Half a century ago today, the Duke of Kent, Anthony Hopkins and 97 other diners had a meal of caviar and lobster canapés followed by grilled steak, all washed down with Dom Perignon. There was nothing too unusual about this slightly ostentatious menu, one that was a typical example of 1970s British fine dining. But it was a lunch that cost more than £1 billion to serve up. It was the first meal on board the very first scheduled flight on Concorde – the plane that, for close to three decades, made it possible to have breakfast in Belgravia, a meeting in Manhattan and still be home for supper in Soho.
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That’s not a schedule that appeals to me (there’s nowhere decent to eat of a morning in Belgravia). But thinking of Concorde, 50 years on from it going supersonic on its first flight to Bahrain, is one of the few elements of the past which trigger a deep and irritable jealousy.
I’ve worked as a travel journalist for the past 20 years and, in that time, I’ve been lucky enough to have secured more than my fair share of complimentary flights, many of them in the relative sanctuary of business class. But I’ve also taken hundreds and hundreds of economy flights. Even on so-called legacy carriers, I’m hardly stepping on heterodox territory by declaring that the standard of service, comfort and, yes, food, has markedly declined across the board since the millennium. The nadir came for me when I put down my tray table on a Royal Air Maroc flight a few years back, only to have a child’s soiled nappy slide on to my lap. I didn’t much fancy the pasta after that.
I do find myself wondering if there should be a shift in my Overton window. Is flying the exception where I should depart from my usual bromide that for every one joyful thing about the past compared to now, there was always something else that was comparatively worse?
Concorde, and flying in the 1970s in general, seems, to a 47-year-old who was only born at the fag end of the Callaghan era, to have been a truly glorious exercise in glamour, style and copious daytime drinking. Cigars were handed out on the first Concorde flight after that blow-out meal and, although I imagine the smell on board must have been mephitic to non-smokers (few as they were in number back then), I assume that I would have gratefully inhaled the odour of a lit Cohiba if pressed to choose between that and the septum-burning whiff of a modern-day on-board chemical toilet.
So this is an open call to all readers who were regular flyers on Concorde, or any airline, in the era of Wombles, wedge shoes and Rick Wakeman. Can you tell me if jetting off anywhere from Lagos to Los Angeles really was a more pleasant experience 50 years ago?
Who cares about supreme comfort when you could be on the other side of the world in the time it takes to watch Oppenheimer?
I’ve tried hard to think of the negatives. If you forgot to bring your paperback (I imagine The Day Of The Jackal by Frederick Forsyth and anything by Tom Robbins would have been an appropriate in-flight read in that era) then there would be little to do on board except get monumentally drunk – no bad thing of course.
And what if the sybaritic menus of the era didn’t actually taste as good when flying at supersonic speed? The New York Times story from 22 January 1976, detailing the maiden flight, reported that passengers weren’t asked if they would like their steak rare or medium; every one came out overcooked, according to the reporter on board. And they say nurses have it tough…
Concorde wasn’t perfect, of course. From the outset, travellers complained that the extra speed did not make up for the small seats and narrow aisle space. But who cares about supreme comfort when you could be on the other side of the world in the time it takes to watch Oppenheimer?
My favourite story about the first Concorde flight all those years ago concerns a passenger called Philip Croucher. He took on board 6,000 first-day covers in order to get them stamped in Bahrain before flogging them back in the UK. He told reporters he expected to make £12,000 in profit, an ambition that rendered him more than happy to pay £200 in excess baggage charges.
What happened to Mr Croucher’s scheme? These are the kind of tales from the ‘golden age of travel’ which make me feel resentful that my parents didn’t bother having me until 1978. By the time I came of age and took to the skies on a regular basis in my mid-twenties, the caviar had been replaced by crisps and I was more likely to have an actor from Hollyoaks than Anthony Hopkins as an on-board companion. Concorde was retired in 2003 without me ever getting the chance to try it for myself.
‘The past is a foreign country,’ wrote L.P Hartley. And it seems, as far as flying is concerned, they didn’t just do things differently there. They did them a whole lot better.
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