By Coach to France 1938

This is from a holiday scrapbook recording a coach trip to France and Switzerland in May 1938. Luggage labels mark the route taken. The happy travellers can be seen, lined up for a photograph en route - the group leader is in the centre - he is described as a professor of English from the Sorbonne, a fluent linguist and “possessed of a first class knowledge of the history of France”. Missing is the photographer and chronicler of the trip. He’s an articulate observer of rural life and the natural world. When recording his impressions of human behaviour, he favours a sardonic tone that shades into pomposity and, on occasion, downright misanthropy, nowhere more so than when commenting on the physical imperfections of the ageing dowagers of Aix les Bains at their leisure in the casino. Orléans is a source of irritation - constant reminders of England’s defeat at the hands of Jeanne d’Arc overshadow the pleasure of a superb lunch at the Grand Hotel d’Aignan. Despite being a “port city”, Bordeaux meets with approval. Half the hotels in Biarritz are closed due the Spanish Civil War. At the Hotel de France in Pau they were served with the “finest lunch in all France”. The scale and mass of the fortified city of Carcassonne “impressed itself in detail more permanently upon our recollection than any other place we visited”. Nightingale song is heard in Avignon but Provence is too hot for comfort. In Geneva there was “a tablet to the memory of Woodrow Wilson, the man who fashioned the boat of peace and wouldn’t row”. Swiss pluralism is commended thus, “Happy is the state which has the genius to keep the demon of racial intolerance at arm’s length”. There’s an opportunity to do some snowballing in the heights of the Jura but all too soon the coach is back at Calais after overnight stops in Vittel and Amiens. A three hour crossing to Dover in storm force winds followed by a traffic jam in Kent concluded the trip and the participants went their separate ways with scarcely a mumbled farewell.

Coast Daylight

The Southern Pacific (SP) Coast Daylight train made its first trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco on March 21st. 1937 being waved off in style by Hollywood star, Olivia De Havilland. This was a prestige effort with custom-built steam locomotives and rolling stock. At a time when competitors were turning to diesel traction in the early streamline era, the SP kept faith with steam power despite the risk of being associated with obsolete technology. To emphasise the sense of modernity, cosmetic streamlining was applied to the locomotives together with a highly visible colour scheme of red, orange and black quite unlike any of its rivals. Contemporary observers commented that the effect was similar to that of a circus train. The vision of senior execs and Hollywood moguls shuttling up and down the coast in air-conditioned luxury turned out to be short lived as the business travellers soon defected to the airlines. The residual traffic was significantly less profitable and in the post-war years all the special facilities, the tavern car, the coffee shop, the parlour car, the hairdresser and clairvoyant, were gradually withdrawn until the final indignity when the restaurant car was replaced by an automat. The rapid decline in rail passenger travel in the US is well documented and although Amtrak continues to operate this and many other services the original Coast Daylight offered a lustre and glamour that can never be repeated. 

Postcard of the Night No. 8, Cheyenne, Wyoming

Night has fallen over the crossroads of the nation and the rival networks of bus and train offer the nocturnal traveller an easy exit from Cheyenne. An oversized Union Pacific flag is attached to the tower of the railroad depot. According to my 1949 timetable a train from Cheyenne can be in Chicago in 16 hours or go west to San Francisco in just under 24 hours. The indigent itinerant in search of free high-risk railroad travel would be making for the hobo jungle to compete with fellow vagabonds for a ride in a freight car. First hand experience of the delights of the Bus Depot is limited but I can still recall the odour of diesel, donuts and Lucky Strikes that hung heavy in the air of these uninviting facilities. My diary for 1966 records that I passed through Cheyenne on August 23rd. en route from Salt Lake City to Omaha in the air-conditioned confinement of a Greyhound bus. 

Ramblin’ Man

Hank Williams travelled his Lost Highway and Chuck Berry searched for The Promised Land but only Lemon Jelly captured an Englishman’s passage through the wider world in the sublime Ramblin’ Man. It’s the loose-footed Psycho-geographer’s Anthem with a litany of place-names, famous and obscure, in sober tones redolent of Wilfred Thesiger or Patrick Leigh Fermor. Later this week I shall visit two locations from Lemon Jelly’s list. Last month we added another verse to our own list:

Chorleywood
Sheffield
Kingston upon Hull
Chalfont St Giles
Youlgreave

The task is to match each photo to a location – the only prize is a sense of self-satisfaction.

Itinéraire Tripolis Ghadamès

This curious book was published in French by Mondadori in 1939 to promote the attractions of a road trip from Tripoli to Ghadamès through the Libyan desert. The illustrations are uncredited and possess a flair for topographic watercolour combined with an Art Deco sensibility. Not all the images are equally successful but some of the best have been selected here. The narrative is conventional but the mood is dream-like and nowhere more than the scene in a hotel bedroom where a pair of fashionably dressed female guests coexist in an eerie atmosphere of psychological isolation.