ON TOUR

Books on travel inevitably provide a snapshot of how things were at a particular moment. If the writer is observant and competent, that is. This makes such books particularly useful if you are writing historically and studying the period of choice. You can also get an inkling of the atmosphere of the moment from journals and diaries, of course; but it is travel books, and particularly travel books about England, I find fascinating. I have quite a few.
A recent shuffle through my bookshelves brought to light an embarrassment of riches, including Celia Fiennes and Daniel Defoe, William Dutt and John Byng, JB Priestley and Carl Philip Moritz, James Plumtre, Arthur Young and HV Morton. I dare say there are a few more tucked away if I cared to dig deeper.
HV Morton's In Search of England was undertaken, written and published in 1927, which was no mean feat, his travels being by motor-car, and I have always found it fascinating even if Morton himself sometimes comes across as a bit of a nostalgic duffer.
What I had not realised - until I stumbled across a copy of I Saw Two Englands in a charity shop - is that Morton had actually undertaken three expeditions around England, the second in May, 1939, and the third in October of the same year, when war was very much in the air. In fact, the final third of this book is devoted to a tour of the country seven weeks after the War started.
Armed with a bundle of official letters, permits, petrol coupons and letters of introduction, and provided with a gas mask and a first-aid box, and his faithful motor-car, he visited aircraft factories, spoke to air raid wardens and Land Army girls, watched a fishing fleet come in after a night of dodging mines, toured an ammunitions factory and a prisoner-of-war camp, visited the postal censorship office, and watched tanks roll off a production line.
Morton also weaved a delightful story around the dispersal of ministries and Government departments in London into the countryside, when he decided to visit the Cereal Imports Committee. Previously housed in Baltic House, in St Mary Ax, the chaps who purchased wheat from the world were now housed in a 'hidden' mansion somewhere in Surrey.
He drove to the village, asked directions and drew a blank, because there was nothing to see. So he went to the post office, asked for the way to the Committee's offices and again drew a blank. Then he mentioned someone's name. This produced a glimmer of recognition, and he was given directions to a mansion set amid acres of woodland and pasture. A butler answered his knock at the front door.
This chap, still splendidly stiff with formality, evidently lead him through gilded room after gilded room, and finally asked for a particular person by name. 'Mr Blank?' queried a clerk, somewhat irreverently. 'I expect you will find him in the swimming bath.'
The butler then took Mr Morton into a 'fabulously expensive' indoor swimming bath. In order to make space for the Cereal Imports Committee from the Baltic Exchange the water, of course, had been drained out and a wooden floor inserted. And in this ornate hole in the ground some 30 clerks were beavering away at trestle tables 'with their noses in ledgers or their mouths to the telephones.' Not far away, on the squash court, there were more offices, more clerks, and more trestle tables and telephones. 
Morton said later that every time he ate bread he recalled that the wheat had originated in a house among yellowing woods and crowing pheasants.
(I Saw Two Englands, by HV Morton. Methuen, 1942)