Tourists on Tour

Today I noticed an amusing phenomenon: tourists who wear tourist souvenirs from their previous destinations. This was the young man who brought this to my attention as he has followed a similar journey to mine: I covered Portsmouth Dockyard in a previous blog post. 

He is wearing a cap bought from HMS Victory in Portsmouth while here on holiday in Dubrovnik. Seeing this I see something of his tourism history; I see him on tour coming from a northerly historical maritime location to a southerly historical maritime location. A tourist on tour. I almost don't see him stopping off at home but instead imagine him making the journey direct from the UK to Croatia.

This is something very different from this tourist group. No prizes for guessing where they are from. They are recognisable for where they have come from whereas the man above, Italian I believe, is recognisable more for where he has been to. And this is something of a standard tourist conversation: exchanging lists and short comments about places you have visited. "I have been to Greece" says one,  "Oh we've been there too, back in 1983 when it was so beautiful and quiet." comes the reply.    

The Henry VIII Tour: how to make history die

I learnt about The Henry VIII Tour when looking online for guided tours of Portsmouth and found that the city council arranges tours every two weeks on Sunday afternoons around different topics. This weekend it was Henry VIII's turn.

The tour began with us assembling and paying for tickets. Many of us had already bought them in advance through the City Museum and D Day Museum, while one or two people bought them on the spot from the guide himself. It cost just £3 so was inexpensive and there were about 20 of us taking it all in all.  

The tour began with a history lesson. The guide read from notes and freely acknowledged the researchers who had done the bulk of the research on this topic some 30 to 40 years ago by consulting original documents from the time of Henry VIII, that is to say from the early 16th Century. The tour was presented as a history of the king's relationship with Portsmouth and it was told chronologically starting with the situation that he inherited from his father. 

As the first part of this story related to the size and nature of the British fleet the guide produced a book that had some illustrations of warships so that his talk had some images to relate to. It was unfortunate that the style of illustrations was a little like those in a children's book. This older man showing us childish pictures of warships was slightly ridiculous but also charming. 

After some time introducing the topic we moved from the Square Tower to the beach. The guide again read from his his notes and then added some observations of his own to them. This was to be the general format that the rest of the tour settled into. 

Something that was quite striking was that the actual spaces we passed through were strangely absent in the tour. By that I mean we saw many things that could have been brought into the frame of the tour if the tour was about the real geography of the location. I'm thinking, for example, about the Solent Guild of Woodcarvers who we passed besides and who were producing carvings with medieval designs. This made me see how this tour was developed as a text that served to impart historical research and had not been written in situ developing the historical information from what was already there on the ground. 

We came to the marina and here the subject matter turned to beer. At this point I realised there was another organising system to this tour, material had been put together according to topic as well as according to chronology. It had been written in such a way that these two orders of classification interrupted one another as little as possible but it was inevitable that within each topic there were some chronologies of their own. This meant that these two orders sometimes pulled in separate directions, added to which the order of the space imposed a quite separate logic again. The route we walked neither followed the Henry VIII chronology precisely nor did it wholly follow the thematic logic either. This meant that the guide was often left saying, "anyway..." and then throwing in some observations of his own, which at times added a new order of its own.   

We stopped at two churches and I learnt one rather interesting fact that was new to me. The city of Portsmouth was excommunicated for over 50 years following a visiting bishop being killed by an angry mob who demanded to be paid their wages. Add to this another little known story I heard about Queen Victoria who, when she visited the city was so upset by the population's indifferent reception that she had a new train line built so she could avoid the city and reach her Isle of Wight residence via a Gosport quayside instead. There is something of this unruly, iconoclastic history of the city that lives on today.

The structural problems of the Henry VIII tour notwithstanding, it was interesting to see a genuine local history tour given by a blue badge guide. I now realise that my approach to tours comes from a  completely different perspective: I prioritise form, structure and live presence whereas this tour was all about the content.

As well as this tour being useful general research on tours I took it to research the tours of Portsmouth as I would like to do something local. I now realise however that the city would be even more challenging than Stuttgart as there are very few tours on offer and not such a great a volume of tourists either. This was abundantly clear from the vacancies sign displayed outside this guest house near the sea front. A mid-summer weekend in which the city was bathed in warm sunlight and they still had vacancies. Well, it is either that the tourists are not coming in great numbers or, that this guest house "ALBATROSS" has chosen a particularly bad name for their establishment, the bird being a byword for a burden or curse.

The Armed Forces Day Tour: a Portsmouth Dockyard ship tour

I took a tour around Portsmouth Dockyard on Armed Forces Day at the weekend. And if you are wondering what that is, Armed Forces Day is a recent invention, a nationwide event that has been running since 2009. The organisers describe it as, 

an opportunity to do two things. Firstly, to raise public awareness of the contribution made to our country by those who serve and have served in Her Majesty's Armed Forces, Secondly, it gives the nation an opportunity to Show Your Support for the men and women who make up the Armed Forces community: from currently serving troops to Service families and from veterans to cadets.

I don't know if that means that simply by going along to the dockyard I was showing my support, but one way or another I was interested to see what Armed Forces Day looked like and how it functioned as a tour.

Upon entering the dockyard sailor/guides attempt to get you to buy tickets for the pay-to-see attractions like HMS Victory or The Mary Rose Museum but, leaving these historic ships aside, I headed to the contemporary warships which, conveniently enough, were free to view. There were two and it was HMS Defender that I settled upon. You first start the ship's tour on the quayside with the queue that snakes its way between the metal barriers 

Approaching the front of the queue you get your first human contact. A sailor welcomes you and offers a brief introduction to the tour, "welcome to HMS Defender, always face the ladders when going up and down them (people didn't), don't go off the designated route, careful of the the yellow and black high voltage areas, keep children under control, no photographs in the command room, your bags may be searched and enjoy your tour!" 

The line then juddered forwards, went up the gangplank and we were onboard ship. The majority of the time we, the visitors, filed through the corridors of the ship on our own, going through metal hatches and wondering what the different tubes were for. 

Every now and then we came across the sailor/guides who were dotted around at regular intervals standing by their equipment and offering explanations of how it worked. Here is a man showing the fire extinguishers. 

And here is another showing off the guns. The semi-automatic rifles were very popular with the children, there was always a queue to get to fire them. Fortunately they were not loaded! Behind you can also see a girl trying on body armour and a helmet while raising a gun. Final thing to mention is the boy's cap. The Armed Forces day seemed to be a bit of a 'flag fest'. I noticed on the day's official website they were even selling flags and encouraging people to set up their own events to celebrate the armed forces in their area. 

I am in fact somewhat familiar with this type of tour from back when I was growing up. Similar events were held in the 70s and 80s called 'Navy Days'. These offered ship tours, activities like bomb defusing and entertainment like military bands. In the past recruiting was also quite a prominent feature; these days they are not quite so hungry for new sailors. The function of the day has changed somewhat, and seemed to me to be more about creating positive PR for the military so that the country as a whole accepts the armed forces' disproportionately large size (and with that expense) and its continued deployment in Afghanistan and worldwide. 

We got to see many corners of this modern 2009 destroyer and could contrast it with older warships such as HMS Victory that can be seen in the distance. I read that the HMS Victory tour operates on a similar basis to this one, namely you follow the tour path yourself and dotted around the vessel are sailor/guides who will explain to you different aspects of the ship. This really seems to be the military's way of offering tours: rather than the guide following you and explaining everything you get to hear from a number of sailor/guides about each of their specific roles such as communications officer, helicopter pilot etc, and their associated area's of the ship. 

Getting off HMS Defender I had a cup of instant coffee in the visitor tent erected near the ship. WW2 music and dances took place just outside and within we had plenty of red, white and blue and pictures of smiling soldiers being decent chaps. It was really a very nationalistic event and I noticed it was approvingly reported on the national news later in the evening.

  

On leaving the dockyard I noticed a sea vessel far more my style: this sadly neglected fiber-glass boat sitting on the quayside that the owner had tried in vain to sell and was now offering for free. It looked OK to me, it just needed a motor to stick in the back and then you could be off for a tour of Portsmouth Harbour!