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The British State as Hotel Occupier on the Home Front, 1914-1922: A Model for Comparing Experiences in the Wartime Hospitality Sector

La réquisition d’hôtels sur le front intérieur par l’État britannique, 1914-1922 : un modèle pour comparer les expériences dans le secteur de l’hôtellerie en temps de guerre
Kevin J. James et Andrew P. Northey

Résumés

Cet article présente un modèle et une méthode pour étudier les hôtels du front intérieur britannique pendant et après la Première Guerre mondiale. Il explore les rôles des hôtels et des autres lieux d’hébergement commercial en temps de guerre – en tant qu’ils contribuent à façonner les contours du conflit et de ses suites, mais également en tant qu’intermédiaires et sites de contestation politique, économique et sociale. Pour cela, il adopte un modèle théorique innovant et influent qui a été utilisé pour explorer les rôles des hôtels dans des conflits plus récents, développé par Fregonese et Ramadan (2015). Cette étude met en évidence la façon dont les hôtels ont été impliqués dans l’infrastructure de la guerre et décrit de quelle façon l’appareil d’État central britannique s’est évertué à mettre en œuvre des programmes de réquisition, d’adaptation et de compensation des hôtels. Cette étude défend notamment l’idée de répertorier les établissements ayant été réquisitionnés en temps de guerre ainsi que les districts dans lesquels avaient lieu ces réquisitions, en vue de comparer systématiquement leurs fonctions et opérations en temps de guerre et pendant la transition vers la paix.

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Introduction

1The severe and extended disruption of the tourism, accommodation and wider hospitality sectors occasioned by the rapid spread of the coronavirus in spring 2020 and the impact of public health measures on the functions and operations of hotels during that period, including their repurposing as quarantine sites, invites reflection on historical precedents. The historical analysis of the impact of disruptions outlined in this article proceeds from a developing programme of research that examines intersecting legal, social and economic histories of war, tourism and the commercial accommodation sector through an analysis of British hotels during and after the First World War. Underscoring the value of an innovative model for exploring hotel geopolitics that has until now been applied to recent urban combat zones, it proposes a comparative perspective on hotels’ historical implications in the administration of the war, the wartime economies of localities, regions and the country, the structuring of civilian and military work and leisure, and post-conflict trajectories of hotel use.

2Selected case studies of places of commercial accommodation operating under a variety of circumstances—as places of leisure, as hospitals, as places of convalescence, as billeting sites, as centres for the state’s administration of the war effect, and for mixed uses—reveal the uneven character of wartime disruptions and post-war conditions throughout the hotel sector, especially in terms of how they related to tourist markets. In developing a British analysis that spans the war and the years after its conclusion, the project contributes to new scholarship on hotels and violence, as well as between tourism and war, inviting transnational dialogues to evaluate and compare the impacts of wars on hotels’ peacetime operations, and to assess the interpretative potential of Fregonese and Ramadan’s (2015) model of hotels as geopolitical actors in diverse historical contexts. So doing, it advances the study of ways in which civilian travel infrastructures adapted to the circumstances of war and transitions to peace.

3The purpose of this article is to: (1) offer a critical survey of the historiographies of tourism and conflict in which this emerging programme is situated; (2) explore models that have been developed by scholars in diverse disciplinary contexts that are applicable to this research; and (3) outline the specific programme of research, identifying the districts under study and the diverse adaptations by British hotels and other places of commercial accommodation to the exigencies of conflict. It ends by suggesting how this research programme can contribute to timely considerations of disruptions in the operations of the hotel sector.

Historiographical Contexts: Hotel Occupation and Hotel Operations in Conflict Zones

4The history of the wartime hotel is situated at the intersection of rich, interwoven historiographies of travel on the home front and the place of the modern hotel in conflict zones. This paper will explore two of these key areas of scholarship: one addresses the relationship between war and the infrastructures of travel, including the social history of work and leisure, the legal and administrative history of the state and wartime mobilisation, and the interconnections between frontlines and the home front (Watson, 2004; Pennell, 2012; Jones, 2013; Lomas, 2014; Grayzel, 2012). The second develops a focussed, comparative institutional analysis to explore the diverse functions of operations of hotels in wartime and post-war environments.

Mobilisation and Demobilisation on the Home Front

5Scholarship on the home front has explored not just the war’s impacts on industry, work and systems of labour, but also the history of service sectors and travel institutions in the elaboration of wartime infrastructures of work and travel. Increasingly, wartime leisure patterns are studied not in terms of extinction (Morgan and Pritchard, 1999; Torrie, 2011; Butler and Suntikul, 2013; Walton, 2013; Gordon, 2018; Evanno and Vincent, 2019), but rather reorganisation—and research often underscores changes in the composition of tourist markets. Recreational travel can persist through conflict; indeed, it can intensify in certain areas that may primarily service a domestic market in countries such as the United Kingdom in the First World War, when it was not a major theatre of war, and supplied many longstanding tourist destinations with a large market of well-paid holidaying industrial workers, as well as combatants on leave. The growth of tourism in Britain in the decades before the war was accompanied by an expansion of the range of commercial accommodation, from humble boarding houses to grand seafront hotels, especially as the seaside became a critical destination (Walton, 2000). Other places, such as inland spas saw an influx of visitors as tourism grew (Borsay, 2012). London notably, but other large cities, too, boasted a complex hierarchy of commercial accommodation which serviced tourists and others, from humble inns to commercial hotels to opulent, purpose-built grand hotels; and the growth of new means of capital investment, as well as a developing infrastructure, spurred the birth of large railway hotels. The tourism economy figured into this diverse offering of commercial accommodation in complex ways: in some places such as Blackpool, small-scale boarding houses were the predominant accommodation form for a working-class tourist market (Walton, 1978). In other places, larger establishments, including inns and commercial hotels, prevailed and recreational travellers mixed with other patrons. Together, they offered a large and diverse supply of commercial accommodation that proved adaptable to a variety of wartime purposes. Indeed, the intrinsic heterogeneity of built forms, functions and markets mean that the history of commercial accommodation defies generalisation.

6In addition to underscoring the persistence of tourism in wartime, scholars have also emphasised how the Armistice of 1918 and the ‘homecoming’ marked neither a thorough resumption of, nor a decisive break from (as Arthur Marwick famously contended [1965, 1968]), pre-war cultural forms, economic patterns and social practices: victory and optimism mixed with disappointment and impatience as the machinery of war was rolled back. New social, economic and political challenges emerged. Physical demobilisation was protracted, involving an extensive infrastructure incorporating ships, railways and hotels on a transnational scale, and economic and bureaucratic demobilisation often involved state interventions in such domains as health and housing (Barham, 2004; Swenarton, 2018). Demand for convalescent (and quarantine) facilities grew as injured personnel returned from abroad. The state expanded operations in such domains as war pensions adjudication and administration (Koven, 1994; Bourke, 1996). The complexion of wartime workforces in the hospitality sector changed, and regimes of surveillance enacted over hotels persisted after the conflict (Brayborn, 1981; Grayzel, 2012; Grayzel and Proctor, 2017; James, 2018a). In addition to charting the diversity of experiences during the war, this study explores the extent to which the commercial accommodation followed a variety of paths in the post-war era. The sector offers historians a lens through which to explore complex and post-war dynamics, as its history becomes more extensively theorised (Black, 2019).

7It is critical to acknowledge the remarkable diversity of experience within the sector. Locational factors and the physical affordances of buildings were key factors that influenced ways that they were implicated in home-front activities. During the war, some institutions were partly repurposed—often through requisition—to house administrators and serve as hospitals or as places of convalescence. Others continued to welcome tourists in large numbers. Moreover, the uneven geography of vulnerability during the First World War, and the concentration of industrial production, military resources and bureaucratic infrastructures in different areas, produced a distinctive regional geography of hotel use. It rendered the east coast of Britain more susceptible to both U-boat and air attacks and resulted in the designation of ‘prohibited areas’ whose strategic locations and industries were deemed especially sensitive under the Defence of the Realm Act (1914) (Panayi, 2014, 2016). Scholars have underscored ways that people and institutions were not merely ‘resources’ mobilised for war; they actively shaped their participation in, and resistance to, such initiatives—through industrial labour struggles in mines, munitions and shipbuilding sectors, for instance (Wilson, 1986; Gregory, 2008). Regionally diverse experiences of conflict are also underscored in scholarship that explores the organisation of the war economy, including agriculture and industry (Dewey, 1989), while studies of institutions such as the railway station in the organisation of the war effort (Richards and MacKenzie, 1986; Winter and Robert, 2012) have drawn attention to the adaptation of travel infrastructures in wartime. This diversity of experiences also characterised the hospitality sector.

8Commercial accommodation provided a critical infrastructure for the war effort. It supplied buildings that were repurposed by the state to coordinate the war effort—as centres for bureaucracy, for billeting soldiers and refugees, and for housing the wounded returning from combat. But it also continued to service a vibrant tourist market. Tourism was not extinguished by war, but its geography and the composition of its markets were significantly impacted by the conflict. Wartime leisure patterns were structured by the exigencies of: (1) intensified industrial production, and the recruitment of thousands of new workers into factories; (2) constraints on consumption and limitations on travel which were often mandated by the government; and (3) the persistence of the day-trip and domestic holiday, often to well-established destinations, despite the severe disruptions of war. Many resorts and places of accommodation continued to welcome leisure travellers, while others were wholly or partially enlisted within the logistics of the prosecution of war. Some hotels on the vulnerable east coast of Britain closed, while others in places such as Dover became key military transit points. In some districts, large numbers of Belgian refugees strained accommodation, and hotels and boarding houses were enlisted to relieve the pressure on private homes (Laqua, 2016; Buck, 2016). In London, the state’s requisitioning of hotels for administrative purposes elicited diverse responses, while at some hotels outside the metropolis—inland spas in Derbyshire, for instance—pre-war leisure uses intensified with the arrival of a mixed constituency of users, including troops and domestic recreational travellers (Morgan and Pritchard, 1999; Walton, 2000). Moreover, the Armistice did not produce status quo ante bellum. In a signal of the war’s enduring and uneven impact after 1918, some establishments remained, temporarily or permanently, in state hands. Others returned to profit as private enterprises, and still others closed due to challenging economic conditions.

9Places of accommodation also reflected broader trends in British society, such as changes in the complexion of its labour force. With many pre-war large hotels boasting cosmopolitan workforces, the move to reduce alien labour in wartime (Walton, 2012; Panayi and Manz, 2014) had profound impacts on the sector: the feminisation of the hotel workforce became more marked as the war progressed and the pool of British males available for work in hotels diminished. Indeed, the prioritisation of British labour, and intense scrutiny of hotel guests, guided the operations of the sector throughout the conflict (James, 2018a). A history of the hotel sector during wartime, and in the years after the conflict ended, demands a close analysis that engages with: (1) themes of continuity as well as the changes induced by the exigencies of war; and (2) the diverse regional and institutional experiences which underpinned the sector and its relationship to the wider hospitality sector, the state, and industries and initiatives connected to the war effort, including the growing demand for the accommodation of industrial workers, soldiers, or Belgian refugees.

Hotels and the Home Front

10While the term ‘hotels’ is often employed in this research as shorthand for places of accommodation, it pays close attention to the range of institutional types such as inns and boarding houses, as well as the many built forms of hotels. And in engaging in a longitudinal study that explores their functional dynamism, it pays close attention to their relationship to tourism. Scholars of war in a variety of contexts have argued that tourism and war should not be conceived in binary terms—the onset of war does not ‘end’ tourism (Gordon, 1998, 2018; Smith, 1998; Walton, 2000, 2013; Sladen, 2002, 2005; Weiss, 2004; Page and Durie, 2009; Dawson, 2011; Weaver, 2011; Butler and Suntikul, 2013; Durie 2017). Rather than being a casualty of war, there is evidence of the sector’s adaptability and resilience. The binary is further diminished when the leisure of soldiers themselves, during leave at home or in occupied zones, is considered, often through the conceptual lens of ‘militourism’, developed by Teresia Teaiwa (1999) and grounded in a critique of neo-colonial practices, or by scholars who are interested in the studying of a phenomenon which in the broader sense may be described as the ‘soldier as tourist’ (White, 1987; Cozzi, 2009; Torrie, 2011; Atia, 2012; Buchanan, 2016; Cleave, 2016; Freeman and Crooks, 2017; Nicholson and Mills, 2017).

11In exploring continuities and disruptions in wartime, we have the benefit of insights that have been systematically developed over the course of the past two decades. A sophisticated theoretical framework has emerged that explores hotels in later twentieth-century conflict zones—notably Beirut and Sarajevo (Fregonese, 2009, 2012; Morrison, 2016), as well as in areas of civil strife such as Freetown (Hoffman, 2005, 2007). Davidson (2006, 2018) has developed an innovative interpretation of the concept of ‘occupation’ beyond coercive use to embrace other ways of dwelling within hotel space. Increasingly, hotels have become a focus of theoretically sophisticated analyses of their roles in conflict zones—not merely as sites in and around which conflicts play out, but in terms of how they structure and pattern: (1) warfare (Hoffman, 2005, 2007; Henderson et al., 2010); (2) press narratives of conflict (Smirl, 2016); (3) civilian as well as combatant mobility (Morrison, 2016); (4) programmes of patriotism and allegiance (Baranowski, 2007; Gorsuch, 2011); and (5) conflict resolution strategies (Walton, 2009; Fregonese and Ramadan, 2015).

12This project argues for the expansion of the geographic scope of such analyses to include places outside zones of persistent violent conflict, and an extension of the chronology of analysis to the post-war period. In places that were not on the frontline of wartime violence, the hotel became critical to shaping responses to conflict, and the hospitality sector was profoundly changed by war. Scholars of Swiss hotels, for instance, have underscored how they were profoundly impacted by the First World War, despite the country’s neutrality (Barton, 2009, 2019; Müller and Hoppler, 2013). In Britain, hotels’ technological capacities, scales and locations influenced the administration of the war effort and the transition to peace, even if it remained comparatively insulated from the levels of violence that were experienced elsewhere.

13The hotel’s functions as a conduit for, and shaper of, political, social and economic relations in war and peacetime have been underscored by a wide body of recent literature that have explored its American form as a signifier of a distinctive civic culture (Sandoval-Strausz, 2007) and as a laboratory for technological innovation (Berger, 2011), by studies of colonial hotels as sites of hybridity, encounter and diffusion (Craggs, 2012; Peleggi, 2012) and by scholarship on hotels’ influence in shaping ‘scopic’ politics that structure both warfare and narratives of it (Davidson, 2018). The focus of most wartime studies has been on large urban centres and on institutions that are located in centres of violence. Following the lead of recent scholarship, this project treats places of accommodation as agentive institutions that both reflect and shape local and national economies, the prosecution of conflicts and peace, and patterns of sociability, politics and jurisprudence. It draws together an extensive range of archival records based on a definition of establishments that James (2018b) has elaborated in a typology. And it expands the scope of critical analysis beyond large-scale hotels to encompass seaside boarding houses, which were enrolled within the war effort in important ways.

Models and Methods for Exploring the British Hotel in Wartime

14The primary conceptual model employed in this builds on the scholarship of Craggs (2012), Henderson (2000, 2001, 2010), McNeill (2008), Peleggi (2005, 2012), Ravi (2008) and Scott (2018) in colonial environments, by Wharton (1999, 2001, 2007) and others (Endy, 2004; Pack, 2006; Hoffman, 2005, 2007; Rosendorf, 2006; Merrill, 2009, Alifragkis and Athanassiou, 2018, Sarmento and Linehan, 2019) in the ‘Cold War’ context and in conflict and post-conflict environments (Hoffman, 2005, 2007; Davidson, 2006, 2018; Fregonese, 2009, 2012; Fregonese and Ramadan, 2015; Lisle, 2016; Morrison, 2016; Smirl, 2016). It examines commercial accommodation through detailed institutional ‘biographies’ of establishments (McNeill and McNamara, 2012). The building biography has been used to explore the ‘life cycle’ of hotels, from erection to demolition, and to interrogate their construction, business, cultural and political histories. Drawing on the press and archival materials—notably materials that span many UK government departments, including the Departments of Labour and Works and the Ministries of National Service and Munitions—we have built a longitudinal analysis of specific buildings selected according to the geographical and functional criteria outlined in this paper, and traced their physical adaptations and their uses from the years preceding the outbreak of war in 1914 through wartime and, critically, the period between 1918 and 1922. Given the scope of their project and its specific interest in exploring the complexity of the relationship between the physical infrastructure adopted by, and adapted to, the needs of the expanding post-war state, this latter period is central to the analysis of how the post-war tourist economy figured into the structure of the commercial accommodation sector as some establishments were returned to pre-war uses, and others assumed new functions (as government offices, for instance). In exploring the post-war period, this research programme extends the lens of hotel biography beyond wartime (James, 2018b) to localise Adam Seipp’s (2009) illuminating analysis, which explores physical, economic, bureaucratic and cultural dimensions of demobilisation, and seeks to situate hotels as actors whose physical affordances, locations, and historical functions, including pre-war and wartime operations, shaped ways in which soldiers were repatriated, regions adapted economically to post-war conditions, tourist flows continued and the state developed post-war infrastructure as it expanded in several domains. It also builds on a vibrant scholarship exploring the experiences of the conflict in specific British localities (Connelly, 2001; McCartney, 2005).

15Employing the lens of hotel biography, Fregonese and Ramadan (2015) have developed a testable model of hotel functions that Morrison (2016) has explored in a probing building biography of Sarajevo’s Holiday Inn. Fregonese and Ramadan have elaborated six key functions in which hotels’ material affordances and historical operations can shape the prosecution and resolution of conflict: (1) as tools of soft power and state projection; (2) as ‘soft’ targets; (3) as part of the strategic infrastructure of conflict; (4) as shapers of press narratives of conflict; (5) as sites of emergency care and hospitality; and (6) as sites of conflict resolution. The case studies in this pilot research programme extend chronological and geographic applications of the Fregonese and Ramadan model to diverse environments in Britain during the First World War. This research compares several urban centres, of different sizes, with differential vulnerabilities and distinctive histories, encompassing places that were not centres of continuous urban combat, and therefore not studied as victims of ‘urbicide’ (Fregonese, 2009; Humphreys, 2015; Bădescu, 2017). It hypothesizes that in areas of Britain, establishments’ functions diverged from those in war zones—where they served, for instance, as morgues. In Britain, many operated as sites of convalescence, accommodation for soldiers and refugees, as places of civilian and military leisure, and as nodes for war administration.

16The British state’s wartime institutional interventions had important, albeit much more modest, precedents in the decade prior to 1914, when British hotels’ markets and functions were impacted by new state measures, notably licensing restrictions that had an uneven impact on the trade, accompanied by a compensation regime designed to mitigate their effects. These helped to spur the development of trade organisations which became important conduits for the hospitality sector to express views on the impact of state measures during the war. Indeed, this earlier period provides a critical context for understanding the mechanisms of state involvement in the sector, and trade responses to them, after 1914, and demands great attention. However, the First World War marked a turning point in terms of the intensity of such interventions, and introduced new disruptions occasioned by the loss of some markets, the growth of others, such as domestic industrial workers and combatants on leave, and changing locational preferences amongst many travellers owing to the perceived vulnerability of some coastal areas of the country. The intervention of the state, moreover, did not end with the cessation of hostilities. These themes frame the analysis of how particular institutions adapted to the conflict, through a variety of ways, either in the context of state requisitioning, closure, continuing commercial operations, or a mixture of the three.

17The systematic application of Fregonese and Ramadan’s criteria involves an examination of individual hotels and geographic hotel clusters. The programme of research involves discrete stages:

  1. The identification, through a comprehensive survey of the local and national press, of specific districts according to criteria that permit systematic comparison. They were selected according to a number of criteria: (1) their locations (including inland and coastal districts), and an often-related degree of vulnerability to violent attack; (2) their historical functions, clienteles and amenities; and (3) their physical affordances, such as scale, and whether they were purpose-built hotels or other buildings, such as boarding houses.

  2. The choices of specific establishments in these districts were based on the robustness of archival records—in The National Archives, the Parliamentary Archives and diverse local and county repositories. We also use the trade press, especially The Caterer and Hotel Proprietor's Gazette and Hotel Review, Restaurant Gazette & Catering News, to provide detailed accounts of many trade bodies’ meetings (as most of their archival records are not extant). They, and the local press, must be treated cautiously, mindful of self- and state-mandated censorship that limited and shaped information flows about the experiences of the conflict. Moreover, unlike the Second World War, central government documentation of requisitions during the First World War is spread over many departments, committees, commissions and parliamentary record collections. This second stage involves the analysis of these diverse central and local government records, chamber of commerce minutes and the hotel trade press that document the status of hotels on the eve of war and the contested wartime requisitioning and repurposing of establishments during wartime. Adopting the Fregonese and Ramadan framework to explore the diverse uses of the places of accommodation, this research stage interrogates ways in which locational factors, historical functions and the character and supply of accommodation shaped the uses of institutions in the war effort and underscores diverse ways that specific establishments were enrolled with that effort.

  3. The third stage of research examines the experiences of hotels and places of accommodation in the five years following the war’s end. It particularly explores the ways in which the selected establishments figured into discourses of patriotism during and after the First World War. The press often produced and reproduced a patriotic narrative of the hotel as a local resource voluntarily ‘placed’ at the disposal of the state during the outset of the conflict. In Buxton, in Derbyshire, for instance, 8,000 free treatments were made available to invalided and wounded soldiers at the expense of the council in 1916 (Broad Arrow, 29 March 1916); in contrast, in War Compensation Courts and in the trade press, hotels owners frequently complained of the high tolls of the war and protested requisitioning as costly and coercive. These discourses were strategically deployed as post-war circumstances introduced new mechanisms to claim redress, underscoring how the sector’s management and local chambers of commerce formulated responses to new contexts and incentives through periods of war and peace.

The British Hotel in War and its Aftermath: Some Preliminary Findings

18The first stage of research, now complete, has identified experiences in two broadly defined geographic regions–within and outside London—whose own sectors were intrinsically diverse. All regions, including London, which was subject to significant aerial bombardment, had different levels of vulnerability to violence, different historical functions and infrastructures, and were enrolled in different ways within the geography of wartime leisure, state operations, military training, medical treatment and convalescence.

191. London hotels were profoundly affected by the prosecution of the war owing to the role of the city as a political and bureaucratic centre. As a capital city, where there was a density of large-scale ‘grand hotels’ built since the late nineteenth century, London witnessed the extensive state requisition of large hotels for the administration of the war effort by departments such as the War Office, the Ministry of Munitions, and other departments. St Ermin’s Hotel, for instance, was used during the war by the Ministry of Munitions and afterwards by the Ministry of Labour. Other establishments, such as the Hotel Cecil, also fell under state control.

20The wartime operations of requisitioned hotels reaffirmed London’s status as a nerve-centre for the bureaucratic organisation of war and often involved the expeditious seizure of the buildings and extensive interior interventions, which resulted in disputes over the extent of compensation owed to the previous owners when the war ended and many hotels were returned to private ownership. In some cases, the extent of the state seizures of hotels, especially large establishments such as the Hotel Cecil, led to a contraction of the supply of hotel rooms. Meanwhile, even as some sources of demand, such as overseas tourism, all but disappeared, soldiers on leave in the metropolis and domestic commercial and leisure travellers continued to generate demand for hotels throughout the conflict. Indeed, the First Commissioner of Works, Sir Alfred Mond, organised an interdepartmental committee to assess existing and future hotel requisitions, in response to pressure from trade bodies and local governments (TNA, T1/12031/4046). Many hotel proprietors and managers complained that they were unable to meet the essential demand of customers—for rooms, and also for food and drink, which were increasingly subject to direct government control. At the end of the war, Mond faced strong pressure to return as many of the establishments to their pre-war functions as possible.

212. Hotel Experiences Outside London: The diversity of experiences outside London are exemplified by case studies of specific localities and establishments. We have selected them because of their diverse and distinctive locations, historical functions and clienteles, and variety of wartime operations. They are located in:

223. Glasgow, a major industrial centre of war production, where the Kenilworth, the Adelphi and Armstrong’s Hotels were requisitioned by the Admiralty and Air Boards (Glasgow Herald, 3 May 1918) in moves that were contested by hotel owners and the Glasgow Corporation (Minutes of the Corporation of Glasgow, C1/3/59, 2 May 1918). As elsewhere, the broader hospitality sector was severely impacted by food orders, restrictions on the opening hours of premises, monitoring of alien labour and other economic interventions by the state: the Glasgow City Archives hold the records of the Glasgow Restaurateurs and Hotelkeepers Association (TD/1735/1-2), which offer insight into the responses of the trade to these changing operating environments, including its efforts to establish and maintain a common level of prices amongst members to limit competition within the sector. This large industrial city offers a case study of conflicts that were engendered by government intervention in the private hotel sector, and the participation of local government in resisting these efforts in a large urban environment.

234. Derbyshire, specifically Matlock, Matlock Bath and Buxton were amongst Britain’s premier inland resorts, accessible by the Midland rail line. Existing facilities for the accommodation of large numbers of visitors proved well suited for several wartime purposes, including:

  1. billeting troops in the first months of the war, as they drilled and prepared to deploy—a time when thousands of soldiers passed through Matlock and Matlock Bath, for example (Manchester Evening News, 5 February 1915; Derbyshire Advertiser and Journal, 20 February 1915; Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 22 February 1915);

  2. hospitals, which, like the Peak Hydro in Buxton, were adapted to treat wounded combatants (Derby Daily Telegraph, 29 September 1917). The War Office also took over several hotels in Buxton in 1917 to serve as hospitals for Canadian soldiers and troops, moving them from the principal areas of convalescence on the south-east coast (Derby Daily Telegraph, 27 September 1917); and

  3. military convalescent establishments, which operated within several former hotels throughout the war. The Royal Hotel and Baths in Matlock Bath, for instance, were occupied by the Canadian Officers’ Convalescent Hospital (Derbyshire Advertiser and Journal, 29 June 1918). These functions intensified in the war’s final months, when the Rockside Hydro in Matlock, for example, was requisitioned as a convalescent facility for Royal Air Force officers (Derbyshire Advertiser and Journal, 30 November 1917).

24These hotels serve as sites to explore ways in which the physical affordances of resort accommodation made them especially amenable to mobilisation for large numbers of military personnel, while historical functions associated with medical and health treatments made them conducive to adaptation as convalescent sites. At the same time, there was a marked preference for inland resorts as holiday places for British leisure travellers, due to the perception of the relative safety they afforded, compared with eastern seaside locations that had been popular before the outbreak of hostilities (Warwick and Warwickshire Advertiser, 31 July 1915; Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, 5 October 1915; Stirling Observer, 31 July 1915).

255. The Kent coast, where many seaside holiday sites that had been popular tourist destinations witnessed a substantial increase in wartime use of commercial accommodation, especially for the transit of combatants, heading to and returning from the front lines. At the same time, some establishments claimed to have experienced a precipitous decline in civilian patronage (Whitstable Times and Herne Bay Herald, 22 May 1915), while many were commandeered for the purposes of attending to wounded soldiers as soon as they landed on British soil. In October 1917, for instance, wounded Belgian soldiers were transported to several ‘hotel-hospitals’ on the coast, including 600 who were treated at the Hotel Metropole in Dover (Folkestone, Hythe, Sandgate & Cheriton Herald, 17 October 1914). A comparison of hotels on the south-east coast with more northerly coastal centres such as Kingston upon Hull, which was vulnerable to U-boat attack, reveals places where binaries broke down between the war- and home-fronts and between the functions of hotels as sites of refuge and of violence. The openness to attack resulted in many functions being transferred to hotels and resorts further inland as the war progressed, signalling the differential geography of vulnerability which influenced decisions over hotel requisitioning over time.

266. Cornwall, which was comparatively distant from areas of attack. The Poldhu Hotel was also the location of the Marconi’s Wireless Telegraph Company’s transmission station, considered a critical communications infrastructure. Newquay’s Headland Hotel remained open and operating during the conflict and welcomed a number of famous guests such as Rudyard Kipling and his wife in 1918 (Cornishman, 25 September 1918) as the region became a favoured wartime holiday destination, due in part to its amenities and also to the comparative security of the south-west coast. In such places, a key research question centres on the extent to which Britons who were not enrolled in the conflict might have been able to seek protection, either on holiday or on a more extended basis, from the potential violence of war in these districts. These places offered the familiarity of the pre-war seaside resort holiday and reflected a westward shift in the geography of leisure holiday destination preferences.

277. Blackpool, which offers an especially instructive case of how a specific category of small-scale accommodation—the non-purpose built ‘company houses’ which were principally used in peacetime by working-class holidaymakers who boarded with the famous ‘Blackpool landladies’—were enrolled within the war effort, mainly through billeting thousands of troops and accommodating large numbers of Belgian refugees (Blackpool Gazette & Herald, 19 February 1915). Blackpool also continued to attract the patronage of large numbers of recreational travellers over the course of the conflict, in part due to its strategic location close to large industrial centres in the north-west of England, although the complexion of holidaymakers changed (with more women and fewer day-trippers, for instance, on the early August Bank Holiday in 1916 [Weekly Dispatch, 6 August 1916]). Local company housekeepers had a trade association that was active before the war, and remained so during the conflict, lobbying for, amongst other goals, enhanced compensation for the billeting of troops. While large-scale premises in Blackpool, as elsewhere, were also enlisted within the war effort, the experience of Blackpool’s boarding houses offers a valuable comparison with the larger, purpose-built places of commercial accommodation that are also explored in this study.

Figure 1. Key places under study

Figure 1. Key places under study

28Together these case studies reveal how the wartime experiences of hotels, the complexion of their clienteles, and the nature of their operations, were influenced by several, interrelated factors: (a) locational considerations, including their proximity to, and distance from, areas of conflict, their presence in designated areas deemed of sensitivity to the conduct of the war, and their situations within or outside major urban centres, most notably London, which served as the nerve-centre of the war effort; (b) the openness of proprietors, local chambers of commerce and other actors to voluntarily make their premises available, mixing patriotic motivations and financial calculus, and the role of the state in requisitioning premises for a variety of purposes; and (c) the historical functions and amenities associated with particular places, especially inland resorts which were favoured as centres of medical treatment and convalescence. They also reveal a dynamic westward and inland shift in locational preference, for both leisure and convalescent facilities, from many eastern coastal locations over the course of the war.

British Hotels in the Wake of War: Divergent Post-war Paths

29The last stage of this research programme centres on debates surrounding the condition and uses of hotels after the end of hostilities, including their continued use by the state for expanded domestic policy roles, and the return of many to private ownership. The post-war period witnessed the failure of several businesses, and concerted efforts to revive the broader hospitality sector in places such as Cheltenham, co-ordinated there by the Chamber of Commerce (Cheltenham Looker-On, 21 June 1919). Many establishments, such as the Lord Warden Hotel in Dover, were released from public control and reverted to their previous functions. At the same time local, national and trade bodies for such occupations as commercial travellers became implicated in efforts to have hotels released by the state to increase the supply of rooms and support the resumption of economic activity. Many such disputes are documented in the records of the War Compensation Courts that were established to adjudicate the level of financial compensation the state could owe proprietors for the use of land and/or premises, and which continued to evaluate claims through the 1920s. The calculation of such compensation was contested in the courts, with the state often adopting a narrow view of financial losses, determining that they were to be evaluated in terms only of the differentials between state ownership and private ownership in times of conflict, and not in comparison to any comparative conditions that existed before the outbreak of hostilities, which could potentially inflate the monies owed by the state. In addition to hotels that were returned to operation as commercial establishments, and those that were bankrupt at war’s end, many hotels remained in government hands after the war, including London’s Russell Court Hotel (TNA, TS 28/119), which was occupied by the Air Ministry during the war and then converted into a sanatorium; the Angel Hotel, Cardiff, which was requisitioned and maintained after the war by the Ministry of Pensions (TNA, WORK 12/77/2), and the Clifton Down Hotel in Bristol, which was commandeered for the Ministry of Pensions (TNA, WORK 12/77/1) and repurposed as a regional, post-war War Pensions headquarters.

30Hotels lay at the centre of much wider contests over property rights and the state, which resulted in heavy circumscriptions on the requisitioning and use of such buildings in future conflicts. The profound constitutional implications of disputes over requisitioning are revealed in the extensive litigation that surrounded the commandeering of hotels, beginning with a petition of right filed in 1917 by the owners of a London hotel that resulted in a landmark 1920 ruling (Attorney-General v De Keyser’s Royal Hotel Ltd). It transformed customary claims of the state over private property by constraining royal prerogative and had impacts on the wider use of government powers throughout the Commonwealth (Rubin, 1994).

31Engaging with this critical period requires an approach to the varied, shifting and contested landscape of the post-war infrastructure of civil re-establishment that examines the persistence of non-private sector ownership and commercial operations, contests over the extent of wartime intervention that required redress, and the continuance of state-mandated practices such as guest registration that were introduced during the war and remained requirements in the sector afterwards. Together they point to the disruptive impact of war, but also the development of new markets, new uses, and new legal regimes within the hospitality sector that endured beyond the end of the war. They should not cloud, however, the vibrancy of the tourism sector in places such as Blackpool, where the commercial accommodation sector adapted dynamically during and after the war to diverse demand from recreational tourists and the state.

Conclusions

32These findings are based on a survey of the press and archival research at the Parliamentary Archives and the National Archives in London, as well as a range of local and county archives. These case studies illuminate the profoundly uneven influence of the First World War on the domestic hospitality sector and demonstrate the value of adopting a granular analysis that captures the diverse experiences of hotels under different systems of management, operating for different markets in different places, during and after the conflict. Above all, the chronology we employ captures the dynamism and diversity of institutional adaptability in the commercial hospitality sector, through the longitudinal study of selected establishments. It allows us to incorporate into the analysis the ways non-British hotels participated in post-conflict diplomatic activities. For instance, it underscores the importance of Paris establishments such as the Hotel Majestic (the headquarters of the British delegation) and the Hotel Astoria (which functioned as a bureaucratic nerve-centre) during the peace negotiations in 1919. To what extent did they function as extraterritorial ‘British’ hotels and in what ways were they implicated in the resolution of the war?

33British hotels’ experiences of infrastructural mobilisation and demobilisation during this period elucidate changes in markets and operations in the 1930s and beyond, including requisitioning and compensation during and after the Second World War, and during other conflicts in other jurisdictions in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It also suggests ways that, in the context of crisis and severe disruption, institutions in the hospitality sector adapted dynamically to new conditions, constraints and opportunities, and followed divergent paths during a protracted period of ‘normalisation’. Given the extraordinary peacetime disruptions connected to Covid-19, which had significant and uneven impacts on the hospitality sector, the diverse experiences of these places in times of crisis and normalisation may prove especially instructive.

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Newspapers

Blackpool Gazette & Herald

Broad Arrow

Cheltenham Looker-On

Cornishman

Derbyshire Advertiser and Journal

Derby Daily Telegraph

Folkestone, Hythe, Sandgate & Cheriton Herald

Glasgow Herald

Leeds Intelligencer

Manchester Evening News

Sheffield Daily Telegraph

Stirling Observer

Warwick and Warwickshire Advertiser

Weekly Dispatch (London)

Whitstable Times and Herne Bay Herald

Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer

Collection at The National Archives

Records of the Office of Works

Records of HM Treasury

Records of the Treasury Solicitor and HM Procurator General relating to legal work for specific departments

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Titre Figure 1. Key places under study
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Kevin J. James et Andrew P. Northey, « The British State as Hotel Occupier on the Home Front, 1914-1922: A Model for Comparing Experiences in the Wartime Hospitality Sector »Mondes du Tourisme [En ligne], 22 | 2022, mis en ligne le 15 décembre 2022, consulté le 22 mai 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/tourisme/5436 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/tourisme.5436

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Auteurs

Kevin J. James

Professor
Department of History and Centre for Scottish studies
University of Guelph (Canada)
kjames[at]uoguelph.ca

Andrew P. Northey

Research Assistant
Department of History and Centre for Scottish studies
University of Guelph (Canada)
andrew.northey[at]outlook.com

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