The Working-Class Of Mallorca's Tourism

In 1938, an act was passed by the British government that wasn't, for obvious reasons, to have much impact for many years. It was the Holiday Pay Act, an item of legislation which lurks in the background to the story of Mallorca's tourism. There was to be entitlement to paid holidays, and when eventually it started to have an impact it was on a sector of the workforce which had previously been unable to afford taking time off without pay - the ordinary working man and woman.

After the war, the Workers' Travel Association, founded in 1921, was to renew a key objective: fostering international peace. Through cultural exchange, the belief was that the possibility of further war would be lessened. It was an objective that was shared by post-war tourism pioneers, especially those who were Jewish, such as Gerard Blitz of Club Med and Vladimir Raitz of Horizon. In 1949, the year when both Blitz and Raitz went to Corsica and were intrigued enough by that island's Club Olympique to want to do something similar, the Workers' Travel Association stole something of a march on them. In 1949, it organised its first trip for British workers to Mallorca.

Raitz, in addition to a desire for peace, believed that the ordinary working man and woman should have the means not just of a holiday but of a foreign holiday. 1949 was a year when it all started to fall into place. There were the facts of the pay act and those different trips to Corsica and to Mallorca. Though Raitz was to first take a plane to Corsica, it was Mallorca, the choice of the Workers' Travel Association, that was to feature far more strongly in his plans for developing Horizon and in his wish to provide affordable holidays for everyone.

The Mallorca of the 1950s, in tourism terms, perceived itself as a destination for the well-to-do. It clung to its legacy of the pre-war years, one of a sophisticated, wealthy traveller and of the occasional celebrity, and hotels which reflected this. The change was to be, of course, fundamental, and part of that change was the nature of the traveller. It would be quite wrong to say that Mallorca became solely the preserve of the working-class tourist, but for the masses to have become as they did, they needed to draw on different levels of foreign societies. For the British worker the cost of a Mallorcan holiday in the early sixties was the equivalent of two weeks' wages. Though affordable, it was still a fair sum. But Mallorca itself was so cheap that it was fully worth it.

It seems, nowadays, passé to talk in terms of class, but there are those who do, and, by a particular twist of fate, it is something being given renewed and full voice by parts of the British media which aren't of the establishment: the publishing wings of the Socialist Workers' Party and others are analysing the victory of Jeremy Corbyn in terms of the class struggle.

Corbyn's win is a coincidence, because I had been going to write this article anyway, the inspiration for doing so having been remarks made locally. One set has come from Macià Blázquez, a professor at the university, the other from the journalist Andreu Manresa during his address at Santa Ponsa's fiestas.

Manresa said that tourism of the masses should not be denigrated and nor should those tourists who aren't wealthy be looked down on. He alluded to precisely what Raitz had believed in, a tourism from a time when there was a need to cultivate knowledge of other cultures and peoples, and so to a tourism which had been crucial for Mallorca. Blázquez was more blunt. Magalluf was being "demonised". Working-class tourism was being removed and is being replaced by an "elitist" model. Pointedly, he referred to this model having its "beach club project". It was pretty obvious what he had in mind.

Both Manresa and Blázquez have opened up a line of tourism debate that seems to have eluded partners in the new government, among which is Podemos, whose national leader, Pablo Iglesias, sent Corbyn his congratulations. Here is a left-wing government which, as far as I am aware, has never nuanced tourism in terms of class. Perhaps it is to their credit that they don't or perhaps class in other societies doesn't interest them. But underlying the tourism thinking of the left seems to be a model which panders to elitism. It is the craving for the "quality" tourist, and all the implications this loaded term carries.

Class may no longer be the appropriate term, but there are still the ordinary working men and women seeking affordable holidays. Should Mallorca, should any destination for that matter, concern itself with such needs of foreigners? There was a time when Mallorca most definitely did concern itself.