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

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СКАЧАТЬ of Aviation thought about it, were going to do more than visit the twelfth-century citadel, look for Roman remains or the birthplace of Christopher Columbus, or try to identify the place where Admiral Lord Nelson lost his right eye while leading the siege of the city.

      Their food and wine was included, although they must have been interested to learn on their arrival that a bottle of Corsican wine was selling for 9d. In other words, if they had needed to they could have clubbed together, bought twenty-five bottles, and still have had change left over from £1. But the holiday was all-in. They were pioneers, the first package tourists. The vanguard.

      Raitz was up and running. Calvi was on his map, and in the next year or two other resorts followed. And, in that grey British summer of 1954, he took the big step into Spain. Tossa del Mar, on the Catalonian coast not far from Barcelona, was a fishing village with no banks and only one or two hotels, but it was the landfall for an invasion force that would colonize that coast, then discover and conquer the Costa del Sol stretching out from Málaga in the south, and spread in vast numbers to the Balearic Islands, starting with Majorca. Spain hadn’t seen anything like it since the Middle Ages: five years after Raitz’s first party arrived on the Costa Brava, 77,000 holidaymakers from Britain took a package to Spain, and in the early sixties fishing villages like Torremolinos started to transform themselves into places that would tempt more and more people to come. They did. By the end of the decade the number of people taking foreign holidays had doubled, to 5 million. That number had doubled again by 1979, and by 1990 21 million Britons were going abroad on holiday.

      In later life Raitz regretted some of the consequences. He didn’t like Benidorm – ‘it looks bloody awful,’ he said – which had mutated from a fishing village into a concrete emporium of fun and noise. One estimate gives it the highest number of high-rise buildings per capita in the world. Raitz did cling to some of the hopes he’d had for his enterprise when he was battling to launch it with that first Corsican expedition. He said that the package holiday had been a social revolution. ‘The man in the street acquired a taste for wine, for foreign food, started to learn French, Spanish or Italian, made friends in the foreign lands he’d visited, in fact become more cosmopolitan, with all that that entailed.’

      On the other side of the ledger, in the sixties he had a deeply unhappy experience with the creation of Club 18–30, which tried to get younger people to buy packages. He couldn’t make it work and sold it to Thomas Cook, where it later became a byword for unbuttoned, booze-fuelled binges dressed up as holidays. The price war in the market he’d created was becoming vicious and destructive. Business was big, but dangerous. Horizon itself was in trouble and he decided that it was time to cash in. In the early seventies he sold it to Clarkson’s for a good price and was therefore protected from a collapse that would have been very painful. Within three years of the sale the company had gone bust. The business was changing as fast as it always had.

      Raitz, however, remained the pioneer who had changed everything. He was the model for Freddie Laker, whose cut-price Skytrain shuttle from London to the United States took off with a fanfare in the late seventies and cocked a snook at the big airlines. Laker saw himself as the people’s friend, a kind of Butlins Redcoat at the controls of a jumbo jet. It folded in the end, but paved the way for the cut-price airlines that, by the end of the century, were establishing new and unlikely routes across Europe and carrying stag parties to unlikely places like Riga and Ljubljana with exactly the kind of chutzpah with which Vladimir Raitz had once ferried his first package tourists to Corsica and Spain.

      Behind, Raitz left seaside resorts that often struggled, Victorian piers that started to corrode and topple into the sea. Holiday towns had to use all their imagination to survive, and some faded to shadows. Blackpool went up and down like one of its big dippers, but was claiming, fifty years after he first tempted its holidaymakers away, that it was expanding again by providing new kinds of fun, remembering that the trick was to give people what they wanted, at a price they could afford.

      If Raitz has a monument, maybe it’s in the destination board at every airport, now that people think nothing of a fortnight in the Gambia or the Maldives in the summer. Maybe in October there’ll be a quick one-nighter to Blackpool, sou’wester safely packed, to see the illuminations, the cleverest trick ever pulled for extending the summer season. But who knows, in an unwitting salute to Vladimir Raitz, they might be wondering about a city break in Moscow.

Francis Crick

      Even allowing for the tolerance of some pubs in Cambridge, where you might not be surprised if on a chill Monday evening someone threw open the door and shouted the news that Shakespeare’s plays had been written by a mysterious woman whose identity was now going to be revealed for the first time (before subsiding into exhausted silence), a few people must surely have turned their heads on 28 February 1953, when two scientists tumbled into the Eagle in Bene’t Street and announced that they had ‘discovered the secret of life’ and had the proof in their lab.

      They were Crick and Watson, Francis and Jim, and the scene is worth remembering because hindsight often lends work like theirs a formal aura as if everything happened in an orderly fashion, properly, in sequence, as if planned. They had worked for years on what we would later come to know as genetic biology, but the circumstances of their great discovery were quite chaotic, and controversial too. Moreover, it was little noticed at the time that they had given a shape to the building blocks of life, and suggested how they might fit together. Not many people, after all, knew about deoxyribonucleic acid. We all know it now as DNA.

      Their first scientific paper on the subject was published in the journal Nature in April 1953 – Crick was the principal author – and, looking back from an age where the science of genetics has become a rolling public debate, and often the stuff of headlines, it’s startling to note that it caused no public excitement at all. The only newspaper to pick it up was the News Chronicle, long defunct; there was no broadcast news of it, and the university paper Varsity could hardly claim that its short report was going to shake the world. Yet it was a story that would: a step into the unknown, the invention of a new branch of science, the first serious claim to understand the working of our genes. By whatever name it is known, it was a revolution.

      In that first paper Crick wrote the following sentence, which is one of the masterpieces of understatement of our time, with a whiff of self-satisfaction that was characteristic: ‘It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing that we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.’ In other words, how genetic messages are passed on and how we perpetuate ourselves. Not perhaps who we are, but a clue about how we come still to be here.

      The ‘specific pairing’ was revealed by the model Crick and Watson had built in Cambridge University’s Cavendish Laboratory: the double helix that would become the emblem of their discovery, and a Rosetta stone for modern science. At the top of the structure, two threads are intertwined and then, below, they flow outwards like two locks of hair freed from a perfectly pleated pigtail. As it was once described: ‘The two strands of the double helix separate, and a daughter strand is laid down alongside each with a constitution determined by the base sequence of its parent strand.’ They had established how messages might be carried by DNA, the memory system in our genes, and Crick postulated that there were molecular tags that could interpret the make-up of a gene – as if reading a codeword – and then deliver the right amino acid to the right living cell: the machine inside us all, that shapes everything we do.

      Nine years later this was the discovery that brought Crick and Watson (with Maurice Wilkins) the Nobel Prize for Medicine, although that simple fact conceals a story of rivalry that sits uncomfortably and sometimes painfully alongside the fact of their success.

      In the two years or so before the first paper on DNA, and the construction of the double helix, there was quite a race going on among СКАЧАТЬ