Travels with Baedeker

I have a battered and annotated 1885 edition of Baedeker’s Lower Egypt. The endpaper is inscribed: ‘Helen Caddick, 33 Beaufort Road, Edgbaston, January 1890’. Helen Caddick was a remarkable woman, a travel writer who, after becoming financially independent in her forties, travelled solo all over the world between 1889 and 1914, amassing vast quantities of ethno-geographic observations and photographs.

How this volume is in my possession is lost in the fog of history, but an educated guess is that my father acquired it in a job lot of second-hand Baedekers in 1938. This is because I know that many maps, plans and illustrations pillaged from an 1894 edition of Baedeker’s Greece ended up in my father’s journal of his travels in the summer of 1938.

That year, my father and two other second-year Cambridge classics students were granted bursaries by their respective colleges to travel to Greece in connection with their studies. The journal consists of 200 pages of manuscript, illustrated from said Baedeker and other sources, and with photographs taken with his folding camera. It is packed with the minutest of detail as he was obviously determined to omit nothing. It is informed by the expedition’s two guidebooks: the Baedeker, and Pausanias’s second-century Description of Greece. Many of the sites visited are described with reference to Pausanias and to the works of ancient authors, often in Greek and without translation – not unreasonable given the target audience, I guess – and to works by more recent authors, notably Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.

The trio set off in June from London by train to Brindisi and reached Patras by steamer four days later. Their first destination was Olympia, where ‘the calm of the sacred grove’ gave way to the realisation that the western Peloponnese was not equipped for tourists. Sourcing provisions was to be a recurring issue for their first week. The next visit was the Temple of Apollo Epicurius at Bassae, about 35 kilometres southeast of Olympia. There yet being no proper road, it was a day and a half’s hike to Andritsaena, the nearest village. The builders of the temple conveniently located it on a remote mountain-top at an elevation of 1,131 metres, and a guide was required to take them the final 450-metre climb over six kilometres of trackless wilderness.

On the way to Messene they tested Baedeker’s assurance that if you applied at the gate of a monastery before sunset you would be offered bed and board. At Voulkano, anyway, this was true. The Langada Pass over the Taygetos was another spectacular roadless adventure; after Sparta they walked the Festal Road from Heraeum to Mycenae; thence via Corinth and Eleusis to Athens, which entertained them for more than a week.

My father’s photos of the Acropolis prompted me to fish out mine from a visit 40 years later. There was one broad similarity: the very small numbers of tourists, such that most of both sets of pictures have no human figures in them whatever. The difference of emphasis is palpable, though: mine are architectural and artistic, my father’s more generally historic and literary, with emphases on the Mycenaean age and the Persian wars which, inevitably, necessitated visits to Marathon, Salamis and Plataea.

Then, via Thebes and Orchomenus to Levadia, where considerable interest was taken in the Cult of Trophonius, including drinking from the supposed mythical Springs of Lethe (forgetfulness) and Mnemosyne (remembrance), neither, apparently, with noticeable effect. Thence by bus to Delphi on the scary mountain road via the Cleft Way, where Oedipus killed his father and started all that sorry tale, and through Arachova where, on St George’s Day 1978, we saw schoolchildren in national dress dancing in the snows of Mount Parnassus.

And so home, arriving in London, after five weeks away, three days before his 21st birthday and completing the journal on 13 September. His trip was unusual for a student at that time but was insignificant compared to the intrepid exploits of Helen Caddick. Nevertheless, it is nice to feel the overlap, slight as it may be.

This article originally appeared in the Institute of Historic Building Conservation’s (IHBC’s) Context 181, published in December 2024. It was written by James Caird.

--Institute of Historic Building Conservation