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In Britain, with its voluntarist traditions, the state played a relatively reluctant role in the development of holiday time provision up to and beyond the second World War. Factors such as wages, free time, the availability of transport and accommodation all helped to shape workers' holiday experiences. Such themes, as with shared holiday leisure activities or studies of the growth of resorts themselves, are already well treated in leading examples of the existing historiography, such as John Walton's companion volume in the same series of Studies in Popular Culture, The British Seaside: Holidays and Resorts in the Twentieth Century (Manchester, 2000). But the contribution of workers themselves to the creation of popular tourism has often been underplayed. Barton's interesting and largely novel analysis offers a distinctive angle of vision by exploring the extent to which some features of working-class tourism were rooted in working-class culture. She sets such tourism in its broader political context, stressing the collective activity and bargaining of workers, and pointing particularly to the initiative and energy of savings clubs, friendly societies and union activity in shaping popular tourism. Her structure, while broadly chronological, examines a different theme in each chapter. Chapter 2, ‘No Grand Tours: tourism before 1850’, explores a variety of pre-railway travel alongside the organisation of railway trips by mechanics' institutes and friendly societies. Sunday School and temperance society trips are omitted, presumably on the grounds that some at least were more middle class, though they were certainly often well patronised by the working classes. Writers on the 1851 Great Exhibition have long pointed to it as a key event in establishing the viability of the working-class holiday, and a strong third chapter provides a much firmer empirical foundation for such comments, demonstrating the ways in which, across many provincial regions, travellers' clubs were able to offer a package of fares and London accommodation. Discussion of holidays without pay (Chapter 4) focuses largely on the Lancashire Wakes tradition, extending the discussion to wider contexts such as extended Saint Mondays or hop-picking holidays, although the fairs, race meetings and other major leisure events, common contexts for absenteeism despite opposition from employers and school head teachers, and often excuses for working-class tourism from outside the local community, are, perhaps surprisingly, ignored. She then draws out hitherto neglected but important material on the ways in which different trade unions engaged in collective bargaining for holidays with pay in the early twentieth century. Chapter 6 builds on existing studies of the landladies, boarding houses and similar cheap accommodation for working-class visitors by providing fascinating material on the contributions of early pioneers of socialist recreational activity such as the Co-operative Holiday Association (1891), Holiday Fellowship (1913) or the Workers' Travel Association, and the pioneering holiday camps such as the Socialist Holiday Camp at Caistor (1906), alongside the ‘plotland’ huts, carriages and caravans which appealed to the more independent-minded. Barton sets in context the origins and limited provisions of the 1938 Holidays with Pay Act, and demonstrates its fairly insignificant initial impact despite government concerns over potential future over-development and disfiguration of the coastline. The last two chapters, on the ways the state planned for workers' needs after 1938, and the rise of the continental package holiday for workers in the 1950s and 1960s, make a valuable historical contribution to a literature still predominantly the domain of sociologists. Her treatment is well-researched, and draws on a fruitful mixture of primary sources, including parliamentary, Board of Trade and trade union papers, the Workers Travel Association Archive, a range of oral history sources, and a sampling of newspapers. These are biased towards the midlands and north-west England, the latter an area which led the way in working-class holidays and still dominates the historiography. Barton's important and original book contributes to debates ranging from working-class living standards to popular politics. It is to be hoped that further case-studies will more fully tease out the subtleties and complexities of regional variation over time as a growing minority of workers managed, by a variety of initiatives, to gain time away from work.
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