A rich slice of glossy and untroubled (but sometimes troubling) interwar tourism is afforded by these eight hand-written notebooks, recording the (mostly) European travels of Ida and Guy Merry of Wallington, Surrey, via cruise ship, train, car, plus a ‘self-conducted’ trip to Italy, between 1932-37, including visits to Belgium, Germany, Norway & Scotland, plus excursions to Algiers, Morocco, Spain and Gibraltar; the daily entries, sometimes lengthy, and written with a middle-class tourist eye, capture the novelties and pleasures of cruise ship life for a gregarious couple, the excitement of new journeys, awesome landscapes and different cultures, and detail, in particular, the historically, culturally and artistically significant features of cities and locales, especially in Italy. Ida Merry’s written entries (which appear to have been composed at the time of travel and show steady commitment to documenting their experiences) are illustrated with some contemporary photographs (by themselves and, more successfully, their “table companion” Mr Gill) and reams of postcards, as well as clipped illustrations and maps pasted in (it appears the Merrys’ sought to capture every aspect of their travels possible), plus some wonderful cruise ship ephemera, which lend further flavour to the accounts, and even a few bespoke poems written by a friend.
Through the Merrys’ (othering) eyes, and various camera lenses, peoples of Norway and Morocco are captured (see images above and below); of a visit to Tétouan Ida suggested, ridiculously and with fascination, that “a good deal of the congestion is caused by the bulkiness of the Arabs’ clothes […] the women wear many layers of cotton material wrapped round their bodies + another piece wrapped round their heads + faces, so that only their eyes show.” Other sections capture natural features, including the “Kjendal Glacier, showing hollow where it is melting,” and the almost sublime experience of climbing Ben Nevis, penned by Guy: “Three thousand feet up + we came to greyness only, no sign of life + almost deathly stillness: it is fascinating beyond words on such a day, but I think it would create a feeling of awe on a sombre day.” These are the pleasures and experience of an untroubled middle-class, English couple, with the shadow of impending war and European schism barely present: there only in the early ‘Canadian Pacific Wireless Press’ news digest for S.S. Montcalm (26.9.1932): “GENEVA.—’The severest crisis of the League of Nations is at hand, and with it, sooner or later, the decision on peace or war,’ says Wickham Steed, the special Geneva correspondent of the Sunday Times,” and in a later colour postcard of ‘Mussolini Arena and Monolite’. [ref: 3491]