpah below is from about the turn of the 19/20th centuries.

Schuler invested in new hotels in Abbazia (now Opatija), beginning with the Hotel Kvarner in 1884. It was originally planned as a sanitorium for those with lung disease and a nearby cemetery was even removed, presumably to ease the mind of potential patients. However, Schuler turned the project into a hotel that was aimed to be Vienna's own Sacher Hotel by the sea. It remains a premier hotel in Opatija over 120 years later. 

The Kvarner was indeed so successful that the very next year Schuler's railway opened a second hotel, the Kronprinzessin Stephanie in honour of the imperial heiress. She attended the grand opening of the hotel with her husband, the ill-fated Crown Prince Rudolf. Later renamed Regina Elena and now the Imperial,  it saw many famous guests including Franz Josef I, James Joyce, Gustav Mahler, Isadora Duncan and even after World War II, Josip Tito.

Opatija continued to prosper into the early 20th century, especially as a health resort thanks to its mild climate, and with its 7 km promenade became known as 'the Nice of the Adriatic'. However, it seems  unlikely that Schuler could have contemplated that the resort he helped to put on the tourism map would belong to four different countries within the space of a century. After World War I, Opatija became a part of Italian territory, and then, after World War II it was handed to Yugoslavia and, since 1991, it has been in Croatia.

Dispelling the great 1841 myth

Lazy journalists and poorly researched books often feed their readers somewhat misleading advice that 1841 was the beginning of the 'Package Holiday Industry'. This errant nonsense is based on the fact that the 5th July 1841 witnessed the trip from Leicester to Loughborough organised by Thomas Cook. This 'excursion' had a very narrow purpose; it was to attend a Temperance Meeting in Loughbough and the founding a holiday business had almost certainly never occurred to Cook at this stage.

In fact, although there were further excursions in the succeeding years, it is strongly arguable that Cook's ambitions to be a professional travel / excursion organiser do not fully surface until probably as late as 1850. That was the year that Cook himself first used the description 'excursion agent' in his business dealings. The following year, 1851, was dominated by the Great Exhibition in London's Hyde Park and that event was a major catalyst in the furtherance of Cook's travel activities.

Over the years the '1841 myth' has probably been somewhat encouraged by the Cook organisation. Indeed, as far back as 1891 a book was commissioned and published by the Cook organisation written by a well-known author of the time, W Fraser Rae. The book was lavishly bound and ran to over three hundred pages. In addition a grand banquet was held on the 22nd July 1891 at the Metropole Hotel in London to "commerorate the fiftieth year of the business of Thomas Cook and Son" attended by three hundred guests. Among many distinquished guests were minor Royals and many titled individuals. It was hosted by John Mason Cook, son of Thomas. Below is an extract from the programme with names of the more distingusihed guests on the left, whilst to the right is the programme of music played during the banquet. There were also several speeches and toasts, including, of course one by John Mason Cook.

John Mason was undoubedly one of the first masters of PR in the travel business and no doubt one of his motives was to steal a march on his competitors.

Competitors? Yes, including one huge rival, that around 1891, was as big as the Cook business. Nowadays few have heard of this competitor; his name was Henry Gaze.

More of Henry Gaze's rise to fame will appear in future items in this blog.

Welcome to Tourism in Retrospect

This blog will attempt to look at past events and developments in the travel and tourism industry. As the industry has rapidly expanded in recent years, there is a danger that much of the early, and even quite recent, features of the tourism business will be lost.

As someone who has seen the arrival and departure of Concorde, the rise and decline of several resorts these events need to be recorded. Past printed material has now often been lost whilst much of contemporary tourism's daily operational pattern is reliant on digital forms of communication and may not necessarily be recorded in the manner of past decades.

It is hoped this blog may create a forum for those with an interest in the history of tourism development and also be of use to local historians in places where tourism is, or has been, a significant factor.