1951 ....... a Glenton Tour brochure and a window on a world we have lost

I was too young to remember 1951 but I know it was a year of promise.

It was after all the year of the Festival of Britain, the beginning of the sixth year of year of peace and for many a time when the Welfare State was offering care from the cradle to the grave.

And it was the year when Glenton Tours resumed their coach trips to the Continent.

The firm had begun in the 1920s when an estate agent settled a debt with a customer by accepting a coach and that started “Glenton Motor Coach Holiday Tours.”

Dad worked for them from the very beginning and finally retired in 1987 having driven their coaches around Britain and Europe from the early 1930s.

All of which I have written about already but today I came across their 1951 brochure advertising four, seven and twelve day tours Scotland, the Romantic West, Wales and the Lake District.

And it was on one of the Lake District trips that he met my mother who was working at the Queens Hotel at Matlock Bath sometime in the late 1940s.

The tours were all inclusive, offering “first class accommodation” and the “Chauffeur-Couriers have been chosen after exacting tests of their reliability and skill and give every attention to travellers.  

Nearly all of them were with Glenton Tours before the war and returned to the Company when we re-started in 1947.”

And it is this little entry which opens up the brochure as a wonderful record of that post war period.

Contained also in the “notes and information” is the advice that “Ration Books are not, necessary on any of our tours” and that passengers are advised take "a towel and soap in case some hotels are still unable to supply them.”

The cost ranged from 9 guineas for the “Special 4-Day Easter Tours to  58 guineas for the thirteen day trip to France, Austrian Tyrol, Italian Lakes and Switzerland.”

It is easy to get cynical of a holiday which in just under a fortnight took you through five countries and which you risked missing one if you fell asleep on the journey.

But this was before the internet, and before cheap air travel when even television was in its infancy and so the idea of visiting five countries taking in the views and the history while being catered for in first class style was very attractive.

Added to which as the brochure boasted “You do not have to bother about luggage, frontier, monetary or language difficulties” and “the inclusive charge provided for all food and accommodation, the sea crossing and gratuities to hotel staff."

Of course this was a holiday way beyond many working people but by 1973 many who two decades earlier would never have contemplated a coach trip abroad were signing up.

So in that year Glenton’s offered a total of 69 tours of which 24 were to the Continent.

It never appealed to me as a holiday but then I belonged to a different generation.

For those who the tour did go, many will have begun their holidays on train and coach excursions to seaside resorts taking full advantage of the paid holidays which were by the 1930s a bonus to the holiday trade.

And I won’t be sniffy at what gave dad nearly sixty years of full employment, put food on our table and provided a shed load of people with an experience they would not have otherwise had.

Location; Britain and the Continent

Pictures; from Glenton Coach Holiday Tours, 1951, from the collection of Andrew Simpson