To Penny Hart, who has helped me so
much over the years.
First published in 2005 by Sutton Publishing
The History Press
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Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG
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This ebook edition first published in 2013
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© Jill Hamilton, 2005, 2013
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Contents
Chronology
Preface
One
Religion, Railways and Respectability
Two
A Nonconformist Childhood
Three
The Protestant Ethic
Four
A Spade! A Rake! A Hoe!
Five
A Long Way from the River Jordan
Six
Lay Preacher
Seven
Another New Career
Eight
A New Life in an Old Town
Nine
Total Abstinence
Ten
‘Excursions Unite Man to Man, and Man to God’
Eleven
Leicester: Printer of Guides and Temperance Hymn Books
Twelve
1845: The Commercial Trips, Liverpool, North Wales and Scotland
Thirteen
Scotland
Fourteen
Corn Laws: ‘Give Us Our Daily Bread’
Fifteen
Bankruptcy and Backwards
Sixteen
1848: Knowing Your Place in Society and Respecting Your Betters
Seventeen
The Great Exhibition
Eighteen
Paxton, Prince Albert and the Great Exhibition
Nineteen
Building Houses
Twenty
Crimea
Twenty-one
The Second and Third Decades
Twenty-two
A Leap in the Dark
Twenty-three
America at Last!
Twenty-four
For ‘All the People!’
Twenty-five
The Holy Land
Twenty-six
Jerusalem, Jerusalem
Twenty-seven
The Opening of the Suez Canal
Twenty-eight
Paris: War, 1870
Twenty-nine
Around the World
Thirty
Grandeur
Thirty-one
Egypt
Thirty-two
‘My God, My God, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?’
Epilogue
Appendix: Three Cook Letters
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Chronology
1808
Thomas Cook born in Melbourne, Derbyshire.
1834
John Mason Cook born on 13 January.
1841
Organises his first excursion by rail from Leicester to a Temperance meeting in Loughborough.
1845
Conducts his first trip for profit by railway to Liverpool from Leicester, Nottingham and Derby.
1846
Escorts a tour to Scotland.
1851
Promotes trips to the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park.
The Excursionist published for the first time as Cook’s Exhibition Herald and Excursion Advertiser.
1855
Inaugurates continental tour.
1863
Conducts his first party to Switzerland via Paris.
1864
John Mason Cook, aged 30, joins his father in business.
1865
Office opened in Fleet Street, London.
1866
John Mason escorts the first American tour.
1868
A system of hotel coupons introduced.
1869
Escorts his first party to Egypt and Palestine.
1871
Thomas Cook & Son becomes the official name of the firm.
1872/3
Organises and leads the first round-the-world tour – 222 days and 25,000 miles.
1873
New offices open at Ludgate Circus, London.
The first edition of Cook’s Continental Time Tables and Tourist’s Handbook is published.
1874
Cook’s Circular Note, an early form of the traveller’s cheque, is launched in New York.
1878
A Foreign Banking and Money Exchange Department is established.
1879
1 January. John Mason becomes ‘sole managing partner’.
1884
Thos. Cook & Son conveys a relief force sent to rescue General Gordon from Khartoum up the Nile as far as Wadi Halfa.
1892
Thomas Cook dies in Leicester aged 83.
Preface
Cook is a forgotten hero of his age. This book commemorates the 150th anniversary of his first overseas conducted tour in 1855. Driven by his religious faith, Cook founded a major industry, one that is now one of the world’s biggest sectors. In the UK alone, it is the third largest industry, worth over £75 billion a year.
When Cook was born in 1808, the term ‘tourism’ had not been invented. Leisure in distant places was mostly an unknown experience – as was staying in hotels or eating in restaurants. Poor men made journeys only when necessary; poor women usually stayed at home. Yet, by the time Cook died in 1892, travelling abroad had become part of modern life. The number of travellers from England who steamed across the Channel to the continent via ports with railway connections grew from 165,000 in 1850 to 951,000 by 1899.
It was not until Cook started his cheap overseas tours in 1855 that workers, let alone women, had the opportunity to go abroad easily. His group packages gave them an umbrella under which it was safer to explore foreign places. Just how revolutionary this was can be seen by looking at the small numbers of women who had braved sailing boats in the previous four centuries.
Cook’s career in travel began with the burgeoning of rail and steam transport in 1841; he died just as the combustion-engine era was about to take off. Since Cook’s death in 1892 modes of travel have changed enormously, but not the basic methods, organisation and marketing that he championed. A printer by trade, he knew the potential of advertising, promotions and travel writing – even starting the first regular monthly travel newspaper in 1851. Nearly every trip was promoted in advance with posters and leaflets, and each tourist was given historical and practical information to animate places en route and destinations. The one thing, though, that would startle this man who left school at ten years old would be the university degrees in tourism and the many Professors of Tourism and Leisure Management. As degrees in different aspects of the travel industry have expanded, the Thomas Cook Archives in Peterborough have been mined by research students. Like them, I have relied heavily on this invaluable resource. This book, though, was neither commissioned nor subsidised by the famous travel agency that Cook sta
rted. It springs entirely from my interest in how he opened up the Middle East, especially the Holy Land and Egypt, to tourism.
Three times a week, when walking to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, I walk past the site of Cook’s former house in Great Russell Street, opposite the British Museum, and I never fail to recall Cook’s tenacity and ability to keep going despite terrible reverses. The man who boasted that he had escorted over a million tourists without mishap witnessed the death of his only daughter at home because he personally misjudged the safety of a gas boiler. That was on top of having become estranged from his only son – but if he had lived longer he would have had the satisfaction of seeing that his name continued as a household word, synonymous with popular tourism; and that the Baptist chapel that he worked so hard to open in Rome in the 1870s is still well attended.
Jill Hamilton
Chelsea, November 2004
To travel is to feed the mind, humanize the soul, and rub off the rust of circumstance – to travel is to read the last new book, enjoy to its full the blessings of invention – to travel is to have Nature’s plan and her high works simplified, and her broad features of hill and dale, mountain and flood, spread like a map at one’s feet – to travel is to dispel the mists of fable and clear the mind of prejudice taught from babyhood, and facilitate perfectness of seeing eye to eye. Who would not travel at a penny per mile?
Thomas Cook, Excursionist, July 1854
ONE
Religion, Railways and Respectability
The prejudices which ignorance has engendered are broken by the roar of a train and the whistle of the engine awakens thousands from the slumber of ages . . .
Thomas Cook, Handbook to Scotland, 1846
Tourism is now among the world’s largest industries, but little is known about its greatest pioneer, Thomas Cook, the father of tourism. He revolutionised travel, invented package holidays and brought mobility to the masses.1 The sex, alcohol, overspending, indolent leisure and extravagance that are now associated with much of the holiday industry would horrify him. Few know of his preoccupation with God, Rome and the Holy Land, or of his determination to improve the lot of the working classes, let alone his abhorrence of beer houses, pubs and gin palaces. In the nineteenth century no priest, or minister, did more than this diminutive former preacher to shape Protestant attitudes to Palestine. By opening up Palestine to tourism, Cook deliberately offered the British people a way to reconnect with their religious roots. From 1869 onwards he brought the largest number of British to the Holy Land since the Crusader armies and private parties of pilgrims in the Middle Ages.
In 1976 a BBC documentary on Cook asked the question, ‘But what made him do it? This strait-laced provincial missionary – what drove him on? What fired his abundant energy?’ The following chapters attempt to give fresh insights into Cook – and, so that he, too, can have his voice, extracts from his voluminous writings are included in the appendix. His life gives a vivid picture of the influence of Nonconformity in England in the nineteenth century and the way it helped the slow march to a fairer society and democracy. Success for Cook was integrated with the collective power of the Nonconformists, many of whose ancestors had suffered the rack, the dungeon and the scaffold both during and after the Reformation.
Cook’s near-forty-year career was full of leaps and contradictions, but he himself changed little. He never lost his Derbyshire accent, his fidgetiness or the habit of walking with his hands thrust into his pockets. Sometimes, when listening, he put his hands together and twirled his thumbs over one another.2 One writer described Cook in Paris ‘answering questions and swallowing coffee with a rapid dexterity worthy of a Chinese juggler’.3 Another writer, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s sister, described him in 1871 as ‘a home-staying, retired tradesman’. Failings in etiquette and his ‘northerness’ were compensated by his foresight, patience and the ability of a stage entertainer to hold a crowd and impart excitement.
Cook always felt that God was on his side. All his life he retained the traits of many Baptists – that is, a horror of self-indulgence, debts of any sort or extravagance. Faith sustained him when he was attacked in the press by upper-class critics trying to stem the tide of travellers to ‘their’ resorts. Ever resourceful, Cook actually prospered from their condemnation. When his ‘hordes’ began pouring into the tourist destinations of the more affluent, Cook looked to faraway places to find untrammelled havens. So, while more tourists went to places like Morecambe, Blackpool and Ramsgate, the middle classes were exploring the Continent and Middle East – with Cook.
Cook was impelled by religion. Devotion to God, prayer and the Bible fired his imagination and provided him with his daily strength. He also drew inspiration from two other features of the Victorian era – railways and respectability. Scope came from the spreading of the railways. Integrity came from Temperance, which epitomised the ideals of self-control and self-denial and fitted in with nineteenth-century prudery and decorum. To these can be added resolution and reliability. Finally, there was music. Often bands with drums and trumpets beat out rousing tunes on his excursions.
Cook’s life was no fairy-tale rags to riches story of a man rising effortlessly from obscurity. In his case, nights filled with letter-writing, accounts and editing frequently followed days of sustained effort. Even when short of sleep, he often had to reverse mishaps, but somehow he coped with the misadventures of travel – missed connections, broken-down trains, fierce storms at sea, hotels with double bookings and lost luggage. When things went wrong Cook relied on the ethos of self-help so characteristic of the nineteenth century and religious stoicism. But his ability to remain unruffled meant that he could have prearranged trips to see stampeding elephants. Whether facing insurgent warfare or the perils of the Swiss Alps, customers felt safe.
His assets in the travel business were his career as a printer and his marketing skills combined with rigorous self-discipline, attention to detail and an ability to coordinate transport and ground arrangements. Sophisticated marketing, whether persuading people of the evils of alcohol or the advantages of taking a train trip, was at the forefront of all his businesses. With his own printing presses and the help of just a few apprentices, he could quickly turn out stacks of cheap-to-produce leaflets, posters and flyers. Today, marketing is a subject in the curriculum of universities, but Cook acquired his know-how first by selling cabbages, turnips and other vegetables at Derby market, then by learning how to attract converts when earning his living proselytising for the Baptists, and he finally perfected his skills during his near twenty years as a publisher of Temperance literature. He made sure that newspapers and leaflets heightened the anticipation about coming excursions, and that destinations were made more fascinating by guidebooks and itineraries with potted histories.
Cook’s dazzling progress coincided with the most action-packed period of parliamentary change in England. He started out as an itinerant Baptist lay preacher at the age of nineteen in 1828, the year of the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. His time as a self-employed cabinet-maker began in the year of the Great Reform Act, which extended the franchise to all ‘ten-pound householders’. He reached his goal of escorting trips to the Holy Land the year after the much-awaited passage of the second Reform Bill of 1867, which was also the golden moment of Nonconformity and Evangelicalism in English politics. Politics may sound a far cry from Cook sending thousands of holiday-makers off to criss-cross the earth’s surface, but much reform, like Cook’s early trips, was driven by the same ascendancy of religious ferment.
A leading anti-Corn Law campaigner, Cook promoted ‘the poor man’s bread’, the Big Loaf and aid to the starving. He enjoyed the struggle in the 1840s tremendously. Born eight years into the beginning of the century and dying eight years before its end, he spanned the nineteenth century and was typical of those who were entrenched in Nonconformist religion.4 At a time when reform was a key political slogan, Cook was one of the voices in the large groups
of Nonconformist Liberals who cried out for education, the disestablishment of the Church of England, an end to church tithes and Free Trade.
While religion gave Cook drive and purpose, the Bible was the wellspring of his life, and, after he had taken the Pledge at the age of twenty-four in 1833, Temperance was the catalyst.5 Cut-price package tourism became a social mission. Because travel freed people and widened their social circles, he wanted to help the poor to ‘go beyond’, get out of their rut, escape the confines of their own homes and fleetingly forget the dreariness of their lives by awakening their minds. Most people in his village seldom travelled further than thirty miles at the most, yet Cook took his name to the ends of the earth, turning it into one of the most easily recognised trademarks in the world. The phrase ‘Cook’s Tour’ entered the English language. He made both scenic beauty and history, combined with trouble-free travelling, a saleable commodity.
The following chapters, while unveiling a little-known side of this ‘pioneer of convenient travel’, give an idea of the extraordinary extent to which religion, then one of the driving forces of the age,6 dominated the lives and politics of so many. The contribution of Nonconformity in the nineteenth century, together with the mutual support given by its members, was enormous. Apart from Joseph Paxton, nearly every helping hand extended to Cook in his first fifty years belonged to a Nonconformist.
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