The British pioneers of overseas travel

The British pioneers of overseas travel deserve a medal for braving the roads, the heat and, of course, the tea

Published: 14 January 2001

Are British holiday-makers heroes? That was the only conclusion I could draw from ITV's series Some Liked It Hot, shown over the past two weeks. How brave we have been, it seems, to go abroad at all, considering how parochial we were when it started, back in the days when we were all going on away-days from Sunderland and taking mouthfuls of sewage and catching polio.

I loved the couple, for example, who spoke of solemnly drawing up their will before going on a driving tour of France, "just in case". None of their neighbours, the woman said, believed that they were going to come back alive. Taking a motor car abroad did take courage, in the days when nobody knew if the British were genetically capable of driving on the right. They even had drive-on air services across the channel; cars were driven into the plane's hold through its nose.

And don't imagine that your generation was the first to suffer airport delays. If you are less than 50 years old, your parents certainly got there before you. The boss of the endearingly named Gaytours Ltd, an early mass-market package holiday company, admitted on the programme that what was described to passengers as a "12-hour delay" could easily mean a wait of up to two days.

And aircraft safety? Again our parents seem to have been the guinea pigs. One woman recalled sitting on the runway at Majorca in the early 1960s and being informed by the pilot that he had been unable to find a spanner to tighten up something in the engine and would the passengers please get into the crash position for a trial take-off?

"Going abroad made me feel that important," said one woman. "I thought: 'This is heaven. I'm a movie star.'" She then went and got blistered and had sun stroke and was horribly ill after just the first day on the beach.

I cannot quite imagine the humiliation of being the first British people after the Second World War to set foot on the beaches of St Tropez. "We were like milk-bottles," said a woman on the programme. "Everyone else was brown all over. We felt inferior, ridiculous."

The first British woman on holiday in Greece to fall disastrously in love with a man named Adonis; the first British people to attempt to make a mess of eating spaghetti in Italy; the first British man to complain that "you were lucky if you could get a good pot of tea" at breakfast in Spain: they did it for us.

So when we jet off to the Mediterranean this summer, let's raise a glass to the men and women of years gone by, who made it all possible.