It's a Dying Trade!

I'm not talking about undertaking, as in the music-hall joke book; and this post - you'll be pleased to know - is not about Covid-19 either.  I watched something the other night about the canals that spread across this country towards the end of the eighteenth century.  Within little more than fifty years, they were beginning to decline as the steam age rose to precedence and a far greater network of iron 'roads' (yes, they were actually called roads) grew up to accommodate the railways that ousted the canals from their role as the major carrier of manufactured merchandise.

The railways had another great advantage over the canals ... they carried passengers, too.  People took advantage of the new faster means of getting from one part of the country to another.  And they weren't just for the well-to-do.  The Railway Regulation Act of 1844 demanded that the railway companies should provide one train per day in each direction on all of their lines at a cost of no more than one penny per mile, which brought such luxury within the means of the working classes.

It is said that, had it not been for the Second World War, the advance of the motor car in the early twentieth century would have had the same effect on the railways as they had had on the canals a century earlier.  As it was, many lines were dreadfully uneconomical long before Dr Beeching wielded his metaphorical axe in the mid-'sixties, wiping many thousands of miles of railway tracks not only off the map but, in many cases, off the face of the countryside with unseemly haste.

My theme today is the way that the advance of technology has caused major upheaval to the lives of a great swathe of our population from one age to another over the course of just a generation or so.  I've given just two examples above; I'm sure my reader can just as quickly add a couple more ... and a couple more!

Another such change that claimed my attention last week was in the realms of recreation.  The advent of the railways and the consequent ease of travel, preceded by only a few decades the first reductions in the working week.  Gradually, hour by painful hour, conditions improved; some employers were more generous than others but, in 1938, the Holidays with Pay Act gave those workers whose minimum rates of pay were fixed by trade boards, the right to one week's paid holiday per year.  This was like the firing of a starting pistol.

In many of the industrial areas of the north of England, it was realised that, with all the workforce wanting to take their holiday in the summer months, rather than reduce productivity significantly over a prolonged period, it would be better to close the factories completely for a whole week or more.  This not only benefited the employers, who could also arrange for major maintenance to be carried out when production was at a standstill, but it gave those employees who wished, the opportunity to take their holidays with their colleagues.  

The railways took advantage of this and arranged special trains to convey thousands of holidaymakers from the industrial centres to the coast, where many towns, Blackpool and Great Yarmouth in particular, had developed a new thriving industry catering for their needs.  This trend was not, of course, confined to the heavy industries.  All workers gradually became entitled to paid holiday in increasing amounts.  Soon it became the norm for some workers to have a summer and a winter holiday, and maybe two weeks could possibly be spent at the seaside instead of one!

There were people who, for a variety of reasons wouldn't wish, or perhaps weren't able to go to the seaside.  But they liked to keep up with the places their friends had visited and, from the last years of the nineteenth century, the picture postcard had become one of the easiest ways of achieving this.  It has been said that this was the distant forerunner of Facebook and Twitter, since a card could be posted one morning and be at the far end of the country by the next, or in a nearby town by the same afternoon!

You may remember a square-framed board, criss-crossed by a lattice of tapes, that would hang on the kitchen wall.  During the year, this would provide a suitable place to store correspondence: letters from friends near and far, or bills to be paid, and so on.  But, as the summer progressed, all the friends who had gone on their holidays would send their postcards and these would be carefully threaded on the board, making a colourful display to brighten the lives of those who were at home.

As the decades passed, in the same way as transport advances had led to the seaside holidays, so further advances, first of the motor car and later of passenger air flight, led to its demise.  A week at Clacton or Skegness gave way to a weekend in Paris or Stockholm, which in turn paled to insignificance against the attraction of a week in Cuba or a fortnight in Thailand.  For a while the cards got bigger and the scenes they portrayed less and less familiar, but it wasn't long before the humble postcard had given way to the holiday video, and the lattice board, having been quite empty for many years, was ousted when the kitchen was redecorated.