That was an illusion. Something else was happening. A small party of British tourists was enjoying a new experience. That summer they could smile at the thought of their friends sheltering behind the windbreaks at home. They were gaudy explorers in sun hats and sandals, on their way to the Costa Brava. The invasion of Spain had begun.
The man who was leading it was a Russian Londoner. Vladimir Raitz was born in Moscow into a White Russian family not long after the revolution, so it was always likely that he’d have to get out of the Soviet Union. His grandparents left first, for Berlin, and later, in 1928, when he was 6, he and his mother followed them. His father stayed behind and Vladimir never saw him again. After Hitler took power in Germany in 1933 his grandparents were off again, and like so many Jewish émigrés who had to take flight they headed for London, where Vladimir joined them, a clever young man who spoke, as yet, no English at all. But there was something remarkable about this boy: at the end of his first term at Mill Hill School in north London he was top of his English class. This was the man who would revolutionize the British summer, by taking people away.
He spent the latter years of the war working for Reuters news agency as a young translator, listening to broadcasts from overseas, and when it was all over he began to wonder how he might make a success of life. He looked around for an idea – anything – and began to wonder what was going to happen to the cargo planes that had been used in the war, a little battered and travel-weary but still capable of flight. And then, with the death of his grandfather, he had a stroke of luck: an inheritance of £3,000, a goodly sum then. It was not until the early fifties that the average annual wage in Britain passed £500.
So Vladimir Raitz left Reuters and moved along Fleet Street, where he rented an office and started his own small company. It was a holiday business, and he wondered what to call it. He’d be taking people, he hoped, to places most of them had never seen and knew little about it; somewhere beyond. He had his name: Horizon Holidays.
In 1950 the number of people who took foreign holidays was much smaller than the number who stayed at home. The trades’ holidays, at fixed points of the year, were the signal for a dash to the seaside: in the last two weeks of July, for example, Blackpool would become a Scottish colony, thanks to the Glasgow Fair, when the whole workforce took its break. Going abroad was expensive, and tended to be the preserve of those who had time and money. Thomas Cook had started his travel business around 100 years earlier, in 1845, when he took a party from the English Midlands to Scotland, though it was the business that he got from the Great Exhibition in 1851 that made him. But in 1950s Britain Thomas Cook hadn’t yet turned its mind to mass marketing: it was still the agent for travellers with sturdy leather cases and time to kill. Visiting a branch to buy tickets was like visiting your bank, the clerks conducting their business with proper formality behind wooden desks.
Raitz wanted something different. First of all, he had his eyes on some of those old planes. The problem was that British European Airways, then in public ownership, wanted to stop him. It didn’t like the idea of a freebooter offering flights to places which it already served, for a hefty fare. Raitz had a fight with the Ministry of Aviation and finally persuaded them that he was doing something different. But he was allowed to make his first trip only if he agreed to certain conditions. He could only carry people who could prove that they were teachers, or students connected with them. In other words, Horizon Holidays had to demonstrate that it was more interested in self-improvement than fun. It was fine to go to Blackpool to hear Max Miller telling dirty jokes in the autumn of his career, or listen to Sandy MacPherson on the giant Wurlitzer, but if you were going to go anywhere near the Mediterranean you’d better demonstrate that you had some higher purpose in mind.
Raitz’s own purpose, of course, was simply to establish a good business – but it was an idea infused with his belief that many more people deserved the chance to travel. He had arrived in London speaking Russian, Polish, German and French, and had been turned into an internationalist. Like so many political refugees from the thirties, he brought with him an instinct and a conviction about culture: that broadening the mind, encountering other peoples, was good in itself and something that everyone should have the chance to do.
When his first chartered Dakota 3 took off from Gatwick airport in the summer of 1950, he hoped it was going to be the start of a business that would grow quickly, but it was a modest beginning. There were eleven paying passengers and twenty-one students on the plane. They weren’t travelling luxuriously, or even comfortably. The plane refuelled at Lyon, then completed its six-hour flight to Corsica, landing on an airstrip at Calvi that had been laid out during the war and still bore the scars of that time. There was no airport building; nothing. Raitz remembered later that they sheltered from the sun under the wings until buses came to take them away, to a campsite where they would spend their fortnight’s holiday: two beds to a tent, rudimentary bathroom facilities and washrooms. But for their all-in price of £32 10/- they got something more. At the camp there were a bar and a dance floor. The teachers and students, whatever the Ministry of Aviation thought about it, were going to do more than visit the twelfth-century citadel, look for Roman remains or the birthplace of Christopher Columbus, or try to identify the place where Admiral Lord Nelson lost his right eye while leading the siege of the city.
Their food and wine was included, although they must have been interested to learn on their arrival that a bottle of Corsican wine was selling for 9d. In other words, if they had needed to they could have clubbed together, bought twenty-five bottles, and still have had change left over from £1. But the holiday was all-in. They were pioneers, the first package tourists. The vanguard.
Raitz was up and running. Calvi was on his map, and in the next year or two other resorts followed. And, in that grey British summer of 1954, he took the big step into Spain. Tossa del Mar, on the Catalonian coast not far from Barcelona, was a fishing village with no banks and only one or two hotels, but it was the landfall for an invasion force that would colonize that coast, then discover and conquer the Costa del Sol stretching out from Málaga in the south, and spread in vast numbers to the Balearic Islands, starting with Majorca. Spain hadn’t seen anything like it since the Middle Ages: five years after Raitz’s first party arrived on the Costa Brava, 77,000 holidaymakers from Britain took a package to Spain, and in the early sixties fishing villages like Torremolinos started to transform themselves into places that would tempt more and more people to come. They did. By the end of the decade the number of people taking foreign holidays had doubled, to 5 million. That number had doubled again by 1979, and by 1990 21 million Britons were going abroad on holiday.
In later life Raitz regretted some of the consequences. He didn’t like Benidorm – ‘it looks bloody awful,’ he said – which had mutated from a fishing village into a concrete emporium of fun and noise. One estimate gives it the highest number of high-rise buildings per capita in the world. Raitz did cling to some of the hopes he’d had for his enterprise when he was battling to launch it with that first Corsican expedition. He said that the package holiday had been a social revolution. ‘The man in the street acquired a taste for wine, for foreign food, started to learn French, Spanish or Italian, made friends in the foreign lands he’d visited, in fact become more cosmopolitan, with all that that entailed.’
On the other side of the ledger, in the sixties he had a deeply unhappy experience with the creation of Club 18–30, which tried to get younger people to buy packages. He couldn’t make it work and sold it to Thomas Cook, where it later became a byword for unbuttoned, booze-fuelled binges dressed up as holidays. The price war in the market he’d created was becoming vicious and destructive. Business was big, but dangerous. Horizon itself was in trouble and he decided that it was time to cash in. In the early seventies he sold it to Clarkson’s for a good price and was therefore protected from a collapse that would have been very painful. Within three years of the sale the company had gone bust. The business was changing as fast as it always had.
Raitz, however, remained the pioneer who had changed everything. He was the model for Freddie Laker, whose cut-price Skytrain shuttle from London to the United States took off with a fanfare in the late seventies and cocked a snook at the big airlines. Laker saw himself as the people’s friend, a kind of Butlins Redcoat at the controls