In this remarkable study, Pamela Sambrook rescues from obscurity the contribution of a former member of Napoleon's Imperial Guard to the development of specialist hotels and catering in the formative years of the railway network in England and France. In doing so, she interrogates what lies behind some of Zenon Vantini's very real achievements, legacies and disasters. She asks how far he was driven by his familial background in Elba and his involvement in the political turmoil of early-nineteenth-century France, and to what extent his whole life was known to those around him. Vantini's extraordinary life encapsulates the change between two very different worlds - the old imperial past and the new age of entrepreneurial risk-taking. Never shaking off his old political loyalties, he believed resolutely that the mobility afforded by railway travel would change Europe fundamentally. In the long view he was a component part in the very early years of an industry which arguably changed England and Europe more than did even his hero, Napoleon. Scholars and casual readers of British and European social history will be fascinated by his story.

About the Author
Pamela Sambrook is a former museum curator and distinguished researcher into country-house domestic offices and the lives of the servants who worked in them. She has now retired from consultancy to the National Trust, English Heritage, and from teaching.

Reviews
Zenon Vantini grasped the opportunities presented by political and economic developments in nineteenth-century Europe in a truly exemplary fashion. On his native Elba, he encountered the exiled Napoleon, whom he joined for the Hundred Days. Then, having pursued domestic service in Britain, he conceived the idea of catering for railway travellers, via a chain of hotels that encompassed the continent. Vantini's fascinating transnational career is memorably explored by Pamela Sambrook in this engrossing study. Malcolm Crook, emeritus professor of French History, Keele University This was a most enjoyable read, highly informative and the book has page turning qualities making it difficult to put down. The excitement of the chase is not immediately apparent, but develops well before Napoleon enters stage left. Paul Anderton, former Adult Education Tutor, Keele University Zenon Vantini leased and managed the first railway-owned hotel (at Euston) and the first railway refreshment rooms (at Wolverton). He organised the first continental rail tours ten years before Thomas Cook. Probably no railway pioneer had a more unusual and exotic back-story, yet he is virtually unknown, even to specialist historians. This book fills a significant gap in transport history. Peter Brown, Transport historian, formerly reviews editor of the Journal of the Railway & Canal Historical Society The author has written a lively, fully referenced book about a subject who was difficult to research because of the paucity and widely-scattered nature of the sources. Peter Brown, in Journal of the Railway & Canal Historical Society



Book Information
ISBN 9780718895761
Author Pamela Sambrook
Format Paperback
Page Count 200
Imprint Lutterworth Press
Publisher James Clarke & Co Ltd