Gary Cross Vacations for All: The Leisure Question in the Era of the Popular Front

One of the ironies of the 1930s was the democratization of the summer vacation in Europe. While neither the forty-hour week nor other proposals for economic security were successful, holiday-with-pay won nearly universal acceptance. The vacation was not merely mass escapism as Europe prepared for war; rather the paid holiday was a deeply felt social need which, after the war, became one of the most valued entitlements in Europe. The mass vacation appealed to both the cultural Right and the Left. The holiday-with-pay reflected a consensus that modem work required compensatory leisure in the form of extended periods of time to ’recover’ lost values of family and community. Both the fascist dopo lavoro and the nazi Kraft durch Freude shared with the French Popular Front a common functional language of leisure: patriotism would emerge from touring historical sites and meeting fellow countrymen in different regions and walks of life; popular sports and the return to nature would renew national energies; vacations would give ’dignity’ and ’joy’ to the worker. Is this consensus a reflection of ’deep structures’ which transcend politics? In one sense such a view is surely wrong. The political contest was still the animating factor in leisure policy; agreement was primarily over recognition of the growing cultural centrality of leisure as the terrain for the struggle over control of popular opinion. Especially after the first world war, when the eight-hour working-day became nearly universal, elites of both the Left and Right realized the potential political significance of organizing leisure time. For the French Popular Front, the holiday movement was an attempt (perhaps belatedly) to create an alternative to bourgeois or fascist control of leisure. In terms of the struggle between ’democratic’ and ’totalitarian’ leisure, the non-communist Left attempted to address the failures of Journal

of Contemporary History (SAGE, London, Newbury Park and 599-

New

Delhi),

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working-class organizations by broadening its political base through the appeal of leisure. Distancing itself from the authoritarianism of the fascist leisure organizations, the Popular Front narrow

stressed voluntarism, local initiative, and individualism: the French socialist Minister of Leisure wanted recreation for ’joy and health’ but also as ’an expression of liberty and democracy’. Yet, like the fascists, the Popular Front elite sought to organize the masses and to often enlist them through leisure into their vision of the future It was an interest and leisure attempt groupings. using youth, family to give a socialist content to culture and to supplement abstract and I even divisive economic programmes.’ In another sense, however, the holiday movement clearly did since it was nearly as transcend politics as narrowly defined evident in countries where ideological conflict was relatively weak Britain, for example. The vacation represented a condensation of contradictory objectives both the solution to elite concerns and an accommodation to mass demands or needs. Leftist elites had long shared with conservatives a desire to ’uplift’ the masses, and both groups saw leisure as a potential threat to shared cultural standards. born ironically out of Yet the 1930s presented a new view of leisure the Depression. Elites developed a more positive understanding of workers’ amusements and advocated ’distributed leisure’. The paid vacation was also a response to workers who, in the 1930s, had clearly included a ’real holiday’ in a growing list of rights which defined ’social citizenship’. It was also a response to popular movements - a new generation of youth-oriented holiday-makers and the family vacation. These complex meanings of the vacation culminated in the popular front period in the European democracies. They can best be elucidated in an analysis of this question in both Britain and France. -

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Until 1919, labour seldom demanded extended paid leave from work. With the exception of printers’, miners’ and railwaymen’s unions, vacations were not on the labour agenda in either country. Of course, British law in 1901 guaranteed minors and women the right to six scattered holidays (which were often extended to men); and regional annual shut-downs of plants which coincided with traditional festivals (Lancashire wakes week and the Stockton race week, for example) had nineteenth-century origins. In France, national and local holidays consumed ten or eleven working-days per year. Yet these ’vacations’ had little in common with the twentieth-century

601 movement for extended summer

derived communal fairs and with the exception of the British August Bank sporting events Holiday. Secondly, they did not usually provide enough time for travel and escape from work and home environments. Thirdly, they were generally uncompensated. In France, the time lost to holidays was often ’recuperated’ in involuntary overtime. Even if Lancashire textile companies often provided vacation savings banks, few British workers were financially capable of extending their holiday beyond a long week-end. For many, an annual shut-down undertaken in order to refurbish machinery or because of slack sales was merely a seasonal ’lock-out’, when workers ’did not receive one half-penny’. Of course, both French and British civil servants and clerks enjoyed an annual holiday of several weeks. But this was a mark of whitecollar status, not a right of manual labour.’ To be sure, since 1911 the demand for ’total and sustained freedom from toil’ had been on the agenda of the Trades Union Congress (TUC). Yet only in the post-war wave of collective bargaining for the eight-hour day were paid vacations won by two million wageearners in well-organized British trades.3 In France, in 1919, some printers and bakers won a week’s paid vacation; for the latter to compensate them for night work. One authority linked the holiday movement with the ’rise of democracies’. Between 1919 and 1925, legislation extended paid vacations to various workers in six eastern and central European countries. In Britain, supporters proposed ’an absolute rest from work’ in a paid holiday as a socially beneficial alternative to joblessness which made workers ’unemployable’. However, demands by French miners and metalworkers in 1923 and 1924 for a week’s vacation fell upon deaf ears. And in 1923, only four of 144 collective contracts in France included holiday provisions. Vacation bills offered in 1925 failed in both the French and British

from traditional

religious

holidays. First, they were

celebrations

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parliaments.44 Both the movements for the paid holiday and the reduction of weekly work-time peaked during the post-war period of international labour militancy. Their paths diverged, however, after 1925. The holiday-with-pay was legitimized and gained widespread support from the mid-1920s, while the quest for a shorter working-week was relegated to the ghetto of an increasingly impotent labour movement. This was especially obvious in the 1930s, when the forty-hour movement failed everywhere except in France in 1936, and there it was scrapped within thirty months.’

602 In contrast, the paid holiday had widespread political support in the 1930s. In July 1931, the French Chamber passed a bill which provided a week’s vacation for non-farm workers on the job for at least one year. However, the rural-dominated Senate locked the bill in committee, where it remained until the election of the Popular Front government in 1936. In Britain, there was similar receptivity toward obtaining holiday legislation. Bills were repeatedly introduced, second readings in parliament in 1929 and 1936.6 Employers’ reaction to the paid vacation was not nearly as hostile as it had been to a shorter workday.~The vacation was a perquisite which could raise work discipline (by denying it to workers who failed to remain on the job for at least a year or to workers with bad records of absenteeism). A paid vacation would ’implant in the minds of the employees that they are actually part of the business ...’. An annual holiday also did not necessarily threaten annual production goals: it often coincided with seasonal slow-downs in demand or production. Frequently, this meant that employers did not have to hire new workers and supervisors or to make new investments in facilities or machinery, especially when vacations were not granted individually, but taken collectively during a plant or district shut-down. Perhaps most important, vacations reduced work-time per wage-earner by only forty or eighty hours per year rather than the 400 hours involved in the shift from a forty-eight to a forty-hour week.g Beyond the obvious cost difference was the tendency for all parties to pose the forty-hour week in political economic terms: on the one hand, it was a means of increasing mass internal demand by raising working-class incomes; on the other hand, the forty-hour week was inflationary and a threat to international economic competitiveness. By contrast, the paid vacation was seldom treated as an economic palliative, but as a measure of social hygiene and a legitimate entitlement of leisure. A British paper manufacturer admitted that an unpaid holiday was ’psychologically unsound’. And even a leading French business opponent of a shorter working-day supported the paid holiday, for ’vacations are necessary in the modern world’.9 Coinciding with the granting of the paid vacation was a reassessment of elite attitudes toward popular leisure.

In the inter-war years, traditional attitudes toward leisure prevailed in both the Left and Right. The French employers’ social oeuvre, the workers’ gardens, the patronage of musical, theatrical and sports

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facilities survived, as did the British practice of funnelling leisure patronage through municipal agencies. Employers’ efforts focused on youth, from patronage of sports clubs to company-run youth camps. These fun-filled environments would create

’friendly links’ between adolescent workers and their foremen and provide opportunities for group co-operation necessary for inculcating ’selfcontrol’. French Catholics had long recognized that sport was an excellent vehicle for preserving the flock as did their secular opponents at the village school. Leisure had clearly become a vehicle for a ’politics of consent’ in the liberal democracies as much as in fascist Europe. 10 The western European Left shared much of this traditionalist perspective. The ideal remained to ’organize’ leisure for the masses. Throughout the inter-war years, French communists and socialists attempted to create alternatives to commercial spectator sports and to the sports press and clubs patronized by employers or the Church. Communists and their trade unions advocated using sports and cultural groups to ’train for struggle’ and to create loyalty to union and party beyond the work-place and to integrate the workers’ families into the movement. The Left must organize youth through sport for, as one French socialist argued, ’all the past is lost in the race between reaction and socialism’. This, of course, had long been the practice in central Europe and it became the core of the leisure progamme of the communist-dominated trade unions during the Popular Front. In 1937, Benoit Frachon insisted that unions should ’give satisfaction to the daily needs of workers and their families’.&dquo; As Stephen Jones has shown, organized workers’ leisure in Britain was built upon the late-nineteenth-century efforts of the co-operative societies, the trade unions, the socialist Sunday Schools and the Clarion movement. During the inter-war years, Labour Party activism was reinforced with regular rounds of ’brass bands, teas, rambles, excursions, ... and most popular of all, the annual rally...’. Beatrice Webb even organized a Half Circle Club for wives of Labour men and women organizers to train them to take a public role and to resist the temptations of ’London Society’. These groups used sports to attract youth to their organizations, e.g. the Woodcraft Folk of the co-operatives. The communist-inspired British Workers’ Sports Federation was explicit in its efforts to win wage-earners from commercial spectator sport. 12 In the 1920s, socialists and the International Labour Office (ILO) offered a quite different model of organized recreation ’democratic -

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leisure’. The Director of the ILO from 1919 to 1931 was the moderate French socialist, Albert Thomas, who insisted that leisure could no longer be structured by government, business or even trade unions. Not only were workers too individualistic to submit to this patronage and its hidden agendas, but only multi-class, community-based leisure organizations could avoid the inefficiency and conflicts of ideological leisure. The ILO repeatedly encouraged corporatist and international leisure organizations. Its studies on leisure continually stressed the importance of alcohol regulation, home economics instruction, improved transportation to reduce commuting time, housing programmes and even shorter work-breaks, as a means of creating more ’efficient’ and healthy leisure time. These policies, claimed an ILO report of 1924, would help give ’the eight-hour day its full value as a social and civilizing influence’. 13 This perspective prevailed within the moderate wing of French labour in the General Confederation of Labour (CGT). In 1937, Georges Lefranc, for example, advocated that local trades councils rather than union federations should organize workers’ leisure so as to insure recreation which built ’inter-corporative solidarity’. Umbrella groups, like the Laic Centre of Youth Hostels, in which the unions were only one member, he argued, were superior to all-trades organizations. For Lefranc, the work group was no longer the appropriate unit for popular educational policy. 14 The British adult education movement shared a similar view in their promotion of a multi-class model to prevent intellectual and social rigidification. Educationalists found leisure to be the most appropriate outlet for individual expression. Hobbies, E.B. Castles argued, were the best antidote to the ’deadening compulsion always to be in a crowd’. 15 Despite organizational innovation, the traditional paternalism of the left elite was as strong as ever. Thomas admitted that he did not find problematic the question ’what is good leisure?’ He advocated ’a well-directed use of spare time’ - ‘physical and moral education’ as well as the cultivation of general education. According to the French Confederal Centre for Workers’ Education, leisure should be spent in studying the great books. Its motto was: ’A people who do not read is a people with dead brains, dead action’.’6 Underlying this shared vision of organized recreation was a pervasive anxiety about the ’threat’ of leisure and the decreasing ability of workers in the changing world of work to meet that challenge. The traditional distrust of workers’ use of leisure was explicit in a wide range of Anglo-American and French sociology.

605 was shared by critics of mass production. For Henry the Durant, ’machinery of amusement completes the industrial of training turning actors into spectators’. In the mid-1920s, a common theme in the French leftist intelligentsia was the diminished capacity of workers in mass assembly jobs to marshall the initiative and ilnagination required for anything more than passive leisure. The analogue to the Taylorized factory was the American cinema. For those optimistic enough to offer solutions, the only approach was

This view

patronizing education. 17 Yet this pessimism was challenged in the 1930s by a more positive assessment of leisure and the holiday-with-pay. For C. Delise Bums, increased

mass

leisure had created ’a democratic civilization’ with

a

tendency ’toward social equality’. Bertrand Russell argued that instead of a leisure class, which ’produced a few Darwins and many fox hunters, ... ordinary men and women, having the opportunity of a happy life, will become more kindly and less inclined to view others with suspicion’.’g By the mid-1930s, writers even defended such traditional ’bad boys’ of popular leisure as the football pools and the cinema as harmless excitements; film, said Denys Hardy, was a means to ’extend and define our sympathies and so control our more complex emotional life ...’. By 1937, in France, the Confederal Centre for Workers’ Education abandoned its efforts to reproduce in workers the classical education of its leaders; instead, they embraced a newer model (already well-developed in British adult education) of cultural training through tourism, hobbies and other forms of leisure.’9 Mass unemployment in the 1930s contributed to this more positive assessment of leisure. In Britain, participant observations of ’free time’ in ’special areas’ of unemployment did not evoke the images of economic destitution or social degradation common in the earlier Rowntree and Boothe investigations; rather, they revealed the psychological disability of workless time. Instead of a militant class of the jobless, these studies found that workers were humiliated by unfunded leisure in a society where free time was a compensation for work and leisure was inherently dependent upon income beyond the subsistence of the dole. 20 Adult educators found that displaced workers grew listless and gradually abandoned pleasures which had been a natural part of working life. According to William Boyd, ’freedom from toil is a curse’; society needed to make leisure more acceptable and to train workers for adult recreation. And yet,

as the novelist Walter Greenwood showed in his Love on the Dole, in a society where poverty

606 not general but restricted to ’de-industrializing’ regions, economic scarcity meant loss of self-respect. F. Zweig noted somewhat later that workers defined themselves not as job-holders but as consumers, and thus their ability to express themselves in ’funded time’ was critical to their self-esteem. The need to support leisure in the form of a holiday-with-pay became obvious.21 When ’free time’ ceased to mean merely recuperation from and compensation for work, spare time took on new meanings. For example, a father’s jobless state led to tensions induced by forced family togetherness. Not only did these studies observe the threat of parental role reversal, but they stressed that the ’unemployed man’s wife [has] no holidays’, because unemployed husbands failed to contribute meaningful domestic work. While both French and British writers advocated that men assume greater housekeeping roles, an obvious palliative for the wife was the holiday. In fact, British social workers called for volunteers to ’adopt’ children in order to give wives a chance for a ’real change of scenery’.22 Underlying this thinking was the theory of the ’mature’ economy: technological growth inevitably had reduced the demand for labour, which should be ’distributed’, as leisure for all rather than unemployment for many. The French socialist, Marc Deboin, called for ’jobs for all, leisure for all’, as the key to a rational technological society. And the British scholar, Ernest Barker, argued that since manual labour ’ceases to be an education’, it should be limited and replaced by play for personal growth. The French CGT agreed that a new reduction in work-time was necessary to solve the ’disequilibrium of consumption and production’ caused by ’disorganized rationalization’ and ’overwork’. ’We must recognize that the industrial system creates two products: goods and leisure’, and that there should be a balance of the two so that leisure did not become unemployment. This thinking encouraged a positive understanding of the holiday not as a simple by-product of collective bargaining, but as right of citizenship in an industrial democracy and a necessary corollary of general technological change.23 Even in the depth of the Depression, the social necessity of and right to leisure were gaining legitimacy. In Britain, in the early 1930s, the reform-oriented journals, Industrial Welfare and The Human Factor, were shifting their focus from the quality of the work environment to the leisure opportunities of workers. Articles stressed not only the negative view that workers used leisure time to gamble and drink, but also that the lack of recreational facilities and leisure was

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607 education impeded the fruitful use of free time. These authors noted the health and social potential of fascist and Soviet recreation projects even when they attacked state-controlled leisure. 21 Yet this demand for leisure took specific forms. There was little articulate popular desire for either a shorter working-day or even a two-day weekend as leisure time as opposed to a sharing of jobs. Studies of commuting time and complaints of management’s encroachments upon the eight-hour day suggested some disillusionment with the benefits of daily doses of amusement time. 21 More important, during the 1930s, there was a growing interest in extended periods away from work and the home environment.’ Of course, the Lancashire wakes week at Blackpool had long been in existence, but the popularity of the seaside holiday peaked only in the 1930s. Although the British Holiday Fellowship dated from 1913, its greatest period of growth was the 1930s. The Youth Hostel Association was founded in 1929 and the Ramblers Association in 1932. The first French youth hostels appeared in 1929 and the movement grew rapidly along confessional lines throughout the 1930s. In 1933, French railroads began to offer tours for their workers. The British Camping Club grew from 3,000 to 7,000 members between 1927 and 1935. Although these groups were mostly composed of clerical and skilled workers, some had northern English origins and were, as John Lowerson points out, a reaction to the bleakness of the industrial landscape.26 The romantic image of the rural landscape during the inter-war years was widely popularized in railway station murals. Rural escape surely penetrated popular consciousness. This was obvious in the responses given by the people of Bolton in a 1937 survey regarding their ’ideal vacation’. The image of the country ramble and the peace of the village untouched by industry was even more prevalent than the longing for seaside excitement. Although the influence of the Workers’ Travel Association (founded in 1921 ) was always limited, it and other co-operative agencies promoted the right of labour to a vacation away from home. And the ideal of a holiday camp long predated the commercial success of Butlin’s camps after 1937. 27 Increasingly, the idea of the vacation focused on the problem of ’family holidays’. The Workers’ Travel Association, for example, found that it had to upgrade the accommodation of its guest houses to satisfy family needs in the 1930s; and, in the mid-1930s, even a few town councils like Lambeth - built holiday camps for low-cost family vacations. At the same time, the need for facilities for holidays -

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for the young was growing. As an executive at Guinness noted in 1937: ’As soon as the ... [young] are earning their own living, they like to go off on holidays on their own.’ The holiday camp had the advantage of allowing ’parents [to] let real youngsters go there with their minds at rest’, for they would be taken care of. The French also recognized a new interest in vacations among the young stimulated by their camping experiences in the scouts and school-run colonies des vacances. The desire of youth for freedom from family and adult authority was evident to employers and educators; the vacation was an obvious and non-disruptive vehicle for this independence. 28 -

The legitimization of leisure was clearly focused on the annual vacation. In both France and Britain, a recreational rhetoric emerged in the debates over and implementation of holiday-with-pay legislation. The vacation was necessary for self-development and the discovery of new environments. The TUC report to the Commons in 1937 stressed that time was needed not only for workers to recover from fatigue but for creating ’opportunities to engage in activities and pursuits more satisfying to their individual inclinations than the daily routine’. The worker was ’not merely a machine to be kept in reasonable working order, but a human being with a life of his own to be lived and enjoyed’. For wage-earners in all occupations, ’change of environment is absolutely necessary’. A paid vacation was to provide equality of status between manual worker and clerk. As if to underline their commitment to the right to leisure, the TUC was willing to allow employers to refuse holiday pay to those who took jobs during their vacations. And, as in 1919, British trade unionists argued that the call for an annual vacation was an irrepressible international movement and had already been met by sixteen countries by mid-1937 and that it was a national disgrace that Britain was lagging behind in this respect.29 The British government, however, was a reluctant participant. In autumn 1936, a vacation bill obtained in the Commons a three to one vote in favour of a second reading; the TUC had pressed for legislative support from the Minister of Labour. However, in February 1937, the government sidetracked immediate legislation by calling for an investigative committee .30 Led by Lord Amulree, this group’s recommendations (which became law in July 1938) only gave Trade Boards and other statutory bodies the right to provide holidays-with-pay in forthcoming negotiations. However, as an

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alternative to the prospect of legislation, employers widely conceded week’s paid holiday in collective bargaining: the number of wage-earners with a paid vacation increased from about 1.5 million in 1935 to 7.75 million (40 per cent of the work-force) in March 1938.3’ Although the paid holiday was not an entitlement but tied to a firm or trade, it was gained in the context of an international movement and was so general as to be understood as a national right. In France, the habitual log jam in the Senate was broken by the labour unrest of June 1936. Along with other reforms, a bill for a twoweek paid holiday was passed on 21 June with little opposition. Yet the conge paye, today often identified with the Popular Front, was neither a part of the programme of 1935 nor was it on the list of the demands of the CGT. Conservatives of all stripes supported the vacation as a means of diffusing revolutionary sentiments, for it promoted a classless leisure and a common culture of pleasure. It meant ’moral progress for the worker’ who could then ’go to see his aged parents, often in a distant village’ and the ’head of the family [could] share vacation time with his family ...’. The vacation was a reward for the father to be shared as a gift with his family. It would help restore the patriarchal family.32 Yet these themes of political unity and of familialism (or other forms of privatism) also pervaded the holiday ideology of the Left in both France and Britain. The socialist Le Populaire offered the incongruous image of metalworkers leaving their Paris factory in mass for a two-week vacation in Boulogne, while singing the International a transgression of discipline which the foremen for were also too busy rushing out of the plant for their ignored, they at least one

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holiday.33

The right to a vacation was a victory for the working classes, but also an escape from politics. The Popular Front press loved to mock the presumed discomfort of the old leisure class, as in the cartoon depicting the meeting of a poodle and the ’chien de cong6 paye’ or the hotel-keeper telling the rich that all ’your rooms have been rented’. In the summers of 1936 and 1937, the left-wing press alternated reports on the Spanish Civil War with articles recommending seaside and country resorts and featuring French provincial towns worth’visiting: ’We discover the beauties of our country thanks to the paid vacation’. Parisian workers off on holiday to the four corners of France were also serving a political purpose for they were ’bringing to their home towns the generous and advanced ideas of the great city’.

610 Yet the private image of a family reconciliation was also a common vacation theme. In August 1936, Le Populaire interviewed a worker gleefully departing from the Montparnasse station for Brittany with his wife and child to ’see the old ones’. The communist L’Humanite in August 1936 stressed that the vacation afforded the family who ’live under the same roof but as strangers and without having the time to know one another’ an opportunity for togetherness. Regards offered photographs of the ’first paid vacation’ of families relaxing on the ’little beaches’ in the Nord ’without arrogant luxury, without casinos’. The old enjoyed a ’long merited’ rest in the shade, while children ran along the beach with their parents. This newly found interest in family life extended to L’Humanite’s feature of the intimate life of Lenin and his family. 34 In 1936 the CGT daily, Le Peuple, began to run a sports page, a movie review, and even a ’page du Foyer’. Le Populaire expanded its sports coverage from half a page to one-and-a-half pages and devoted a half-page to a ’women’s section’ and an equal amount to the radio. Despite some objection from purists, in 1936 it gave front-page coverage to the Tour de France. 35 The Left’s old policy of organizing loyalty to the trade union or party through leisure was revived with greater success. The socialist Red Falcons and communist communes emulated their fascist counterparts by sponsoring hikes and camps for youth. L ’Humanité was the impresario for a massive outdoor festival in the Paris suburbs to celebrate the end of summer. The event became increasingly focused on entertainment rather than politics. The communistcontrolled Metalworkers of Paris, which had grown from 17,000 to 230,000 during summer 1936, sought to organize festivals and establish leisure committees at each factory in order to promote sports and cultural activities. This union often simply took over organizations formerly controlled by the employers. Yet it also bought land for camping and even a chdteau near Paris for members’

use.36 The Popular Front government, however, emulated the broadbased model of Albert Thomas which was clearly expressed in the policy of Leo Lagrange, Blum’s Under-Secretary of State for Sports and Leisure. His office provided state support for voluntarist holiday and leisure programmes; he also became the leading theorist of ’democratic leisure’. Of course, these efforts were more symbolic than practical. In fact, the Popular Front’s commitment to mass leisure was flagging as early as March 1937, when appropriations were

611

substantially reduced. Yet the concept of ’democratic leisure’ became integral part of the political and social goals of the Popular

an

Front. 37 In order to facilitate family vacations, Lagrange cajoled railway companies into accepting a programme of inexpensive family excursion tickets. He also administered the building of 253 sports arenas in 1936 and 400 by the end of 1937. The agricultural minister even offered guided tours of Paris to young farm workers. Lagrange also supported the growing Youth Hostel movement. The left-wing press frequently offered informative articles on the art of camping and hiking to the neophyte. In 1937, the Popular Front Ministry of Health proposed the use of country schools as bases for an expanded programme of children’s summer tours and camps. Physical education was introduced in nearly half of the departments during the Popular Front, partly to encourage a lifetime interest in physical leisure activity. Lagrange even popularized tennis, skiing, flying and other traditionally elite sports as ideal forms of physical exercise for the masses. 38 Still the Popular Front opposed ’directed leisure’. Or, as Lagrange put it: ’We must make available to the masses all kinds of leisure which they may choose for themselves’. He advocated the formation of autonomous municipal Leisure Clubs, independent of political patronage, which were to express the new ’social maturity’ of the workers.39 In this context, the blossoming of non-profit popular tourist offices was rather extraordinary. The Parisian Regional People’s Tourist Association, with 30,000 members, specialized in finding cheap holidays for big families. It promoted not only tours to the provinces, but winter vacations in the Alps and even trips to Tunisia. In April 1937, the CGT set up a Tourism Office (which was

used by 6,000 in 1937) and even sponsored a vacation savings bank for members. Teachers’ unions organized the club, Vacances pour tous, with camps and youth hostels. Georges Lefranc’s revived Centre for Workers’ Education even produced a radio programme beamed from the Eiffel Tower.40 Yet the policy was hardly undirected or market-generated. Lagrange reflected the tradition of ’rational recreation’ with his stress upon an ’equilibrium’ between ’health of the body and the health of the spirit which was a Hellenic ideal’. Like so many before him, Lagrange emphasized that ’specialized labour’ required the corrective of physical culture and sport. Again he rehearsed the old biological argument for leisure as a means of reversing the decline in

612 the birth rate and the relatively high morbidity rate in France. And, like his nazi counterparts, he stressed the critical role in national renewal to be played by a physically fit ’new generation’.4’ Moreover, the old paternalism of the left intelligentsia reappeared in the Maison de la Culture, whose members in 1938 organized historical lectures on the anniversary of the Revolution, discussed the works of Zola or Chinese liberation, exhibited art films and, for political action, sponsored a collection of crayons for Spanish children, victims of the civil war. Lefranc’s centre provided guides for workers’ groups visiting cultural sites in Paris.&dquo; Yet there was a great difference between the Popular Front’s leisure ideology and that which was promoted at the Berlin Strength Through Joy Conference of 1936. Lagrange stressed participation rather than spectator sports and simple playing-fields rather than ornate stadia for a ’sport human’ rather than a ’sport athlétique’. Lagrange did not advocate Kraft durch Freude under the flag of national self-promotion or voluntary obedience; rather ’joy’ meant ’spontaneity’ and ’unity’ was the ’breaking-down of the walls’ which separated intellectuals and workers. Recreation clubs were to allow exchanges of experience so that the ’miner, the artisan, the peasant, the mason, the clerk and the teacher will gradually understand the unity of human labour’. In popular tourism, abstract classroom history and geography would become a reality to workers. And, by taking control of participant sports and cultural activities, workers would become free from bourgeois paternalism. He insisted that his objective was to create a harmony of youth based on ’a sympathy and respect necessary for fair play’. Again, leisure and sport were to fulfil the fragile dream of democratic unity. His idea of solidarity was to be found in the apolitical youth hostel which he called a ’republic of youth’. Alice Jouenne typified the Popular Front leisure ideology when she wrote in August 1937 that the more democratic the access to leisure the less prone societies would be to make war:’Leisure promotes peace for it magnifies life and makes one love life’.43

There are obvious differences between the British and French holiday and leisure movements in the 1930s: Britain lacked not only a Popular Front government to carry out a democratic leisure policy and grant an entitlement to a paid vacation, but also the ideological fervour of the French.

613

Still, the British showed equal enthusiasm for leisure and tourism in 1937 and 1938. By 1937, fifteen of Britain’s forty-six million people took one or more weeks holiday away from home. During the late 1930s, there was a rapid growth of private leisure activity, shown, for example, in increased membership of camping clubs and commercial holiday organizations like the Butlin Company (founded in 1937). Perhaps 200 new commercial leisure camps had been set up by 1939. Moreover, there was a new interest in organized ’democratic’ leisure which closely paralleled the efforts of the French Popular Front. The National Savings Committee, which had been founded in 1916 to

’thoughtful spending and purposive saving’, attempted to enlist business support for voluntary ’bonus accounts’ for workers to save for family holidays. The Workers’ Travel Association provided an array’of inexpensive excursions and holiday camps. The Industrial Welfare Society with corporatist membership promoted popular holidays through non-profit travel bureaus and camps, holiday savings clubs and railway savings plans. Trade unionists advocated cruises and even suggested that the government make troop-ships available for international cultural exchanges.44 Despite the failure of TUC proposals for a British Ministry of Sports and Leisure in 1937, laws encouraging the protection of lands for parks and camps were passed in 1939. During the Labour government in 1931, the Minister of Public Works, George Lansbury, proposed numerous projects for playgrounds with an enthusiasm equal to that of Lagrange. In 1937, the Labour Party declared that leisure was to be one of the ’four great benefits’ to be gained from its government, and after the war, when Labour finally came to power, leisure policy planning was high on the agenda. 41 Another manifestation of the idea of state-facilitated leisure was the campaign in Britain for spreading out the holiday season to ease congestion in seaside towns in August and overcrowding on the railroads. Not only lobbyists of the resort industry and railroad companies, but also the TUC and Labourites like Ernest Bevin made concrete proposals to extend the holiday season over a six-month period. For example, the Board of Education parliamentary secretary asked school authorities to devise a plan to stagger the school year to enable family holidays to be taken over a longer period. Attempts to popularize an out-of-season holiday were persistently made by the Labour government after the war.46 The ethos of Popular Front leisure was evident in the July 1937 issue of Labour Magazine, which predicted the end of the ‘beanos, the encourage

614

fun fairs, and the noisy makeshift hilarity which has done duty for the holiday of the many’. In their place would emerge a popular tourism, an opportunity for the exploration of nature and the foundation of a new understanding between different trades and nationalities. Notables of the Left, like G.D.H. Cole, C.R. Attlee and Harold Laski, belonged to the National Committee to Provide Holidays for Unemployed Workers in Distressed Areas, which argued that ’industrial refugees ... need to get away from the misery and drabness of their everyday lives’.&dquo; The moral and political tone was similar to the Popular Front’s notion of social and national reconciliation through leisure. Again, the family holiday theme was repeated in social surveys which focused on the income shortfall which prevented the relatively poor (e.g. households earning less than £4 a week or those with large families) from taking ’real holidays’. The salutary effect of a vacation on housewives was often stressed in the social work and educational

literature.48 Both the French and British interest in the holiday was part of a broad if ill-formed international movement for ’democratic leisure’. In 1938, the International Commission of Workers’ Spare Time, another ILO effort composed of government and labour delegations from the Western democracies, met to counter a similar meeting held by the nazis two years earlier. Its chairman, Louis Pi6rard, expressed concern about ’boredom during daily rest or holidays’ and the consequent ’burst of dreary incuriosity’ which led to ’unadorned idleness without recreation’ and to vice. As in the 1920s, the solution was to train workers to use their leisure wisely and to provide a wide variety of recreational choices. Yet, while delegates expressed frustration at the lack of those government resources which their fascist and Soviet counterparts enjoyed, they were adamant that was to proceed from the individual, not the leisure - like freedom -

collectivity.49 But what did this individual want? Doubtless, mostly personal experiences rather than political education, cultural exchanges or even encounters with nature. The British Miners’ Federation published a pamphlet in 1938 informing members of their vacation rights. It featured a series of pictures of a young miner showering away the last of the coal dust for a week, collecting his vacation pay, packing his wife and two small children onto a train, and finally frolicking on the beach with his tots, over the title: ’Then a dip... Happy!’ In 1937, in an essay contest on the theme, ’How I Would Like to Spend my

615

Holiday’, British workers offered images of sea breezes and water and of ’children burying their sleeping parents in the sand’. The vacation was to be a father’s gift to his family and an opportunity to experience parenting away from the stress and routine of the industrial world. The vacation was also understood as an opportunity for romance, meeting up with old friends or ’letting the world go by’ in a brief varying with age, escape from the world of the clock. These images situation and family personal proclivity probably reflected the of most workers.so aspirations -

-

Labour leaders fully recognized that individuality could be expressed primarily in time spent away from the job rather than in the work experience itself. However, perhaps an unsolvable problem remained: how were the humane values of the labour movements to be inculcated into this leisure culture without ceding this terrain to the merchandisers? The advocates of democratic leisure recognized this problem, even if they lacked the organization, resources, or perhaps the imagination to solve it. Ultimately, the contest was not between totalitarian and liberal democratic leisure but between organized and -

market leisure. And, for many reasons, the latter has generally won. Democratic leisure was not really an adaptation of fascist success in organizing leisure or simply an attempt to re-define socialism in cultural terms. There was a consensus over vacation leisure in the 1930s. This reflected not so much a mood of escapism as a need that transcended the political crisis of the 1930s and signalled a new leisure package that most would prefer in the post-war world sustained time away from work and its environment. Democratic leisure expressed a contradiction of organization and liberty. On the one hand, there was the paternalism of the universityeducated elite of the Left with its programme of rational recreation (which it largely shared with elites of the Right) and its ideal of organizing labour in and through the attractions of leisure. On the other hand, the concept of liberty was expressed not only in a desire for self-directed organized leisure, but in a recognition of the popular demand for pleasure, articulated in the comradeship of youth or the values of family life. This was an expression of a popular consumers’ democracy, which in the Depression had become the definition of workers’ dignity. The paid vacation represented the conquest of bourgeois terrain, but it was also a temporary experience of classlessness. Voluntary agencies were innovators in their accommodations -

616

youth separatism and were most willing to organize it in leisure. Yet, in the long run, the commercial market-place was far more responsive. Adult educationalists and groups like the Holiday Fellowship or Vacances pour tous were surely sensitive to the need to provide the working classes with opportunities for familial expression in leisure. Yet the Butlin’s camps and the Disneylands were far more successful in exploiting this market. Popular Frontism did not inadvertently facilitate depoliticization; rather, the Left failed to avert it while attempting to address the individualistic needs that led to depoliticization. Attempts by policymakers to organize leisure for socialism (or anything else) failed because of lack of resources, contradictions of ’organized individuality’, and the obvious superior adaptability (perhaps responsiveness) of commercial leisure entrepreneurs in marketing leisure. to

Advocates of democratic leisure faced

an

obvious dilemma. Of

necessity, they were directive, but attempted not to manipulate. Their ambiguity was expressed in the contradictory words of Yeridredi, that the Left should ’educate the people to enjoy what they like’. 51 The escape provided by the annual individual or family vacation was perhaps the best expression of this freedom. How to inculcate it with political or elite cultural values was, of course, the problem.

Notes

1. Eugène Raude and Gilbert Proteau, 1936 Léo Lagrange (Pans 1980), 86-7. See also Andries Sternheim, ’Leisure in the Totalitarian State’, Sociological Review, 30, 2 (June 1938), 29-49 and Maurice Eblé, ’La question des loisirs’, Politique (July 1937), 350-65. Note also, Victoria de Grazia, ’La Politique sociale du loisir: 1900-1940’, Les Cahiers de la recherche architecturale, 15-17 (1985), 24-35. 2. Margaret Pollock (ed.), Working Days (London 1977), 218. See also, John Pimlott, The Englishman’s Holiday (London 1947), chaps 1-3; Charles Mills, Vacations for Industrial Workers (New York 1927), 149 ff; Patrice Boussel, Histoire des vacances (Paris 1961), 27-161; Fosdick Curtis et al. (Industrial Relations Staff), ’Annual Paid Vacations for Workers in Countries Outside of the United States’, (New York, December 1925, a copyrighted manuscript in the TUC Archive, HD 5106), 4-6; House of Commons, Minutes of Evidence Taken Before the Committee on Holidays with Pay (London 1937), 36-8. 3. John Beard and A. Dalgleish, Out-of- Work Pay or Holidays with Pay — Which? (Birmingham 1926), 1-15; TUC, Proceedings (1926), 433; Labour Gazette (August 1920), 230; Curtis, op. cit., i-iii, 5-8; Mills, op. cit., 308; Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, Annual Volume (1920), 596-7 and 682; TUC Archive HD 5106 for various union vacations with pay proposals and agreements, 1920-24.

617 4. Curtis, op. cit., 7-8 and Beard and Dalgleish, op. cit., 10. See also Georges Bachelier, Les Congés payés à l’etranger du point de vue internationale (Zurich 1937), 197-8; Roger Guerrand, La Conquête des vacances (Paris 1963), 47; Conseil Supérieur du Travail, (1936), Compte 156-64, 175; rendu ’Congés Payés aux ouvriers’, Bulletin du Ministère du Travail (April-June 1929), 121-9; Curtis, op. cit., 6; Mills, op. cit., 307. 5. International Labour Office (ILO), Hours of Work and Unemployment. Report to the Preparatory Conference (Geneva 1933), 1-2, 8-9, 48-65; Public Records Office, CAB 24/235, Memo, 19 December 1932 and LAB 2 1008 IL 13/1933. For details of international hour and holiday schemes, see ILO, International Labour Conference (Geneva 1935-8). 6. Conseil Supérieur du Travail, op. cit., 129-40, 187-223, 228-32, Voix du Peuple (November 1935), 893-4. See also A. Lorch, Les Congés payés en France (Paris 1938); Nicole Odinet, Les Congés annuels payés (Paris 1937); Joseph-Louis Maleville, La Loi sur les congés annuels (Toulouse 1937); Roger-Daniel Flament, Les Congés payés (Lille 1938). For the British account, see Stephen Jones, Workers at Play. A Social and Economic History of Leisure 1918-1939 (London 1986), 17-20, 27-33. 7. To be sure, the British National Committee of Employers’ Organizations (NCEO) and numerous trade associations opposed a Holiday with Pay Bill of 1936 as a ’wage matter’ which was best left to the collective bargaining process In response to a survey conducted by the Conseil Supérieur du Travail in 1935, French chambers of commerce denied the utility of holidays in this period of short-time and unemployment. Modern Records Centre (MRC), Engineering Employers Federation (EEF) H12/34 NCEO report on the Holiday with Pay Bill, 1936; EFF Circular, 12 February 1937; PRO CAB 24/257, Labour memo, 13 December 1935; Conseil Supéneur du Travail, op. cit., 14-152. 8. Note, for example, the comments of employers in James Whittaker, Holidays with Pay (London 1937), 7-12. 9. House of Commons, Evidence on Holidays with Pay, op. cit., 189 and Conseil Supérieur du Travail, op. cit., 226. See also my The Quest for Time The Reduction of Work in Britain and France, 1840-1940 (forthcoming), chap. 10 and Stephen Jones, ’Trade Unions Movement and Work-Sharing Policies in Interwar Britain’, Industrial Relations Journal, 16, 1 (Winter 1985), 57-69. Michael Seidman, ’The Birth of the

Weekend and the Revolts Against Work: The Workers of the Paris Region during the Popular Front (1936-38)’, French Historical Studies, 12 (Fall 1981), 249-76. 10. Jacques Guerin-Desjardins, Les Camps de vacances de jeune travailleur (Paris 1944), 17-18. Some other sources on conservative leisure programmes in France are Robert Pinot, Les oeuvres sociales des industries métallurgiques (Paris 1924), chaps 1-3; Jean Beaudemoulin, Enquête sur les loisirs d’ouvrier français (Pans 1924), Part 2; and Centre de Formation sociale des cadres de l’industrie et du commerce, L’Adolescence ouvrière (Paris 1939), 89-110. Good surveys include: Robert Holt, Sport and Society in Modern France (New York 1981), 191-205 and Ray Hume, La Colonie de vacance, hier et aujourd’hui (Paris 1955). See S.G. Jones, Workers at Play, op. cit., ch. 3 for British sources. Note also Victoria de Grazia, The Culture of Consent: Mass Organization of Leisure in Fascist Italy (Cambridge 1981). 11. P. Marie, Pour le sport ouvrier (Paris 1934), 29 and 1-14, 24-29; Jean P. Depretto and V. Schweitzer, Le Communisme à l’usine (Paris 1984), 18-19; M. de Vetch, ’La Politique culturelle des syndicats ouvriers pendant l’entre les deux guerres’, (Thesis, Institut français d’Utrecht 1981), 116-21 and 150-88; Benoit Frachon, Le rôle social des syndicats (Paris 1937), 5-6.

618 12. Labour Magazine (October 1933), 45; (December 1933), 94 etc. See also, Stephen Jones, ’Sport, Politics and the Labour Movement: The Workers’ Sports Federation, 1923-1935’, British Journal of Sports History, II (1985), 154-78. Stephen : Radicalism Jones, Workers at Play, op. cit., 142-7. See also David Clark, Colne Valley to Socialism (London 1981). 13. ILO, International Labour Conference, Report on the Development of Facilities for the Utilisation of Workers’ Leisure (Geneva 1924), 1-2. See also Comité national d’études sociales et politiques, L’Organisation des loisirs ouvriers (Paris 1930), 2-8; Spare Time, Official Bulletin, 1 (1938), 4-19, 48-9 and Georges Mequet, ’Workers’ Spare Time’, International Labour Review, 10 (November 1924), 555. 14. Georges Lefranc, Une Expérience d’education ouvrière (Paris 1937), 40-5 and Marc Deboin, L’Aspiration ouvrière vers la culture et les loisirs (Paris 1937), 12, 40. 15. E.B. Castle et al., The Coming of Leisure (London 1935), 35. Other related sources from the adult education movement include William Boyd (ed.), Challenge of Leisure (London 1936), 1-3; Lancelot Hogben, Education for an Age of Plenty (London 1937), 10-14. 16. Comité national d’études sociales et politiques, op. cit., speech by Thomas, 6-7 and Centre confédéral d’éducation ouvrière, Lire Pourquoi? Comment? Quoi? (Paris 1932), 1-40. 17. Examples of this vaned literature include Maurice Halbwachs, La Classe ouvnère et les niveaux de vie (Paris 1913), 125-35, 442-5; George Cullen, The Threat of Leisure (New York 1926), 120-4; Henry Durant, The Problem of Leisure (London 1938), 10-19; Harry Overstreet, A Guide to Civilized Leisure (New York 1934), 19, 28; and Constance Harris, The Use of Leisure m Bethnal Green (London 1927), 43. Treatments of this theme by the French left include Lefranc, op. cit., 24-33; André Philip, Le Problème ouvrier aux Etats-unis (Paris 1927), 147, 216, 225; and Elya Ehrenburg, The Life of the Automobile (New York 1974, originally published in Paris 1928), 23-4. 18. C. Delise Burns, Leisure m the Modern World (London 1932), 234, 255-6; Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays (London 1935), 26-9. Note also John Hammond, The Growth of the Common Enjoyment (London 1933). 19. John Hilton, Why I Go in for the Pools (London 1935); S.B. Rowntree, Poverty and Progress (London 1941), 370-1; Denys Harding, ’The Place of Entertainment in Social Life’, Sociological Review, 26 (October 1934), 393-406; Syndicats (4 December 1936). Note also Jeffrey Richards, ’The Cinema and the Cinema-Going Public in Birmingham in the 1930s’, in James Walvin (ed.), Leisure in Britain (Manchester 1983),

31-53. 20. Richard Evans and Alison Boyd, The Use of Leisure in Hull (Hull 1935), 6, 1821, 47-9; C. Northcott Greene, Time to Spare (London 1933), 119-33; Pilgrim Trust, Men Without Work (London 1938), 144-60; A.C. Richmond, ’The Unwanted Worker and His Time’, The Nineteenth Century and After, 731 (January 1938), 11-20; see also J.B. Priestly, English Journey (London 1934); L.R. Missen, The Employment of Leisure (Exeter 1935), 34; E. Wight Baake, The Unemployed Man. A Social Study (London

1933), ch. 6. 21. Boyd,

op. cit., 47-9 and Walter Greenwood, Love on the Dole (London 1933), 130-1, 171; F. Zweig, Labour, Life and Poverty (London 1951), 43-4, 75-6. 22. Boyd, op. cit., 50; Greene, op. cit., 13-25, 116; F. Zweig, Women’s Life and Labour (London 1952), 141-8; Lefranc, op. cit., 12. 23. Russell, op. cit., 16-17; Ernest Barker, Uses of Leisure (London 1936), 6;

619 op. cit., 11-13; CGT, Pourquoi la semame de 40 heures (Paris 1932), 22; and Léon Jouhaux speech, 26 February 1933, cited in Antoinette Boudet, La Semaine de 40 heures (Paris 1935), 162. See also Louis Walker, Distributed Leisure (New York 1932). 24. See, for example, the following articles in Industrial Welfare, J L. Hammond, ’Industry and Leisure’ (May 1934), 27; ’Recreation Education’ (May 1936), 21-5; and ’Notes on Towns, Centres and Tours’, (April 1937), 27-31. 25. Kate Liepmann, The Journey to Work Its Significance for Industrial and Community Life (London 1944), 74-5, 169. 26. E. Brunner, Holiday-Making and the Holiday Trades (London 1945), 5; John Lowerson, ’Battles for the Countryside’ in Frank Gloversmith (ed.), Class, Culture and Social Change, A New View of the 1930s (Bnghton 1980), 251-71; Ramond de Flocourt, Le Camping au point de vue social et juridique (Toulouse 1937), 2-27; Jean Parant, Le Problème du tourisme populaire (Paris 1939), 93-119; Leonard Arthur, Adventures in Holiday-Making (London 1945); T.W. Price, The Story of the Workers’ Education Association, 1903-1924 (London 1924). 27. Ian Jeffrey, The British Landscape 1920-1950 (London 1984), ch. 1; Mass Observation Archive, ’Worktown Project’, Box 51, September 1937. For an analysis and sources of the holiday camp, see Colin Ward and Dennis Hardy, Goodnight

Deboin,

Campers (London 1986). 28. Industrial Welfare Society, Conference on Workers’ Holidays (London 1938), Jean Adam, ’L’Education physique et les sports’, Les Cahiers du Redressement français, 21 (1927), 3-4; and Debom, op. cit., 22. 29. House of Commons, Evidence on Holidays with Pay, op. cit , 21-2, 27; TUC, Holidaysfor All (London 1937), preface, 3-20; TUC, Proceedings (1931), 334; (1936), 174; Labour Magazine (August 1937), 279; Whittaker, op. cit., 12-20. 30. House of Commons, Report on the Committee on Holidays with Pay (London, April 1938), (Command Doc. 5724), 5-7; PRO CAB 24/267, Labour Memo, 28 January 1937; CAB 24/276, Labour Memo, 21 April 1938; CAB 24/277 Labour Memo, 27 May 1938. See also Stephen Jones, ’Trade Union Policy Between the Wars: The Case of Holidays with Pay’, International Review of Social History, 31 (1986). 31. House of Commons, Committee on Holidays with Pay, op. cit., 21-30; House of Commons, Holidays with Pay, op. cit., 135, 142, 153, 165, 171-3, 178-80, 189-90, 33546 ; Pimlott, op. cit., 215-41. 32. France, Senat, Annales, Débats parlementaires (17 June 1936), 510-14; Conseil Supérieur du Travail, op. cit., 226-7; François Henry, ’Loisirs et la personne humaine’, Semames sociales de France (1938), 1-40; and Guerrand, op. cit., 48-57 33. Populaire (12 August 1937). See especially Julian Jackson, ’ "Le Temps des Loisirs": Popular Tourism and Mass Leisure in the Front Populaire’s CulturalPolitical Vision’, Front Populaire/Frente Popular: Comparative Perspectives on the Popular Front Experiences of France and Spam (1936-1986), University of Southampton, 15-17 April 1986; M. Chavardés, Été 1936. La Victoire du Front populaire (Paris 1966), 260-3; Henri Noguères, La Vie quotidienne en France au temps du Front populaire (Paris 1977), 150-8; Jean-Louis Chappat, Les Chemms de l’espoir ou les combats de Léo Lagrange (Paris 1983), 167-77; and Jean Kergoat, La France du Front populaire (Paris 1986), 335-8. 34. Le Populaire (4 September 1937); Vendredi (13 August 1937); Regards (1 and 7 July, 5 August and 2 September 1937); L’Humanité (1 August 1936, 9 September 1936 and 25 August 1936); (8 April 1937). For a conservative view of this Parisian Syndicats Je suis partout flood of vacationers, see Figaro (5 August 1936 and 14 August 1937) and

21;

620

(18 June 1937) for (29 August 1936). See also Syndicats (12 August 1937) and Vendredi the Left’s response to conservatives’ disquiet over the mass holiday. 35. Yves Becquet, L’Organisation des loisirs des travailleurs (Paris 1939), 227-8; Peuple (11, 19, 23, 24 April, 5, 7, 11 May, 13 July and especially 4 August 1937); Le Populaire (7 July 1936). Jackson, op. cit., 6-12 and Noguères, op. cit., 162-5 are especially useful. 36. L’Humanité (15, 19 and 31 August 1936, 14 and 19 August and 6 September 1937); Frachon, op. cit., 14-16; Vie ouvrière (27 May and 10 June 1937); Depretto, op. cit., 18. 37. See Gilbert Proteau and Eugène Raude, Le Message de Léo Lagrange (Lyon 1950); and Chappat, op. cit., for sympathetic accounts of Lagrange’s life and work. Note also Pascal Ory, ’La Politique culturelle du premier gouvernement Blum’, Nouvelle Revue socialiste, 10-12 (1975), 84-5. 38. Vendredi (9 July 1937); Le Populaire (26 July and 25 December 1936 and 9 August 1937); Regards (5 August 1937); Georges Lefranc, Jum ’36: Archives (Paris 1971), 309-19; Noguères, op. cit., 152-3, 171-83; Kergoat, op. cit., 335-6, 362; and Holt, op. cit., 207-8. 39. Vu (25 July 1936); Guerrand, op. cit., 50; Lefranc, Juin ’36, op. cit., 309. 40. Syndicats (15 June 1938); Vendredi (7 and 21 May 1937); Association touristique populaire de la Région parisienne, Tourisme et loisirs populaires (Paris 1938), 12-38; Yves Becquet, L’Organisation des loisirs des travailleurs (Paris 1937), 202-7; Le Peuple (11April, 13 July 1937); Yves Hellen, ’Un Problème capital; L’organisation des loisirs en France’, Sciences politiques, 11(December 1938), 556-66; Parant, op. cit., 86-94; and Chavardés, op. cit., 255-6. 41. Raude and Proteau, op. cit., 37-9. 42. La Maison de la Culture, Bulletin d’information des Centres (February, April 1938) and Le Peuple (4 November 1936). 43. Lagrange speeches collected in Chappat, op. cit., 173-4, 193, and Vendredi (12 June 1936); and Raude and Proteau, op. cit., 37-9, 43, 131-2. On the linkage between Lagrange and the youth hostel movement, see Chappat, op. cit., 204; Chavardés, op. cit., 255-9; Oeuvre (22 May 1938); Cris des auberges de la Jeunesse (July 1937); and Auberges de jeunesse Textes internes (BIDC, 1937-44). Jouenne quotation in Peuple (4 August 1937). 44. E. Brunner, Holiday-Making and the Hohday Trades (London 1945), 3-10; Labour (June 1939), 34-8; Industrial Welfare Society, ’Conference on Workers’ Holidays’, (London, 30 November 1938) and National Saving Holiday Clubs, ’Holidays with Pay’, (London 1939) in the TUC Archive, HD 5106; M RC, EEF H12/ 39, Memo on National Savings Committee, 17 September 1937; TUC, Annual Proceedings (1936), 118-19; PRO, POWER 20/44, poster on Holiday Clubs, 1938. 45. George Lansbury, ’Playing Fields Make for Prosperity’, Labour Magazine (August 1931), 146-9 and Labour’s Immediate Programme (London 1937), 6 cited in Jones, Workers at Play, 135. Sources on later labour policy include, R.C. Davison, How to Tackle the Post-War Holidays Problem (London 1944); National Council of Social Services, Holidays, A Study of the Post-War Problem and the Field of NonCommercial Enterprise (London 1945); and E. Higgs, ’Leisure and the State: The History of Popular Culture as Reflected in the Public Records’, History Workshop Journal, 15 (1983), 141-50. 46. The short summer school vacation, the attachment to the traditional August

Bank

Holiday, the unwillingness of employers to accept two holiday periods, and the

621 understandable British desire to flee the dirty industrial towns for a (hopefully) sunny beach made unlikely the prospect of alluring workers to accept a cooler and perhaps damper vacation in June or September. MRC EEF H12/34, Memos on holidays, 28 February 1936, March, 12 November 1938, 19 June 1939; TUC, Proceedings (1938), 440; International Union of Food and Drink Workers, Holidays with Pay in the Food and Drink Industry (Zurich 1938), 23; Louis Smith, Holidays with Pay. A Plea for Voluntary Arrangements (Lincoln 1939); British Railway’s Press Office, ’Notes about Early Holidays’ (London 1938), in TUC Archive, HD 5106. 47. Workers’ Travel Association, ’Holidays with Pay Mean Hard Work for Somebody’, Labour Magazine (August 1937), 282; ’The National Committee to Provide Holidays for Unemployed Workers in Distressed Areas’ (London 1938), in TUC Archive HD 5106. News Chronicle survey (June 1939) cited in James Walvin, Beside the Seaside (London 1978), 108; Industrial Welfare Society, op. cit., 8; and The Listener (1 September 1938), 429, all on the problems of ’family’ vacations. 48. Industrial Welfare Society, op. cit., 8; Brunner, op. cit., 3-76. 49. International Association for Workers’ Spare Time, Official Bulletin, 2 (1938), 15, 35-6. For the fascist equivalent, see International Central Bureau, Joy and Work. Report of the World Congress for Leisure Time and Recreation, July 1936 (Berlin 1937). See also Lebert H. Wier, Europe at Play. A Study of Recreation and Leisure Time Activities (New York 1937). 50. Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, Annual Volume (1938), 18-22. Mass Observation Archive, Box 51, James Whittaker’s essay contest entrants, September 1937. 51. Vendredi ( 12 June 1936).

Gory Cross Associate Professor of History at The Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of A Quest for Time: The Reduction of Work in Britain and France, 1840-1940 (Berkeley 1989) and is currently editing a book on working-class holiday-makers at Blackpool in the 1930s, drawn from the MassObservation Archive. He has also recently completed an Anglo-American history of leisure. is

an