Post-War Motoring in the Lake District, the 1920s and 1930s

Chapter 6 explores Lake District tourism during the inter-war period, focusing on what impacts mass-motorization made on roads, tourist behaviour, local life, and the cultural value of the Lake District. The growth of charabanc and coach travel brought increasing numbers of day trips and tours from ever more distant places, creating a new battlefield for local complaints and conflicts. When a mountain electric railway from Ambleside to Keswick was proposed in 1921, many were convinced that it would be preferable to the constant streams of dust-raising charabancs. Eventually, a groundswell of opinion arose that mountain solitudes and walkers’ and cyclists’ rights should be protected from the ‘rash assault’ of unlimited road construction and queues of cars. Amid this motor-age controversy Wordsworth was once again summoned to give voice to modern discontents. Controversial plans to construct new roads over Wrynose and Hardknott Passes, and a by-pass road through Dora’s Field below Rydal Mount, were abandoned.

Wordsworthian Tourism in the Interwar Period

Chapter 7 explores how the cultural identity of the Lake District was redefined and preserved after the First World War through two trends: new global tourism, and the advent of outdoor movements. First it focuses on foreign visitors, including American and Japanese tourists, who have made no slight contribution to the re-invention of ‘Wordsworth Country’. Then it explores some of the new walkers’ guides, including those by William Thomas Palmer, Maxwell Fraser and Henry Herbert Symonds, that were particularly attuned to foot-stepping through Wordsworth’s Lake District and encouraged readers to go back to Romantic pedestrianism. The chapter also pays attention to how the hiking and cycling boom among urban working classes changed the tourist landscape in the Lake District, becoming the driving force behind conservation and access campaigns and the new National Parks movement. Taken as a whole, the chapter investigates how Wordsworth’s legacy was preserved and then rehabilitated in the interwar era of mass motoring.

Epilogue

The closing chapter focuses on two events at Dove Cottage in 1935: a transatlantic radio broadcast of Grasmere sounds to North America, and the opening of a new museum at Dove Cottage. These two events offer us perspectives through which to assess the multiple threads that run throughout this book: globalism and nationalism; accessibility and preservation; the progress of technology and a growing sense of cultural heritage; the pressures of modern life and the quest for rest and recreation; national defence and nature conservation. The chapter then gives a final consideration to the engrained traveller / tourist antithesis: how the district’s cultural landscape has been constructed through a series of competing dynamics, broadly represented by ‘democratic’ ideas of enlarging public accessibility and more ‘exclusive’ conceptions of how we should ‘worthily’ enjoy nature. Throughout, Wordsworth’s vision and language have continued to be adapted both to promote and protect, culminating in the establishment of the Lake District National Park in 1951 and, most recently, to its designation as a World Heritage Site in 2017.

The First World War and the Lake District

Chapter 5 reveals how the Great War of 1914–1918 produced a remarkable upturn in Wordsworth’s reputation, and how it had an inescapable impact on the cultural landscape of the Lake District. For obvious reasons, Wordsworth’s sonnets on liberty and independence had strong public appeal, and his sense of crisis during the war with Napoleonic France was shared by many who stood against Germany. Equally, Wordsworth’s poetry and the Lake scenery offered consolation and relief at a time of widespread tension, anxiety, and horror. When hostilities ended, Wordsworth’s association with the Lake scenery, combined with his patriotic revival during the war, produced the idea of the Lakeland mountains as a stronghold of national liberty. Twelve mountains were donated to the National Trust to be preserved as war memorials, and public free access to them were also secured.

The Railway Controversy in Wordsworth’s Lake District

Chapter 2 explores how Wordsworth’s anti-railway arguments were variously redeployed by the Victorian conservationists, such as John Ruskin, Hardwick Drummond Rawnsley, and Gordon Wordsworth, all of whom campaigned against multiple railway projects in the Lake District. As the railway proposals became the subject of nationwide discussion, the question arose as to whose property the Lake District was, and who could claim a right to decide what to do with it: ‘stakeholders’ included local residents, farmers, aesthetic elites, and working-class tourists. Opponents of railways argued that the area’s aesthetic and literary value, and its Wordsworthian associations, were of national interest and also vital to local economic growth. Railway construction was thus debated, even by the anti-railway lobby, in terms of economics rather than what would now be termed environmental concerns. This chapter reveals how the railway controversy was an explosive mixture of aesthetics and class-struggle, democracy and populism, tourism and industrialization, commercialism, local economy and national heritage, and, lastly, an emergent environmental consciousness.

Introduction

After establishing the scope and critical context of the book, the Introduction gives a brief history of the A591 main road linking Kendal and Keswick. This ancient road was and is the central axis of the Lake District in many respects; it was a setting for several poems of Wordsworth, and along it Wordsworth, Coleridge and other Romantic writers took up residence. Attracted by these literary associations and by the spectacular landscape, tourists have journeyed along the road on foot, by coach, by bicycle, and in motor vehicles. The surrounding landscape has also been a centre of campaigns against many projected incursions by railways and road constructions. As a principal site of the book, this chapter gives a cultural and social portrayal of the road, following Hardwick Drummond Rawnsley’s coach journey of 1888 — a glimpse of the last days of pre-modern literary tourism by coach — to highlight how this traditional mode of travel was affected by the age of transport revolutions.

The Arrival of Motorcars

This chapter examines the earliest period of motor tourism and how the Lake District responded to the gathering motor revolution. In 1897 one of the first adventurous motorists, Henry Sturmey, successfully crossed Kirkstone Pass, and within a decade the first motor tourists began to penetrate all corners of the district. As their numbers increased so did complaints about dust, noise, fumes, speed, and the expense of building and maintaining the roads. Proposals to make a new road over remote Styhead Pass, for example, provoked disputes just as the railway projects had done, and Wordsworth was summoned to defend mountain solitudes and the rights of walkers against invading motorists. The chapter reveals how motor tourism rapidly transformed people’s awareness of the environment in which they lived and travelled, and how Wordsworthian values of natural beauty and quiet, the sense of retirement, and the recreational value of walking were increasingly drawing tourists’ attention.

Romantic Motorists, Romantic Cyclists

Chapter 4 investigates how and why the motorcar attracted George Dixon Abraham, James John Hissey and other early motorists, and explores how they adopted and adapted the poetics and aesthetics of Romantic writers, including Wordsworth and Shelley, in describing their new mobilised perceptions and bodily sensations as they hurried through changing weather and scenery, attempting inaccessible mountain passes and dizzying descents. As motor cars gradually replaced horse-drawn vehicles, and the speed of travel increased in the pre-War period, the pursuits of a more leisurely literary tourism gradually declined. At the same time, motorists were finding their own ways of enjoying the country roads, free movement and self-reliance, which was impossible for railway passengers. Likewise, intrepid bicyclists, such as Fitzwater Wray, relished their mobility and self-dependence as they toured in the Lake District in the early twentieth century. The chapter reveals how the Romantic ethos of oneness with nature, freedom of wayfaring and personal independence were revitalized in early motorists’ and cyclists’ poetics of the road.

Wordsworth and Railways

This chapter offers a wide-ranging reappraisal of the controversy provoked by the projected Kendal and Windermere Railway in the years 1844 to 1847. It re-examines Wordsworth’s motives for entering this controversy, the support and opposition he attracted, including some poetical ripostes, what he failed to see and where he was far-sighted. Frequently criticized as selfish, class-biased discrimination against mass-tourism, or welcomed as a dawn of modern environmentalism, Wordsworth’s anti-railway sonnets and letters published in the Morning Post were in fact more complex than has been supposed, and sometimes contradictory. Far from rejecting railways and technological invention, Wordsworth predicted a glorious future for steam power in terms that were, ironically, quickly appropriated by railway promoters to further their own aims. Ranging widely beyond the Kendal and Windermere Railway, the debate allowed Wordsworth to voice his opinions on scenery, transport, self-dependence, master-employee relations, local society and economy, aesthetics and prescient environmental considerations.