His attempt to begin a career of lay preaching, district visiting, Bible distribution and impressing religion and morality on an unsettled population coincided with a triumph for both the Nonconformists and Catholics. It was a crisis with the Catholics which opened the door. Fearing a rebellion in Ireland, the Duke of Wellington, who had become prime minister that year,1 demonstrated that staunch Tories were moving with the times by putting through the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. Following this act, in April 1829, much to the joy of the 60,000 Irish Catholics in Liverpool and 40,000 in Manchester, the Catholic Emancipation Act2 was passed. The next month, in May, the first Roman Catholic took his seat in the House of Commons. Such was the feeling against Catholics that the king sobbed as his gouty hand signed the bill and some Protestants attributed the bad weather in the summer to its passing.3 It was the beginning of the lessening of divisions between members of the Church of England and members of other religions.
Thomas realised that to qualify as a missionary or preacher he needed to be a practised speaker. In the early hours with his friend John Earp he would climb through the chapel windows and rehearse, ‘each in turn became preacher and audience’.4 This pulpit style was later used by him when herding tourists.
After diligently studying theological dogma Thomas was appointed an Evangelist. An ‘impressive service, in which he was solemnly set apart for the work’,5 was later described in the Home Mission Register. But an entry in the Melbourne Baptist Minute Book on 28 October 1828 showed there were reservations:
It was agreed that Brother Nailor should send a letter to the committee of the Home Mission, on behalf of Brother Cook, as a recommendation, so far as regards his piety – and as a suitable person for the important work as an Evangelist, so far as we judge him fit, whatever other qualifications are requisite we as a Church not knowing the extent of the work devolving on a person in that station we leave the case to the discretion and judgement of the Committee.6
Thomas’s job was to ‘carry the gospel of salvation through faith in the Lord Jesus, to the ignorant and neglected’. In the wake of Captain James Cook hundreds of uncivilised corners of the world had been changed by the Bible and the British flag, but now there was an emphasis on spreading ‘the word’ locally in Britain.
When the blossom appeared on the apple and pear trees, about the time of his twentieth birthday, Thomas, with ‘deep regret’, left Melbourne and became a Village Evangelist for the Baptist Missionary Society. At £36 per annum it was not a profitable calling, but he was doing God’s work. Rain, hail and shine, he strode out across fields silently rehearsing his speeches and sermons. Summer turned to autumn, and to the long dark winter. Undeterred by falling snow, or by the difficulty of negotiating muddy paths, he went on. A hat, some well-worn clothes, writing paper, quills, ink, prayer book, the Bible and a rug in his shoulder-bag were his only possessions. It was usual then, when walking over dark fields at moonless nights, to use a lantern, but for Thomas this was an unheard-of expense. For him the long dark nights, on the move or in lodgings, were often candleless. His habit of rising to catch the first glimmer of morning light so he could read would stay with him all his life.
Thomas’s duties were to hold meetings, conduct services, find converts, preach the Word, distribute pamphlets, help out at Sunday schools, sell Bibles and Testaments. Superhuman joy could be reached through a conversion experience. As a lay-preacher he was poised to snatch people from temptation. He urged them to see ‘the Light!’ and replace the nullity and void in their lives with Him. The Nonconformist chapels provided moral cement to shape the long days of the labourers, underpaid piece workers and factory employees toiling under miserable conditions. The number of drunks, gamblers, dissolute wife-beaters and the generally depraved would have been higher if it had not been for the efforts of the chapels.
Preaching was a precarious existence, attracting hecklers and mobs delighting in hissing and throwing objects at do-gooding busybodies and, above all, at those speaking about salvation. Wesley and his co-preacher, George Whitefield, founders of the Methodist Church, had raised the levels of oratory but had withstood stones, rotten eggs and the dead cats of hecklers. Preaching would empower Thomas all his life, as did the habit of taking risks and stretching physical endurance.
At this stage, he could have provoked unwanted responses as he was bold and had a certain nonchalance. This, though, was balanced by an earnestness which rang through everything he said. Hiding his shyness, like a confident actor he developed a hearty platform manner. Defiantly, he would try to match the words of the hecklers such as when he later condemned hissing as ‘Gooseism and Snakeism’, telling an offender to ‘return to Jericho until his beard is grown. Let us have no more of his puppyism and cowardly sidewinds’.7 This independence provoked one Baptist minister in the area to criticise Thomas:
Calling on Mr. Taylor on one occasion, he was treated kindly and accompanied on the road some distance; but regarding him as a kind of innovator on established order, he said to the young missioner before parting – ‘Young man, I advise you to give up this work at once; you have a cold already, and if you continue the work you will not live long.’ But Mr. Cook did not give it up, and, though more than sixty years have passed since then, he is still living.8
Thomas’s itineraries were brisk and took him through the counties of Rutland, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire and many new industrial areas where conditions were still grim. So far efforts to improve the lot of children had been ineffective, and movements to improve factory conditions still had a long way to go. Robert Owen had fought strenuously for the second Factory Act of 1819, which forbade the employment in cotton mills of children under the age of nine, but there was no adequate provision for inspection to check if factories were implementing improved conditions. Droves of pauper children were handed over to the mill-owners to work long hours in shifts and sleep in apprentice-houses. Days could well last from 5a.m. to 8p.m. with only brief breaks.9 It was not until 1833 that a Factory Act set up inspectors.
There was a battle ahead to relieve the plight of wretched children in rags, starving orphans on the streets, tenants sinking in debt and squalor and widows without sustenance. Apart from the alms from the church, the poorhouse or, with luck, a better job, there was little hope. William Blake called for the building of a New Jerusalem ‘among these dark Satanic Mills’. His epic Jerusalem: The Emanation of The Giant Albion portrayed a world of spiritual freedom, a new land.10
Lord Ashley fought for reform and lent his weight to various bills, resulting in the 1842 Mines Act and later the Factory Act, known as the ‘Ten Hour Bill’. The Mines Act prevented women, girls and boys under ten from working underground; the ‘Ten Hour Bill’ limited the hours of women and young persons in the textile industry to ten hours a day for five days a week and eight hours on Saturday.
Far from Blake’s ‘Satanic Mills’ was Barrowden, in Rutland, north of Peterborough in Northamptonshire. This quintessential sleepy brick-and-stone English village with its duck pond, two greens, mill, tannery, church and chapel became Thomas’s new home. A water mill mentioned in 1259 was now the site of a new mill, behind which was a large tannery, where cow hides were made into rugs, parchment for drums and glue. Thomas lodged in a farmhouse belonging to a Baptist, Henry Mason, a widower with five sons and one daughter, and described11 as a farmer, grazier and maltster. The eldest, Marianne, a Sunday school teacher, kept house. When she met Thomas in 1829 she was already twenty-two, an age which then put her ‘on the shelf’. The courtship dragged on for four years. This was not caused by awaiting permission, as legal consent for marriage was then required only up until the age of twenty-one, and she had been older than that when their romance had begun. Indeed, she was eighteen months older than Thomas.
Photographs show that Marianne was petite, light-haired with blue eyes and thin lips. Her slightly severe appearance was due to sharp features. She was later described as possessing a ‘better business brain than
her husband’ and being a ‘smallish very dapper lady who gave one the impression that she was all there’.12 An interest in religion, especially the Bible, remained prominent in her life. She had learnt to read and write at the same time as taking the art of managing a large household in her stride. Capable though she was, she was shy and hesitant. The mannered correspondence between Thomas and her in their few surviving letters does not reveal a loving relationship, but over the years they developed an affectionate dependency on one another.
Years later Thomas described his debut as a preacher: ‘After I had been one year in the service of the village Missionary Society, I made a tour through the principal parts of the Midland Counties, and held meetings in most of the General Baptist Connexion’ in dozens of towns and villages, including Barlestone, Nailstone, Market Bosworth, Hugglescote, Ibstock, Measham.
During these years he found that, like Bunyan’s roads, his were crowded with moving figures and adventures. The twelve-arched thirteenth-century bridge over the Trent at Swarkestone, the longest stone bridge in England, was crossed and recrossed. At some venues he was greeted with open arms, at others hooted and pelted. For some, heckling, jeering and rough handling were a sport.13 The easiest places were those where there were already New Connexion Baptist chapels, like Hinckley, set up in 1770, the home town of his grandfather. Thomas must have been suffering from the toughness of his campaigning and constant travel, as the Baptist minister there, the Revd James Taylor, told him ‘to get back home as soon as possible’. Years later, Thomas wrote that this minister ‘had the impression that I should not be long-lived if I continued in that work’.
Another centre which he enjoyed was Barton-in-the-Beans, the rich bean-growing area of Leicestershire, a place which had influenced the New Connexion of General Baptists. The town of Billesdon with its academy, run by William Creaton the minister and headmaster, was also high on the list of the places he liked to visit.
SEVEN
Another New Career
In 1829 a shadow fell over Thomas’s career. From £36 per annum, his salary was reduced to just £26 on ‘account of the great kindness of people among whom he laboured giving him so many presents, and, we judge, inviting him so frequently to their social board’.1 Preacher though he was, the only figures that Thomas produced have nothing to do with the converts he brought to the church, but the meticulously measured distances he travelled. In 1829 he noted that he clocked up 2,692 miles. Each day he calculated the distance covered, carefully writing down the figure in a pocket notebook. Over 2,000 of those miles (2,106 to be precise) were walked. A further 500 miles were as a passenger in horse-drawn carriages, stage-coaches or horseback. This careful cataloguing of mileage might also have been to impress his mother, who had earlier undertaken walking tours of England in search of converts.2 The newly introduced railways are not mentioned in Thomas’s notes, as there were then no railways in the Midlands. The Stockton to Darlington railway, Britain’s first railway, was only four years old.
Rails started criss-crossing the landscape after the inauguration of both George Stephenson’s Rocket in 1829 and the Liverpool to Manchester train service3 the following year – the most expensive train built since Stephenson had invented the locomotive in 1814.4 Immediately, it became the fastest line in the world and was also the first ‘inter-city’ railway line linking two large industrial centres. While some companies such as this one made huge returns for shareholders, the promises of many other companies proved hollow. Railway shares were so risky that they were parodied by Lewis Carroll in ‘The Hunting of the Snark’ with the line, ‘You may threaten its life with a railway-share’.
For three years from 1829 discontent from France crossed the Channel. The English monarchy was at its lowest ebb. When George IV died in July, after his funeral The Times wrote, ‘There never was an individual less regretted by his fellow-creatures than this deceased King . . . What eye wept for him?’5 His brother, William IV, sixty-four, was more popular, having kept the habits of a brusque, hard-swearing, hard-drinking sailor.
As a general election had to take place following the succession of a new sovereign, there was a new government, with Earl Grey as prime minister – remembered for the aromatic tea named after him. When disturbances spread in which even moderate orators attacked the absurdity of the electoral system, Grey began the moves which would result in passing one of the most significant pieces of legislation in British history, the Reform Bill. The hurdles, though, were many. On 8 October 1831, after the Archbishop of Canterbury and twenty other bishops in the House of Lords had voted against it, anti-clerical riots broke out across the country.6 In Bristol crowds burned not only the bishop’s palace but another hundred buildings to the ground. The army savagely attacked the crowds, leaving a death toll of over a hundred.
Political stirrings were voiced by churchmen, but new preachers like Thomas had to be careful. He did not, though, have to exercise caution for long. Before his thirty-second birthday, he faced the fourth change in the way he earned his living. Job shortages and general distress were heightened by an epidemic of cholera – which had replaced both smallpox and the plague as the major killing disease – of unprecedented severity.7 This was seen as a judgement of God upon the nation, and there were cries to shut down theatres and ballrooms, to smash card tables and to sack parsons who hunted. When one MP called for a general fast as an act of penitence for the state of the nation, Henry Hunt, the rabble-rousing MP who had been imprisoned after the Peterloo riots, asked the promoters if they were aware that one-third of the people of Britain fasted almost every day in the week.8
Like those of thousands of men in England then, Thomas’s nerves were quickened by the economic downturn. The Baptists announced that there were no longer any funds to pay an itinerant preacher. This may have been a convenient excuse. Should he further his schooling and become a minister like Winks, who had already moved from Loughborough to Leicester to give more scope to his dual career as a clergyman and publisher of children’s literature? But at twenty-three Thomas let his heart rule his head. He set up shop as a carpenter in Barrowden so he would be near Marianne Mason.
Mastery of his trade put Thomas in a better position than the thousands of unskilled unemployed, but customers were slow in coming. In the middle of November 1832 he relocated to nearby Market Harborough, the twelfth-century market town dominated by the Anglican church of St Dionysius. From then onwards the county of Leicestershire was to be his home. No doubt, the appeal of Leicestershire was partly because of its reputation for religious tolerance. Nearby was Lutterworth, the home of John Wyclif, the ‘morning star of the Reformation’; George Fox, the founder of the Society of Friends or Quakers, was also born nearby in Fenny Drayton.
Market Harborough, which then had a population of only about 2,500 but at least six places of worship, was on a road to Leicester, and the Royal Mail coach from Manchester to London stopped there each day at 9.30p.m. at the Three Swans in the high street.9 Day and night countless drivers of coaches and carts halted to refresh themselves and their horses while collecting boxes of hats and carpets. All trade was welcome, as the carpets and worsteds factory belonging to John Clarke and six straw hat makers, the main employers in the town, were then feeling the effects of the slump depressing trade everywhere.
Thomas’s rented house in Adam and Eve Street, backing onto Quakers’ Yard, was, like his workshop, surrounded by one-up, one-down labourers’ cottages. To establish himself in a new town would have been a brave or a foolish thing to do without either cousins, uncles or membership of a chapel. For a worker migrating from town to town, belonging to a chapel could be the ticket of entry and offer instant relationships with people with common aims. Religious affiliation often turned members into a particular community that fought together so each could ‘better oneself’. Politics once again was becoming a subtle component of chapel life, something which was soon to gain momentum and, from the late 1850s, carry the Liberal Party into the next century.
No newcomer who settled in such a town was ever truly part of it. Outsider though Thomas had been in Barrowden, he had been on the fringe of acceptance by being engaged to the daughter of a well-respected family. Here in Market Harborough, as in most small towns, groups of suspicious neighbours instinctively excluded, and even rejected, outsiders. The experience of these snubs would harden Thomas for the many which lay ahead.
At last in 1832 – over a year since the bishops had opposed it – the political struggle which had begun after Waterloo came to a head. The Reform Bill, which Grey called ‘that most aristocratic measure’, was passed. Bonfires were lit up and down the country. The anomalies were still huge,10 but the Rotten Boroughs were no more. Less than 15 per cent of adult males had the vote out of a population of 24 million, but there would be forty-two MPs for the industrial towns and each county was to have two MPs. With the number of voters still limited to about one in eight adult males, the increase was only from 400,000 to somewhere between 600,000 and 800,000. While it broadened the class and backgrounds of those who could take part in the ballot, there was still a wide gulf between MPs and the people who elected them.11 The aristocracy continued to dominate politics, with landowners filling most seats on both sides of the House, but now at least some MPs now lived in the areas they represented.
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