Hoping to learn more about traveling during an uncertain time, I pick up a used copy of a romance travel novel published in the 1930s. Why not take a lesson or two from our elders? The main character in Maysie Greig’s book, Honeymoons Arranged, sets up vacation travel packages for newlyweds at the All Year Tourist Company in London. Celia Hammond’s so good at her job that she’s hoping for a promotion, only to find herself passed over because 1.) she’s a woman and 2.) she’s not related to the company’s owners. Fireworks and a few travel adventures ensue.
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Visiting London and Planning Honeymoons Shortly Before World War II
Given the year this work was published (my edition was published in 1940, but it looks like an earlier one may have been issued in 1937), I am hopeful that some mention of looming difficulties in Europe will be made or the actual outbreak of World War II will be addressed. Real-world problems don’t really make their way into the work, although the “present unsettled condition of Europe” has some newlyweds looking to honeymoon closer to home. I learn from another source that 20 percent of visitors to Germany in 1937 were from Great Britain or Ireland.
Adventures in Travel Then and Now
Then again, the reason to read a romance novel is to achieve a certain measure of escapism, so it is not particularly surprising that politics or the economic situation (the remnants of the Great Depression) are not much addressed (although our protagonist does help support her sister and her sister’s family). Popular destinations in some measure seem to be the same in the 1930s as they are now (absent the pandemic, that is). Back then, “fashionable sporting resorts” offered “skiing in Switzerland, playing polo in the Argentine, tennis on the Riviera,” Greig writes.
What turns out to be most interesting about this work is its discussion of the tourism industry at a moment when adventures in travel, in an era prior to the internet, very much had to be planned. An interesting metric is introduced: that more women were obtaining passports than men. Contemporary readers might marvel at the casual sexism in the workplace back then; the main character who very much wants to move up the career ladder is flummoxed at various points by people who don’t think women should work outside the home.
Ditching the Popular Destinations
Honeymoons Arranged hints at a nagging sense of overtourism, although that modern descriptor is not used to describe the vagaries of the travel and hospitality industries. “There is a growing set of travelers who want to get away from the beaten track,” one character says. “To a great many enlightened people, such places as Nice, Monte Carlo, Geneva, the Italian lakes are abhorrent,” he continues. This fellow wants to start offering cruises to places no one else is sending tourists to. All it will take is good advertising and that generation’s influencers: word of mouth from people who’ve gone on the tours.
Lines from Honeymoons Arranged Worthy of These Pandemic Times
“Don’t you think there are people who want to travel to get away from all these blasted modern comforts which are making soft, namby-pamby creatures of us all?”
Maysie GreIg, Honeymoons Arranged
“Also they had been afraid of finding themselves alone and isolated in New York, and there is no place where one can feel more isolated than in a large city.”
Maysie Greig, Honeymoons Arranged
Does the Book Make You Want to Go There?
Although set in London, the city does not place much of a role in the book. Some intriguing islands off the coast of Scotland do feature in the story. A plot twist makes the islands not particularly appealing back then, but the Orkney Islands certainly seem worth visiting now—well, when the pandemic subsides, that is.
What’s there to see? The Broch of Gurness, a ruin from the Iron Age; the 5,000-year-old Neolithic village of Skara Brae, and the Standing Stones of Stenness, which are vaguely reminiscent of Stonehenge.
Where are the Orkney islands?
All in all, Honeymoons Arranged is worthwhile read, both for the glimpse into the history of the tourism industry it offers and as a cogent reminder about the need for equality in the workplace.
—Lori Tripoli
Lori Tripoli is the editor and publisher of Bashful Adventurer. Based in the New York City vicinity, she writes about travel for a variety of publications.
Contact Lori at loritripoli @ bashfuladventurer.com.
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