Commander Norwich Duff'sEuropean Tour Journal 1819
During1819 Norwich Duffundertook a European tour. He kept a journal which is surprisinglyclear. Most (alas not all) of the pages from that journal have survived downto the present generation. Here we present some we think most interesting.
NorwichDuff was born 1792. Wartime sometimes requires men to grow up quickly. In October1805 Norwich served at Trafalgar on HMS Mars, the ship captained by his father, who losthis life that day. Promoted to Lieutenant in November 1811 and to Commander in June 1814,it is apparent that by 1819, when he undertook his European tour, Norwich will have beenseen by many, probably including himself, as an upwardly mobile naval officer. (He would indeed be promoted to captain in 1822.)
There maywell have been a conscious public policy objective in having young officers undertake suchEuropean tours and record what they noticed. Certainly Norwich is careful torecord information on fortifications and key industries in the towns through which hepasses. In 1819 the traumas of the Napoleonic wars were still acutely recalled inmany parts of Europe, and the likelihood of future rivalry between Britain and France wasa given. His tour took Norwich initially to Paris, then eastwards across theChampagne district to the Rhineland. The route continued through modernGermany, never going too far from the Rhine, up to Schaffhausen, and from thence intocentral Switzerland. Somewhere near Grindelwald the writing stops abruptly tobe followed by a series of blank pages: it appears that Norwich had intended to comeback and fill in those missing pages subsequently. He never did. However, the journal takes up again a month later, crossing the Simplon Pass into northernItaly, where he visited the major cities before, presumably, implementing his statedintention to board a British ship at an Adriatic port and returning home with the RoyalNavy.
Norwich'sjournal extends beyond 100 pages of handwriting, but the earlier pages are the moresatisfying. The most interesting portions, in the view of this writer, mostly concern theinitial weeks of the tour, when Norwich was in France. The German portion becomesincreasingly concerned with the uneven quality of the hotels. The Italianportion, for better or worse, looks suspiciously dependent on notes taken from guidebooks,and concludes with a several pages on the museums etc of Bologna.
By 1819,the famous balloon pioneer and publicist Jean-Pierre Blanchard had died. Hiswidow supported herself still by giving dramatic demonstrations involving her husband'sinvention. Then, as now, evening displays involving fireworks were a populardiversion, and Norwich attended one such display presented by the WidowBlanchard. Modern balloons are filled with helium, but in 1819 the availablelightweight gas, evidently, was hydrogen. The risk of a presentation in thepark that combined fireworks with a balloon full of hydrogen will be apparent to anyoneaware of the Hindenburg disaster of the twentieth century. In 1819, however,these risks evidently were less widely appreciated.
Theinitial pages of Norwich's journal are missing and a member of an intervening generationhas described the journal as undated. The wider availability of historicalknowledge has, however, permitted the present writer to date the entire tour, since thedramatic demise of Mme Blanchard has been authoritatively reported in other sources.
The reference to the mile stone industry at La Ferté occupies only a few lines halfway down this page, but the evidence of large scale production of milestones isnonetheless an intriguing insight into the industrial activity of the time. Wemay speculate that Napoleon's massive state road building programme will have renderedmilestone production a booming business in France, and maybe also elsewhere in the empire,during the early years of the nineteenth century. The evident abundance of unshippedproduct suggests that demand for mile stones may have fallen back following the Bourbonrestoration.
Châlons-sur-Marnenow appears on the maps as Châlons-en-Champagne
Until theend of the eighteenth century, in Europe, any long distance messages too complicated to becommunicated by a line of beacons, travelled, at best, at the speed of a man on ahorse. Under the pressure of the war, the Committee of Public Safety(revolutionary government) was persuaded to adopt the brilliant invention of thebrothers Chappe, whereby a network of Telegraph stations was established linking Paris toseveral key frontier points.
Telegraphstations were located on high ground, each within view of two adjacent stations located asfar as possible on the next horizon so as to stand out. Each telegraph stationconsisted of a small wooden or (more usually) stone hut with a large wooden pole stickingout of the roof. Pinned at the top of the pole was a smaller (sometimes)horizontal pole, hinged so that it could rotate freely through 360 degrees. Ateach end of the (sometimes) horizontal pole was hinged another pole. Byvarying the angles of these three moving poles, a wide range of distinguishable characterswas available. The necessary code was devised and distributed, and arelatively sophisticated message could thereby be relayed from Paris to (for instance)Strasbourg in a matter of minutes. The three movable arms could have their anglesrapidly changed using a system of ropes.
Thestation at Clermont en Argonne was one of a series probably originally intended to runfrom Paris to Landau, but by 1819 Napoleon had fallen from power, Landau was part of theWittelsbach's (Bavarians') territories, and the actual end point for this telegraph linewas Strasbourg. In 1819 the French telegraph system was a state of the artcommunications technology with a fine future ahead of it. E-Mail pioneers takenote. Of course, rail roads and electronic telegraphs would render the systemof the brothers Chappe a redundant technology long before the end of the nineteenthcentury. Today the platform for the telegraph station where Norwich Duffquizzed the signalmen can still be seen, and the view to the east extends far away in thegeneral direction of Verdun, and beyond that, Germany. (The view towards Parisis blocked by tall trees.) The Clermont station itself had been removed by the1914-18 war when a large gun was mounted on the platform it had occupied. (Clermont en Argonne was located on a major World War I battle frontier, and wasconsequently in large part destroyed during that war.)
Forfrancophones keen to know more about the telegraph network of the Chappe brothers, anextremely interesting article entitled "Le Télégraphe de Chappe" by Jean andJean-Pierre LaParra was published in Le Petit Journal Brabant-sue Meuse by L'Association"Culture et Loisirs", 55100 Brabant sur Meuse, France. The articlefirst appeared 1994. It's cover is shown here, both for the picture and forthe contact details. Note, however, that French telephone numbers have changedsince 1994. The telephone number for L'Association would presumably now be +33 32985 82 21. (From within France that will be 03 29 85 82 21) The Clermont telegraphstation was located on high ground and seems likely to have been a low squat stone hut,rather than the crenelated affair depicted here, but the pole sticking through the roofand the attachments thereto would have been the same.
Verdun was famous as one of themasterworks of Vauban, the famous designer of urban fortifications, and Norwich is alsointerested because it appears to have been a holding point for British PoWs during theNapoleonic wars.
The reference to Var(r)ennes is only made in passing: Norwich recallsthe arrest of the fugitive King Louis XVI by the village postmaster that had occurred some26 years earlier. The revolutionaries had concluded, like Oliver Cromwell onreaching the equivalant point in the English Revolution, that a living monarch representedan unacceptable threat to the (republican) state. Citizen Bourbon and his wife wereunceremoniously returned to Paris and guillotined soon after their arrest atVarennes. Louis had actually been recognised by a hotel worker at SteMenehould, and it was a s a result of this identification that the order to arrest theking had arrived up the road. It is believed that the hotel worker who recognisedLouis did so because of his resemblance to his image on the coinage, which constitutes aninteresting tribute to whomever designed the coins of that time.
Norwich refers to the constitutionalstate of Luxembourg in 1819. The congress of Vienna had left the three statesof modern Benelux unified as the Netherlands, and 1819 found Luxembourg ville garrisonedby Prussian troops on behalf of their Dutch allies. In 1830 the southern Netherlandswould revolt against domination by the northerners, and Belgium was formed, applying theapproximate frontiers of the territories that, prior to Napoleon's invasion, had comprisedthe Hapsbourg's Austrian Netherlands. At that point, the western part of Luxembourgwould become part of Belgium, while the eastern part remained within the lands of theDutch king, albeit separated from his other provinces by chunks of Belgian Luxembourg andLimburg. Somewhere round 1890 the Dutch king died and was succeeded by a woman. The Luxembourgeois constitution did not allow for a female ruler, and sincethat time Luxembourg has ceased to share it's monarch with the Dutch, though it stillshares it's flag with the Dutch and the locally spoken language is far closer to the Dutchthan to the dialect of German spoken east of the Moselle.
Crossing from the Dutch king's Luxembourgeois territories to thePrussian king's territories, Norwich notes the contrasting styles of customs officials inthe two territories.
In Trier, which he calls always by its French name, Treves, Norwich'did' the city's extensive Roman remains, though one gains the impression that he wouldhave liked the city better had he not found the hotel, La Maison Rouge, "dirty andvery uncivil". Times, presumably, have changed. Interestingly, a few pagesfurther on Norwich notes that the people in this region do not hesitate to complain aboutthe region having been annexed to Prussia, having preferred occupation by theFrench. Both Paris and Berlin are a fair distance from the Rhineland, thoughit is possible that if, as seems possible, Norwich conversed only in English or in French,he was excluded from the opinions of folks speaking only in dialects of German.
Norwich had been in France for above a month and may not have gottenused to having crossed a frontier, since he refers in his journal to Treves as reputedlyone of the oldest towns in France, though the compiler had the impression from othersources that in 1815 Trier had been included in the lands granted to Prussia.
Norwich seems to have been impressed by Mannheim, noting that both theRhine and the Neckar are crossed here by "a bridge of boats". Norwichrecords that about a mile below the town (population 18 300) the Russian army crossed theRhine in 1813. (The compiler is insufficiently up to speed on the comings and goings ofthe various armies during the closing years of the Napoleonic War to wish to challengeNorwich on this historical detail.)
In Heidelberg, like tourists ever since, Norwich concentrated on thecastle, concerning which much of his description might have been written during thepresent century. Norwich was impressed by the (then) sixty year old Heidelberg Tun(giant barrel) built to hold tribute wine which Norwich notes has been three times fulland has, in 1819, been forty-three years empty.
Alpine tourism involved serious exercise in 1819.
Norwichcould not know of the prominent role that Piedmont would play in the Italian unificationsome forty years later, but clearly he found Turin a fine capital, if a little flamboyantfor his protestant taste: he stayed several days and followed what was seems likelyto have been a fairly well established city tour itinerary. The middle part ofthe second of these six pages includes an enjoyable report of Norwich's first encounterwith grissini torinese (bread sticks). Reference to a performance of Rossini's"little French farce, The Maid and the Magpie", which Norwich notes had beentranslated and played in England, when the allies were bombarding Paris, may concern theopera that we know as The Thieving Magpie.
Norwich's Itinerary superimposed on modern maps
5th June 1819 to 18th August 1819
Norwich's Itinerary
14th September 1819 to late October 1819
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Updated at 19:10 on 12 March 2008