35,000 feet flying home from Greece and remembering Dad and Glenton Tours

Crossing the Alps

From 35,000 feet the geography of Europe is plain to see.

We are heading north from Greece following the coast of Italy from Bari up towards Venice and the Dolomite Mountains.

The land below is a patchwork of yellow and green fields with small hamlets and numerous rivers glinting sliver in the sun.

All of course in direct contrast to the landscape of the Greek islands at the height of the summer with their mix of sparse vegetation and burnt brown earth.

Below us the land is more fertile; the fields are greener and the villages larger and closer together. And in a few minutes the countryside around Venice gives way to the mountains.  But these are not the rugged empty mountains of Greece but all together different.

Dotted across them half hidden are a succession of lakes and there is the hint of snow on the highest summits.

On route for Asos

This remains a wonderful way to see our continent, but there are limitations, so while you can see vast stretches in a matter of minutes, it is from a great height and dependent on a lack of cloud which so often obscures the view.

All of which makes me reflect on that more gentle way of seeing Europe in the 1950s and 60s. which for  most this was the coach tour.

And my dad spent his whole working life in the holiday trade taking people of modest means on sightseeing tours of Britain and mainland Europe.

In the age before cheap air travel this was the holiday for those who didn’t want sun and sand or a week at a Butlin’s.

These were all inclusive trips which offered “Your own reserved seat in a special Glenton touring coach, a tour of your choice, hotel accommodation including dinner and breakfast, gratuities to hotel staff, services of an experienced chauffeur-courier and a specially written guide book.”*

The tours lasted for anything between 7 and 15 days.

For £45 Tour C7 in 1965 offered nine days to the Swiss and Italian Lakes, leaving London on the Saturday, staying in Brussels on the Sunday night and travelling on to Lake Lucerne on the Monday, then later in the week to Lake Maggiore and then in to Switzerland and back via Burgundy to London.

Of course it is easy today to sneer at an experience where everything was provided and if you failed to look out of the window you might miss a country, but in an age before the internet with television still in its infancy this was a relatively cheap way to see places which would otherwise just be a picture in a book.

And this was value for money given that the national average wage in 1965 was £26.

There are still plenty of travel companies offering this sort of holiday but back in the late 1940’s and ‘50s this was an experience just opening up for thousands who were beginning to enjoy the first taste of consumer prosperity.

They are as much an indication of that new Britain as the washing machine, television and motor car.

Asos

All of which may seem a long way from a flight across our continent in the early August of this year but I think not.

For despite the countless times I have travelled south to Italy and Greece I never tire of what I see passing below me in just the same way that fifty-nine years earlier Miss J P Bass recorded her pleasure at seeing the Swiss Alps in the summer of 1954 with Glenton Tours

*Glenton Tours Brochure 1955

Pictures; the Greek Islands, the Italian Dolomites and a page of the 1965 Glenton coach cruises Britain and the Continent brochure from the collection of Andrew Simpson