Be grateful

THE ART OF TRAVEL (1872): OR, SHIFTS AND CONTRIVANCES AVAILABLE IN WILD COUNTRIES. By Francis Galton. Phoenix Press; 382 pages; $19.95 and £12.99.

FLIGHT TO THE SUN: THE STORY OF THE HOLIDAY REVOLUTION. By Vladimir Raitz and Roger Bray. Continuum; 246 pages; $24.95 and £16.99

“IF YOU have health, a great craving for adventure, at least a moderate fortune, and can set your heart on a definite object, then—travel by all means.” Thus wrote Francis Galton, one of those splendid figures of Victorian Britain, in “The Art of Travel” which ran through eight editions in the second half of the 19th century. A first cousin of Charles Darwin's, a keen amateur meteorologist who invented the term “anti-cyclone”, a passionate promoter of eugenics (a term he also seems to have devised): he was lucky enough to live in an age when maps still had blank spaces and young men like him could inherit enough money to explore them.

His book was written to guide them. Its attractive philosophy is that travel should be an experience, not a quest, to be enjoyed rather than endured. He urged patience: an expedition was more likely to fail if the traveller hurried or pushed forward thoughtlessly. Instead, he counselled: “Interest yourself chiefly in the progress of your journey and do not look forward to its end with eagerness.”

His instructions for dealing with Africans are generally humane, though not (as the introduction delicately puts it) something “which commends itself to modern thinking”. African women “were made for labour: one of them can carry or haul as much as two men can do.” He is more endearing when lapsing into elaborate instructions for making a sleeping bag (a novelty apparently devised by French customs officials) or for finding one's way when lost (an exercise that involves algebraic formulae and complex diagrams).

There is nothing like reading Galton's advice on “Revolting food that may save the lives of starving men” (vide “Dead animals, to find”) to put the horrors of modern British charter travel into perspective. Which brings in “Flight to the Sun”, a rather unsatisfactory amalgam of two books in that the authors write alternate chapters. Vladimir Raitz is the swashbuckling Russian immigrant who founded Horizon Holidays by coaxing the Ministry of Civil Aviation to allow cheap flights to Corsica (on condition, to pacify the state airline, that he carried only students and teachers). Grainy photographs show his original clients posing in the lee of their aircraft in tweed jackets and long woollen slacks.

The passion for cheap holidays, says Mr Raitz's co-author, Roger Bray, was first aroused on the eve of the second world war when parliament passed an act which gave a week's paid annual leave to all Britain's industrial workers. Billy Butlin, an ingenious South African, launched a pair of holiday camps in Skegness and Clacton-on-Sea under the slogan, “A week's holiday for a week's wage.”

To go abroad, though, meant waiting for post-war restrictions to end. By 1959, one in eight British holidays was being spent abroad. When Court Line collapsed in 1974, taking Horizon and two other holiday firms with it, more than 40,000 British tourists were abroad at the time. Indeed, going bust has been as predictable a feature of Britain's charter travel market as sunburn, sex, cheap wine and revolting food.