ACTIVITY 186: Listen to this extract from a radio programme presenting writers Lesley Morris and Wendy Johnson who have just published two interesting books about tourism. At this first step, just listen for general comprehension. Then try to answer these two questions below. Finally check the correct answers.

Now listen again to Lesley Morris and Wendy Johnson's interview while you check the transcription of their interview below.

PRESENTER:

The first ever package holiday took place on July 5th 1841. It was an away-day to Loughborough from Leicester. A train was chartered for its passengers to attend a religious festival. The whole trip, for 570 people, was organised by a then unknown man, Thomas Cook.

Lesley Morris has written Package Tourists about the origins of the package tour. Wendy Johnson is author of a book about famous women travellers, Wandering Women. Lesley, have people always travelled or did it really only start in the nineteenth century?

LESLEY MORRIS:

Oh no, they always travelled but the difficulty was that people only really went for reasons of war, or for business, or on a pilgrimage. I mean, there are records of 15th century women going off on pilgrimages and more or less going by themselves, but it was incredibly difficult to do apart from that.

PRESENTER:

Wendy, some of the women that you've uncovered did make extraordinary expeditions early on.

WENDY JOHNSON:

They did, yes. There were the great British women travellers, like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who went off to Turkey in 1716, thereby scandalising society; or Lady Hester Stanhope, who wandered round the Middle East, describing herself as 'Queen of the Desert'. But I think it all began back in the 4th century when an abbess from Spain went to what she called 'right to the other end of the earth' – it was in fact to Jerusalem – it was, as Lesley said, on a pilgrimage. But, erm, once she was there she became the most enthusiastic tourist: she took an excellent guidebook with her, er, which was the Bible, and she engaged a rather enterprising tour guide, who took her round some of the famous places mentioned there. She did all the usual things that a tourist would do even now.

PRESENTER:

And Lesley, how did package travel take off after this Loughborough experience? – which I suppose wasn't really a package holiday, although it was the first charter ...

LESLEY MORRIS:

Mmm, the first charter, yes. Well, in fact Thomas Cook organised excursions after that. He took tourists to Scotland, he took them to the seaside resorts, and he had this belief that the earth was there for people to enjoy. And he really believed that. So the working man could go, if he paid money into the working club, and he took wife and children and all the rest of it.

But it wasn't until about 1855 that we have a record, when Mathilda Lincoln went on a trip to Germany and France and Belgium and then - she went with her brother and two sisters - and she records in her diary that, er, many of her friends thought it was far too adventurous to go to countries that were not under the British flag. But she said that 'we could venture anywhere with such a guide and guardian as Mr Cook, for there was not one of our party who did not feel perfectly safe when under his care.'

And from that time on, package tours began to take off. There weren't, er, many of them and it must have taken, well, quite brave women to go, I think - I think most of them were waiting to get married - but they went, sometimes with relatives, and gradually they began to travel more and more until eventually most of the package trips of the late 19th century were women, in fact travelling by themselves.

Thomas Cook respected women travellers actually, for their courage and determination. For example, in the 1890s, with the, the great cycling craze, he actually promoted cycling trips for women, single women. As long as they took a friend with them they could go off to Europe cycling, which, was er, pretty daring when actually you couldn't go shopping by yourself, you had to go shopping in London with a companion in those days.

PRESENTER:

There were also independent women travellers at this time, weren't there, Wendy – apart from the packages, I mean?

WENDY JOHNSON:

Mm, yes. Lesley was saying a lot of Cook's tourists were ladies who were waiting to get married. But a lot of the independent travellers were women who had decided that probably they were too old to get married. They were the unmarried daughters who had done their domestic duty and when their parents died, they had perhaps received some money and they had little else to do at home, so why not go abroad? And that's what they did, in great numbers.