Slow Train to Switzerland

by Diccon Bewes

  Unlike Miss Jemima, we won’t be returning to Paris on the last leg of our tour; I’ll stay in Switzerland and my mother will go straight back to London. With only a few hours, rather than a few days, to play with, we decide to go and admire Baron Haussmann’s city makeover, which was in full swing by 1863. The cramped Paris of Quasimodo and D’Artagnan was at that time being bulldozed into wide boulevards and public parks. As Thomas Cook noted in May of that year:

  whole streets of close-crowded houses are gone, and not a trace of them can be found; whilst, as by the wand of some mighty magician, have sprung up on their sites lines of buildings – mansions or shops of great magnificence.

  Just such a shop is the Galeries Lafayette, which admittedly came after Haussmann but sits on the boulevard that bears his name and is the epitome of the Parisian grands magasins. Its interior is as opulent as most of the goods on sale, so we admire the art nouveau domes while ignoring the price tags. It apparently attracts 120 million visitors each year, and I think a good percentage of them are there with us. It’s like playing a game of sardines with 1000 participants, none of whom can stand still.

  Shopping was also on the 1863 Paris itinerary, with the ladies in particular succumbing to some retail therapy. They requested that their luggage restrictions be removed as “amid the attractions of the Parisian shops, it was found almost impossible to carry them out”, while on departure “the entire available staff of the hotel” was needed to attend to the luggage. We are decidedly more restrained, although I can’t resist indulging in a pain au chocolat. They always taste better in France.

  Shopping aside, Miss Jemima’s whistle-stop tour of Paris included a Sunday service at Notre-Dame, climbing to the top of the Pantheon, strolling down the Champs-Elysées and devouring the art in the Louvre: not so different from a modern visitor’s wish list, although that would have the obvious additions of the Eiffel Tower and the Sacré Coeur (dating from 1889 and 1914 respectively). Instead of these two was one must-see of that era: Napoleon’s tomb in the Hôtel des Invalides. These days the golden domed building itself is possibly more of a draw, but in Miss Jemima’s time the imposing red quartzite tomb was only two years old. Boney died in 1821 while in exile on the island of St Helena, although he had to wait 19 years before his body was brought back to Paris, and another 21 for his tomb beneath the dome to be finished. For Victorian visitors, beside an appreciation of the monument – “its magnificence was dazzling” – there was most likely also some Schadenfreude in seeing the last resting place of the man who’d (almost) conquered Europe but was defeated by Nelson and Wellington (with a little help from their European friends).

  Being closer in time to those events (the Battle of Waterloo was less than 50 years earlier), Miss Jemima probably had a relatively good grasp of contemporary French history. If your knowledge of that era relies on reading A Tale of Two Cities and watching Les Misérables, or even singing along to “Waterloo”, then here’s a quick guide to help you understand the France of 1863.

  The storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 precipitated the revolution that ended with the execution of Louis xvi and the creation of the First Republic. Then came Napoleon. A general in the revolutionary army, by 1804 he had crowned himself emperor. The First Republic was dead; long live the First Empire. But once a general, always a general, so Napoleon couldn’t resist invading most of Europe, only to lose it all in 1815; back to square one. The republic had failed, as had the empire, so the answer was obvious: bring back the monarchy, under another Louis (xviii), although that also didn’t last. In 1848 Revolution No. 3 (and you thought there’d only been one) ushered in the Second Republic for just four years, when it was a case of the empire strikes back.

  Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte has a unique place in French history, managing to be both the first president of France and its last monarch. Having been legitimately elected, he proclaimed himself emperor in 1852, so creating the Second Empire. Napoleon iii lasted much longer than his uncle (the first Napoleon), finally being overthrown in 1870 in favour of the Third Republic. However, he was very firmly in power when the Junior United Alpine Club arrived in Paris.

  Despite the “fatigues of sightseeing in a great city”, Miss Jemima enjoyed the French capital. She is most effusive about La Madeleine church – “Truly magnificent erection!” – and the Place de la Concorde – “one of the most magnificent squares in Europe” – but less impressed by the local work ethic:

  “It was a brilliant day, and we saw Paris in holiday attire. Indeed, when is Paris not keeping holiday? For what the Parisians call work, we would style recreation in England.”

  She left Paris happy, while I’m happy to leave.

  Train rides need never be dull. Oscar Wilde made sure that he brought his entertainment with him – “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train” – whereas Miss Jemima was content to look out of the window – “And what armies of poplars intersected the meadows; undoubtedly the poplar is the tree of the country” – or watch the locals:

  “the semi-theatrical yet joyous meeting and greeting between Monsieur and Madame, … as they kissed each cheek repeatedly then kissed again, the same repeated with compound interest on le petit enfant.”

  She and her companions even manage to “air our acquirements in la langue française” with “two very sensible and, of course, polite Frenchmen” sharing their carriage.

  The poplars and people may not have changed in 150 years, but the level of comfort has improved as much as the speed of travel. Miss Jemima’s account of their day-long trip – “these pent-up, stuffed carriages become a torment to us and in our parboiled condition, how we hailed every stoppage as a welcome opportunity to descend and cool” – sounds like a ride on the London Underground today. The regular stops back then were possibly as much about taking on fresh water for the engine as fresh air for the passengers. Electricity and air-conditioning have replaced both sorts of steam that train travel once produced, but the changed internal design of the carriage helped as well. In the 1860s French trains were similar to British ones: divided into compartments of different classes and levels of comfort, with no corridors or connecting doors. It was the same in French-speaking Switzerland, where Baedeker rated the lines as “far inferior in comfort” to those in the German-Swiss areas, which used the American design from the start: a central gangway with seats on either side and a door at each end of the carriage. That was much more comfortable, and better for accommodating large dresses or moving around to see the views.

  Miss Jemima was certainly impressed when she finally got to ride on such a train:

  “The Swiss undoubtedly understand and believe in comfortable railway travelling. The carriages on the broad gauge are not cut into compartments, but are large cushioned saloons with an aisle down the centre. Neither are the railway managers niggardly in space, nor bent on conveying strangers too swiftly through their lovely country, but transmit them from station to station with a measured dignity, at two-thirds of which we alighted to change carriages, but no bustle, fuss nor even steam, for the engines burn coal: consequently the funnels pour out a volume of smoke as black as any in Leeds or Lancashire.”

  Smoke outside, smoke inside. Cook’s Tourist’s Handbook to Switzerland makes it clear that smoking carriages were attached to every train, but indulging was not ladylike behaviour: “Gentlemen desiring to smoke should always seek a smoker’s compartment, as the odour of tobacco, which will cling to a carriage for days, is very nauseous, and often even injurious to certain temperaments.” When I first moved to Switzerland, the smoking compartments were still there on SBB trains – most carriages had a divider one third of the way down with smoking allowed in the smaller part. Swiss public transport, as well as stations, became smoke free in December 2005.

  Our carriage is a sleeker, modern version of the same design; cool, comfortable, smoke free and first class. The oddities of modern ticketing being what they are, it was
cheaper than second, so we gave ourselves an upgrade. However, our fellow travellers are neither sensible nor polite. We are surrounded by one man, three women, two children and a baby, though it’s not clear if they’re one big happy family. The youngsters are certainly less than happy, unless those screams are ones of pleasure, but they’re clearly a family along with the women. Each of their three faces is a wiser, wrinklier version of the younger model: three generations of motherhood. Where exactly the man fits into the picture is hard to judge: father, grandfather, brother, uncle or maybe all four. I’m left thinking that Thomas Cook would not be amused – these are definitely children he would classify as not to be taken to Switzerland.

  Salvation comes in the form of lunch, which brings peace to the carriage. Never having travelled first class in a TGV, I hadn’t realised that food was included, so our preparation for the journey involved eating lunch near the station. But free food is free food, so we indulge in a second lunch. Then, helped by the gentle rocking of the train, the kids subside into snuffles of a post-prandial snooze, surrounded by their detritus strewn all over the carriage – messy, but blissfully quiet.

  Lunch at your seat is a far cry from the bun fight that Cook & Co. had to experience when eating on the go. In his report of that first trip to Switzerland, Cook tells how the 62 passengers in his group were fed while waiting in Dijon station, which had Refreshment Rooms that were “pronounced by Bradshaw as one of the best Buffets in France”. He had telegraphed ahead earlier that day, asking the proprietor “to provide dinner for fifty, if he thought they would have time to eat it”. The menu was slightly more than a filled baguette:

  a most excellent dinner had been prepared, and so admirably was it served that in ten minutes a considerable party got a satisfactory repast. Soup, fish, meats, potatoes, peas, French beans, sweets and fruits were all served in rapid succession.

  I only hope he had some indigestion tablets to hand out on the train afterwards.

  The French countryside flashes past until Mâcon, where the train transforms from a hare into a tortoise. We rechristen it the TPV, or Train à Petite Vitesse, although it still goes at a speed that would give Miss Jemima a fit of the vapours. While she’d be happier with the even slower pace needed to wind along the Rhone valley, to be honest no one wants to go faster just when the scenery becomes more interesting. The cliffs grow higher as the river gets narrower and hills threaten to become mountains; a lumpier landscape means that Switzerland can’t be far away. The closer we get, the more impatient I become, but, of course, we are running late. We may be travelling to Geneva, the birthplace of Swiss watch-making, but we’re on a French train, so the normal rules of punctuality don’t apply. Finally we arrive in Switzerland, or la Suisse as it’s called in these parts.

  Hopping across the Channel has become the travel equivalent of a microwave ready meal, so quick and easy that we barely notice it any more. Visiting France is now commonplace for many Brits: a day trip to Calais supermarkets, a weekend at Disneyland Paris, a summer holiday in the Dordogne, a year in Provence – each of them seems normal, whether by car, train or plane. Even if some of us still don’t really understand the language(s) or road rules, the Continent has long since lost its air of mystery. But 150 years ago, things were very different. Going to France was an adventure, not least because the country had been the enemy for most of the past 800 years; the Battle of Waterloo was closer in time to Miss Jemima than the Cuban Missile Crisis is to us today.

  As for travelling onwards to see the Alps, it might as well have been Outer Mongolia in many people’s minds, so distant and so alien, and yet almost familiar and welcoming through the poems and paintings of the incurable Romantics. Byron, Turner, Wordsworth and Shelley – they had made the Alpine scenery seem inviting to the British public, while adventurous mountaineers such as Leslie Stephen and Edward Whymper were making headlines by conquering peak after peak. The seaside was out, mountains were in. Nevertheless, as appealing and exciting as it was, most people had neither the time nor the money to go off on a Grand Tour; that was still largely something for rich young men whose rite of passage was to experience life in the bars and brothels of Europe. Still, the desire was there and holidays were becoming more normal for the almost-wealthy, the growing middle classes who were getting tired of British breaks. Miss Jemima’s first words in her journal are telling:

  “What an anxious question this annual holiday is now becoming! Everyone has been to Scotland, some of us had done the Land’s End, Ireland is not everybody’s choice, the International Exhibition had tired us all of London, Scarbro’ is only suitable for invalids and children, the Lake District done years ago, and Fleetwood is worse than Scarbro’ – where shall we go next?”

  Where indeed. The obvious answer was abroad – the Continent, as the British like to call the rest of Europe – but such a trip involved time and money, both of which had been in short supply for anyone other than the idle rich. Now, though, as the leader of the Industrial Revolution, Britain had become the wealthiest country in the world and the only one where more people lived in towns than the countryside. A whole new class was developing rapidly, one between factory workers and landowners, a middle class of doctors, lawyers, bankers and vicars. It was a group of people who had enough money and enough time to think of a holiday abroad; all that was needed was the means. Enter Thomas Cook.

  There’s no clear evidence of why he chose Switzerland for his next big trip. It was hardly an undiscovered country (the first Murray Handbook had appeared 25 years before), although Cook hadn’t been there himself at that point, and as we’ve seen, his first forays across the Channel ten years before weren’t so successful. When he announced the first trip on 6 June 1863, he tried to explain the delay:

  For many years we have been pressed to attempt a trip to Switzerland but two great difficulties always presented themselves in the face of this idea: First, we were so wedded to Scotland … that we felt unable to give the time requisite for a Swiss excursion. … In the second place, we always felt the difficulty of attempting to conduct anything like large parties where there were no complete links of railways or steamboat communication.

  That changed with his trip to Paris in May of that year, where he got both new information on routes and a promise of cheap fares. A Swiss trip was now viable, and Cook obviously had an inkling that if he could provide a practical way for people to get to the Alps, they would want to follow in the footsteps of painters and mountaineers. He was the right man with the right plan at the right moment. Taking people by train made the idea feasible in terms of time; taking them in a group made it possible in terms of money. He could offer a tour that was affordable and achievable within two or three weeks. It was the perfect solution, just as long as there were enough customers to make it profitable. That was impossible to predict, so he took the plunge to see what would happen.

  While the lure of the mountains – fresh air, spectacular scenery, great cheese – has not changed, the means of reaching them has. I could have got to Geneva by plane, train or even automobile, but I took the boat–train combination, just as those first Cook’s tourists did. That showed me one thing about my journey so far: not a lot has changed in the last century and a half, apart from speed.

  My trip from Newhaven to Geneva was slow by modern standards but far faster than Miss Jemima’s, mainly thanks to the TGV rather than the ferry, although it wasn’t so different that she wouldn’t recognise it. Just think how much more advanced we are in other areas, such as communication or warfare, compared to the nineteenth century. Railways were the revolution that made this trip possible, shrinking Europe to such an extent that going abroad for two weeks became a reality for the first time. Still, in the age of the plane the train is holding its own, at least in Europe. Fly from London to Paris and by the time you’ve got to the airport, queued for security, waited to board, gone up in the air, come down again, waited for your luggage and finally travelled back into the centre, you’re probably better
off getting on the train at St Pancras and relaxing all the way.

  For 150 years the train has kept on running in the face of faster or more flexible competition. While it has faced cutbacks and delays, it has not gone the way of the VHS tape or the USSR and been consigned to the scrapheap of history. If anything, train travel is enjoying a revival in its fortunes as people seek either to do more than just get from A to B as quickly as possible or to reduce their carbon footprint. Slow travel is back, with the trip itself often now part of the holiday, both the means and the end. Miss Jemima and Mr Cook must be smiling in their graves.

  TWO

  THE CITY BY THE LAKE

  It is a great mistake to suppose that travelling in Switzerland is so very difficult that it may not be undertaken by ladies, or by persons not of the strongest mental and physical calibre … even delicate persons may, with tolerable ease, reach the famed scenes of Geneva.

  —Thomas Cook, The Excursionist, August 1863

  Sunday in Geneva was the first highlight of that first tour

  One franc and fifty rappen a day. That’s all an average Swiss factory or farm worker earned in 1863 – just enough to buy a bar of soap or three kilos of flour. In today’s money, it’s about 22 francs, or closer to a typical hourly wage. Switzerland was a relatively poor country in the mid-nineteenth century, certainly in comparison to Britain, where workers earned a lot more for shorter hours: three times as much money for a factory worker on 10 hours a day rather than the 12–13 hours in Switzerland, though both were at work 6 days a week. That included children in many cases; child labour was abolished in Switzerland only in 1877.