Commander Norwich Duff's European Tour Journal 1819
During 1819 Norwich Duff undertook a European tour. He kept a journal which is surprisingly clear. Most (alas not all) of the pages from that journal have survived down to the present generation. Here we present some we think most interesting.
Norwich Duff was born 1792. Wartime sometimes requires men to grow up quickly. In October 1805 Norwich served at Trafalgar on HMS Mars, the ship captained by his father, who lost his 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 been seen by many, probably including himself, as an upwardly mobile naval officer. (He would indeed be promoted to captain in 1822.)
There may well have been a conscious public policy objective in having young officers undertake such European tours and record what they noticed. Certainly Norwich is careful to record information on fortifications and key industries in the towns through which he passes. In 1819 the traumas of the Napoleonic wars were still acutely recalled in many parts of Europe, and the likelihood of future rivalry between Britain and France was a given. His tour took Norwich initially to Paris, then eastwards across the Champagne district to the Rhineland. The route continued through modern Germany, never going too far from the Rhine, up to Schaffhausen, and from thence into central Switzerland. Somewhere near Grindelwald the writing stops abruptly to be followed by a series of blank pages: it appears that Norwich had intended to come back and fill in those missing pages subsequently. He never did. However, the journal takes up again a month later, crossing the Simplon Pass into northern Italy, where he visited the major cities before, presumably, implementing his stated intention to board a British ship at an Adriatic port and returning home with the Royal Navy.
Norwich's journal extends beyond 100 pages of handwriting, but the earlier pages are the more satisfying. The most interesting portions, in the view of this writer, mostly concern the initial weeks of the tour, when Norwich was in France. The German portion becomes increasingly concerned with the uneven quality of the hotels. The Italian portion, for better or worse, looks suspiciously dependent on notes taken from guidebooks, and concludes with a several pages on the museums etc of Bologna.
6th July 1819 Balloon accident in the Tivoli Gardens (click here to see the journal pages)
By 1819, the famous balloon pioneer and publicist Jean-Pierre Blanchard had died. His widow supported herself still by giving dramatic demonstrations involving her husband's invention. Then, as now, evening displays involving fireworks were a popular diversion, and Norwich attended one such display presented by the Widow Blanchard. Modern balloons are filled with helium, but in 1819 the available lightweight gas, evidently, was hydrogen. The risk of a presentation in the park that combined fireworks with a balloon full of hydrogen will be apparent to anyone aware of the Hindenburg disaster of the twentieth century. In 1819, however, these risks evidently were less widely appreciated.
The initial pages of Norwich's journal are missing and a member of an intervening generation has described the journal as undated. The wider availability of historical knowledge has, however, permitted the present writer to date the entire tour, since the dramatic demise of Mme Blanchard has been authoritatively reported in other sources.
10th July 1819 Mile Stone inventory at La Ferté-sous-Jouarre (click here to see the journal page)
The reference to the mile stone industry at La Ferté occupies only a few lines half way down this page, but the evidence of large scale production of milestones is nonetheless an intriguing insight into the industrial activity of the time. We may speculate that Napoleon's massive state road building programme will have rendered milestone 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 unshipped product suggests that demand for mile stones may have fallen back following the Bourbon restoration.
12th July 1819 Châlons-sur-Marne (click here to see the journal page)
Châlons-sur-Marne now appears on the maps as Châlons-en-Champagne
13th July 1819 The telegraph station at Clermont en Argonne (click here to see the journal page)Until the end of the eighteenth century, in Europe, any long distance messages too complicated to be communicated by a line of beacons, travelled, at best, at the speed of a man on a horse. Under the pressure of the war, the Committee of Public Safety (revolutionary government) was persuaded to adopt the brilliant invention of the brothers Chappe, whereby a network of Telegraph stations was established linking Paris to several key frontier points.
Telegraph stations were located on high ground, each within view of two adjacent stations located as far as possible on the next horizon so as to stand out. Each telegraph station consisted of a small wooden or (more usually) stone hut with a large wooden pole sticking out 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. At each end of the (sometimes) horizontal pole was hinged another pole. By varying the angles of these three moving poles, a wide range of distinguishable characters was available. The necessary code was devised and distributed, and a relatively sophisticated message could thereby be relayed from Paris to (for instance) Strasbourg in a matter of minutes. The three movable arms could have their angles rapidly changed using a system of ropes.
The station at Clermont en Argonne was one of a series probably originally intended to run from Paris to Landau, but by 1819 Napoleon had fallen from power, Landau was part of the Wittelsbach's (Bavarians') territories, and the actual end point for this telegraph line was Strasbourg. In 1819 the French telegraph system was a state of the art communications technology with a fine future ahead of it. E-Mail pioneers take note. Of course, rail roads and electronic telegraphs would render the system of the brothers Chappe a redundant technology long before the end of the nineteenth century. Today the platform for the telegraph station where Norwich Duff quizzed the signalmen can still be seen, and the view to the east extends far away in the general direction of Verdun, and beyond that, Germany. (The view towards Paris is blocked by tall trees.) The Clermont station itself had been removed by the 1914-18 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 was consequently in large part destroyed during that war.)
For francophones keen to know more about the telegraph network of the Chappe brothers, an extremely interesting article entitled "Le Télégraphe de Chappe" by Jean and Jean-Pierre LaParra was published in Le Petit Journal Brabant-sue Meuse by L'Association "Culture et Loisirs", 55100 Brabant sur Meuse, France. The article first appeared 1994. It's cover is shown here, both for the picture and for the contact details. Note, however, that French telephone numbers have changed since 1994. The telephone number for L'Association would presumably now be +33 329 85 82 21. (From within France that will be 03 29 85 82 21) The Clermont telegraph station 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 roof and the attachments thereto would have been the same.
Verdun was famous as one of the masterworks of Vauban, the famous designer of urban fortifications, and Norwich is also interested because it appears to have been a holding point for British PoWs during the Napoleonic wars.
The reference to Var(r)ennes is only made in passing: Norwich recalls the arrest of the fugitive King Louis XVI by the village postmaster that had occurred some 26 years earlier. The revolutionaries had concluded, like Oliver Cromwell on reaching the equivalant point in the English Revolution, that a living monarch represented an unacceptable threat to the (republican) state. Citizen Bourbon and his wife were unceremoniously returned to Paris and guillotined soon after their arrest at Varennes. Louis had actually been recognised by a hotel worker at Ste Menehould, and it was a s a result of this identification that the order to arrest the king had arrived up the road. It is believed that the hotel worker who recognised Louis did so because of his resemblance to his image on the coinage, which constitutes an interesting tribute to whomever designed the coins of that time.
17th - 20th July 1819 Luxembourg and Trier / Treves
(click here to see the journal pages)Norwich refers to the constitutional state of Luxembourg in 1819. The congress of Vienna had left the three states of modern Benelux unified as the Netherlands, and 1819 found Luxembourg ville garrisoned by Prussian troops on behalf of their Dutch allies. In 1830 the southern Netherlands would revolt against domination by the northerners, and Belgium was formed, applying the approximate frontiers of the territories that, prior to Napoleon's invasion, had comprised the Hapsbourg's Austrian Netherlands. At that point, the western part of Luxembourg would become part of Belgium, while the eastern part remained within the lands of the Dutch king, albeit separated from his other provinces by chunks of Belgian Luxembourg and Limburg. Somewhere round 1890 the Dutch king died and was succeeded by a woman. The Luxembourgeois constitution did not allow for a female ruler, and since that time Luxembourg has ceased to share it's monarch with the Dutch, though it still shares it's flag with the Dutch and the locally spoken language is far closer to the Dutch than to the dialect of German spoken east of the Moselle.
Crossing from the Dutch king's Luxembourgeois territories to the Prussian king's territories, Norwich notes the contrasting styles of customs officials in the 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 would have liked the city better had he not found the hotel, La Maison Rouge, "dirty and very uncivil". Times, presumably, have changed. Interestingly, a few pages further on Norwich notes that the people in this region do not hesitate to complain about the region having been annexed to Prussia, having preferred occupation by the French. Both Paris and Berlin are a fair distance from the Rhineland, though it 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 gotten used to having crossed a frontier, since he refers in his journal to Treves as reputedly one of the oldest towns in France, though the compiler had the impression from other sources that in 1815 Trier had been included in the lands granted to Prussia.
27th - 29th July 1819 Mannheim, Heidelberg and Schwetzingen (click here to see the journal pages)
Norwich seems to have been impressed by Mannheim, noting that both the Rhine and the Neckar are crossed here by "a bridge of boats". Norwich records that about a mile below the town (population 18 300) the Russian army crossed the Rhine in 1813. (The compiler is insufficiently up to speed on the comings and goings of the various armies during the closing years of the Napoleonic War to wish to challenge Norwich on this historical detail.)
In Heidelberg, like tourists ever since, Norwich concentrated on the castle, concerning which much of his description might have been written during the present 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 full and has, in 1819, been forty-three years empty.
11th - 12th August 1819 Mount Rigi (click here to see the journal pages)
Alpine tourism involved serious exercise in 1819.
October 1819 Impressions of Turin (click here to see the journal pages)
Norwich could not know of the prominent role that Piedmont would play in the Italian unification some forty years later, but clearly he found Turin a fine capital, if a little flamboyant for his protestant taste: he stayed several days and followed what was seems likely to have been a fairly well established city tour itinerary. The middle part of the second of these six pages includes an enjoyable report of Norwich's first encounter with grissini torinese (bread sticks). Reference to a performance of Rossini's "little French farce, The Maid and the Magpie", which Norwich notes had been translated and played in England, when the allies were bombarding Paris, may concern the opera 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 17:14 on 06 February 2004