Copenhagen to Oslo: Part 1 Great Continental Railway Journeys

I'm embarking on a new railway adventure that will take me

across the heart of Europe.

I'll be using this -

my Bradshaw's Continental Railway Guide, dated 1913, which

opened up an exotic world of foreign travel for the British tourist.

'It told travellers where to go, what to see and how to navigate

'the thousands of miles of tracks crisscrossing the continent.

'Now, a century later,

'I'm using my copy to reveal an era of great optimism and energy,

'where technology, industry, science and the arts were flourishing.'

I want to rediscover that lost Europe that, in 1913, couldn't know

that its way of life would shortly be swept aside by the advent of war.

I'm beginning a new journey through Denmark, Sweden and Norway,

which, until the early 16th century,

were all ruled by a powerful Danish monarchy.

By the time of my guidebook in 1913,

the three were politically separate,

but known collectively as Scandinavia.

The British traveller could now visit

the extreme landscapes of mountains and lakes thanks to the railways.

'At the turn of the 20th century,

'British tourists would have felt a particular connection to

'Scandinavia, thanks to the marriage of the future King Edward VII

'to the Danish Princess Alexandra in 1863.

'Their daughter Maud would go on to become Queen of Norway,

'forging further strong links

'between Britain and these Nordic lands.

'My adventure begins in Denmark's capital Copenhagen, crosses

'the famous Oresund Bridge to Malmo in Sweden,

'then travels north along Sweden's west coast to Gothenburg,

'stopping briefly in Trollhatten

'before heading to Norway's capital, Oslo.

'Along the way, I lose my inhibitions in a Swedish sauna...'

On the whole,

I don't take my clothes off with people I don't know.

'..ride one of the world's oldest fairground attractions...'

Oh!

'..have a Highland fling, Scandinavian style...'

ALL: Skol!

'..and brave a white-knuckle ride

'based on a winter sport invented by Norwegians.'

Whee-hoo!

One of the great experiences of my life.

My first stop is the Danish capital Copenhagen.

My Bradshaw's quips that, "Denmark is a little monarchy,

"formerly more extensive, between the North Sea and the Baltic."

Copenhagen is the economic, political

and cultural centre of Denmark.

It started life in the 11th century as a Viking fishing port.

Surrounded by water and interlaced with canals,

it's a veritable Venice of the North.

It is connected to Stockholm, Hamburg, Berlin

and beyond by the railways.

Copenhagen's main railway station was, in fact,

new at the time of my Bradshaw's guide

but, built as it is out of traditional wooden trusses,

it has the feeling of a Gothic banqueting hall -

perhaps a way of reminding us that the Danish monarchy traces its

origins back more than 1,000 years to the middle of the 10th century.

'According to my guide, Copenhagen is one of the pleasantest

'of the smaller capitals of Europe.'

And 100 years on,

the historic skyline is unspoiled by high-rise buildings.

On leaving the railway station,

travellers would have noticed at once one of the oldest

amusement parks in the world - the Tivoli Gardens.

'Ellen Dahl knows all about it.'

-Ellen, hello.

-Hello.

What is the origin of the Tivoli Gardens at Copenhagen?

When Tivoli was founded in 1843, it was a big fashion all over Europe.

So this was the first place in Denmark you could actually

go into the public domain and see people and have fun

and have a meal and see a show and just be out.

Now, if I've got this right, the railway came after Tivoli Gardens.

-It started in 1847, didn't it, the railway?

-That's true, yes.

And the first railway station in Copenhagen was just next to

Tivoli, so just a little more west.

And people would stand inside Tivoli to look out on the railways

and see the trains, because they'd never seen anything like it.

And, vice versa, people would stand in the train station

and look into Tivoli and see all the fun going on in here.

What does Tivoli mean to the people of Copenhagen?

Well, Tivoli is somewhere that everybody has been.

People have very fond memories of Tivoli, so they tend to get

very attached to things that are in Tivoli and they tend to want

to relive childhood memories, actually, when they are here.

I'd like to return to childhood myself,

on the most popular attraction in Tivoli.

Every year, up to 1.3 million thrill-seekers

ride this wooden roller coaster.

Dating from 1914, it is one of the oldest of its kind in the world.

How much has it changed, then, in the last century?

It's extremely authentic.

Of course, things have been maintained

and things have been changed,

in terms of actual boards and rails and things like that,

but the ride is as you would have seen it 100 years ago.

I can't wait any longer.

-Ellen, this will be fun.

-Are you all right?

-Yeah. I like roller coasters.

-Don't stand up.

-Hold your arms inside the carriage, yeah?

-And keep hold of Bradshaw.

Hold on to your book.

The roller coaster is pulled up to the top of the first incline,

the highest point, and then gravity takes over.

You have to put your arms up, yeah?

Aaa-oh!

HE LAUGHS

Oh, my bottom was well off the seat there.

That's what they call air time. That's the fun of it.

'Tivoli is Scandinavia's most popular attraction.

'Over four million visitors a year enjoy the rides.'

-Oh, Ellen, that was brilliant.

-Did you enjoy it?

My bottom was in the air more than it was on the seat.

After that excitement, I'll seek a classic theme park refreshment.

-Hello.

-Hello, Michael. Welcome.

-Thank you, Kjeld.

This looks like a very traditional ice cream salon.

How long has it been going?

It's been going on for more than 100 years. Since 1906.

-Has it been in the family?

-Yes. See the picture up there in the corner?

The small boy over there, that's my grandad, back in 1906.

-That's amazing.

-Yeah.

Kjeld's family have been using the same recipe for waffle cones

for over a century.

Let's see whether I can master the age-old technique.

-OK, here goes.

-Yeah.

-Right. So, I lift the waffle.

-Yeah.

-And that one.

-I turn this around. I give it a small squirt.

-Perfect.

Yes. So far, so good.

The difficult bit is still to come.

A small squeeze.

And now we just wait.

Now is going to be the tricky part.

-Lift up?

-Yeah.

-Close that up.

-Next one.

The difficult thing here is to get that fold working just right.

-Nice and easy.

-Nice and easy. And put it down there.

-And put it down there.

-Yeah.

-Sort of.

This is almost perfect. Almost.

'I had no idea that waffle cone making was such a precision art.'

I hope that was worth it cos my fingers are burning.

I hope it tastes as good as it looks.

Mm! My visit to Tivoli has given me

a real flavour of an amusement garden, 1913 style.

'In the early 20th century,

'the Tivoli Gardens were a great leveller -

'a place where both rich and poor came to enjoy themselves.'

Hurrah, two!

But elsewhere in Copenhagen,

the social divide was more rigidly observed

and nowhere more so than at the Amalienborg.

These four near-identical palaces are still home

to the Danish royal family.

Around the time of my guide, the connection with

Buckingham Palace naturally drew many British visitors.

Historian Knud Jespersen knows more.

How did it happen, then,

that Princess Alexandra married the British Prince of Wales?

I think that the key person in this process

was Edward's elder sister, Vicky,

who was Crown Princess in Prussia and who had taken it upon herself

to find an appropriate spouse for her little brother.

They sent pictures to Edward, who rejected them one after one.

Then she also sent the picture of beautiful Alexandra.

Then he was very pleased with that so some secret meetings were arranged

at different places in Germany,

and it ended up with a wedding in 1863.

The marriage at Windsor took place amid great ceremonial.

The British welcomed Alexandra with a poem

written by Alfred Lord Tennyson, the Poet Laureate,

celebrating the ancient links between the nations.

"Sea-kings' daughter from over the sea, Alexandra!

"Saxon and Norman and Dane are we

"But all of us Danes in our welcome of thee, Alexandra!"

A successful marriage between Alexandra and Edward VII?

I think so. I think Alexandra was a very tolerant woman,

who endured all Edward's affairs.

-Was she popular in Britain?

-I think so.

She had a good social instinct

so she could communicate with

the upper class at the court and also with the common people.

Alexandra was the Diana of her day,

and not the only member of her family to grace a European throne.

One brother became the King of Denmark. Another, King of Greece.

And her sister, Dagmar, Empress of Russia.

I'm interested, you know, these two women, Alexandra and Dagmar,

they have both become empresses.

That must have been quite important, politically.

It was because there was a direct connection between

the two great powers of Europe - Great Britain and Russia -

and it showed when the Russian Revolution broke

and the Tsar's family were chased and executed.

And so Dagmar's son, who by then was Tsar, was murdered.

-And other members of the family?

-All of them.

She was the only one that survived.

And only thanks to her evacuation by the British man-of-war,

which was sent to Crimea

on the instigation of Queen, or Empress, Alexandra.

The bond between Alexandra and Dagmar was forged

during a happy childhood.

Growing up together close to the Amalienborg Palace,

the princesses enjoyed stories read to them

by a Danish writer famed across the world.

'Hans Christian Andersen is perhaps Denmark's best-known author.

'His fairy tales are known everywhere,

'and many, such as Thumbelina and The Princess And The Pea,

'have inspired ballets, plays and films.'

The visitor using my Bradshaw's guide

had a brand-new tourist attraction to see,

because in 1913 they unveiled a statue to The Little Mermaid,

one of the characters from a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale.

And now tourists will risk life and limb

to get close to this pretty creature and her fishy tale of woe.

More than a million people visit The Little Mermaid each year.

Most know her from the Disney film but, unlike her cartoon counterpart,

this Little Mermaid's story didn't have a happy ending.

-Can you remember the story of The Little Mermaid?

-Er...yeah.

It's a love story about The Little Mermaid

and she's condemned to stay in the water.

She couldn't get out.

Is it a happy story or a sad story?

A sad story.

Are you visiting Copenhagen?

Well, I'm local. I live only 3km from this place.

What is the genius of Hans Christian Andersen?

Why was he so successful? Why do we remember him?

I think because he expressed himself through the fairy tales.

He was a very sensitive person

and he had a special life when he was young and so on

and he had to fight for his life. He was born in 1805.

He never married and maybe he never had any relationship with a woman.

The Little Mermaid has a rather sad ending.

Maybe he was projecting his own life in this story as well.

To him, there was no happy ending.

He was happy because he became world famous when he was older,

but his personal life was not so happy.

It looks as if he's making a lot of tourists happy today.

The Little Mermaid's appeal is enduring and universal.

But, with a train to catch, I must return to the station.

A traveller using a Bradshaw's guide in 1913 would have had to do

the next part of my journey over to Sweden by steamer.

But, even at the beginning of the 20th century, the idea of a bridge

was already a dream, and finally the dream became reality in 1999.

MUSIC: "Hollow Talk" by Choir Of Young Believers

# Echoes start as a cross in you... #

'My journey is taking me across the Oresund Bridge.'

'It's a central feature of the Scandi-noir drama The Bridge.

# Spatial movement which seems to you... #

'In the television series, it brings together detectives from Denmark

'and Sweden to solve a gruesome murder.

'The bridge also allows people to commute

'between Malmo and Copenhagen.'

# Hollow talking and hollow girl. #

-Hello.

-Hello.

-Do you use it very much?

Yeah, because my mother-in-law has a small house in Sweden,

and we live in Denmark, so sometimes we go visit the house there.

The bridge is for both trains and cars, is that right?

-That's right, yeah.

-What do you normally do? Train or car?

-Car.

I suppose you must all be very proud of this bridge.

-It's an amazing piece of engineering.

-Yes, it is.

Has it really altered people's lives?

Danes are going more to Malmo in Sweden for shopping

and probably also the Swedes are coming into the city of Copenhagen

for fun and restaurants and so on.

It now takes just 30 minutes,

crossing the ten-mile Oresund Strait,

to travel from Copenhagen to Malmo in Sweden.

We are now passing beneath Swedish soil.

My next stop will be Malmo.

My Bradshaw's tells me the railway station is on the quay

close to the landing place of the steamers from Copenhagen.

In 1917, a bald-headed gentleman might have been seen

passing through that station on his way to Russia.

His journey was to have epic consequences.

'The passenger travelling to his place in history was

'the Russian revolutionary leader, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

'To find out what he was doing here in Malmo,

'I'm following his footsteps across the bridge

'from the station to the Savoy Hotel.

'Over a drink in the bar there,

'guide Jacques Schultze tells me more about Lenin.'

-Hello, Jacques.

-Hello, Michael.

Why have we met in the Savoy Hotel?

Because some people say that he actually spent the night here.

There is a little bit of discussion about this

because the old ledgers are unfortunately missing

so we don't have his signed autograph that he spent the night here

but we are quite certain at the very least

he had a traditional Swedish smorgasbord here.

'Lenin was returning from exile in Zurich to Russia.

'In February 1917, the hardships of the war had led to

'a revolution in Russia and the Tsar had abdicated.

'But for Lenin the revolution was incomplete.

'Only a takeover by his own Bolshevik faction of communists

'would guarantee the transformation of Russia into a people's state.'

Where was Lenin

when the first revolution occurred in Russia at the beginning of 1917?

He was still in Switzerland.

When news reached him of the revolution,

he saw this as his chance to say,

"Speed is of the essence. We have to rescue the revolution."

Of course, Germany was quite interested in this

because the Russians were still fighting

and they saw this as a chance to get the Russians

out of the war by having a proper revolution, so to speak.

'The Germans saw that a second Bolshevik revolution

'would take one enemy out of the war

'so they could concentrate on the Western front.

'They gave Lenin safe passage by train from Switzerland,

'through their own country to Scandinavia,

'from where he could reach Petrograd - now St Petersburg.'

So, how did he make the journey across Germany?

He made it in, some people call it the poisonous germ.

The legend is he was sealed up in a compartment

so he couldn't spread his revolutionary ideas along the way.

It was sealed and the story goes that actually

one part of the compartment, they had a chalk line on the floor

where they had German soldiers on one side watching him

so he wouldn't get up to any, well, funny business.

And the train was sealed in the sense that, of course,

he wasn't allowed out in Germany

-and nobody in Germany was allowed onto the train either.

-Exactly.

So, it was like a sealed diplomatic post-box that was sent up

through Germany and Denmark and then over here.

So, what were the consequences

of Lenin's journey from Switzerland, via at the Savoy Hotel in Malmo,

to St Petersburg?

I would say that the final consequence would be

the Russian Revolution, when people think of the Russian Revolution

as the forming of the Soviet state.

So, really, this German plot of sending a poison chalice,

this revolutionary back to Russia, was successful

because after the revolution Russia drops out of the war.

Yes, of course.

Early morning has brought me to this beautiful place,

thanks to a reference in my Bradshaw's to the fine pier harbour.

What a place for bracing sea air and possibly something more.

The buildings at the end of the pier are the Kallbadhus sauna,

which was built in 1898.

The owner, Henrik Klamborn,

tells me about a fine Swedish custom that takes place here.

It's quite a tradition, almost quite a cult for the Swedish people,

this matter of bathing.

Yes, this is almost like a religion.

When you have a cold bath and you come from the hot sauna

to the cold water, you feel very good and it's like...

I don't know what you call it in English, but you must do it again.

-It's like a cigarette.

-It's addictive.

-Yeah.

-So the tradition is you go from a very hot sauna into cold water.

-Yes.

-How hot, how cold?

-Between 85 and 95 degrees.

And in the winter, you have -2, -3.

-And you go from one to the other?

-Yes, directly.

Does that kill many people?

No. Not yet, I hope.

-Let's go and have a sauna. Do I put my swimming trunks on?

-No,

you don't. When you're in the sauna, you don't have any clothes on at all.

-I'm so sorry.

-OK.

-Let's give it a go.

-You're welcome.

Across Scandinavia, families go to saunas together

and seem to have no hang-ups about being naked with the in-laws.

It's as natural for them as taking a stroll in the park.

We think of Swedes as being, to put it mildly, pretty relaxed

about nudity, whether it's saunas or Swedish movies or whatever.

Is this true? Is this true?

I don't think Swedes are more...

What do you call it? The nudity and stuff, more than other countries.

But I think the films have been more

giving the wrong idea what Swedes are.

But, on the other hand, the fact that you do like saunas -

you say it's a kind of a national religion -

that does mean a lot of people who don't know each other being naked.

Yes, it is.

I have to tell you, that would be very un-British.

-It is?

-Oh, yeah.

-OK.

On the whole,

I don't take my clothes off with people I don't know.

Saunas have been part of Scandinavian culture

for hundreds of years.

The heat, along with being beaten with birch twigs,

increases blood circulation and the whole experience climaxes

with a plunge into freezing cold snow or water.

Time for me to see how my British stiff upper lip

copes with the experience.

Now for the Scandinavian plunge.

You didn't really think I'd do the full Swedish monty, did you?

Aargh!

Whoa!

Oh! That is invigorating.

It is.

But I'm not sure I'd describe it as addictive.

'Thawed out and properly dressed, I'm ready to continue my travels.'

I'm heading 11 miles north-east to the town of Lund.

It's a ten-minute journey on a line which opened in 1856.

Bradshaw's rather downbeat assessment of my next stop, Lund,

is, "A quiet town, once much more important."

But it does go on to say,

"The Romanesque cathedral, 12th century,

"is regarded as one of the finest in Sweden."

Indeed, it could have gone further and said

it's one of the most historic sites in northern Christendom.

From the 12th century onwards, pilgrims beat a path

to Lund Cathedral and, even today,

it attracts 700,000 visitors each year.

'I'm meeting Anita Larsson to find out more.'

Hello, Michael. Welcome to Lund Cathedral.

Thank you, Anita. It is a stunning building.

What is the significance of this in Christian history?

Well, this was actually the central Christian part of Northern Europe

in the Middle Ages because the Archbishop of Northern Europe

was placed here and therefore this church was built.

-Does it have any relics of saints?

-There are some interesting relics.

For example, some drops of the breast milk of Mary, for example.

-How curious.

-Yes.

-And has it been altered very much?

-It looks very complete from the outside.

-Yes.

There were big restorations in the 1800s.

For example, the western part here with the two towers

were completely new-built in the 1860s and '70s

because the medieval towers were in rather bad condition.

So this is 150 years old

but the eastern part is complete from the 1100s.

-How magnificent.

-Yes.

One of the finest features of Lund Cathedral

is the Horologium Mirabile Lundense,

which, if my Latin serves me correctly,

translates as the wondrous timepiece of Lund.

Here in front of you, you have this wonderful clock

that is in two sections.

Originally, it was built in the 1420s

but it was restored in the very beginning of the 1900s.

So, this clock from the 15th century with its signs of the Zodiac,

what does this tell us about the knowledge that those people had?

They, of course, had an opinion of the world.

Everyone did not think that the Earth was flat.

There were people knowing, the scientists, of course, that

the Earth was round and this is what you can see in the middle.

So, if you see the screw in the middle up there,

it is a symbol of the Earth,

and around the Earth you have the sun, the moon and the stars.

-So, they're still going round the Earth.

-Yes.

They thought so, actually.

And we are still saying that the sun is rising and setting,

-even if we know it is not so.

-Exactly.

On the second part of my journey through Scandinavia,

I discover the tiny origins of one of Sweden's greatest icons...

..rediscover a powerful waterfall...

That is spectacular!

..hear how the British were beaten in the race for the South Pole.

These skis, which I have taken out from the showcase,

from the exhibition itself, is Scott's skis.

-That is extraordinary.

-Yeah.

..and pay homage to the man who brought me here.