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Envisioning Switzerland in the Manchester Guardian, 1890-1925:
C. E. Montague, British mountaineering
and the Swiss tourist industry.
150 Years of Popular Tourism in Switzerland: The Great Outdoors
De Montfort University
16th October 2013 http://www.dmu.ac.uk/about-dmu/events/events-calendar/2013/october/150-
years-of-popular-tourism-in-switzerland-the-great-outdoors.aspx
Dr. Jonathan Westaway, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK.
C. E. Montague: A Memoir By Oliver Elton. London: Chatto & Windus, 1929
1905, from a drawing by Francis Dodd
1888, Balliol College, Oxford
Barn-door traverse, Wasdale Head Hotel Y boulder, Mosedale, Lake District
The Economy of Holidays J. A. Hobson
– „where economic pressure deprives individuals of
opportunities of becoming invisible to the market-
of space in which to play, idle and fantasize - their
internal need to engage in the dysfunctional would
erupt in pathologies…a “margin of
disorder”, Hobson wrote, “or hazard and
unreason, will always remain a factor in the
interest of life: hence an element of unordered
play…will always survive.”‟
[Bank Holiday climbing & geology in the N.W.] Manchester Guardian, 26 Dec. 1903
“It feels very much the same to have lost your
way in a big snowstorm on the top of Kinder
Scout and on the Grand Plateau of Mont
Blanc. The Downfall, well curtained with ice,
yields quite as engaging a “pitch” as the glazed
garden wall of rude construction over which
you get at the peak of the Zermatt Rothhorn.”
‘Snow in town’ Manchester Guardian, 21 Dec. 1922
“Within a few minutes the central tower
of the Manchester Town Hall‟s front to
Albert Square had become a system of
steep hanging snow-slopes like a
Chamonix aiguille. They called out to
be climbed.”
‘Up to the Alps’ The Right Place. London: Chatto & Windus, 1924
– „The Swiss are inspired hotel keepers. Some
centuries since, when a stranger strayed into their
valleys, their simple forefathers would kill him an
share out the little money he might have about
him. Now they know better. They keep him alive
writing cheques.‟
Mr. Punch on the Continong, Punch Library of Humour, no date
‘The averted Matterhorn railway’ Manchester Guardian, 16 Nov. 1908
“…this capital could not but
be depreciated if the famous
summit were vulgarised, and
perhaps defaced, by a
station-possibly to be
followed later by a
castellated public house, like
the one now squatted on the
crest of the Gornergrat.”
[Swiss tourist industry: genie out of the pot] Manchester Guardian, 8 Sept. 1906
„But what the metals really rest on,
lower down, is Mr. WHYMPER‟S
“Scrambles in the Alps” and
STEPHEN‟S “Playground of Europe,”
TYNDALL‟s “Glaciers of the Alps”
and “Hours of Exercise”, and the early
“Peaks, Passes and Glaciers”‟
[Snobbishness over rock climbers] Manchester Guardian, 1 Aug. 1904
– „We get our railway tickets from Mr. Cook and use
“Cook‟s tourists” as terms of abuse: we sigh to
“get off the beaten track”, and then we go to the
Riffel Alp; we pine for “the old fascination drifting
on snow slope and solitary ridge,” and to find it we
climb the Weisshorn, or even the Matterhorn.‟
