Journal of Tourism History

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Incidental tourism: British Imperial air travel in the

1930s

Gordon Pirie

To cite this article: Gordon Pirie (2009) Incidental tourism: British Imperial air travel in the 1930s,
Journal of Tourism History, 1:1, 49-66, DOI: 10.1080/17551820902742772

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Journal of Tourism History
Vol. 1, No. 1, March 2009, 49
66

RESEARCH ARTICLE
Incidental tourism: British Imperial air travel in the 1930s
Gordon Pirie*

Geography & Environmental Studies, University of the Western Cape, Private Bag X17, Bellville
7535, South Africa
(Received 20 August 2008; final version received 15 October 2008)

Few air travellers along Britain’s Empire air routes in the 1930s were intentional
holidaymakers. Survey data and passenger profiles culled from other contem-
porary sources show that most commercial airline passengers flew on work
assignment. High fares deterred leisure travel by air, but air passengers flying
long-distance on paid business or public service errands incidentally became
tourists by virtue of the slow, low altitude, daylight flights that stopped frequently
for refuelling: infant aeronautical technology and air travel economics created
tourism of sorts along new routes. Sightseeing from the air and on the ground was
integral to Empire air journeys. Unpredictability added to the adventure value of
flying; the novelty of aerial views added to its scenic value. Airline publicity,
documentary films, and passenger accounts and diaries, stressed this in-flight and
en-route experience: flying was a new way of seeing and experiencing foreign and
historic places and landscapes, and for spotting game. Flying was not just a way
of reaching a destination.
Keywords: Air travel; British Empire; colonialism; sightseeing; transport; tourists;
travellers; technology

Introduction
In the 1930s, passenger air travel became less and less of a novelty. Having started
with a stutter immediately after the First World War, it then emerged on a more
continuous basis in the late 1920s and early 1930s as commercial airline operations
became established. This was especially so in countries where aviation had reached a
relatively advanced stage of development. In Europe and North America, for
example, an aeronautical industry and an aviation infrastructure (aerodromes and
flying schools) sustained flying for military, postal, commercial and leisure purposes.
The development of commercial air travel between the two world wars was
nothing compared to the boom that started in the 1950s. The alignment of the
launch years of scheduled intercontinental air travel with youthful technology and
business operation, and with the prevailing social order and imaginary, makes the
scope of inter-war air travel distinctive. Indeed, the economics of flying and limited
aeronautical technology effectively spawned an early type of ‘air tourism’, which is
the subject of this paper. It was only in the second half of the twentieth century that
jet propulsion, wide-bodied aircraft and low-cost carriers helped to create and
accelerate mass air tourism (see Dierikx, 2008; Van Doren, 1993).

*Email: gpirie@uwc.ac.za
ISSN 1755-182X print/ISSN 1755-1838 online
# 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/17551820902742772
http://www.informaworld.com
50 G. Pirie

Organized aerial excursions started almost a century ago. In Britain, the Thomas
Cook travel company made an agreement in 1911 with a Lucerne-based airship
company to sell tickets for airship travel round the lake. British holidaymakers would
have gone there by rail and ferry. In 1919, for the first time, Cook’s advertised aerial
sightseeing trips over London and southeast England. Its brochure ‘Aerial Travel for
Business or Pleasure’ appeared within a year (Swinglehurst, 1982). Thomas Cook
booked clients on flights to Paris and Brussels in 1920 and 1921, and suggested that
an air trip to the continent was ‘a recognized part of the modern tourist’s
programme’ (Brendon, 1991, p. 259). Later, the company contracted with several
domestic American aviation companies to canvass for passengers and sell tickets for
air travel in the US. From 1928 the travel company made trans-Atlantic airship
bookings. In 1929, Cook’s arranged a charter air tour from New York to Chicago for
spectators attending a championship boxing match (Swinglehurst, 1982). In the US,
more than 1000 passengers boarded Pan American Airways aircraft for flights
between Florida and Cuba in 1928. Holidaymakers were not the majority of air
travellers in the US: during the 1930s about 90% of airline trips involved business. As
late as 1938, discomfort and fear among the American public meant that domestic
airlines carried only a tenth of the number of passengers who used Pullman trains
(Bilstein, 1995). In 1940, tourists constituted 27% of passengers on Panagra’s air
service along South America’s west coast. Businessmen counted for 46% of the
passenger traffic (Lissitzyn, 1942).
In Europe, Britain’s flag-carrying Imperial Airways competed with national
carriers such as KLM and Deutsche Lufthansa for passenger traffic from the mid-
1920s. European air services were used for business travel, but also by wealthy people
for recreation that included shopping and skiing. In 1927 the British carrier flighted
a month-long package air tour of France, Spain, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria and Italy
(Lyth, 2000). In the early 1930s, leisure travel by air in Europe was so slight as not to
merit separate identification. A 1932 listing of passenger traffic on two European
airlines worked with occupational categories rather than trip purpose, assuming that
most travel was work-related
businessmen, officials and engineers accounted for
most passengers (Lissitzyn, 1942). A widely publicized, escorted air tour of European
capitals arranged for 1934 by the British ‘Polytechnic Tourist Association’ was
abandoned through lack of interest (Pudney, 1959, p. 280).
From the late 1920s, while PanAm was developing intercontinental routes into
South America, Imperial and KLM extended their international air links beyond
Europe to serve their country’s respective colonial interests (Higham, 1960; Lyth,
2000). KLM’s principal route linked the Netherlands to the Dutch East Indies. The
service competed for passenger and small freight traffic with the British trunk
operation between London, India and Australia (Dierikx, 1991). Imperial’s other
long-haul service was across Africa between Egypt and South Africa (McCormack,
1974, 1976). Regular air passenger services to and from London and the Middle East
and India were nominally available in the early 1930s: they involved travelling almost
1600 km overland by train in France and Italy owing to geopolitical restrictions until
1934. Singapore and London were joined by air by 1934. A regular weekly service
connecting London to Central Africa began in 1931. The first of Imperial’s 1600
scheduled inter-war flights between London and Cape Town (including overland rail
through France and Italy) was in January 1932 (Wingent, 1991). By the late 1930s,
there were direct air links between Britain and her major imperial interests, excluding
 Journal of Tourism History
Figure 1. New lines of flight and main airport sites on Imperial Airways routes, late 1930s.

51
52 G. Pirie

Canada (Figure 1). Between 1934 and 1939, approximately 50,000 passengers used
Imperial to travel to, from, and in the British Empire. Some passengers flew
outbound from London into the Empire and back again. Others purchased one-way
tickets. Some made flights entirely within British Africa, or on stages of the Middle
East, India, and Southeast Asia trunk route (Pirie, 2004).
Air travel in the 1920s and 1930s was not confined to journeys on commercial
airlines. Wherever flying had taken hold, and especially where flying clubs had been
established, people flew privately for pleasure in small, light aircraft. Some journeys
tracked commercial air routes across continents. Concurrent with the craze of motor
touring, friends or married couples flew themselves as tourists, mostly in privately
owned aircraft. Solo air touring was more daunting, but could be indulged in by
those who could afford to hire an aircraft and pilot. ‘Air taxi’ work in the 1920s
included one of Britain’s famed long-distance aviators flying his country’s Director
of Civil Aviation to India and back on Empire aviation ‘business’ in 1924, and flying
a wealthy American round the Mediterranean (Cobham, 1978). In 1936 Amy
Johnson, the British heroine of long-distance solo flying, helped found the ‘Air
Cruises’ company to fly high spenders to luxury hotels in European capitals (Gillies,
2003). The category of private ‘air tourists’ did not include the men and women who
chased air records (mostly in the decade 1925
1935); for them, flying was anything
but leisurely and flexible. Their published accounts, however, did become travelogues
that anticipated and helped to stimulate air tourism.

Intentional air tourists

It is difficult to know precisely how many air passengers on the Empire or European
services of Imperial were tourists whose reason for flying was to reach a holiday
destination. Among those whose travel purposes are known or can be deduced, few
described themselves as tourists, and few were classified as such. Imperial’s own
advertisements habitually referred only to ‘travellers’, ‘officials’ and ‘businessmen’.
Semantics and conceptions aside, the records that exist about people who patronized
Imperial outside Europe indicate that most air travel was in the course of doing paid
work or performing personal tasks. This category of passenger includes journalists
who almost routinely travelled on inaugural flights (see, e.g. Brittain, 1933, 1934).
Even air travellers who paid their own way were not necessarily travelling as
tourists: for instance, wealthy people flew on errands to be with ailing friends and
relatives (Cross, 1982; Ward, 1929). Travelling on professional rather than private
business, hunters flew on their own account and recovered their safari costs by selling
trophy skins and tusks. Big-game hunters constituted a small proportion of the
wealthy global perambulators. An Imperial manager in Egypt recalled that in the
1930s roughly 2% of passengers were going on safari, mostly to Kenya and Uganda
(Hudson & Pettifer, 1979, p. 79).
In the absence of definitive archival passenger records, attention has focused on
the rich and famous who flew some or all of the approximately 40,000 route kms of
Britain’s Empire airways in the 1930s (Higham, 1960; Hudson, 1972; Hudson &
Pettifer, 1979; Pudney, 1959, p. 314). Named personalities got attention in the press
and Imperial’s in-house magazine, and information about their air journeys can be
retrieved from the historical record. Some flew in the course of performing their
duties, including, notably, leading public figures such as governors general, bishops,
 Journal of Tourism History 53

the Indian Viceroy, and cabinet ministers. As has been remarked, however, Imperial’s
‘average passenger’ was probably less glamorous than the eminent people and the
celebrities, tycoons, lawyers, rich honeymoon couples and unaccompanied children
who were pictured boarding or disembarking from Empire airliners. Lords and
ladies, barristers and consultants, did indeed fly with Imperial (BBC Radio 4, 1988),
but ‘the typical air traveller was most likely to be a government official’ (Lyth, 2000,
p. 875).
The government officials who were among the 12 passengers on a southbound
Imperial flight into Entebbe (Uganda) in 1936 were returning from home leave
(Marston, 1937). No government officials were among the 15 passengers in the
survey that Imperial undertook on a westbound Empire flight in 1937 (Earl, 1937;
Middleton, 1937). Most of the travellers were identified by their occupation and trip
purpose; most were flying in connection with their work. Despite the difficulties
of retrospectively categorizing the purpose of air travel, errors are at the margin:
between 70 and 75% of air travellers in this small 1937 sample were ‘on business’.
Between 25 and 30% of the passengers were holidaying.
The impression from the 1937 Imperial survey is that Empire passengers
outbound from England were mainly ‘business magnates’ or ‘commercial men on
hurried business tours’ and government officials. In a second category were people
whose occupation was not customarily thought of as work. Many were women, but
there were also ‘members of such concerns as film companies to whom time salvage
(not to mention comfort) is important’ (Earl, 1937, p. 223). A number of artists and
authors were said to fly ‘for the sake of experience or because it is fashionable’
(Middleton, 1937; see also Powell, 1992). Classifying all these people as holiday-
makers would stretch credulity. Their desire for an ‘experience’ needs noting,
however.
A June 1938 survey corroborated the finding about the dominance of business air
travel. At that time, the British Air Ministry reported that 40% of the passengers
handled at the Southampton Empire flying boat base were businessmen. Thirty
percent were government officials and army officers. Not all these people travelled in
the course of doing their duties; however, some were starting and finishing their
home leave. Twenty percent of the surveyed passengers were found to be travelling
for pleasure. Five percent were making urgent (presumably non-leisure) private
journeys, and 5% were unaccounted (Aeroplane, 8 June 1938).
A similar profile of trip purposes emerges from the author’s personally
constructed list of Imperial passengers who flew on the Empire routes in the period
1927
1939. Derived from accident reports, biographies, diaries, memoirs, travelo-
gues, reports and airline notices, the 1927
1939 tabulation also draws on author-
passengers’ notes about fellow passengers. Albeit only a tiny sample (0.5% of the
50,000 Empire air passengers), the 1927
1939 listing indicates that work travel was
the dominant type among individual passenger flights whose purpose was specified
or can be guessed. In a data set comprising 240 passengers (60% of whom flew in the
years 1934
1937), the records of 96 individuals (40%) contain information about
their trip purpose: 67 (64%) were making work trips, and 29 (28%) were flying on
recreational journeys.
Of the 29 trips coded ‘leisure’ in the reconstructed 1927
1939 passenger list, 13
were to unspecified destinations. London was mentioned most often (six times),
followed by Kenya (three), England (two), and continental Africa, Alexandria,
54 G. Pirie

Cairo, Cape Town and Malaya (one each). Little can be inferred from the
destinations of Empire air flights about trips of unspecified purpose. The gender
breakdown of leisure and work trips is predictable: twice as many women (17) than
men (eight) made journeys classified as leisure flights, and 15 times more men (61)
than women (four) flew on stipulated or inferred work trips. Of the 91 individuals of
known sex (five appear in the literature without names, titles or occupations) who
made an Empire flight, 25 (23%) were coded as flying on holiday.
There is a remarkable consistency across the four different data sets regarding the
proportion of Empire flights undertaken for work and pleasure. Indeed, in the 1930s
it would appear that commercial or personal business flights on Empire air routes
outnumbered leisure flights in a ratio of approximately 3:1.
The main reason for the relatively small share of leisure travel by air in the British
Empire is probably the expense of air tickets. Excepting perhaps in the case of perks
for corporate executives, and in the case of assisted passages for high-ranking civil
servants going on leave, leisure flights would have had to be paid personally. This
put long-distance flight out of reach of most holidaymakers in the 1930s. The
affordability of flying was not in question for wealthy individuals and families, or for
well-endowed commercial organizations. It was only marginally affordable for the
English middle class even though its members were not seriously affected by
unemployment, and enjoyed much of Britain’s almost continuous 14% rise in real
income between 1923 and 1938. Purchase of assets (such as housing and consumer
durables) rather than air tickets accounted for a large slice of increased personal
expenditure (Benson, 1994).
Despite fragmentary evidence about a decline in the absolute level of Empire
airfares during the 1930s (e.g. the advertised one-way fare between London and
Karachi dropped from £120 in 1929 to £85 in 1938
equivalent, respectively, to
£5230 and £3889 in 2007 using the retail price index), members of the middle class
did not take to the air in droves for self-funded recreational travel. Cost was not the
only deterrence. Expense was compounded by the perceived risk (accentuated by
sensationalist news headlines and newsreel images of air accidents), and by the
reported discomfort of sitting in a cold and noisy aircraft passing through air
turbulence at low altitude.
The engrained foreign holidaying habits of Britons would also have curbed leisure
air travel. Diverse holiday destinations in Europe remained relatively inexpensive
and accessible, whether by rail or steamer. Flying had a slight comparative speed
advantage but was more expensive and more restricted by adverse winter weather,
and most rail journeys were more frequent and more reliable. As regards travel
beyond Europe, the custom of taking relaxing sea voyages may have been difficult to
overturn in the public mind. There was certainly some disinclination to risk long
flights over remote and wild country. As late as 1937, long after Empire air service
could still be considered ‘experimental’, Vita Sackville-West berated her husband
(Harold Nicolson, writer, broadcaster and Foreign Office official turned parliamen-
tarian) for returning home by air from East Africa after working 10 weeks for a
commission on African education (Nicolson, 1966, pp. 18, 295). Airline operational
statistics and publicity showed the relative safety of flying, but the public seemed
particularly fearful of airliner crashes. In the 32 months after the introduction of
flying boats on Imperial’s Empire air services in October 1936, seven passengers (and
12 crew) were killed in 12 major crashes (Mayo, 1939).
 Journal of Tourism History 55

In the financially austere 1930s, value-for-money would have been a considera-

tion for the middle class when deciding on a holiday destination and mode of travel.
In the early days of Empire air service, the time saved by flying to extremities such as
Cape Town and Sydney was marginal. Holidaymakers with limited time would have
been more attracted to air journeys that saved considerable time over shorter sectors.
For example, the advertised 1931 London
Karachi single airfare of £98 (£176 return)
(£4772 and £8571 in 2007 prices) cost only £6 (£292) more than first-class surface
fare for a journey that saved 12 days. In the same year, the advertised London

Kisumu flight saved 23 days and was £2 (£97) less than the first-class overland fare.
On other flight sectors, time savings may have been outweighed by the certainty,
superior comfort and lower price of first-class sea journeys. At the end of 1934 the
advertised single fare for the seven-day, 20,500 km flight from London to Brisbane
was £195 (£9921), more than twice as expensive as the cheapest steamship fare of £96
(£4884), and nearly 60% more costly than the £123 (£6258) needed for a first-class
berth (Economist, 29 December 1934; Times, 31 August 1931). But flying was not
just about balancing time savings and cost; it was also about conspicuous
consumption, boasting and thrill.

Incidental air tourists

The small number and ratio of passengers who flew on Empire air services for the
sole or primary purpose of holidaying suggests that air transport in the 1930s had
much less to do with tourism than it did half a century later. Infant commercial
aviation on the Empire routes was indeed less important to tourism in a quantitative
sense, but the links with tourism were also qualitatively different. Many air travellers
who boarded aircraft in the course of work assignments actually became tourists
once in the air, and they had tourist experiences at ground stops en route to their
destination.
It was the technology of aviation that effectively turned all organized Empire
flying into air touring in the 1930s. In particular, the performance of commercial
passenger aircraft transformed air travel into sightseeing. One reason was that
aircraft had a limited geographical range. Aircraft size, aircraft construction
materials, aircraft payloads, engine power and fuel efficiency affected how far
aircraft could fly before landing to refuel. Crucially, operating considerations had to
be balanced against profitability: there was a limit to how much fuel could be loaded
without decreasing space for revenue-earning mails, passengers and luggage. Even
when state subsidies to airlines made profitable flying irrelevant, civilian aircraft
were still expected to perform a service and to carry more than just pilots and fuel.

Sightseeing on the ground

Owing to their limited flying range, Imperial’s aircraft landed at regular and short
intervals along the Empire trunk routes. The exact distance varied according to
flying conditions (notably wind speed and direction, and altitude) and the variety
and generation of aircraft used. In the early 1930s there were approximately 30 stops
provided on the London
Cape Town journey (involving 72 hours in the air, four
changes of aircraft, and 2000 km of rail travel) (Heathcote, 1932). Between Cairo and
Cape Town there were 27 main aerodromes and 30 intermediate alighting places
56 G. Pirie

(Pudney, 1959, p. 111). A 1936 Imperial timetable lists 22 stops between Cairo and
Cape Town. Of course, aeronautical considerations interleaved with traffic con-
siderations in determining landing places: Imperial needed to operate into and out of
colonial capital cities for economic, service and prestige reasons. In some places,
notably the Persian Gulf, the configuration of routes and landing places was a matter
of intense political strategising (Al-Sayegh, 1989).
The time that aircraft spent at refuelling stops varied. The preparedness of
ground service crew and equipment was a consideration. The possibilities of
inclement weather played a role; the time remaining for daylight flying was crucial.
No Empire aircraft in the 1930s were equipped with night navigation capabilities.
Landings scheduled at sunset were for overnight stops; emergency landings in the
late afternoon would generally become overnight stops.
Frequent stopping, and overnight halts, helped to make tourists of all air
travellers irrespective of their trip purpose. Passengers disembarking temporarily
at aerodromes could not avoid experiencing the local climate, scenery, buildings
and refreshments. They saw the dress and heard the speech of local refuelling and
cleaning crews, and curious local onlookers. Even on route sectors operated by flying
boats rather than land-planes, many of Imperial’s stops were off the beaten track: air
passengers were visiting more than the Empire’s prime seaports that were known to
and photographed by thousands of maritime travellers. Yet, at isolated, inland
colonial outposts the balance between indigenous and exotic did vary: Imperial had
its own modest ‘station’ buildings and facilities in some places, and would recreate
comfortable ‘little Englands’ for its passengers, flying crew and expatriate airfield
superintendents. There, authenticity was compromised by imported foods and
decoration. At other stops, facilities and services were decidedly in the vernacular. At
Sharjah in the Persian Gulf, passengers were accommodated in a Beau Geste fort
with watchtowers, parapets, iron-spike palings, and barbed wire. Three dozen
retainers of the local sheik stood guard. Evidently, passengers curious to see the
bazaars could escape the compound, once to great consternation (Tuson, 2003,
pp. 208
211). Drinking water was delivered to the fort in water skins on donkey
back. Petrol was offloaded from dhows and forwarded by camel (Allen, 1928;
Sphere, 4 March 1933).
At overnight stops in sizeable towns, passengers would be taken by motor coach
to a commercial hotel. At Cairo, the airline used Shepheard’s Hotel and the
Continental Savoy Hotel. They were said to be among the finest in the world.
Shepheard’s was legendary, the epitome of style and sensation, a playground and
watering hole for the aristocracy, dashing officers, brave explorers, and gorgeous film
stars. Sir Richard Burton, Henry Morton Stanley, General Gordon, and Lawrence of
Arabia had been guests. Ross Smith spent the night there in 1919 during his
pioneering flight from England to Australia. Many Imperial passengers sleeping
overnight at Shepheard’s must have felt they were the new agents of Empire (Nelson,
1960). At Baghdad, Imperial’s passengers stayed overnight at the Hotel Maude and
had the use of the town’s three main clubs. In descending order of status, these were
the ‘British’, the ‘Railway’ and the ‘Alwiyah’. The first was exclusively male and was
used mainly by city gents. The other two had a mixed membership and offered
facilities for swimming, tennis, squash, polo, pig sticking and shooting game. At
Basra, passengers stayed near the airfield at the Iraq Railway Rest House (Frater,
1986; Sinderson, 1973, pp. 72
73).
 Journal of Tourism History
Figure 2. Air travellers as camera subjects. Imperial Airways passengers (13 men, three women) boarding an 18-seater HP42 after refuelling at
Khartoum, some time between April 1932 and October 1936. Most were probably transit passengers. Source: Science & Society Picture Library, Science

57
Museum, London: picture no. 10412536.
58 G. Pirie

Lengthy stops allowed passengers to walk about or hire motorcars to see local
sights. During a July 1933 flight from Croydon to Cape Town, at least one passenger
took a moonlight taxi trip to the pyramids near Cairo (Heathcote, 1932). When
flying north across Africa, Sir Edward Buck made a brief social call at Government
House in Entebbe. At Juba (Sudan), Buck and his fellow passengers Lord and Lady
Chesham spent a night, visited a mission church, and saw the hostel and housing in a
model ‘native village’. During a stop of a couple of hours in Khartoum (see Figure
2), an army major showed the trio around the zoological gardens. Overnighting at
Luxor, Lady Chesham visited Tutankhamen’s tomb (Morris, 1978, pp. 359
360).
While in Khartoum, a woman passenger strolled along the quay past a general’s
fenced mansion, a lieutenant’s Italian villa and the governor’s house (Crile, 1937,
p. 210). In 1938, Enoch Powell, then a youthful classical scholar (and later the
controversial British politician) showed off the Acropolis to the three-man airline
crew and the three women passengers and young boy during the Athens stop on
Imperial’s Southampton
Darwin flying boat service (Heffer, 1998).
Some of Imperial’s stops were unscheduled, not to say accidental. Storms, flooded
airfields, hard landings, damaged undercarriages, empty fuel tanks and technical
failures delayed service on several occasions. Passengers awaiting replacement
aircraft, parts or fuel could spend time sightseeing at airline expense. Kingdon
Ward’s 1929 flight included a desert rescue (Ward, 1929). Sheltering from a storm,
three celebrity passengers on an Imperial aircraft delivery flight in 1932 landed
unexpectedly at a private estate in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) where the
impromptu colonial encounter could not have been bettered (Lamb, 1999, pp. 166

171, 176
181).
Passengers had different experiences of Africa after other forced landings.
Contrary to orders from Imperial, for whom he was making a publicity film, the
renowned cinematographer Paul Rotha sat in the cockpit to film an aircraft making
a crash landing in Tanganyika in 1932. The excited African in charge of a small,
single-track railway station telegraphed for a relief locomotive and carriage
the
scheduled weekly train service had passed the previous day. The film crew, the flying
crew and two American passengers ended up at a New Year’s Eve party in a dreary
Dodoma hotel (Rotha, 1973). After a forced desert landing beside an uninhabited,
roofless fort in the Middle East, an Imperial captain sent his passengers out to collect
dry dung in their hats so that they could keep warm during the cold nights (Frater,
1986, p. 80). In 1933, 12 Imperial passengers spent a day and a night on the ground in
the Nubian Desert between Cairo and Khartoum before being rescued (Flight, 26
January 1933). Better accommodation was to hand during delays caused by a
refuelling fire and poor weather at Kuwait in 1934: passengers were sheltered by the
local British agent and then in an Anglo-Persian Oil Company house (Political
Diaries of the Persian Gulf, May & June 1934). In 1939, 13 flying boat passengers
had an unexpected taste of the African bush when incorrectly installed on-board
navigation equipment led to a forced landing off-course on the Dungu River in the
northeast Belgian Congo (Coster, 2000).
There were also elements of adventure in Elspeth Huxley’s six-and-a-half-day
Imperial flight from Entebbe to Croydon in 1933. Made independently, her
husband’s flight was worse: it stranded him, the crew and other passengers in the
Northern Rhodesian bush for three days when pilots lost their way and the aircraft
ran out of fuel. The discomfort of flying left a lasting impression on 26-year-old
 Journal of Tourism History 59

Elspeth. Her journey was bumpy, hot and stuffy. Passengers were airsick. The
midnight temperature at Khartoum was 1108F. A ‘repellent’ breakfast was served
before sunrise at Atbara. At Wadi Halfa, an inedible lunch smothered by flies was set
out in a stiflingly hot tent. Passengers endured a night in a ‘horrible’ hotel at Assuan.
On the positive side there was pleasurable sightseeing to the Tomb of the Kings
and the Khartoum zoo. Elspeth’s mother’s 1935 return air journey between Kenya
and England in 1935 was a similar ordeal (Huxley, 1980, pp. 92
93, 109
111, 1985,
pp. 90
91).
Night time tourism was limited by Imperial’s practice of rousing its passengers in
the early hours of the morning so that they could wash, breakfast and be at the
airfield for dawn departures. Nevertheless, some passengers could not resist nightlife
away from hotel or aerodrome base. During a 1929 flight (when Imperial still used
the Nairn Motor Transport Company’s hotel at Baghdad), at least one of the
‘transit’ passengers attended a cabaret in a city nightclub. There, among Arab
gigolos, he spotted buttoned-up, ‘Englishmen trying to appear indiscreet’ (Daily
Express, 17 September 1929, p. 8). Passengers staying overnight in Cairo could
always watch Egyptian belly dancing. Indiscretions fringed on what is now called
sex-tourism. One ‘very respectable’ English passenger sought out Cairo’s special
cinemas that screened pornography (BBC Radio 4, 1988). An ex-Imperial manager in
Egypt was expected to know the going rate for Cairo’s ‘ladies of pleasure’.
Apparently the airline bus called at Alexandria’s nightclubs and brothels on its
way to the airport in the early morning; one Madame customarily cashed in piles of
coupons that Imperial gave its passengers to relieve them of having to use hard
foreign currency (Hudson, 1972, p. 80; Hudson & Pettifer, 1979).
On the ground, air passengers could get more fleeting glimpses of foreign people
at close quarters. Air travel could be an encounter with the ‘primitive other’. At
Malakal (Sudan), passengers gazed at near-naked natives with their curious head
hair (Butcher, 1932). Air travel was also presented as a comical technical
juxtaposition. At Mpika (Northern Rhodesia), African ‘boys’ were given the task
of lighting the landing ground. By rattling flare buckets they scared off lions drawn
to the landing ground by the presence of oxen used to haul a grass mower. Part of the
air tourist experience was watching the expression of colonial social organization.
The engineer-in-charge at Mpika carried a pistol that he could use both to frighten
the lions and chivvy the reluctant Africans (Brenard, 1939). At some airfields on the
Empire route there was even trading in souvenirs. At Bima, an Indonesian stop used
by Imperial’s partner Australian airline, local people who converged on the aircraft
(and who were presumptuously named the ‘reception committee’) wanted to sell
cockerels, hens, cloth, daggers and onions (King, 1938).

Sightseeing from the air

Tourism on air routes in the 1930s was not confined to ground stops. Sightseeing
from the air was another consequence of limited aeronautical technology. Imperial’s
passenger aircraft cruised at relatively low altitude, their operating ceilings reaching
3000 m toward the end of the decade. The fuel efficiency achieved by modern
passenger jets cruising at three times higher altitude or more over long stretches was
beyond the lifting capability of aircraft engines 70 years ago. The fuel-hungry climb
rate to reach such a ceiling before descending again was out of reach. It was this
60 G. Pirie

rather than the inability to pressurize passenger cabins that set a low ceiling to
aircraft operations. Another reason for low flying was that prominent ground
features and markings (hills, rivers, towns, railways) were crucial for navigation
before the advent of navigation charts and radio beacons.
Empire air passengers effectively became tourists because of frequent stops and
because of daylight air journeys made at relatively low altitudes. As aircraft were not
equipped with navigational equipment that allowed flying in poor visibility, most
flying was also confined to fair weather. Flying low, below the cloud base and haze,
the ground was generally visible. At cruising speeds little faster than 160 km per hour
there was usually a lot to see; there were few stretches of land whose character did
not vary over two hours. The distance flown over featureless water bodies was just a
small proportion of Empire air journeys.
Newspaper reporters, as well as commentators and diarists, were fond of
recording aerial sights in words and photographs. Gazing out of an aircraft cabin’s
large windows while seated, or when strolling about on a flying boat’s spacious
‘promenade deck’, Empire air travellers would have seen a panorama of human
endeavour unfold beneath them (e.g. Kettles-Roy, 1931). Some noticed the impress of
colonialism particularly. Sir Edward Buck and his companions looked down at the
spectacle of the Aswan Dam, and their airliner’s descent over the pyramids to Cairo
gave glimpses of the High Commission riverside gardens (Morris, 1978, pp. 359

360). Descending into Entebbe, aircraft flew over the golf course, the government
house with its swimming pool, the resident’s white-painted bungalows, the fine red
roads and the parade ground for troops. Beneath the clouds were ‘all the
appurtenances of British administration in the tropics’. The Union flag formation
of Khartoum’s avenues and streets was visible as never before; the layout was ‘the
very embodiment of British Imperialism in Africa’ (Makin, 1935, p. 189). An
impressionable young British colonial officer flying back from home leave to his
Bulawayo posting in 1936 admired the design hallmarks of Empire. Nairobi was well
laid out, ‘a real feather in the cap of the British’. He identified hill houses, tennis
courts, games of cricket, three large well-appointed hotels, Government House, the
cathedral and a spacious railway station with a platform wide enough to parade six
regiments (Imperial Airways Gazette, August 1936). Imperial nostalgia was served
well at Wadi Halfa where passengers rested in a building reputedly occupied by
generals Gordon and Kitchener, the legendary British battle heroes. Filling his
leisure time in Khartoum, a South African air traveller hired a car to see where
Gordon had been killed and where Kitchener had lived (Armstrong, 1933).
Pre-colonial landscapes were also visible from the air. Flying along the course of
the Nile River, for example, Imperial’s passengers could stare in swift succession at
Abu Simbel, temples at Thebes and Horus, the Colossi of Memnon, and the Giza
pyramids (Figure 3). A flight north from Egypt across the Mediterranean and
southern Europe to London whisked passengers from the seats of ancient powers
and civilizations in Alexandria, Crete, Athens and Rome, to the heartlands of
modern European power and culture in Paris and London (Crile, 1937). In reverse, a
week’s journey to Rhodesia traced the history of civilization via Rome, Greece, Crete
and Egypt to the spot where humans may have first emerged (Stokes, 1936). As if
anticipating western heritage tourism, aviation elevated and extended the post-
European surface tour.
 Journal of Tourism History
Figure 3. An HP42 flying low past Cairo’s Giza pyramids. Source: Science & Society Picture Library, Science Museum, London: picture no.10412837.

61
62 G. Pirie

The notion of flying as touring through history also applied on the Middle East
sector of Imperial’s Indian service. In the 1930s, an illustrated London magazine
proclaimed that passengers overnighting at Gaza were staying where Samson had
once removed the city gates. The flight from Jerusalem to Baghdad was said to follow
the Jericho road and gave a view of the village of Bethany, the Apostles’ Fountain,
the Good Samaritan’s inn and the great ruin of Agar Kuf (Sphere, 13 May 1933, 17
March 1934, 22 January 1938). Antiquarianism, orientalism and piety were served
well. In 1934, a series of weekly articles in the London Times rhapsodized about
flights giving glimpses of strange, sacred, mythic lands. Air services were not just
utilitarian, they were an education. The newspaper published photographs of the
Gulf of Corinth, ancient Athens, Bethlehem and Jerusalem (Times, 8, 15, 22, 29
March 1934). Imperial’s aircraft were said to roar along a route where once
Alexander the Great had marched and sailed (King-Hall, 1935, p. 601). Maps and
photographs relating to the Indian air service peeled back the living past (Camac,
1929; Cooper, 1935a, 1935b, 1936; Eggar, 1929).
Bibliophiles, fixated knitters and sleep-deprived all-night revellers would miss the
aerial sights, but the novelty of an airborne perspective on the world meant that most
passengers would have found it hard to resist even just an occasional peek at
impressive natural landscapes such as the Nile, the Sudd swamps, Mount
Kilimanjaro, and Jabal-i-Mehdi, the massive geological outcrop on the bleak
Baluchistan (Makran) coast. Air travel allowed passengers to stare down in awe
on animals as well as landscapes. The pages of one air travel narrative (Crile, 1937)
teem with giraffe, elephant, rhino, lion, eland, hartebeest, gazelle, hyena and
warthog. Game, storks and herons vie for page space with monumental buildings.
Spotting wildlife had never been as easy, or as fruitful. Without having to comply
with rigid air traffic regulation, Imperial’s pilots would occasionally divert off- course
slightly and descend to allow glimpses (and photographs) of teeming (and often
stampeding) animal herds. Over Uganda, a pilot circled so passengers could see
hundreds of elephants stampeding from the plane’s shadow and engine noise
(Heathcote, 1932). In the 1934 launch issue of Air Travel and Commercial Air
Transport, a magazine devoted to ‘the pleasure and profit of international travel and
transport by air’, the editor enticed thoughts of the wild by publishing articles on the
lure of Africa. He reproduced overhead photographs that told of a new opportunity
to see ‘Big-Game from Above’.
Effortless sightseeing with a new angle and field of vision could be portrayed as
educational, but it was also, less nobly, a marketing device. The Dutch airline KLM
published a hardcover guidebook (Rusman, 1935) that framed and aestheticized the
air tourist experience along its transcontinental route for its educated, inquisitive
clientele. One fascinated passenger wrote and published his own travelogue about
the history, landscape and economic and social activities along the Dutch air
route (Berghaus, 1934). Guests of the French intercontinental carrier wrote about
their Marseilles-Saigon flight (see, e.g. Tharaud & Tharaud, 1932). Imperial never
commissioned similar pre-digested, earnest guides, but the airline did produce a
pamphlet that acted as mute tour guide to exoticism. Text noted, for example, that
‘after Syria we skirt the Hauran, formerly the land of Bashan, peopled by a race of
giant men, and now the mountain stronghold of the Jebel Druses’. The airline also
produced magazine articles and illustrations, timetables and air route strip maps that
were filled with alluring text and images about aerial sights. Sightseeing pleasures en
 Journal of Tourism History 63

route and at Empire destinations were common allusions and fantasies in Imperial’s
full-colour advertising posters, now part of the iconography of the golden age of air
travel (see London, 2007; Morris, 1989; Szurovy, 2002). The airline’s publicity films
were also filled with images that were intended to entice custom (Pirie, 2003).
Publicity material for the Africa service capitalized on passenger sightings of game,
and Imperial’s ability to speed people to jumping-off points for safaris. In the second
half of the 1930s, several full-colour cards in a series of 50 inserted in cigarette
packets depicted important stops en route to Africa and Australia (see Hudson &
Pettifer, 1979, p. 64).
A 1931 Imperial advertising poster was designed to show everything the airline
could enable the air traveller to see; a map cluttered to the point of illegibility with
hand-drawn caricatures showed the countries served or flown over. The outline of
Australia, for example, contained a pair of cricket wickets, a rabbit, a Kangaroo and
a sheep. Copy for a 1931 advertisement for the Indian and Cape services listed the
sequence of stops together with clichéd encodings relating to legends and resources.
Cairo stood for the Nile and the pyramids. Baghdad was the jewel of the East. Gaza
was the gateway to the Holy Land. Basra was redolent of Sinbad, dates, oil and
carpets. Juba was home to the Nile headwaters. Nairobi was marked as the centre of
big-game country. Broken Hill was the site of the Katanga radium mines. Salisbury
was connected to King Solomon’s mines at Zimbabwe. Bulawayo was the junction
for Victoria Falls and World’s View. Johannesburg and Kimberley smacked of gold
and diamonds (Royal Air Force Museum, n.d.). To fly along Imperial’s trunk routes
was to tour the new highway of Empire, to savour its riches, and to explore the
mysterious ‘clusters of dark syllables’ (Samuel, 1934, p. 30) that spelled out the new
bridgeheads of putative airborne Empire.

Conclusion
In the early days of air travel, at least on the British Empire routes, most passengers
were on business assignment. In the 1930s, most long-distance leisure travel was still
by sea; ‘intentional’ air tourism was negligible. The destination-based mass tourism
facilitated by contemporary airlines differs numerically and structurally from the
tourism served by early airlines. Whereas tourists now use aircraft solely as ways of
reaching their destination, in the past, sightseeing was an integral part of the flight
itself. The American historian and cultural critic, Daniel Boorstin, lamented in the
mid-1960s that the modern tourist ‘gets there without having gone’ (cited in Bilstein,
1995, p. 106). Thirty years previously, however, air routes and flight schedules were
the essence of the journey, regardless of whether the air traveller was undertaking a
business trip or some other non-leisure trip.
Flying made all passengers into impromptu tourists. Sightseeing was not
confined to a passenger’s final destination. When there was no overnight flying,
passengers slept less while airborne. On-board entertainment comprised sightseeing,
diary writing and reading. Passengers did not watch films behind closed window
blinds. Instead they could watch natural and built environments project themselves
into view beneath the aircraft. Aircraft captains diverted and descended to show
sights. A considerable proportion of the time between flight origin and destination
was spent on the ground allowing passengers to experience foreign places and life in
some degree.
64 G. Pirie

The aeronautical technology of the 1930s meant that flying was much slower than
today. Aircraft on the Empire air routes operated by day only, at lower altitudes, over
short flying stages, and with a degree of unpredictability. Early air tourism was also a
product of an age before society had been saturated with aerial photography, and
when overhead views of the earth were still rare. In these two respects tourism was
mediated technologically. Air tourism in the 1930s was contingent on infant civil
aeronautics. High seat prices and circumscribed aeronautical practices shaped a
hybrid category of what is now called ‘business tourism’: few Empire passengers flew
‘just on holiday’, but all engaged in sightseeing en route. This was unlike the modern
phenomenon of vacationing before or after a business trip when the ‘holiday’ flight
leg is rarely a sightseeing event itself.
Cast in terms that presuppose deliberation and intent, air tourism in the inter-
war British Empire would have been very slight. Yet the evidence is that irrespective
of their reasons for flying (and most flew on urgent business), air travellers in the
1930s were axiomatically sightseers. Many passengers would have sighted and
experienced things en route that were different from what they set out to see,
photograph or study at their destination. Whether their bird’s-eye view confirmed or
contradicted the imaginary and stylized imperial landscapes and aerial perspectives
of which Victorian authors and artists were so fond (Stiebel, 2001), what might be
termed the ‘impaerial’ now became real. A minority of air travellers started out as
tourists; most became ‘captive’ tourists. For that matter, airline pilots, cabin crew and
overseas airfield superintendents were also tourists, albeit preoccupied ones. Applied
just to passengers, the notion of an ‘accidental’ tourist would be misleading as it
suggests unanticipated sightseeing; this would have become less and less common as
more people saw aerial photographs, as written accounts multiplied, and as publicity
film and text reconfigured the travel imaginary. In the 1930s, however, British Empire
air travel did bear the marks of ‘incidental’ tourism.

Notes on contributor
Gordon Pirie teaches and researches transport and travel, and has published widely on
southern African transport in particular. His book Air empire: British imperial civil aviation
1919
1939 will be published by Manchester University Press in 2009.

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