Forty-four years before Brexit, our suspicion of foreigners was alive and well. The 1972 annual report from the London Tourist Board decreed that Britain could not, and, frankly, would not, welcome any more tourists.
Soon after, the British Tourist Authority unleashed a ‘mite of spite’ against backpackers who were allegedly pitching up in Dover ‘demanding virtually free accommodation’. Perhaps most damningly of all, Sir Hugh Casson of the Royal Fine Art Commission suggested an influx of young tourists in hotpants had ruined the Mall. ‘Parts of London have disappeared in a pox of shorts and pop music. The Mall has become a coach park by day and a doss house by night.’
These scantily clad tourists were, the Observer Magazine discovers, not particularly enamoured of the British either. In a report entitled ‘The Tourists Nobody Seems to Love’, the journalist Allen Andrews learns that the feelings were mutual.
Speaking to Andrews about her thoughts on British hospitality, Italian Maria Ottinetti took a swipe at our much-pilloried cuisine: ‘Whoever said plain English cooking was good? The only thing worse is plain Welsh cooking!’ In fairness, considering our love affair with Spam – consisting of six variations of pulped pork and potato starch – she may have had a point.
When asked what she thought of her time in England, Mrs Birgit Wartenberg, a Swiss housewife, had only one word: ‘Dirt.’ Andrews writes that she went on to thoroughly wash her hands with eau de cologne, distrusting the efficacy of water to obliterate the last traces of Blighty from her person.
Another Italian, Joyce Garbutt, recalls trying to hail a cab to Ealing from the airport: ‘Nobody admitted to knowing where Ealing was, but said Sid would take me. I was passed down a row of winking drivers all saying, “Sid will look after you, dear,” until I realised that to these men Ealing meant only abortion clinics. I ran away and hired a car!’
Andrews ends his report with a heartfelt appeal to the compassionate Observer readers on behalf of our beleaguered tourists: ‘If we want more of their cash, we have got to give them more to enjoy.’ Well, if you can’t pull on their heart strings, pull on their purse strings.
