Drawing the line between reverence and exploitation

Nearly a century after an assassin’s bullet set into play the complicated web of treaties that led to the First World War, it is the poetry of the likes of Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke that endure as literary first-hand accounts of bloody battles.

As I prepared last weekend for a sixth visit to the Western Front, the words of Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’ kept coming into my mind: ‘If I should die, think only this of me: that there’s some corner of a foreign field that is for ever England.’ What he and his fellow poets could never have imagined was that almost 100 years later more people than ever would be visiting so many corners of foreign fields.

What is it that draws people to the now tranquil and picturesque Belgian and French countryside where so many men lie in well-tended cemeteries? Is it that as we prepare to mark the 100th anniversaries of battles such as the Somme and Passchendaele, that the British nation has never recovered from the horrendous causalities that affected every family in the land?

At the Great War’s end, Winston Churchill who fought in the Ypres Salient where 250,000 British and Commonwealth troops fell between 1914 and 1918, said ‘A more sacred place for the British race does not exist.’ Today it is a place of pilgrimage and big business for the local economy.

Nonetheless, this niche tourism market isn’t all about the First World War. Wherever a battle has been fought, an invasion repulsed, a siege relieved, a daring escape made or some atrocity meted out then there is likely to be a tour dedicated to such footnotes of the world’s long bloody history.

Battlefield tours fall under the umbrella of what is known as ‘dark tourism’. Yet those who make such trips, such as yours truly, do not do so out of some macabre fascination with death and suffering. For far too many it is to see where a family member fought or died, while those with no direct connection may want to put make substance to a name on the local war memeorial or to see where heroes, imortalised in the nation’s history, made their pact with glory.

In some instance – and I have seen it myslef – historic sites can be exploited for personal gain and profit, with conveniently reconstructed or compelety new trench systems, the mandatory gift shop and other ruses to play on the emotions of visitors. Unfortunately, human nature being what it is, there will always be those without a conscience on the lookout to make a fast buck regardless of the methods they choose to do so.

It is the same when a reverential silence is broken at sporting occasions, war memorials on Remembrance Sunday or at our own Liberation Day commemortaion. When a crowd comprising tens of thousands stands still and silent there will always be some idiot who simply won’t shut up.

There is fine balance to dark tourism – and that is where to draw the very thin line between reverence and exploitation.

A visit to a First or Second World War cemetery or the site of battles such as Culloden, Waterloo and the Normandy Beaches is judged to be a pilgrimage or historical experience. But what can be said of a tour around New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina or an excursion downtown in New York to Ground Zero? Not my cup of tea says the woman who has visited the Bridge at Arnhem, the Mohne Dam of Dambusters Raid fame, the Somme, Passchendaele and Auschwitz, so who is to judge?

In spite of being inundated with fortifications dating back to prehistoric times, and knowing from experience the lucrative market in battlefield tours, I often wonder why Jersey does not exploit the growing market in dark tourism. After all our premier attraction, the Jersey War Tunnels, and to a lesser degree Mont Orgueil and Elizabeth castles, fall into this category.

The idea for a combined Channel Islands bid for World Heritage status for all the fortifications in both Bailiwicks has again been raised. But getting UNESCO’s stamp of approval for such national and cultural ‘treasures’ isn’t a guaranteed tourist draw

It requires a lot of money to make the British shortlist let alone the final stage. Moreover being designated is simply the start of putting in place the necessary – and expensive – infrastructure to support any increase in visitor numbers. Then there’s guides to train, visitor centres to build, tours to compile and all the costly associated marketing to generate business.

And along a very lengthy and complicated way there is the delicate juggling act of achieving that all-important balance. Captitalising on the dark tourism market could be a welcome boost for the Island’s economy but only if it is undertaken with the utmost historical accuracy, common decency and in good taste.

It was the philosopher, poet and novelist George Santayana who said: ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it and only the dead have seen the end of war.’

There is a sign on a staircase at Auschwitz with those very words. If dark tourism can benefit the world by preventing man from repeating past mistakes, then it will have served a purpose far more important than monetary gain.