Having been on the wish list for many years this was a Christmas present :-)
Key within the exploration is the fuzzy distinction between “Tourism” and “Pilgrimage” - in the context of the battlefields many felt that being a ‘mere’ tourist was inappropriate and a dishonour to those that fought and died during the War.
The numbers of visitors in a era before mass foreign travel is remarkable, the mix of motivations for going complex and, like the decisions around creating War Memorials, contested.
The comparisons between Great Britain and Australia and Canada is useful, it is not simply the different geographical distance of those three places to the First World War battlefield that shaped the differing relationship to visiting them.
The level of snobbery that is evident, the concerns about working class visitors, is something that we have hopefully moved beyond, but then again it creeps into many contemporary political debates but perhaps dressed up in subtler clothes.
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