Broadening the mind on the Grand Tour

It is a well-respected maxim that travel broadens the mind. For many British young people this takes the form of a “gap year” before going to university. The equivalent in the late 18^th and early 19^th century – if you could afford it – was the Grand Tour.

Who were the Grand Tourists?

It has been estimated that some 40,000 Britons undertook the Grand Tour during the period from 1750 to 1825. They were nearly all the eldest sons of wealthy aristocrats and they would have undertaken the Tour when aged anything between 15 and 21.

The notion behind the Tour was that the education provided by the great Public Schools (i.e. institutions such as Eton, Harrow and Winchester) was not particularly well-rounded, and in order to be fully educated it was important to have first-hand knowledge of great art and architecture. In the days before public art galleries (London’s National Gallery dates from 1824) it was impossible to see the works of masters such as Titian and Raphael. You had to travel to where they were in order to see them, and in most cases that meant Italy.

Aristocratic young men were given an education that placed great emphasis on the classical languages, particularly Latin. In order to put flesh on the bones, where better to go than Rome to view the remains of its ancient past?

Also, many people of this class were expected to play a role in politics and diplomacy. That meant knowing foreign languages, the teaching of which was largely ignored by the Public Schools. In order to learn French or Italian you had to spend time in France or Italy.

An Expensive Business        

The Grand Tour was only available for families with very deep pockets. A tour could last up to five years, and the participants did not expect to spend much time in student hostels! A tourist would take at least one servant with them, and some would be accompanied by several. They would travel in their own horse-drawn carriage, with all the expense that that entailed, and they might well hire extra staff such as porters during their travels.

It has been estimated that some fathers spent as much as £10,000 a year on financing their son and heir’s Grand Tour – the equivalent of millions today.

Some Danger Involved

As soon as a tourist set foot in France they would become open to the attentions of highwaymen and tricksters. Some learned – the hard way – the benefits of keeping gold coins hidden about their person.

Tourists would be exposed to many threats to their health, such as diseases to which they had no immunity and untrustworthy water supplies. Many took well-stocked medicine chests with them.

On reaching Marseilles, the route to Italy was either by sea – with the risk of being attacked by pirates – or across the Alps. The latter route meant traversing Alpine passes shrouded in furs against the cold and sometimes having to follow narrow tracks with sheer drops to the valley below.

Indulging in the Arts

Once in Italy, the tourist could head for Venice, hopefully in time for the annual carnival. This was an opportunity for enjoying oneself at masked balls or taking part in gondola races, and for soaking up the culture provided by Venetian architecture and the artistic works of Canaletto and many others.

Another popular destination was Florence, where many great works by the Old Masters could be seen. However, Rome was always the greatest magnet, not least for the ruins of the Forum and better preserved buildings such as the Colosseum.

Some tourists ventured further south to visit the ruins towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum, although these have become far more visible in more recent times thanks to later excavations.

It must also be pointed out that not all Grand Tourists were as conscientious in soaking up the culture as their fathers might have wished. It should surprise no-one that sending a rich young man off to France and Italy, far away from parental control, might offer temptations to behave badly, and that was certainly the case in many instances.

What did the Grand Tourists Come Back With?

Many deep-pocketed tourists were able to buy works of art that took their fancy and return with them to Britain. Many great country houses today have their walls lined in part with purchases made by past Grand Tourists. Some of these works have subsequently found their way into public collections such as those of the National Gallery and major regional art galleries.

Landscapes by artists such as Claude and Poussin were sometimes used by estate owners to guide garden designers such as “Capability” Brown and Humphrey Repton towards the production of their own classical landscapes.

It also became the custom for Grand Tourists to have their own portraits painted in front of a famous antiquity. This was a somewhat more expensive – and far more time-consuming – version of the modern in situ “selfie”.

Apart from paintings, tourists collected sculptures, pottery, objets d’art and furniture, many examples of which can still be seen today in properties now owned by the National Trust and English Heritage.

Sons of aristocrats who later inherited their fathers’ estates were sometimes inspired to re-design their great houses along the lines of sketches they had made while on tour. The Italianate “Palladian” designs of Robert and James Adam owe their origin to this tendency.

Always a Success?

By no means. As mentioned earlier, not every Grand Tourist took the event as seriously as was intended. Although the average tourist returned to England as a far more sophisticated person than they had been when they left, some had acquired habits that attracted mockery and ridicule from stay-at-homes.

These included ornate clothes, extravagant wigs and foppish attitudes.

The Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith was of the opinion that the average tourist returned “more conceited, less principled, more dissipated and more incapable of study or business than if he had stayed at home.”

© John Welford

South African history: the Great Trek

South Africa’s Afrikaners (Whites of Dutch origin) regard the Great Trek as the event that marked their identity as a people.

The Causes of the Great Trek

When – over a five-year period between 1835 and 1840 - some 14,000 Afrikaners packed their belongings into ox carts and set off from the Cape Colony to find new lands that they could call their own, they did so because life was becoming steadily less desirable for them where they were.

Dutch settlers had first arrived in the Cape in 1652, but they were later joined by British colonists who eventually seized control of the territory in 1805. The British had different ways of doing things – for example, they abolished slavery, gave Blacks and Whites equal status and introduced English as the official language in schools and churches.

Apart from these legal moves, perhaps the most important source of discontent for the Afrikaners was the fact that the influx of British settlers placed increasing pressure on the availability of land for farming. Many Afrikaner farmers decided that they would be better off if they found new lands for themselves further east and north.

The Routes of the Trek

The Great Trek was not a single journey by a large group of people but a succession of “treks” from various starting points in the Eastern Cape that used a number of different routes.

The first two “Voortrekker” (forward journeyer) parties were led by Louis Trichardt and Hans van Rensburg. They set off together in 1835 northwards across the Orange River but later split up after a quarrel, just south of the Limpopo River.

Van Rensburg took his group northwards along the course of the river but encountered hostile Tsonga tribesmen who wiped them out.

Trichardt’s party headed for the coast, although they were in no great hurry to reach it. When they did so, three years later, nearly half of them, including Trichardt himself, died of malaria. The survivors made their way to Port Natal.

Meanwhile, thousands more trekkers had set out on the journey of some 300 miles, many of them making for the mountain of Thaba Nchu, north of the Orange River. From there, they headed eastwards over the Drakensberg Mountains.

Making the Trek

The Trekkers had many different environments to contend with on their journey, including vast stretches of dusty veldt and steep mountain slopes. All a family’s possessions would be loaded into an ox-drawn wagon and at night the wagons would be arranged in a circle to provide some protection from attack.

Progress was never rapid, averaging around 6 miles (10 km) a day. When climbing or descending steep slopes there was always the danger that the ox wagons would run out of control, so the practice was to remove the rear wheels and tie branches under the axles.

The Trekkers were not advancing into empty territory and they met considerable opposition from native tribes, especially the Zulus. Zulu power was eventually broken at the Battle of Blood River in December 1838.

The End of the Trek

The Trekkers, who became known as Boers (meaning farmers) set up a republic in Natal, on the east coast. However, this was annexed by the British in 1843 and the Afrikaners had to move again, finally settling in the high veldt to the north and west. Two Boer republics were established and recognized by the British, these being the Orange Free State and the Transvaal (or South African Republic).

An unexpected consequence of the Great Trek, and the expulsion from Natal, was that the Boers now controlled areas that contained extensive gold and diamond reserves. Not surprisingly, the British sought to take over these areas, and this ambition was a major cause of the two Boer Wars (1880-1 and 1899-1902) which led to the Boer Republics becoming part of the British Union of South Africa.

© John Welford

How tobacco got from America to Europe

There can be few people today who would say that the use of tobacco, mainly by smoking it, has not been an unmitigated disaster in terms of public health and unnecessary early deaths. A tobacco-free world would surely be a much happier and healthier one.

From a European perspective the chief culprit for its introduction is generally held to be Sir Walter Raleigh (c.1554-1618), although this is only part of the story, given that tobacco was in use in Europe long before Raleigh was even born. However, Raleigh, who had explored the southern part of North America that would eventually form the Dominion of Virginia, became acquainted with the tobacco plant and the uses to which it was put by the native Americans. He certainly popularised its use in England.

The leaves of plants of the Nicotiana genus (the name comes from the Frenchman Jean Nicot who introduced tobacco to France in 1560) are hallucinogenic when dried and smoked in very high concentrations, and it is thought that this is the use to which tobacco was originally put by the priestly class of early native Americans. Once in a tobacco-induced trance they believed that they could communicate with the spirits of ancestors or gods.

The Mayas of central America are known to have used tobacco for recreational purposes during the height of their civilization around 900 CE. Stone carvings on temple and palace buildings show high-ranking Mayas enjoying their “smoking tubes”. They also used a form of snuff (tobacco dust that is sniffed up the nose), and tobacco leaves were also chewed as well as smoked.

The Aztecs who dominated central America in the centuries prior to the Spanish conquest used tobacco for both recreational and ceremonial purposes. The drug was assigned its own goddess, Cihuacoatl, whose priests wore gourds that contained tobacco during ceremonies in which human sacrifices were performed. Again, the assumption is that tobacco was used to send the priests into a trance-like state during which they would carry out their grisly rituals.

The first Spaniards to arrive in the region noted the widespread use of tobacco, which was not limited to the privileged classes. Aztec banquets would start with smoking tubes being passed to the guests, and these would be given at the end of the meal to the servants and poor people in the vicinity, so that any unused tobacco was not wasted.

It is commonly thought that the cigarette is a modern invention, but these smoking tubes were a half-way house between pipes and cigarettes, in that they often consisted of combustible materials such as reeds that might be partially burnt during use and thus be reusable on at least one other occasion, as mentioned above. Cigars, consisting wholly of tobacco leaves, were also in use in central and south America.

However, in north America these forms of smoking arrived much later. European settlers, on making contact with native Americans, were often invited to smoke a “pipe of peace”, and it is in this form that the idea of tobacco smoking originally crossed the Atlantic.

It is not difficult to see how the idea arose that tobacco had medical benefits. If someone was put into a trance by smoking tobacco, they would be far more relaxed and thus less likely to feel pain. Any pleasurable experience makes one “feel better”, even if the symptoms of one’s disease or discomfort have not been tackled. When the symptoms return the obvious answer is to take more of the “medicine” that alleviates them. Visitors from the Old World who succumbed to a tropical disease might be persuaded to try tobacco and take a supply home with them so that they could continue with what they supposed was the cure.

Given the highly addictive nature of nicotine, which is the chief active ingredient in tobacco, it is clear that there would be another reason why a returned traveller would want to ensure a constant supply of the leaves, not only for himself but also for his friends and family who had also been induced to try the wonder drug from the New World. It is little wonder that, once discovered, tobacco use spread round the world with great rapidity, even before the aggressive marketing of tobacco companies got to work to force their poisonous wares on to unsuspecting millions of people in both the developed and developing world.

One of the great tragedies of the modern world, namely the massive toll of tobacco-related illnesses and deaths, was therefore imported under false pretences from people in the Americas who had as little idea of the harm they were causing themselves as would smokers across the world for centuries afterwards.

© John Welford

Ways in which the Ottoman Empire was impacted by British foreign policy

The Sick Man of Europe

The Ottoman Empire was the Muslim successor of the old Christian Byzantine Empire that was in turn based on the Eastern Roman Empire. Centred on Constantinople (Istanbul), at its height in the late 16^th century it occupied much of south-eastern Europe stretching nearly as far as Vienna, as well the whole of the Levant, Egypt, modern-day Iraq, and the north African coast as far west as Algiers.

However, the Empire proved to be too unwieldy to hold together, especially when an expanding population could not be fed and the central government refused to modernise at a time when the countries of Europe were doing so. For much of the 19^th century, the Ottoman Empire was the “Sick Man of Europe”. The invalid’s continuing decline led the great powers to have many sleepless nights over what would happen when he died.

Britain Versus Russia

The British government, at the heart of a growing worldwide empire, was as interested as anyone in the health of the old Ottoman Empire, from several perspectives. For one thing, the “jewel in the crown” of the British Empire was India, and anything that affected the security of India, or free passage in that direction, was a matter of great concern. For another, the imperial ambitions of Russia had to be countered. France was another rival to be kept in check.

During the middle years of the 19^th century, British foreign policy was driven by a remarkable man, Viscount Palmerston, who sat in the House of Commons by virtue of his peerage being an Irish one. With only a few interruptions he held high office from 1809 to 1865, mostly as either Foreign Secretary or Prime Minister. His was a tough “no nonsense” approach, his response to crises often being to “send a gunboat”, but he was also a master of the game of international politics and adept at playing his cards with skill and cunning.

In 1829, Britain supported Greece in its war of independence, but Palmerston then came to realise that the Ottoman Empire had great value in being a buffer to Russian ambitions, especially where they concerned access to the Mediterranean through the Bosphorus and Dardenelles, the narrow waterways that led through Ottoman territory to the Black Sea. The last thing Britain wanted was Russian warships patrolling the Mediterranean and threatening British trade and her route to India.

The Ambitions of Mehemet Ali

A crisis arose as a result of the Greek revolt, in that the Sultan had called for assistance from his powerful Egyptian viceroy, Mehemet Ali, who now sought a substantial reward for his efforts. The Sultan offered him Crete, but Mehemet Ali really wanted Syria. To complicate matters, France had been very active in supporting Mehemet Ali in his modernising and expansion of Egypt, and they were likely to support him in any action he took.

When, in 1831, Mehemet Ali’s army swept through the Levant and threatened the territory of Turkey itself, the Russians offered protection to the Sultan and sent a fleet to Constantinople. The British put pressure on the Sultan to buy off Mehemet Ali with the territory he sought, after which the Russians also withdrew. The Russian price was a treaty that closed the Dardanelles to the enemies of Russia, a situation that was far from satisfactory to Lord Palmerston.

In 1839 the British prompted Ottoman Turkey to take revenge on Mehemet Ali, but the Egyptian army and navy proved to be too strong. Palmerston now sought to threaten Egypt with an ultimatum, but the French took Mehemet Ali’s side and tried to negotiate a direct deal between Turkey and Egypt. Tempers rose on all sides, and for a time it seemed possible that Britain and France might go to war over the issue.

Palmerston was reluctant to climb down and even sent a fleet to bombard the Syrian coast, but eventually he was pacified by a deal whereby Mehemet Ali gave up Syria but stayed as the hereditary ruler of Egypt. The best result from Britain’s point of view was that the Dardanelles were now declared closed to the warships of all nations.

The Next Crisis

The next time that British foreign policy impacted the Ottoman Empire was in the 1840s. The sick man’s health was not improving, and in 1844 Britain and Russia agreed to consult over what should replace the Empire should it collapse. Meanwhile, Britain and France were in agreement that Russian ambitions should be curtailed. However, towards the end of the decade Russia became convinced that the Ottoman Empire could not last much longer and started to exert considerable influence in the Balkans, where a number of states were showing signs of pushing for independence. While still wanting to preserve the Ottoman Empire, it was clearly Russia which was pulling the strings in this region.

The Crimean War began almost by accident, occasioned by Russian efforts in 1853 to put pressure on the Sultan over the protection of Christians within the Empire. The British and the French supported the Sultan, and when the latter declared war on Russia, an Anglo-French fleet entered the Black Sea in support of the Turks and three years of war followed. At the end of the war the sick man was no better. The Sultan promised to improve the lot of his Christian subjects, but did little to keep his promise.

The Suez Canal

The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 brought the British and Ottoman Empires into direct confrontation. The building of the canal had been one of the many modernisation projects that the then Khedive of Egypt, Ismail, had begun during a period of great prosperity. However, the financing of the canal had required Egypt to take foreign loans on terms that proved to be ruinous and brought the country to the verge of bankruptcy. In 1875 the British government bought out the Egyptian government’s shares in the canal at a bargain price, and the canal, built by Egyptian labor and largely at Egyptian expense, was now destined to benefit only those foreign nations who were in any case going to benefit from the new trade routes that the canal made possible.

Egypt was now forced to accept domination by the French and the British, who virtually ran the economy in ways that were highly disadvantageous to the Egyptian people. Not only did they have to pay interest on their loans and dividends to the canal bondholders, but they also had to pay tribute to the Ottoman Sultan. The money was raised from taxes on the peasantry, many of whom were reduced to starvation.

Eventually, the Egyptian people and army rose in revolt, and the British response was to crush the revolt with considerable force. In July 1882 the port city of Alexandria was bombarded from the sea with the loss of around 2,000 civilian lives. In September, the battle of Tel-el-Kebir resulted in the deaths of 57 British soldiers and perhaps as many as 10,000 Egyptians.

The Sudan

However, the easy British victory turned to dust later that year when the territory to the south of Egypt (modern-day Sudan) rebelled, under a fundamentalist Islamic leader who declared himself to be the “Mahdi”. The British grossly underestimated the forces that opposed them, with the result that an army column was destroyed and the celebrated British general, Charles Gordon, became cut off in Khartoum and was killed before he could be rescued. The British socialist William Morris wrote, “Khartoum has fallen, into the hands of the people it belongs to”. The Sudan was not re-captured until 1898 when, at the Battle of Omdurman, the slaughter of the native army, including the murder of wounded prisoners as revenge for the death of General Gordon, sickened the young Winston Churchill.

World War I

When the First World War broke out in 1914, the Sultan sided with the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary. It is quite possible that, had the war started 20 years earlier, Turkey would have been allied with Britain and the other “entente” powers (France and Russia), but the virtual British takeover of Egypt and support for anti-Turkish groups in the Middle East had changed things.

As First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill masterminded a naval attack in 1915 on the Gallipoli Peninsula that overlooked the Dardenelles, with a view to opening a route to Britain’s new ally, Russia. This was a military disaster, with huge losses being inflicted on the British Empire forces (more than 44,000 killed), which included a large number of Anzac (Australia and New Zealand) soldiers and sailors.

Despite the fact that Ottoman casualties were greater in number than those of the Allies, their victory gave them fresh hope of being able to revive the Ottoman Empire. In striving to reassert their authority in the Arab lands under their somewhat shaky control, they inspired the “Arab Revolt” of 1916-18, which was then supported by the British, led on the ground by Colonel T. E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”). Lawrence was instrumental in uniting many disparate Arab forces and getting them to carry out attacks, for instance on the railway that ran south from Damascus, that in turn diverted thousands of Ottoman troops from their main objectives.

Post-War Policy

The main Arab aim had been to replace the Ottoman Empire with an Arab Caliphate that would have extended across much of the Middle East. However, the European powers had other ideas, and the post-war partition of the Ottoman Empire took little account of Arab views. Various promises had been made during the war in order to gain support for the war effort, but it proved impossible to keep all of them due to their conflicting nature. In particular, Lawrence had promised the Arabs that they would have an independent state covering most of the region, but the Balfour Declaration of 1917 promised support for a Jewish state within Palestine. The consequences of those mixed messages are with us to this day.

Under the League of Nations, Britain and France were granted mandates over various parts of the old Ottoman Empire, with the British mandates covering Palestine, Transjordan and Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). By drawing straight-line boundaries around territories that had never had fixed borders before, the new masters of the region created all sorts of problems for future generations, such as the division of Kurdish lands between four modern states.

All in all, British foreign policy had a huge impact on the Ottoman Empire over a long period of time. It cannot be said that the policy was always wise or far-sighted, and its ramifications affect international relations even now.

© John Welford

Reasons for Great Britain's Colonization of Australia

In some ways, Australia offered the conditions for the perfect colony, but in other ways it was far from ideal. Captain James Cook had sailed along 2,000 miles of the east coast in 1770, landing only at Botany Bay (as named by him). He claimed the coastline for the British crown, but it was another 18 years before any attempt was made to site a colony there. He thought that the southern coastline was reminiscent of South Wales, and “New South Wales” it has been ever since.

A perfect colony?

What made Australia perfect for colonization was that it was an untouched, empty continent that the British could occupy without opposition. Although Dutch navigators had discovered parts of Australia long before Cook arrived, their countrymen made no attempt at settling there. Cook had noticed that there was a native population, but they proved to be largely docile and to have no intention of resisting any incursions by Europeans.

On the other hand, as the first settlers soon discovered, this new continent proved to be an unfriendly host. The natives were hunter-gatherers who had made no attempt to cultivate the land or build settled communities, so there was no infrastructure to take over or imitate. The wildlife was impossible to tame or farm (you can’t milk a kangaroo), and there were many species of snake, spider and scorpion that were armed with deadly venom. The climate was baking hot away from the coast, and although several fairly large rivers disgorged into the sea close to Botany Bay, others proved to be highly seasonal, drying up completely for many months of the year. There were no obvious natural resources that anyone would want to exploit and send back to England. So what reason could there possibly be for wanting to colonize this place?

The answer was precisely its remoteness and harshness. These properties were exactly what were needed when the old country wanted to export its most troublesome commodity, namely its criminals and undesirables. Australia was perfectly suited to becoming a penal colony.

Somewhere to send British criminals

This function had previously been taken by the American colonies, particularly those of Georgia and the Carolinas, although Newfoundland was also used for this purpose. With American independence, a new convict settlement was needed, and Botany Bay sounded just about right, although nearby Sydney Cove turned out to be more suitable for building a settlement.

The “Salisbury and Winchester Journal” of 25 April 1785 stated that: “Michael Dennison (from Poole), for having broken open a sloop, from which he stole several articles, was sentenced to be transported for seven years”. He made the journey aboard the “Alexander”, which was one of the ships of the “First Fleet” that arrived at its destination in January 1788 with its thousand or so convicts, soldiers and officials. Although 28 convicts died on board the Alexander during the passage, Michael Dennison survived to become one of the first white Australians.

Who were the convicts?

The convicts were, generally speaking, from the lowest rungs of the English social ladder, who were used to living hard lives and settling disputes with their fists.

Although the convicts were often tough people, and were transported for having committed offences, many of the crimes would strike us today as being mild in the extreme. Stealing as little as a shilling, for a first offence, could land someone in Australia. There was a case in my wife’s family history of a girl of fifteen who was asked to a hold a horse for a man who had just ridden up and dismounted next to where she was standing. The horse had been stolen, and when the constable arrived she was arrested for being in possession of stolen property. The girl later became one of Australia’s matriarchs and the ancestor of a great Australian dynasty.

In the 19^th century, many transportees were political prisoners, notable among which were the “Tolpuddle Martyrs” from Dorset who were transported in 1834 for organising themselves into an agricultural trade union. They were later reprieved and returned to England.

Staying on

In Australia, discipline was often harsh, although there were other colonies, such as nearby Norfolk Island, where life was even tougher due to the brutality of the regime. If anyone could survive and make a living in Australia, the English criminal courts had chosen their candidates well. It was soon apparent to the convicts that, because escape was impossible in that there was nowhere to escape to, they might as well make the best of a bad job. Although transportation was not usually for life, seven years being the almost universal term, convicts who had served their sentence often chose not to return, preferring to make a new life for themselves in a new country.

The suggestion has been made that the penal colony was in fact originally planned as a colonial establishment, and that it was always the intention to build an outpost of Empire on the far side of the world. That is hard to establish, given that at the time of the First Fleet nobody knew anything about the conditions that would be found there, or even whether survival was possible at all. The officials and soldiers who travelled with the prisoners must have been every bit as apprehensive as their charges.

Building new colonies

Later fleets took supplies with them that made it more likely that permanent colonies would be established. These supplies included cattle and sheep, which proved to be far more adaptable to the conditions than might have been imagined. There is a story that, when explorers tried to find a route to the interior through the notoriously difficult Blue Mountains, they discovered a herd of wild cattle on the other side, these being descendants of the original cattle that had found their own way round the mountains rather than across them!

In time, Australia did reveal its natural resources, such as gold, sapphires, opals, coal and iron (much later discoveries included uranium and natural gas). These made the early colonies much more valuable than simply a place to dump exiles from the home country. It did not take long before Australia became a place of voluntary emigration for people who wanted to make a fresh start, with more than 500,000 colonists arriving from the United Kingdom between 1851 and 1861. Many incentives were offered down the years to persuade people to go there, and it has only been relatively recently that immigration has had to be capped.

Transportation to New South Wales ended in 1840, by which time the colony was well established as the home of free people.

The Australian continent was never the scene of colonial rivalry between the European powers, with non-British immigration being unknown until the 20^th century. The Australian colonies became an untouchable British preserve, with Britain as their sole export market and the one source of commodity imports. The way of life of the colonists was British in all but name, and they also became annoyingly good at playing cricket!

© John Welford