Tourism Histories in Ulster and Scotland: Connections and Comparisons 1800–1939

Contributors

TRICIA CUSACK has taught at the Open University, Cardiff Metropolitan University and the University of Birmingham. Her current research focuses on intersections of national identities, visual culture and place, including waterscapes. She has published in diverse journals such as Art History, New Formations, The Irish Review, Nations and Nationalism, National Identities and the Journal of Tourism History. She co-edited Art, nation and gender: ethnic landscapes, myths and mother-figures with Síghle Bhreathnach-Lynch. Her book Riverscapes and national identities was published in 2010. An edited essay collection, Art and identity at the water’s edge appeared in 2012, and a further collection, Framing the ocean, 1700 to the present: envisaging the sea as social space will be published in 2014.

ALASTAIR J. DURIE has held a series of academic teaching, examination and research appointments at the Universities of Aberdeen (1971–89), Glasgow (1989–2001) and Stirling (2001–) as lecturer and then senior lecturer. He currently teaches the history of medicine for the Open University and the history of sport at the University of Stirling, and supervises postgraduates for the University of the Highlands and Islands. His first research and publications were in the field of Scottish textiles, and his book The Scottish linen industry in the eighteenth century appeared in 1979. He has also published essays on banking and management, transport and culture. In recent years the primary focus has been on the history of Scottish tourism. Scotland for the holidays: tourism in Scotland 1780–1939 was published in June 2003, which was followed in 2006 by a study of hydropathy, Water is best: the hydros and health tourism in Scotland, 1840–1940. Most recently, he has edited Travels in Scotland 1788–1881: a selection of journals and diaries (2012), for the Scottish History Society.

ERICA LEA GERMAN is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of British Columbia and holds an M.A. in history from the University of Guelph. Her research explores the connections between tourism, family and gender in Victorian Britain.

KATHERINE HALDANE GRENIER is professor of history at the Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina. She is the author of Tourism and identity in Scotland, 1770–1914: creating Caledonia (2005), as well as several articles on tourism in nineteenth-century Scotland. She is currently working on a study of Sabbatarianism in Victorian Scotland.

KEVIN J. JAMES is associate professor of history at the University of Guelph, Canada, and founder of the Tourism History Working Group. Author of Handloom weavers in Ulster’s linen industry (2007) and Tourism, land and landscape in Ireland: the commodification of culture (forthcoming), he also writes on comparative Irish and Scottish social history, with a focus on tourism, hotel history and the history of hotel albums.

SHANNON O’CONNOR is currently working as a cataloguer for a non-profit company in Ontario. She has master’s degrees in history from the University of Guelph, where she was a founding member of the Tourism History Working Group, and in information studies from the University of Toronto.

ERIC SIMPSON lectured in history for the B.Ed. degree of Edinburgh University. He has written and lectured on many different aspects of Scottish history and heritage. His books include: The auld grey toun: Dunfermline in the time of Andrew Carnegie 1835–1919 (1987); Discovering Moray, Banff and Nairn (1992); Going on holiday (1997); and Dalgety Bay: heritage and hidden history (1999). When not exploring seaside places, he heads for the hills. He has climbed all 282 Munros (Scottish three-thousand-foot-plus mountains). A native of Buckie, Banffshire, his learning was enhanced by the facilities and teaching provided at the town’s public library, the local high school and Aberdeen University. He has resided at Dalgety Bay in Fife since 1966. He was historical adviser for the BBC Scotland TV series Grand Tours of Scotland, which to date has run to four series. His latest book, Wish you were still here: the Scottish seaside holiday has just been issued.

JOHN K. WALTON is an Ikerbasque professor of social history, working in the Instituto Valentín de Foronda, University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. He edits the Journal of Tourism History and has published extensively on histories of tourism, destinations, sport, leisure and identities, especially in Britain and Spain. He began his academic career as a historian of north-west England and the Irish Sea economy, and his most recent book (as editor) is Mineral springs resorts in global perspective: spa histories (2013). Forthcoming, edited with Jason Wood, is The making of a cultural landscape: the English Lake District as tourist destination, 1750–2010.

ERIC G.E. ZUELOW is associate professor of European history at the University of New England in Biddeford, Maine. He is author of Making Ireland Irish: tourism and national identity since the Irish Civil War (2009) and editor of Touring beyond the nation: a transnational approach to European tourism history (2011). Zuelow serves as both deputy and reviews editor for the Journal of Tourism History.

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the Institute of Ulster-Scots Studies, and especially Professor John Wilson and Dr Billy Kelly, for their strong and enduring support of this project from its inception at a symposium co-hosted by them, through the Institute of Ulster-Scots Studies and the University of Guelph’s College of Arts, under Dean Donald M. Bruce. The symposium, which Sally Halliday helped to organise, was graciously hosted by the Tower Museum in Derry/Londonderry, under the auspices of Bernadette Walsh. James McConnel and Éamonn Ó Ciardha also offered valuable assistance in its organisation.

This collection advances a unique partnership forged in part through the Tourism History Working Group at the University of Guelph, generously supported by the Department of History under Dr Peter Goddard, with project funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Graduate and undergraduate students make a valuable contribution to the group’s ongoing activities, which we would like to acknowledge here. The remarkable insights and enthusiasm of Christopher Quinn, Erica German, Shannon O’Connor, Monica Finlay, Wade Cormack and Alex Clay s graduate scholars have contributed to its dynamism and vitality. Levin Maaskant, as an undergraduate student, also made important and much-valued contributions to the group’s early development. Evan Tigchelaar played a critical role in the completion of this collection in 2013. To these students we offer our deepest thanks for developing a critical cohort engaged in important scholarship on Irish and Scottish tourism history.

The Ulster Historical Foundation, and its executive director, Fintan Mullan, have stood behind this publication since it was first proposed to them. We are grateful to them for their support and encouragement. To Professor John K. Walton, who has blazed a trail in tourism history, and who has honoured us by authoring an epilogue to this volume, we dedicate this collection.

KEVIN J. JAMES AND ERIC G.E. ZUELOW

Introduction

Kevin J. James and Eric G.E. Zuelow

The current narrative of tourism history is inextricably bound with the evolution of modern Britain. Whether the topic is Elizabeth I’s desire for a clever solution to growing foreign-policy challenges, an ever-increasing consumer culture, the arrival of steam power as a potent engine for rapid mobility or expanding workers’ rights, the growth of tourism is never far behind. When the Virgin Queen faced daunting challenges from growing continental empires, she inaugurated what would become the Grand Tour. In an age of landed aristocracy, the desire to find new ways to display wealth (and therefore power) inspired aristocrats to send their sons to Europe to develop language skills and artistic taste.¹ Some of these landowners made the trip themselves, relentlessly searching for works either by great masters or fashionable newcomers.² Travellers of slightly lesser rank followed them. Both groups included many women, whose experiences have only recently been explored. Industrialisation assured the growth of a middle class and the spread of wealth down the social hierarchy. It eventually made it possible for more people to contemplate moving beyond their immediate geographic environment. Railways and steamboats transformed travel. They made it affordable, available and, most of all, comparatively quick, but their foundation was an existing and often neglected network of roads and canals.³

Yet the stories of modern Britain and modern tourism are even more tightly intertwined. The United Kingdom was not the only centre of the scientific revolution, but it was the first country on earth to industrialise. When entrepreneurs and landowners constructed the first factories, they accelerated urbanisation. All of the attendant problems of cities resulted. Sanitation was poor, air quality rotten, the smells famously dreadful. Medical men and scientists blamed the bad air for disease, even if it was the cholera-laden water that was most perilous. Under the circumstances, the desire to escape the city is entirely understandable. Conveniently, Irishmanturned-Londoner Edmund Burke provided a goal and a destination when escaping urban grime – the sublime and the beautiful, which joined Rev. William Gilpin’s famous category of the picturesque. Rolling hills and peaceful beaches were beautiful; raging cataracts, jagged mountains and storm-driven waves crashing against sea cliffs were sublime. Naturally, it helped that mountains and beaches feature whipping winds and clean air.⁴ It was not long before new leisure regimes such as the seaside holiday evolved, attracting first the rich, then the middle classes, and finally (and most famously) the workers.⁵

British history also left another legacy to modern tourism – a fascination with ruins and palatial homes. Manor houses and great estates offered eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tourists a chance to admire good taste. They confronted visitors with an introduction to the ruling class. They embodied power and authority. Meanwhile, romantic ruins showed a different kind of power – the divine. Man could build great abbeys or castles, but God ultimately held the upper hand. He was the maker and the destroyer. For late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britons, that dichotomy was clearly visible amid ruins that were well sited near rushing rivers, covered in vines and positioned against a backdrop of looming hillsides.⁶

Of course, in lore, it was an Englishman who made it possible to reach these newly exciting destinations. Thomas Cook was only one of a number of men to provide package tourism to the masses, but he is by far the most famous. Deservedly or not, his pre-eminence is due in part to a carefully stewarded brand that speaks to a tourist industry in which not just sites, but also service providers, have been invested with considerable import by marketers. Cook stands as a great economic explorer, taking legions of English men and women into exotic locales and slowly building a hugely influential business in the process. Yes, much of his notoriety came from running working-class excursions to the London Great Exhibition of 1851, but his real fame involved ferrying middle-class curiosity-seekers into the wilds of Scotland, where they could gaze upon a kilt-clad ‘other’ whom they imagined to be entirely different from themselves.

Glasgow and the central belt may have been vital to the rise of British industrial might, but Scotland was nevertheless very different. It was a fringe area, populated with noble savages worthy of touristic observation. It was only when railway companies refused to sell Cook tickets in the hope that they could steal his business, thus briefly closing Scotland to him, that he looked abroad to even more exotic locations for his trips.⁷ Tourists almost always desire difference. The greater that difference, the more status is to be gained from the trek.⁸

It is only more recently in the writing of tourism history that Scotland and Ireland have emerged as important elements of the previously Anglocentric narrative. While the story of tourism is focussed primarily on the British, that story has often been more English than British. There is a clear sense of core versus periphery, in which Englishness relegates other inhabitants of the British Isles to ‘other’ status. In the usual tourism narrative, the developers were principally English, although they undoubtedly had effects upon Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The ‘Celtic fringe’ offered English tourists a sublime destination, dotted with eyecatching ruins. Yet it can seem that the inhabitants of these wild places had little role in the greater story of tourism.⁹ That narrative is rapidly changing. The historiography of Scottish and Irish tourism is undergoing a remarkable expansion in quality and quantity. In keeping with this, a growing list of historians is fleshing out our understanding of tourism history, revealing important development efforts in previously peripheral areas.

Scotland’s oft-cited inferiority complex¹⁰ and a related concern about the prevalence of a ‘tartan monster’ that will not die because it ‘possesses the force of its own vulgarity – immunity from doubt and higher culture’¹¹ likely fuelled the fact than an interest in tourism development and cultural representation arose in Scotland far sooner than it did across the Irish Sea. As a result, we know a great deal about the development of Scottish tourism,¹² the role of tourism in negotiating the Anglo-Scottish relationship¹³ and the evolution of the Scottish ‘brand’ – complete with its reliance on tartanry¹⁴ and related kitsch.¹⁵ In the past few years, the story of Irish tourism has started to receive a similar level of scholarly attention, and has developed into a sub-field of Irish history in much the same way that Irish travel writing has become a focus of Irish literary scholarship. There are at least three monograph-length histories of the Irish tourist industry,¹⁶ landmark studies of travel writers’ accounts of Ireland before the Great Famine and after,¹⁷ an exploration of the formulation of place branding,¹⁸ some excellent ethnographic research¹⁹ and a plethora of material on more recent tourist-development efforts.²⁰

While there is still much work to do, the fact is that the story of both Scottish and Irish tourism is coming into ever-sharper focus. And yet there is a significant oversight. With only a few exceptions, the above scholarship is primarily concerned with either the Anglo-Irish or the Anglo-Scottish relationship. England almost always emerges as the most important source of tourists, leaving the relationship between other groups and regions of the British Isles largely unexplored. Did large numbers of Scottish tourists not visit Ireland and vice versa? Were developments in Scotland not closely watched in Ireland, especially since the two tourist landscapes overlap somewhat? Surely this relationship is every bit as important as that between England and Scotland or England and Ireland.

The Ulster–Scotland axis

Tourism aside, the axis between Ireland (and especially Ulster) on one hand and Scotland on the other has received considerable attention, especially within the framework of ‘three-kingdoms’ and ‘four-nations’ history.²¹ The present collection, roughly encompassing the period from the Act of Union of 1800 (effective 1801) to the mid-twentieth century, testifies to this influence. This said, there are profound differences between older and more recent studies of interactions between, and parallels and contrasts in the experience of, Ulster and Scotland. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historiography produced distinctive ethnic characteristics. The Ulster-Scot embodied an admixture of the Covenanting Scotsman and the stoic Ulster farmer – a figure endowed with deep piety and sturdy ruggedness. These qualities were testament to having withstood the trials of seventeenth-century settlement and the punitive Test and Corporation Acts, then having weathered an equally inhospitable transatlantic exile.²²

Modern academic studies of Ulster and Scotland have embraced more systematic inquiries into populations and movements, as part of an enterprise that is often subsumed under a broader Ireland–Scotland comparative rubric.²³ It is part of an explicit effort, initially led by economic and social historians, to develop an agenda for exploring parallels and contrasts in which Ulster (or at least parts of it) loomed large – particularly in the analysis of religion, political radicalism, industrialisation and urbanisation across the North Channel. At its core are human movements from the northern reaches of one island to another, sometimes in the form of permanent settlement, but featuring return migration and Ulster serving as a staging-ground for the wider peregrinations of Scots. Seventeenth-century Scottish settlement in Ulster, many scholars contend, laid foundations for extensive modern human movements and cultural influences across the channel.²⁴

The result is said to be a region of notable commercial and cultural coherence. Scholars have explored distinctive aspects and impacts of Scottish settlement: its historical geography (particularly its concentration in Ulster’s north-east) and the evolution of particular cultural forms, most notably a vibrant and diverse Presbyterianism. They are given flesh and bone in studies of the autodidact poet-weaver,²⁵ of the radical sons of the 1798 Rebellions, and of particularistic social and cultural forms that the 1798ers carried into a broader transatlantic world.²⁶ The study of cross-channel settlement has produced a raft of scholarship on the intensity of continuing social and cultural exchange. Work on the late-eighteenth-century Ulster–Scotland axis embraces both religion and political radicalism and often suggests an inextricable linkage between them.²⁷ Indeed, historians detect in the Ulster uprisings of 1798 – focussed to such an extent on the regions of Presbyterian settlement – more than a faint impulse of Scottish Covenanting radicalism.²⁸ The physical mapping of this axis has condensed Scotland and Ulster to a ‘region’ comprising north-east Ulster and south-west Scotland, an area that incubated intense personal, intellectual and cultural interaction.

The distillation of politico-cultural affinities to this geographic connection, and to those particular brands of Presbyterianism associated with it, remains the underpinning of many studies of the nineteenth century.²⁹ They project cultural unity onto a space that spanned the North Channel, depicting south-west Scotland and north-east Ulster as a coherent region of intensive cultural and commercial exchange in the early-modern period. At the same time, the thematic lens has widened to embrace urbanisation, industrialisation and other key features of modernisation. It lays stress on the social and economic consequences of human migration, on locating the experience of particular social groups within the structures of modernising society³⁰ and on comparing the great industrial cities of Glasgow and Belfast.

Equally important, and daunting, is the task of exploring social and cultural forms, whether movements such as Orangeism (spearheaded in Scotland by Irish Protestant migrants in the pre-Famine decades), or antagonistic confessional identities that built communities and conflicts across the North Channel and were nurtured by political parties and popular football.³¹ At the same time, patterns of industrial and commercial development promoted intensified exchange between regions of Scotland and Ulster: steamers plied the North Channel, enabling not only greater leisure travel, but also the seasonal movement of dockyard labour from one great shipbuilding centre to the other, along with migrant ‘tattie howkers’ and others whose livelihood strategies spanned the Irish Sea.

Focussing on themes of migration, industry