Slow Train to Switzerland

by Diccon Bewes

  “Oh, I’m so glad you said that. I was thinking exactly the same but didn’t want to say anything. It feels a bit like cheating.”

  We agree that it’s not strictly following the rules, but we can live with that. So we decide to return to Bern and the comfort of home. It’s exactly two weeks since we were in Newhaven waiting for this trip back in time to start, but somehow it feels like so much longer. Almost every day has been far busier than a normal holiday, always on the move, changing hotels, seeing the sights, hitting the heights and generally rarely stopping. There’s also the small matter of someone having made a mistake when booking a flight. A lapse of concentration meant that I booked my mother’s flight back to London for tomorrow morning, one day too early. Even seasoned travel writers make basic mistakes. It could have been much worse: I could have left my passport at home, turned up at the wrong airport or checked in a day too late, all of which have happened to former colleagues over the years.

  Miss Jemima and friends left Neuchâtel at 4pm, with an overnight train journey to Paris ahead of them. Twenty hours later they were back in the French capital for their extended city sightseeing tour, but our heroine confesses that they did not completely enjoy the experience:

  “Whilst we were pleased with our peep at Paris, it must be admitted we saw it rather disadvantageously. Reaction from the excitement of Swiss travel and the weariness induced by rapid journeyings came upon us just when we most needed great powers of endurance to bear the fatigues of sightseeing in a great city.”

  At last, she succumbs to being human. I was beginning to wonder if there was something in the water back then that gave them such stamina. And she admits that Paris could not compare “with the wonders of mountain scenery by the side of which any scene of man’s device is paltry”. When, on Thursday, 16 July 1863, our intrepid travellers finally returned to London, they were most evidently pleased to be home:

  “The memory of our three weeks’ holiday has many bright spots, but none in their way more precious than the happiness we experienced in setting foot on an English shore, and hearing again our mother tongue.”

  Mr William also looked back on the tour in his last letter home. “I am very glad we came. Apart from the great pleasure we have had, the experience it gives is really very valuable. I should have no difficulty in going about anywhere now and we are so much better informed on many subjects.”

  It really was character-building stuff for him, and his sister, much as it had been for the first Grand Tourists and would be for teenage InterRailers many decades later. The times and transport change, but the results remain the same. And as her journal ends, Miss Jemima reflects a little on the tour and all that the Junior United Alpine Club had experienced:

  “It is to the Swiss rambles that we look back with the greatest pleasure, apart from the recollection of a pleasant companionship that has served to enliven many subsequent hours. … We had acquired a wider knowledge of human nature, habits of self-reliance, and valuable lessons of our own ignorance that amply repaid us all for the fatigue and inevitable annoyance attendant on foreign travel.”

  At supper that evening, my mother and I raise a glass to a long-gone lady who has been our constant companion and guide for the last 14 days. Without Miss Jemima, we would most likely never have stayed at the Giessbach hotel, watched the sunrise on Rigi, walked along a glacial gorge or sat in the rain waiting for Mont Blanc to appear. We have followed her route and her timetable, albeit with modern means of transport and far more pairs of underwear. And for the most part, the Switzerland she saw is still recognisable today. Yes, the towns have grown as the glaciers shrunk, the toilets have improved as much as the trains, and prices have risen with standards. But the landscape is as beguiling as ever; it was the main reason they came 150 years ago and the reason people will keep on coming. Some things never change, no matter what.

  Many months later I am back on the Rigi Bahn, riding through a winter wonderland of trees laden with so much snow they look like they’re disguised as cauliflowers. A few days earlier I got an email from Renate Käppeli about one particular entry in an old guest book. She may have found something, so I’m returning to the Kulm hotel to see what she has uncovered in the archives. I can barely sit still now that the summit of Rigi is in sight; I can’t wait to see the book. Will Miss Jemima be in there? I do hope so.

  The battered brown guest books may be sacred, but they are also crammed full – for that one day in July 1863 there are four big pages of swirly Victorian script to decipher. I can practically hear the quills scratching across the creamy, ink-blotted paper as I run my finger down the list of names of now-dead visitors from Berlin and Rotterdam, Boston and Savannah, Lausanne and Zurich. Every third one seems to be from London, Cheltenham or Saffron Walden, making the search that much harder.

  And then there they are, at the top of the day’s last page.

  W.W. Morrell, York, England

  Miss Morrell, Selby, ditto

  They really were here. After following her for so long, I have finally found her. The hotel where they slept has gone, but this tiny record of their visit has survived 15 decades among thousands upon thousands of other tourists’ names. I’m not usually that keen on signing hotel guest books; they always seem either pointless or egotistical. From now on I will sign one everywhere I stay.

  I almost kiss Frau Käppeli, but Swiss decorum gets the better of me. Instead, I skip down to the train and smile my way back home. And I send my mother a text:

  “Found: one lady from Yorkshire, answers to the name of Miss Jemima.”

  The Morrells’ guestbook entry from Hotel Rigi Kulm, 9 July 1863

  AFTERWORD

  “Kings and cockneys may be excellent people in their way. But they have in common the property of being very objectionable neighbours at an hotel.” Sir Leslie Stephen’s caustic observation is interesting, not just for the fact that it came at a time when the h of hotel was still silent in English, as in French (so was preceded by “an”), but also on the matter of class. He did not want to share the Alps with the common man or a nobleman; it was a place for gentlemen, preferably of the upper-middle class, who knew how to dress for dinner but didn’t expect a valet to do it for them. Thomas Cook ruined all that by becoming travel agent to kings and cockneys and everyone in between. He prompted a mixing of cultures and classes never seen before on such a scale. Switzerland was soon a playground for the whole of Europe.

  It began as an affordable tour for a group of English people in search of a new adventure; it mushroomed into an industry that accounts for 5 per cent of global GDP thanks to one billion international tourist arrivals in 2012. That’s one billion people going abroad in a single year, with Switzerland, the birthplace of mass tourism, accounting for a mere eight million of them. It’s a small fish in a very big pond.

  So what happened between then and now? What became of the main players in the tale I have just told – Thomas and Jemima, and Switzerland itself? It’s time to see how that first tour changed a country, created a global brand and conjured up an incredible surprise for me.

  In 1863, Switzerland was slowly edging towards prosperity and stability, although the challenging topography and piecemeal politics meant that wealth was concentrated in a few places. As we have seen, many rural areas were relatively poor, with people supplementing small farming incomes with handicrafts. Cantons and communities were distinct entities, isolated from each other by distance and by attitude, while federal government was as young and weak as a new-born lamb. The railways changed all that. With the advent of trains and tunnels, Switzerland could be one nation for the first time, geographically speaking. It no longer took days to reach Ticino from the northern cities and Valais wasn’t cut off by its mountain borders any more. Trains also made it possible to travel around the whole country in winter, not only for tourists but for everyone. The weather, like the Alps, had been conquered. Even travelling in the lowlands became comparatively quick and easy, giving the Swiss – or
some of them – the chance to explore.

  In 1874 Thomas Cook produced his own guidebook to Switzerland, featuring ships, trains, coaches – and camels.

  Railways ushered in an era of faster, cheaper mass transport – 25 million passengers in 1880, 240 million in 1910 – but for many Swiss it was still out of reach financially. What was affordable for British visitors was a luxury for locals. Transport history centre Via Storia reckons that most of those 240 million passengers were tourists and the small layer of Swiss society with money, but the middle classes could at least contemplate a trip for the first time; not often or far, but a possibility, although in third class most likely, as first class was double the price, and mountain trains were even more expensive. Someone from Zurich might manage a day trip once a year to Lake Lucerne or to another Swiss city, one that had probably been an economic rival until then.

  At that time, Swiss industry was as fragmented as its politics, with no one city dominating the economy. This decentralisation, due to the lack of good transport links but also to the political system, meant that the country specialised into many mini-economies. Different areas concentrated on particular goods, normally those of high value to overcome the crippling transport costs and limited terrain. For example, St Gallen had its embroidered textiles, La Chaux-de-Fonds its watches, Basel its silk ribbons, Alpine regions their cheeses. It wasn’t a perfect system, nevertheless. Incomes were low, hours were long and some local economies became dangerously dependent on one trade. In 1913, the embroidery trade in St Gallen employed half the population, and exported more in value than the watch industry, so when it died with the loss of overseas markets in the First World War and the advent of cheap foreign competition, the blow was devastating to the local economy.

  The railways integrated Switzerland into a single market, psychologically and economically. Products could now reach their customers quickly and cheaply, whether that was watches going abroad or carrots to the cities. And it was tourism that helped finance the railways. Outside the heavily populated lowlands, few lines would have been viable without the money coming in from tourists. A train to Grindelwald made no economic sense other than to take visitors up to the mountains, and probably still doesn’t. How long would the famous Glacier Express survive as a normal line? None of the towns along its route is big enough to support such a remote train service.

  Tourism was from the outset the grease that oiled the wheels of the trains that united Switzerland. It became a perfect circle of life: tourists made the railways viable and financed new lines, which brought in more tourists, which made it feasible to raise more capital to build more lines. And all the time the economy as a whole was benefiting from improved transport and bigger markets. Tourists also bought watches and chocolate to take home, so spreading the word about Swiss quality products. Furthermore, the new art of photography made the mountains seem so much more realistic, and inviting, than an oil painting, motivating ever more tourists to see them in person.

  It’s almost as if the Swiss economy had been waiting for something to kick-start its race to success. While all the elements were in place, a vital link was missing; that is until tourism made the railways viable in such a difficult environment, when it was full steam ahead on every front. A look at some of the Swiss companies founded in the decades after 1863 says it all: Nestlé foods 1866, Schindler lifts 1874, Maggi foods 1884, Victorinox penknives 1884, Sandoz pharmaceuticals 1886, Laufen bathrooms 1892, Roche pharmaceuticals 1896, Kuoni travel agents 1906. Switzerland transformed into something closer to the country we know today, not quite as prosperous but well on the way. A knack for innovation helped, giving us products like cellophane, tin foil and stock cubes – all Swiss inventions from the early 1900s. Then came the two world wars, which turned everything upside down. Nevertheless, the Swiss economy survived both traumas largely unscathed and filled the void left by shattered economies elsewhere. Immigration from southern Europe provided cheap labour, Swiss attention to detail ensured high quality, and the trains delivered access to a worldwide market, so the money rolled in.

  All through that meteoric development, tourism has been the backbone of the Swiss economic miracle, providing a bedrock of income that helped sustain development elsewhere. The Alps had been a perilous place and a hindrance to progress, but they quickly became Switzerland’s greatest resource and the key to its success. Industrialists in Zurich could invest in ever grander hotels and ever higher railway lines, knowing that they would reap the rewards. Ruskin may have bemoaned the “consuming white leprosy of new hotels and perfumer’s shops” and castigated his fellow Britons for having taught the Swiss “all the foulness of the modern lust of wealth”, but there’s no denying that tourism transformed the countryside economy. In 1870 there were 38,000 people working in the hospitality and transport sectors; in 1900 that had rocketed to 118,000, many of them in rural areas. Such growth was sustainable only because the tourists kept on coming.

  Switzerland had a total of 9300 hotel beds and 2.9 million overnight stays in 1863; ten years later those figures had more than doubled, and by 1913 there were 211,000 beds and 23.8 million overnights. Such a peak would not be reached again until the 1950s. Today the levels are higher, 245,000 beds and 35.5 million overnights, but the latter figure includes much larger numbers of Swiss domestic tourists. A hundred years ago that was only a fifth of the market, now it’s more than twice that. One sure sign that the Swiss are richer than they once were is that they can afford to holiday at home. In 1863 a hotel breakfast cost the same as a day’s wages for a Swiss farm or factory worker; in 2013 it’s probably not even an hour’s worth of work time.

  The luxury element has not been lost either. The tradition of palace hotels offering every possible comfort lives on in Switzerland, which has 93 five-star hotels, or one for every 85,000 inhabitants; in comparison Germany has 125, or one for every 650,000 people. In the past these grand hotels were the first to have electric lights, lifts, central heating and indoor toilets, because their guests expected it, and such modern comforts soon trickled down into Swiss towns and homes. Today these top (that is, expensive) hotels undoubtedly help the bottom line, which is tourism’s healthy contribution to the Swiss economy: 35.5 billion Swiss francs, half directly in hospitality and transport, half indirectly in goods and services. Then there are the 275,000 people directly employed in tourism, and probably almost as many dependent on it. Someone has to make the chocolate!

  It’s not all roses, though, as the recent referendum on holiday homes shows: under the new rules no community can have more than 20 per cent of its housing as second homes. This was a clear reaction to overdevelopment, overpricing and overcrowding, although most of the tourist regions voted against it. Should the countryside or the economy be protected? That conundrum was being debated a century ago when they built the Jungfraubahn, and will probably never be resolved.

  For all its drawbacks, tourism has helped Switzerland to prosper and will continue to do so. A growing middle class, increased personal wealth, improved transport links and the lure of the Alps – those are exactly the conditions that in the nineteenth century transformed Switzerland into the world’s first mass tourist destination. They are the same reasons that Chinese, Indians and Brazilians are today arriving in their thousands. The countries have changed, but it’s the same scenario as 150 years ago. Thomas Cook’s legacy lives on, not just in the 680,000 British visitors who still find their way to Grindelwald and beyond, but in the countless other nationalities who join them there.

  However, there is one big difference. Today’s tourists can organise everything, or have it done for them, before they even leave home. That first tour was remarkable for its lack of planning and preparation, not really the sort of package tour we know now, where you pay up front with, at the very minimum, your travel and accommodation included. Things were much more ad hoc and relaxed than that, at least at the beginning, so they could easily have gone pear-shaped. Switzerland’s transport system was not as d
eveloped as in other countries and outside the main towns there was little in the way of infrastructure. It could have been a disaster, a thought that must have been on Cook’s mind the whole time.

  He needn’t have worried. The first conducted tour was so successful that a second tour followed in August, during which Cook wrote:

  I am in Paris surrounded with some 500 or 600 enterprising Tourists, and am expecting an addition of 400 or 500 more tonight. Already a party of 100 has started for Switzerland, and I expect to follow them to-morrow with 260 to 300 more.

  In the end there were over 200 Tourists (Cook always gave them a capital T as they were on his Tours) in his Swiss party travelling on from Geneva on that second trip, so he had to divide the group for the Circular Tour to Mont Blanc. Half followed the same route he had taken in June (as we have seen with Miss Jemima), ending up with a boat across Lake Geneva; the other half were sent round in the opposite direction, starting with the boat and ending with carriages from Chamonix – another extraordinary logistical triumph. As for Cook, he then ventured off to Lucerne, Interlaken and Bern, surviving on a “hash of bad French, worse German and broad English”. Language difficulties aside, his readiness to explore more of Switzerland so soon, with a view to adding those destinations to his tours, is perhaps proof that he realised what he had unleashed: an appetite for all things Swiss.

  A third conducted tour followed, so that by the end of that summer 2000 people had travelled with Cook to Paris, with about 500 of them going on into Switzerland. This set the (snow)ball rolling, and it soon became an avalanche. In May 1864, the season began again and Cook was already offering four different tours in Switzerland. The first, starting in Geneva, was the familiar Mont Blanc circular tour from the year before, where ladies were provided with mules from Chamonix to Martigny (or vice versa) when travelling in either first or second class (for 45 francs or 40 francs respectively); gentlemen only got a mule in first class. The other three routes had starting points in Lausanne, Basel and Neuchâtel and included Lucerne, Bern, Lake Thun and Lake Brienz in various combinations on their itineraries.