The Beckoning Horizon: Preliminary

Distant, mysterious, attractive: the limit of our visual surroundings here on Earth, a horizon is something particular to ourselves. Few can share the horizon we see, and if we move far it takes on a new shape.

Like the mythical hoard of gold at the end of the rainbow it is always there but can never be reached. We can get to where we saw our horizon stood, but by then it will have moved, taken up a new line in order to taunt us as if saying ‘you can’t catch me’.

Horizons demand that they be crossed. Humans are usually curious. They are prone to believe that things are better in somewhere else. Peoples with an outward urge send their pioneers to find out. If reports come back about new opportunities in distant lands, new travellers will set off to conquer, trade or perhaps settle there.

If they are successful another kind of traveller might follow: the leisure visitor, the tourist. These four represent the main kinds of travellers – the explorers, the conquerors, business people and tourists. To them, the horizon beckons them to travel, to enjoy whatever they can find beyond. This brief analysis will attempt to illustrate how tourism has been shaped by its influence.

These groups are not mutually exclusive. Explorers might trade, the conquerors enjoy rest and recuperation. Business people get time off for leisure, tourists …. well, tourists explore.

That term conqueror is chosen deliberately, since this might mean military action, evangelism, political or economic expansion, maybe cultural activities. Creating the British Empire meant all of them in greater or lesser measure around the world. Business people and tourists followed in the footsteps of the soldiers, missionaries and imperial administrators. Do business travellers ‘conquer’? Yes – economically.

Do tourists – leisure travellers – ‘conquer’? Yes – economically, by adding to trade, but also culturally, by bringing their own way and standard of life which local people at the destination might want to copy. And it works in reverse, the tourist returning home with souvenirs, goods and ideas that are absorbed into their own way of life, introducing new fashions and interest. Though of course the locals might resent the intrusion of an unpopular culture, resist and fight back.

That was always one of the main reasons for leisure travelling, for tourism. The Grand Tourist of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the young man sent to be educated in the ways of the world. He would return with paintings and prints, artefacts and written accounts of the ways of life of other countries and his own exploits while abroad.

The spa and seaside visitor during those same years might have similar acquisitions: more important, he or she had socialised with other people similar to themselves but probably encountered others who were very different. Their transactions, whatever they might have been, had both direct and indirect educational value.

During the nineteenth century church and educational groups such as those from the new Mechanics’ Institutes made day excursions to other towns, the countryside and the coast, introducing their members to a variety of new experiences. By the later part of the century they might be making longer journeys of a few days or more, perhaps in the company of Thomas Cook, John Frame, Sir Henry Lunn or T A Leonard, all pioneers of mass tourism who were inspired by ideas of education and improvement. Quentin Hogg had founded the Polytechnic Touring Association. In America, camping had become a popular activity in imitation of the wilderness pioneers, stimulated by the writings of Ernest Thompson Seton.

During the twentieth century there were more developments of an educational nature. Baden-Powell’s Boy Scouts and Girl Guides Associations were important organisers of educational tourism. The Swedish Touring Club set up shelters and cabins about a bicycle ride apart soon after its founding in 1885. In Germany Richard Schirrmann started a hostel for poor city schoolchildren to benefit from country travel, and the school excursion and later the school journey were both important in the country before the first world war.

Kurt Hahn came to Britain to escape the Nazis, and founded not only Gordonstoun School in Scotland with a strong outdoor training element, but also, with Lawrence Holt, the Outward Bound system of adventure training centres. The Youth Hostels Association began its network of British hostels for low-cost travel in 1930. The United States saw a spreading of what is still called the ‘Chautauqua’ adult education movement which started to run residential courses in New York State in 1874, though most seem to have been at that date non-environmental subjects such as Bible knowledge, music and literature.

In the UK ‘formal’ education involving travel has a long history, but relatively less widely used. As long ago as the seventeenth century London apothecaries were taken ‘herbarizing’ into the country to be taught to recognise useful plants. Geology and botany were both taught in universities and incorporated field visits from the early nineteenth century.

It was not until after the second world war that the new Field Studies Council starting setting up teaching centres and regional field courses, and counties such as Derbyshire began to open their own residential centres for schools to use. In 1957 Peter Lawrence organised his first canoeing trip for children, the basis of PGL Holidays. For adults interested in mountaineering, skiing and other outdoor pursuits commercial firms were established even earlier, some between the wars.

Even the appearance of some well known sun-and-sand holiday packages can be traced back to educational activities. The ‘traditional’ Butlins Holiday Camp started in Skegness in 1936 came forty years after tented encampments in Norfolk and the Isle of Man which were originally for politically- and religiously-minded gatherings of men to enjoy fellowship and discuss issues.

Butlin added his famous redcoats to organise entertainment, but as a fairground concessionaire he was well placed to add rides and sideshows. Again, the indirect social education from his sports, dances and competitions must have been great for those who stayed in these camps.

More recently, ‘special interest tourism’ has become a term associated with niche marketing of, amongst other things, educational breaks and holidays on subjects ranging from architecture and music to painting and photography, wine-tasting and creative writing. For example, Ind Coope began its Leisure Learning programme based on weekends at its UK hotels in 1975, and Martin Randall started his cultural tours in 1988.

It is a measure of the way in which the industry now perceives tourism that content-based travel is seen as a niche operation. Most forms of tourism, as described above, stemmed from some kind of blend of informal education with a high measure of enjoyment. Many influences contributed to the growth of travel: the element of exploration, whether pioneering or personal, was one, a response by the curious human to the beckoning horizon which lay all around.

Crossing the Divide

Tourists by the million have crossed from Britain to France over more than three centuries. Their destinations might have been the towns of the French coast, more distant places in Europe, or even further to the continents beyond the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. During the twentieth century air transport delivered a faster alternative, and in its closing years the Channel Tunnel gave rail links to the continental system.

Those travellers might have been seeking relaxation on sunny beaches, quiet countryside, city life, social adventure or any of a dozen other opportunities. For each and every one, something had attracted them to go abroad: stories heard from friends and acquaintances, or what they learnt in school. Or perhaps the reports of other travellers in newspapers and television. There may have been someone in a foreign country with whom they corresponded or talked on the telephone. In recent years the internet or the web might have played its part in bringing tempting tales of the enjoyment to be found far away.

All these sources of information added to the jigsaw of knowledge held by the recipient. Some of it, lively and fresh in the memory, would soon fade. Other snippets in letters and photos, leaflets, newspaper clippings, written notes, books, videos – even some souvenir presented by another traveller – would last longer, teasing reminders of an idea, an image, of another place desired, awaiting visitation.

These sources can be divided into four groups. The first are those brought by personal contact with people. The starters here are our parents, family members, friends and acquaintances, the people at home. As the youngest of children these are the sources of all our world knowledge. But we learn to crawl and then to walk, opening up new sets of opportunities for discovery for the first time as we explore our surroundings, opening doors onto the outside world and beginning to make our own way into places where before we could only go with parents.

This is the second group of information sources – the different forms of movement and means of travel. Walking is one, riding in a car or on a bike, are others. Buses, trains, ships and planes perhaps come later. Personal contacts are increased through the distinctive contribution of travel.

Each mode of movement has its own characteristics and peculiarities. For example, when we walk we have an all-round vision of the world, full of sounds and smells, things to touch and even to taste. A car on the other hand is restricted, cut off from all but vision and some sounds, some smells, and it goes where the driver chooses.

As passengers we don’t make the choice. Such a source of frustration to an exploring child! This feature, with someone else deciding where to go, and controlling therefore what we encounter, is a form of selection which elsewhere, in the media, is called editing, and it is found everywhere in travel and therefore in tourism too.

Very young children are exposed to the media of postal services, telephone and internet. Sometimes they are what is termed one-to-one, as with the telephone or individual postal messages like a birthday card; sometimes one-to-many as with a mass mailing leaflet or web page. These latter forms lead in to the mass media of newspapers, books, television, radio, audio and video recordings. Less common now are public speeches, once a staple means of political persuasion but now turned over to the broadcast media or set in films or plays.

All of these media represent indirect ways of accessing world knowledge. They rely entirely on the opinions and actions of other people in supplying information – the mediators of knowledge. It is interesting that our growing child has been in this situation before: relying on parents and others is also a matter of relying on someone else’s views and timing.

The fourth group of discovery processes are those within education – here meaning formal education, organised and structured, as opposed to the ‘informal’ which is that which we do ourselves when we move to find out things for ourselves. Of course it needs to be said straight away that all education relies on activities ranging from the more didactic – being told by someone else – to the heuristic – learning by our own efforts.

Over time there has been a shift from the didactic towards the heuristic, for good educational reasons, the growth of discovery media available, the increasing interactivity of communication and the sheer numbers of people taking part. Heuristics is about finding out, the student’s learning processes rather than the teacher’s telling processes. In this discussion ‘education’ refers to those structured and organised activities run by professional tutors, trainers and mentors. It means education as it is organised in schools, colleges, universities and adult education classes, and will be referred to as ‘formal’ education.

Four groups of activity have been described in the order in which they are encountered by the child growing into an adult. Formal education is entered only after the other three are well established as influences, somewhere around the age of five. Formal education is usually seen as completed after some ten to twenty years. However, for those who can do so, and who want to take advantage of them, formal systems of education are available life long.

Each of the four groups employs and builds on the previous groups’ activities. So travel extends the face-to-face nature of primary contacts with family members and others by adding the outcomes of mobility, the exploration of new places and people.

The media extends the range again with indirect or ‘virtual’ access to more destinations and sources beyond the normal reach. They also stimulate efforts to reach at least some of those places. Finally, education uses face-to-face contact, travel and communications media to reach its objectives.

The suggestion to be made is therefore that travel, and tourism, should be seen in a different way than the one it usually seems to occupy in public discussion. It is not just as a means of making money or of having a good time. It is most definitely more than that – it is a primary means of discovering the world and its peoples, of understanding it and how we deal with it.

Travel and tourism offer what the other forms of discovery do not – the ability to see things for ourselves. How that happens and whether the results are good or bad depends on how they are organised, by whom and with what aims and objectives they have.

Done well it is a contribution to the quality of life. Such enrichment comes from information flowing through the four broad channels of personal contact at home, personal contacts gathered as a result of travelling; the media, and education. The schematic below illustrates this. Information obtained through these sources is interpreted by individuals in the light of their existing, accumulated experience, and it is then stored. Human memory is one form of storage, rich and dynamic but easy to decay. The artificial media such as paper, photos and electronic recordings last longer, though they are less dynamic and lack the multiple facets of memories.

3D Media

William Randolph Hearst spoke to the nation through the New York Journal and to posterity through his house, Casa Grande.

Casa Grande is the central ‘keep’ of Hearst Castle on La Cuesta Encantada – “The Enchanted Hill” – the complex and grandiose buildings which were the inspiration for Xanadu in the film Citizen Kane. They perch on top of a 1,600 ft mountain looking out over the Pacific in California, at the centre of a 50,000-acre estate. Built between 1919 and 1947, Hearst Castle is really a collection of European-style structures in modern materials, designed to accommodate the acquisitive lifestyle of its owner.

Hearst Castle is now a California State Monument. The Spanish-style name of the main house seems more appropriate to European eyes, to whom a castle has curtain walls and crenellations. The multiple names reflect the fact that to William Randolph Hearst the place was an expression of many different ideas about his home, as power-base, family focus and memory of childhood explorations.

As a child of 10 in 1873 he had been taken by his doting mother on a European tour lasting eighteen months. They had seen the British Isles, France, Germany, Switzerland and Italy, tracing the kind of itinerary favoured by wealthy young Europeans on the Grand Tour. Spain was not included in those travels. The Spanish element of Casa Grande came from the settlers from that country who set up missions and ranches in an older California.

Having inherited his father’s wealth from silver mining and the estate, Hearst began to create a home to impress the world. His own business was newspapers, starting with the San Francisco Examiner once owned by his father, adding more plus consumer magazines and cinema newsreels later. Hearst wrote editorials and reports for the Examiner and for the New York Journal that he bought.

Together with contemporaries such as Joseph Pulitzer and Merrill Goddard of the New York Herald he set much of the tone and style of American opinion in the early twentieth century. His whole life was spent promoting his own opinions about the world, and he did so using his home as well as his papers. As Casa Grande/Hearst Castle grew, full of eclectic European-style architecture and objects and even a menagerie with zebra, lions and giraffes' William Randolph invited in politicians and playboys, film stars and financiers, for weekend parties presided over by himself. He could show off his culture and learning as well as his wealth and control of a media empire.

Hearst Castle was a home and a statement of power and an interest in art, and it is now a tourist attraction. There is a web site with information about its story. A visitor leaflet can be downloaded with a brief history and explanation of what can be seen at the property to take the narrative further. A Visitor Centre at the entrance to what is now a State Park shows a National Geographic Imax film about Hearst and the house.

From the Centre a shuttle bus climbs the mountain to deliver each party of visitors to a tour guide who will show them round. The architecture, works of art and the landscape – still with zebra and cattle to be seen – stimulate more thoughts about the place and its owner. Back at the Visitor Centre books, videos and DVDs can be bought about both of these and about the architect who worked for Hearst, Julia Morgan.

There are miniature reproductions of statues, there are candle snuffers, copies of tiles, ornaments and pictures. To some visitors these are just status symbols to be stuck on a shelf and hopefully admired by their visitors in turn – just as in the days of the Grand Tour. To others they provide three dimensional examples, on a smaller scale and less well made, perhaps, not only of the life of the man who collected the originals but also of a culture distant in both time and space.

To someone on one side of the world what did ancient Egypt look like on the other – or Greece, Russia or England? By themselves they tell very little. On the other hand, like the smell of a cake to a nostalgic mind they might set off a train of thought and enquiry which opens up a better understanding of what was, long ago, and what is, far away.

California still has the San Francisco Examiner and it has the Hearst San Simeon State Historical Monument. Both newspaper and tourist attraction tell their stories daily to thousands of people. Each of them have staff who select the stories and the illustrations for them. They decide which channels will carry those stories to people – newspaper sections, web site and special publications in the case of the paper; tour guides, books, videos, exhibition and Imax film for the Park.

They are informative, entertaining, profound, shallow, illuminating, educational or propagandist in turn according to how they relate their narratives and to how their audiences interpret the messages. Both are examples of different varieties of mass media, spreading their messages from their narrators to their mass audiences. The newspaper is a medium of two dimensions, the great buildings and collections of Hearst Castle are of three. Tourists ‘read’ landscapes and attractions the world over, three-dimensional media which have been created to say something to the people who behold them.

[Author's photos published by kind permission of the Director of Hearst Castle, State of California]

A Positive Role: Tourism As Education

The argument about re-evaluating tourism depends on two important points.

The first is that tourism’s educational value does not refer to some special ’niche’ activity, some form of tourism which is separate from all others. Labelling it as ‘special interest tourism’ under this guise misses the point. All tourism has some kind of educational value, because however people discover new places and people, and experience new events, contributes to their personal store of knowledge.

The second point is that in order to ensure tourism makes a positive contribution to the quality of life, tourism managers must understand how communication processes work within the broad field of tourism activity. Tourists use all their senses - sight, sound, touch, smell and taste – when they visit a destination. They perceive the landscapes, voices, music and everyday sounds; the different textures of the beach, the sea, the built environment; the scents and odours, the food and drink of the location.

This is not just important to those managers who happen to be socially and environmentally concerned. An effective operator selling Spanish beach holidays to twenty-somethings knows all about the importance of the smell of the paella and the taste of the beer. A successful dealer in siestas for the over-sixties is well aware that the scent of the gardens is all part of the product.

Nor is it just something that destination managers have to think about. Teachers already want to know what guide books are on hand at educational attractions, and what the quality and communication levels of the displays are. They know how the cultural and scientific influences at work in theme parks they take their school children to relate those aspects in their classroom work.

In turn, this should put good attractions and school visits high on the agenda for local government officers and councillors. Civil servants and members of parliament ought to take a similar interest. Good tourism is about much more than the tea-shop economy: it’s about the whole of life in many cities and areas of the countryside. It helps create the images of these places in a way which affects their manufacturing and service capabilities as well. In its very particular way tourism is the way of confirming to visitors what places are like.

Lowell, Massachusetts, an ex-industrial town which shares characteristics with many north of England former textile communities, applied the mantra: “Where people visit, other people want to live; where people live, other people set up businesses”.

Tourism is, properly managed, a part of regeneration processes. Coalbrookdale in eighteenth-century England helped create an industrial revolution by welcoming visitors to see its pioneering production and use of iron. The Great Exhibition showcased to the world how Britain had become an industrial nation. This kind of tourism informs and educates as well as entertains.

This kind of tourism communicates effective messages. Many are implied rather than explicit. The messages are conveyed in a multitude of ways, from promotional work through the environmental management of destinations to the provision of guide books, exhibitions and information panels. The nature of tourist staff in attractions and services in those places creates judgements in the minds of visitors through appearance, attitude and their quality of customer service.

The ways in which the media report on places affects outcomes – and so media relations work is an essential to the good manager. All of these channels of communication are capable of being used to persuade their audiences by their managers, but that is also a reminder of the importance of public understanding of how they are being influenced at different levels.

The argument being put forward in these pages is that tourism is a means of discovery which feeds our need to know and understand about our world. It can enrich the quality of life for everyone – or it can destroy it.