by Diccon Bewes
At least food in Switzerland was cheaper than in Britain – beef was 1 franc per kilo compared to 1.70 francs (8 pence a pound in old English money, or around £2.40 today) – but it ate up twice as much of the household budget, because that itself was substantially lower. Other goods were unbelievably expensive – a pair of shoes was 6½ pence in Britain but 5 francs (nine times as much) in Switzerland. Renting a three-room flat in Switzerland cost 275 francs a year, whereas a two-up, two-down house in Britain was only £8 (or 200 francs). Things that seemed cheap for visitors were often out of reach for most Swiss people – a second-class train ticket from Lausanne to Bern cost 7.20 francs, which is 100 francs in today’s money but back then was more than two days’ wages for even a skilled Swiss worker.
Such luxuries were almost impossible for a normal Swiss household in the 1860s, when 60 per cent of its money went on food, 20 per cent on rent and heating and 14 per cent on clothes. There wouldn’t have been a lot left for doctor’s bills, let alone train trips. Today, a typical Swiss household spends 10 per cent of its (much higher) budget on travel and only 9 per cent on food and drink; the biggest chunk (36 per cent) goes on taxes and insurance.
Rural poverty was a fact of life in nineteenth-century Switzerland, which had almost no natural resources other than water, wood and milk, a rugged landscape that wasn’t particularly suited to arable farming, and poor internal transport. It relied heavily on imports to survive, which was made harder with no access to the sea, but at least it controlled the crucial Alpine passes, so could make a living from imports and exports. There was money in and around the prosperous cities of the north, such as Basel or Zurich, where textiles and watches, bankers and merchants were the generators of wealth, but not much trickled down into the countryside. Half of Switzerland’s 2.5 million people were then living at a basic level and life expectancy was 40 years for men and 43 for women, or half what it is now. So while Miss Jemima would be content with the “famed scenes of Geneva”, she would also be confronted with beggars and paupers in the countryside.
Famine, floods and fires made a hard life impossible for many, so they fled abroad. They didn’t just go to neighbouring countries where they could maybe find a job, but overseas, where they could build a new life. In 1850 there were 50,000 Swiss living abroad; by 1880 this had shot up to 250,000; by 1914, over 400,000 Swiss had left their native country. For somewhere the size of Switzerland that is a significant percentage of the population, although in a few cases the emigrants were paid to leave. The situation in some places was so bad that they shipped the paupers to America so the community didn’t have the cost of looking after them.
Switzerland had only been a country in the modern sense for a decade or so. For five centuries it had been a loose confederation of states (known as cantons), with almost no central government or national identity. Then in the space of 50 years, it endured invasion, famine, social unrest and civil war, and was reinvented three times until a new federation emerged in 1848. That federal state has survived until now, although that wasn’t a foregone conclusion. The original three cantons united in 1291 to resist their Austrian overlords; as more cantons joined, the Swiss Confederation had grown to 13 cantons (and a motley collection of territories, protectorates and allies) by the time Napoleon invaded in 1798. He swept away the whole system and introduced a new Helvetic Republic, a single state with one government. It wasn’t popular and was abolished before its creator could lose the Battle of Trafalgar. However, a return to a newer version of the old Confederation, this time with 22 cantons, proved equally untenable, thanks to the divisions between town and country, Protestants and Catholics, rich and poor. The inevitable civil war came in 1847, after the Catholic cantons formed a secret alliance (known in German as the Sonderbund) and tried to break away. War only lasted a month, with victory for the Protestants and a total of 98 fatalities – a very civil war.
That short conflict led to a long peace under a new constitution that created a federal government, a federal capital in Bern, a single market and a single currency. The Swiss nation and franc were born. Fifteen years later, the new republic was doing alright, especially in comparison to the previous five decades when it had been constantly divided or conquered. Nevertheless, progress was slow, with real development hampered by both geography and politics. However, change was just around the corner.
In the decades immediately after Cook’s first tour, the Swiss railways, then in their infancy, would expand over and under the mountains; the pharmaceutical companies would explode (though not literally) into life; Daniel Peter would invent his milk chocolate and Karl Elsener would create his Swiss army knife; and, most importantly, Johanna Spyri would write a book about a little orphan girl who lived in the mountains with her grandfather and a worryingly large number of goats. The British would come in their thousands, bringing their money and their morals with them – an economic and social invasion that would affect Switzerland almost as much as any of the far-flung corners of the British Empire. Not that that was the intent: the Brits came simply for some fun and adventure in the playground of Europe.
What did the British think of the Swiss in Miss Jemima’s day? Our heroine doesn’t say much on the subject, but others did. Thomas Cook commented that “The Swiss are a kind, generous and appreciative people”, while another travelling diarist, Miss M.J. Furby, noted that “They seemed poor but quite contented people”. But it’s Mr Murray who holds forth in wonderful style:
On the subject of the moral condition of the Swiss, and their character as a nation, there is much variety of opinion. The Swiss with whom the traveller comes into contact, especially the German portion of them, are often sullen, obstinate, and disagreeable, and he is annoyed by the constant mendicancy of the women and children, even in remote districts, and on the part of those who are not, apparently, worse off than their neighbours. This disposes the traveller to dislike and to take very little interest in the people amongst whom he is travelling; he has also heard much of their timeserving, their love of money, and their readiness to fight for any paymaster in former times.
He goes on to praise Swiss guides – “For the most part, the guides may be said to be obliging, intelligent, and hard-working men” – while warning of the men in the coaches, “The conductors, especially with a small additional fee, are generally civil; the clerks &c, at the diligence offices are occasionally insolent and disobliging.” In the end, he appreciates the ease of travelling in “the land of liberty”:
There are no passports, no custom-houses, no tolls, no gendarmes; none of those ridiculous restrictions to prevent people from incurring danger which are so annoying in France and Germany; and no interference whatever with the individual freedom, whilst there are nearly everywhere good inns, good roads, and tolerable means of locomotion.
The means of locomotion have only got better since then.
Geneva was one of the pockets of wealth in the Switzerland of 1863, and that’s largely down to watches, banks and one determined man – a Frenchman at that – Jean Calvin. The man from Picardy transformed Geneva into a Protestant Rome, making it a place of nineteenth-century pilgrimage, although not for nuns and kneeling worshippers. This city was top of the must-see list for those who believed that hard work and proper behaviour were the way to salvation, or at least to having a good life before enjoying a good death. A newly industrialised Britain had discovered that the Protestant work ethic produced material and spiritual benefits in equal measure. So they came to see the city of Calvin, “that tried citadel of Protestantism” as Miss Jemima described it; although she also called him “the supreme Dictator”, so this wasn’t exactly hero worship. Naturally, on arriving in Geneva the first thing our travellers did was go to church. It was a Sunday morning, after all.
Gare Cornavin, Geneva, which only opened in 1858, was
Miss Jemima’s first taste of Switzerland
With its simple stone clock tower and A-frame nave, Holy Trinity Church would not look out of pla
ce in the Cotswolds or the Dales. It’s an English village church that happens to sit in the middle of Switzerland’s second city, halfway between the lake and the station. You might think that odd until you learn that Anglicans first fled to Geneva in the 1550s, not because they fancied living by the lake but because they feared dying at the stake. England under Mary I was not a safe place for those who thought the Pope was a charlatan in red shoes. Holy Trinity was founded in 1555 by Anthony Gilby and Christopher Goodman, two Marian exiles who went on to help create the Geneva Bible, an English translation that pre-dates the King James Version. This became the bible of choice for many English-speaking Protestants, including the Pilgrim Fathers, who took it with them on the Mayflower. The current church building on Rue du Mont Blanc dates from August 1853, built where the city walls had stood until three years earlier. The roll call of chaplains shows that Miss Jemima would have listened to a sermon from Henry Dowton. Many chaplains later and the church is still there, with all its services in English.
Inside it feels just as English, not as bare as Swiss Protestant churches nor as fussy as Catholic ones: simple wooden pews with well-thumbed New English Hymnals, memorials to British Consuls long since gone, the hymn board showing this week’s choices (398, “Lift up your hearts!” and 436, “Praise my soul, the King of Heaven”) and a poster about weekly coffee mornings. I find churches fascinating places – not for their religious role, which leaves me cold in disbelief, but for their architecture, history, peacefulness and feeling of community. This church is no different. It may be lacking in architectural splendour, but that doesn’t mean it’s not at the heart of its own community. As for peace, there’s plenty of that. Cocooned inside the tranquil, dark nave, you forget that one of Geneva’s busiest streets is outside the door. For me, every church has something individual about it, something I remember long after stepping outside into the real world. At Holy Trinity, it’s the wall memorial adorned with a small pickaxe: “In tender memory of Howard Neil Riegel who perished on Mont Blanc July 12 1898, offered by his loving friends Beatrice and Fanny Suckling.” Those last two names are so English they’re positively Dickensian.
Having nourished the soul, Miss Jemima and friends proceeded with their traditional English Sunday by sitting down to lunch. But this was no Sunday roast, it was a table d’hôte, a communal meal (eaten with Americans, Germans and French, no less) of multiple courses. The whole thing impressed her so much that she listed everything they ate:
“Ten courses served in succession; it reads like an index to a cookery book …
1 Vegetable soup (mild)
2 Salmon, with cream sauce
3 Sliced roast beef with brown potatoes
4 Boiled fowl, served on rice
5 Sweetbreads
6 Roast fowl with salad
7 Artichokes
8 Plum pudding, steeped in brandy
9 Sponge cakes and stewed fruit
10 Sweet pudding in iced custard
11 Two varieties of creams
12 Ripe cherries”
Artichokes and cherries aside, that doesn’t sound like the lightest or healthiest meal around. No wonder they decided to spend the afternoon exploring the city, as much to walk off the food as see the sights. But what was there to see in Geneva back then? Today’s tourists might come for the Jet d’Eau, one of the world’s tallest fountains, or a tour of the United Nations building, but both those were a long time in the future in 1863. Time to consult the Murray Handbook:
Although Geneva is deservedly a great focus for travellers of all nations, it possesses within it few objects of interest to the passing stranger. As a town, it is not very prepossessing; it has no fine public buildings; in short, scarcely any sights.
Not the most glowing recommendation, but the book does goes on to praise the city’s location beside the lake and near the mountains, and devotes eight pages to describing the sights that it had just declared not worth seeing, as well as giving a potted history and shopping tips. That is much like most guidebooks today, all of which can be viewed as direct descendants of this format, and of its German counterpart Baedeker. This is the grandmother of all guidebooks, so let’s meet the old lady herself.
My Handbook to Switzerland is the ninth edition, published in May 1861 and most likely the one Miss Jemima used, since it was the latest edition available in June 1863. It’s a small hardback with burgundy-red covers, 590 thin pages and small print. It has fold-out maps but no illustrations and is organised around different touring routes, rather than alphabetically or by region. So, for example, the Geneva section is part of Route 53, which falls about a third of the way into the book. In all there are 170 different routes, some of them quite short and all cross-referenced, so you sometimes have to leaf back and forwards. It’s not always user friendly, at least not to a user from the twenty-first century.
Before the routes comes the advice, 66 pages of practical information on everything from money and modes of travelling to guides and local customs. So we can discover that horse-drawn carriages “at convenient hours and very moderate fares now traverse almost every road in Switzerland daily” or be warned that “In making purchases, as in the choice of inns, travellers should be cautious of following blindly the advice of the guide, who too often regards the percentage offered or the quantity of liquor supplied to him more than the interest of his employer”. We can also get top survival tips, like “Many persons find relief from the intense thirst by keeping a pebble in the mouth.” Tasty.
Best of all, given that many of the book’s readers will never have been to Switzerland, there are five suggested Skeleton Tours for planning a trip. Wonderful idea, until you actually see what is being proposed:
A: TOUR FOR PERSONS WHO DO NOT RIDE; about six weeks of easy travelling.
That covers almost the whole of Switzerland and beyond: Basel to Chur, Lugano to Schaffhausen, Constance to Mont Blanc, and everything in between. You’d essentially be on the go constantly for six weeks – in a carriage. If that wasn’t enough, then Tour B was the same but with Zurich thrown in for good measure.
C: ROUTE FOR MODERATE PEDESTRIANS, OR FOR LADIES ABLE TO RIDE, including most of the remarkable scenery of the Central Alps. Three months.
This was a serious tour suggestion, obviously for those with both time and money, and very good shoes. Much of the itinerary, which covers every corner of the country, is on foot (for the men, anyway), with over 70 stops and excursions listed. The description does at least recognise that not everyone is equally able: “Excursions rather too difficult and fatiguing for delicate ladies are given in italics.” One such excursion is simply written as “Ascend the Aeggischhorn”, omitting the fact that it’s a mountain just under 3000m high.
For a shorter trip, consider this:
D: TOUR OF FOURTEEN OR SIXTEEN DAYS, hard travelling and fine weather.
That might sound more doable to our modern time sensibilities, but they’re not joking about the hard travelling. Day 1 is either Schaffhausen, Rhine Falls and Zurich, or Basel and Lucerne. Then it’s walking and riding through central Switzerland, across the Bernese Oberland, over into Savoy, back to Lake Geneva, on to Bern and Basel. Every day somewhere new, a Victorian version of “If it’s Tuesday it must be Grindelwald” but without the tour bus. And there’s more:
E: TOUR FOR PRACTISED PEDESTRIANS, keeping to the higher parts of the Swiss and Savoy Alps.
The crucial word here is “pedestrians”, which doesn’t mean someone walking along a street but someone hiking across country and up above 3000m. The handbook details 52 days of walks, but advises that “from 10 to 14 days additional should be allowed for rest and detention by bad weather”. That’s alright then: 10 days of rest dotted in between 52 days of exertion. It sounds like a great holiday for mountain goats.
Such suggested tours were obviously fairly impractical for most visitors, especially those who were only in Switzerland for a fortnight or so, but the book itself is more helpful when it comes to the detai
ls for each place. For example, in Geneva it has hotel suggestions with comments (“Hotel d’Angleterre, a new but second-rate inn, near the railway; Hotel du Rhone, clean and reasonable”), a map, a general overview of the city and its history, a short bio of Calvin, a quick run-through of the main sights – Cathedral, Zoological Museum, Public Library, Botanic Garden – and practical information about trains, the British Consul (“most obliging and anxious to be useful”), day trips and shopping. That last part is very much for the Englishman (and woman) abroad, listing where to buy English cutlery, good stationery, the best snuff, English books, and of course good tea.
Perhaps the most engaging part of the book for a modern reader isn’t the lengthy descriptions of the hikes but the adverts at the back – 52 pages of ads touting hotels, portmanteaus, watches, passports, maps, telescopes, insurance and cough remedies. In case you’re not entirely sure what a portmanteau is, it’s nothing more than a mini-trunk with drawers, dividers and compartments. Rather oddly, the adverts cover everywhere from Munich and Florence to Paris and London, so maybe this section was the same in every Murray Handbook, not just the Swiss one. There are some Swiss advertisers, such as J. Grossmann, “manufacturer of Swiss wood models and ornaments in Interlacken” (sic), the Swiss Couriers’ and Travelling Servants’ Society, and first-class hotels in Villeneuve, Lucerne and Bern. There are also two pharmacies, one in Interlaken, who declares he is an English druggist, the other in Zurich, who “prepares and dispenses Medicines and Prescriptions according to the English Pharmacopœia”. All rather ironic, given that many of today’s medicines available in Britain are made in Switzerland.
Back to Geneva. In 1863 it was the largest city in Switzerland: the 1860 census shows it having 41,415 inhabitants, far more than Basel, Bern or Zurich. Its mighty city walls had been recently knocked down and the main train station built, but at its heart was still the old town up on the hill, as it is today. Since then Geneva has grown to 192,000 people (along the way losing its No. 1 status to Zurich) and become a centre for international finance and diplomacy, but walking around the historic centre is like stepping back in time. The narrow streets, the tall houses, the sloping squares, the steep steps all combine to create the illusion that the nineteenth century has yet to arrive, let alone the twenty-first. That is, until you see the prices in the chic antique shops along the Grande-Rue; they are definitely modern.