The New Elizabethans: Sixty Portraits of our Age. James Naughtie

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      But it was in the sixties that he made what became maybe his lasting contribution, the one that Harold Wilson, three times Prime Minister, said was the proudest thing he had done in power: the Open University. Young couldn’t see why, with the ever-present TV set, students couldn’t work and study from home. There were sceptics – even Iain Macleod, the formidable and far-sighted Conservative, described it as ‘blithering nonsense’. But within a few years, after a shaky start on a quagmire of a campus at Milton Keynes, the Open University was turning out thousands of graduates every year and has since become the world’s leading online university, its teaching standards in many disciplines rated more highly than those in some quadrangled, much older seats of learning. Two generations of graduates have done what otherwise might have been impossible for them.

      Maybe that is Young’s legacy, but there is more. He was imaginative enough in the eighties, for example, to propose, after President Reagan announced his ‘star wars’ defence programme, the establishment of a Martian colony that he hoped would eventually declare independence from earth. He was going to simulate conditions on Mars in the building on London’s South Bank that would become Tate Modern, and persuade thirty people to be filmed in a kind of serious embryonic Big Brother. It never happened, but he always wondered what it would have been like.

      The fifties are often lazily caricatured as the dull, do-nothing decade. Michael Young’s career belies it, and the evidence is still there.

Vladimir Raitz

      The summer of 1954 was dull and wet, the coolest around the British coast for nearly fifty years. June was unseasonably rainy. There was some good news in July: the wartime hangover of food rationing came to an end. But the weather stayed bad right through the summer. Holidaymakers in Southend, Bournemouth, Colwyn Bay, Scarborough and Largs were well wrapped up. The weather wouldn’t have been a surprise. And, as ever, they got exactly what they paid for. They knew on the Lancashire coast that Reginald Dixon was playing the mighty organ next to ‘the biggest one-ring circus in the world’, that the old chip shop would be on the same corner, the same bony donkeys ambling across the sand. There would be saucy comedy: Benny Hill was television personality of the year, one of the first, and you could rely on him. A young comic called Ken Dodd appeared for the first time in Blackpool, and he’d still be playing there more than half a century later. The heyday of variety hadn’t yet passed.

      The old resorts with their Victorian piers, Punch and Judy shows and funfairs were doing good business. Spoilsports intervened that summer to use the Obscene Publications Act to prosecute Donald McGill, the postcard artist, for producing two cartoons that were thought to have gone too far. Weymouth Pavilion and the pier at Great Yarmouth, which had survived wartime bombing, burned down. Otherwise you might have thought it was an unchanging world, as predictable as the next Blackpool tram clanking and squeaking up the north promenade in the rain. The weather might be determined to be changeable but the rituals of the seaside seemed, by contrast, reassuringly permanent.

      That was an illusion. Something else was happening. A small party of British tourists was enjoying a new experience. That summer they could smile at the thought of their friends sheltering behind the windbreaks at home. They were gaudy explorers in sun hats and sandals, on their way to the Costa Brava. The invasion of Spain had begun.

      The man who was leading it was a Russian Londoner. Vladimir Raitz was born in Moscow into a White Russian family not long after the revolution, so it was always likely that he’d have to get out of the Soviet Union. His grandparents left first, for Berlin, and later, in 1928, when he was 6, he and his mother followed them. His father stayed behind and Vladimir never saw him again. After Hitler took power in Germany in 1933 his grandparents were off again, and like so many Jewish émigrés who had to take flight they headed for London, where Vladimir joined them, a clever young man who spoke, as yet, no English at all. But there was something remarkable about this boy: at the end of his first term at Mill Hill School in north London he was top of his English class. This was the man who would revolutionize the British summer, by taking people away.

      He spent the latter years of the war working for Reuters news agency as a young translator, listening to broadcasts from overseas, and when it was all over he began to wonder how he might make a success of life. He looked around for an idea – anything – and began to wonder what was going to happen to the cargo planes that had been used in the war, a little battered and travel-weary but still capable of flight. And then, with the death of his grandfather, he had a stroke of luck: an inheritance of £3,000, a goodly sum then. It was not until the early fifties that the average annual wage in Britain passed £500.

      So Vladimir Raitz left Reuters and moved along Fleet Street, where he rented an office and started his own small company. It was a holiday business, and he wondered what to call it. He’d be taking people, he hoped, to places most of them had never seen and knew little about it; somewhere beyond. He had his name: Horizon Holidays.

      In 1950 the number of people who took foreign holidays was much smaller than the number who stayed at home. The trades’ holidays, at fixed points of the year, were the signal for a dash to the seaside: in the last two weeks of July, for example, Blackpool would become a Scottish colony, thanks to the Glasgow Fair, when the whole workforce took its break. Going abroad was expensive, and tended to be the preserve of those who had time and money. Thomas Cook had started his travel business around 100 years earlier, in 1845, when he took a party from the English Midlands to Scotland, though it was the business that he got from the Great Exhibition in 1851 that made him. But in 1950s Britain Thomas Cook hadn’t yet turned its mind to mass marketing: it was still the agent for travellers with sturdy leather cases and time to kill. Visiting a branch to buy tickets was like visiting your bank, the clerks conducting their business with proper formality behind wooden desks.

      Raitz wanted something different. First of all, he had his eyes on some of those old planes. The problem was that British European Airways, then in public ownership, wanted to stop him. It didn’t like the idea of a freebooter offering flights to places which it already served, for a hefty fare. Raitz had a fight with the Ministry of Aviation and finally persuaded them that he was doing something different. But he was allowed to make his first trip only if he agreed to certain conditions. He could only carry people who could prove that they were teachers, or students connected with them. In other words, Horizon Holidays had to demonstrate that it was more interested in self-improvement than fun. It was fine to go to Blackpool to hear Max Miller telling dirty jokes in the autumn of his career, or listen to Sandy MacPherson on the giant Wurlitzer, but if you were going to go anywhere near the Mediterranean you’d better demonstrate that you had some higher purpose in mind.

      Raitz’s own purpose, of course, was simply to establish a good business – but it was an idea infused with his belief that many more people deserved the chance to travel. He had arrived in London speaking Russian, Polish, German and French, and had been turned into an internationalist. Like so many political refugees from the thirties, he brought with him an instinct and a conviction about culture: that broadening the mind, encountering other peoples, was good in itself and something that everyone should have the chance to do.

      When his first chartered Dakota 3 took off from Gatwick airport in the summer of 1950, he hoped it was going to be the start of a business that would grow quickly, but it was a modest beginning. There were eleven paying passengers and twenty-one students on the plane. They weren’t travelling luxuriously, or even comfortably. The plane refuelled at Lyon, then completed its six-hour flight to Corsica, landing on an airstrip at Calvi that had been laid out during the war and still bore the scars of that time. There was no airport building; nothing. Raitz remembered later that they sheltered from the sun under the wings until buses came to take them away, to a campsite where they would spend their fortnight’s holiday: two beds to a tent, rudimentary bathroom facilities and washrooms. But for their all-in price of £32 10/- they got something more. At the camp there СКАЧАТЬ