Luggage on donkey carts and suits at the airport: Readers on the golden age of travel

Richard Mosley recalls the summer of 1982 in Venice

Last week, Anthony Peregrine wrote about all the weird and wonderful things you might have forgotten about holidays in the 1970s, including smoking on flights and hitch-hiking as students. Your responses were rich and broad – there were almost 1,000 comments left on his article.

We contacted three of you to find out more about your experiences. Here, we share your memories of travel in the golden era of the Seventies and Eighties.

‘We survived on a budget of £10 a night’

Richard Mosley, 61, who lives in the UK and Brazil, recalls the summer of 1982:

“University had finished and I wasn’t due to go back up to Durham until October, so a mate and I bought our European Train Timetable book, our francs, lira and drachma (the Euro being a football tournament, not a currency, back then), a few traveller’s checks (remember those?) and boarded a train. We’d agreed to meet two other school friends on the Greek island of Paros about three weeks later – July 14 1982. And, somehow, we did.

“Being pre-internet and mobile phones, I genuinely can’t remember how we found places to stay on the way, but I do remember more than one day of panic having arrived in Venice, Pisa or Rome and having to find a pensione or pousada for the night. Talk about focusing the mind – especially on a budget of probably only £10 a night.

‘I remember the panic of arriving in Venice, Pisa or Rome and having to find a place for the night’

“We managed to meet our two mates in Paros as agreed, spent a great week in Greece and then headed home. We got a train from Athens to Venice, through what was then Yugoslavia, and I remember just how grey the Communist country was ... it looked like a thoroughly miserable place. Luckily the train hardly stopped and we slept through much of it.

“From Venice we got a train to Paris, and then, after a desperate panic to get to Calais on time for our ferry back to Blighty, arrived an hour early as we’d forgotten that France was an hour ahead of UK time.

“It was a great experience, of genuinely being on your own and having to resolve your own issues. No mum and dad Whatsapping you all the time, or, sadly, sending you more money by instant transfer.

“I do remember receiving a right old rollicking from my folks on my return from Inter-railing because I hadn’t let them know where I was. Apparently the postcards I’d sent hadn’t arrived.

“The travel bug must have stuck, as in later years I lived in Hong Kong, and now spend my days between the UK and Brazil.”

‘We wore suits and smart dresses for the flight – it was an event’

Susan Firth, 77, retired and living in Bexhill, visited Santorini before overtourism:

“I remember a holiday to Santorini in 1979. It was the first time we took our son on a flight. We were in our best clothes: suits for the men, smart dresses for the ladies, all of which then hung in the wardrobe until the return journey. Flying was an exciting event.

Susan Firth’s son was granted entry to the cockpit on a return flight from Santorini in 1979

“There were no security luggage scans at the airports, although there was a conveyor belt for the suitcases. At Santorini it was a different story – next to the plane was a group of men with donkey carts onto which the luggage was loaded.

“The return flight turned out to be the highlight for our son. In those days the pilots invited anyone interested in seeing the cockpit while airborne to form a queue. Our 11 year old politely waited until last and was allowed to stay in the cockpit during landing.

“That experience possibly shaped his life. He served for 20 years in the RAF and is now a commercial airline pilot.”

Susan on holiday recently with her husband and son

‘Our B&B was booked well in advance, by letter’

Marilyn Smith, 72, retired and living in Burton in Lonsdale, recalled adventures on home soil:

“The holidays we looked forward to the most were in Cornwall. My family and I usually stayed in a rented cottage or a B&B, which was booked well in advance by letter. They were not luxury holidays – the accommodation was usually quite basic, but they had a luxury of a different kind to them that is hard to describe.

“On one occasion we arrived at our holiday cottage in Devon, near Hartland, to find that the access road was down an overgrown woodland track that we could barely get the car down. Ivy Cottage, which had sounded so romantic, turned out to be a horror. We spent one night there, my mother having decided that it had a ‘presence’ and she couldn’t stay a moment longer. My father found a telephone box, rang the owner who put us up in the annex of a huge, rambling old house on top of the cliff, overlooking Lundy Island. It turned out to be one of the best holidays we ever had.

Marilyn Smith recently visited Mount Royal in Montreal, Canada

“To my sister and I they were a true adventure, a different world, the getting there was as exciting as the holiday itself. In later years I felt the same sense of adventure when setting off for the airport, but no longer. The excitement and appeal of travelling has long gone, something that has to be endured rather than enjoyed, a means to an end – and that is so sad.

“Our late August holidays in the Lake District were just as wonderful, because of the addition of our grandparents. We used to rent two caravans on a farm at Torver, on the shores of Coniston Lake. I would stay in one with my grandparents and my sister in the other with mum and dad. They were small and cramped compared with today’s caravans.

Marilyn’s mother on the steps of a rented caravan in the Lake District

“At night a partition was pulled across to divide the sleeping quarters, if you could call them that – every movement rocked the caravan, the crockery would rattle and the whole fabric of the van would creak. They smelled of Calor gas and when it rained, they generally steamed up and the windows leaked, but they were still wonderful. Each morning I would walk up to the farm with grandad for a jug of milk for breakfast, we would collect eggs from the hens that roamed free and spend the days paddling in the lake, trying to entice ‘tiddlers’ into empty milk bottles with bread for bait, or fishing with our fishing nets and usually catching nothing more than stones from the lake bed. It was during these holidays that the mountains and fells of Cumbria began to take a hold on us, and they never left us.

“We tend to look back upon these holidays with an irrational perception of how wonderful life was, when in reality it was hard. My parents both worked, they saved hard for these escapes and I know they sacrificed much to make sure we had these holidays. They shaped us both as a family and as people and I’m not so sure the extravagant holidays of today do the same.”

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