The Leicester Chronicle described throngs of people in Loughborough ‘lining the streets and filling the windows as they passed by’. Once in the market place the crowd paused to raise their voices and sing, then they marched and held up placards as they were applauded by amazed onlookers. The mood was raised by Cook’s zest for life, his sense of style and all the props that would give a carnival atmosphere.
A stylish picnic lunch under the trees – something which would be a hallmark of thousands of tours – was laid out on white tablecloths. There was good bread and Yorkshire ham and later a high tea of cakes, crumpets and sandwiches. To compete with the fellowship, conviviality and companionship that is so associated with drinking in alehouses, groups played innocent games, such as ‘kiss in the ring’, ‘tag’, ‘drop the handkerchief’ and ‘blind man’s bluff’, then they dispersed themselves into new groups for dancing followed by a cricket match.
‘Hip, hip, hurray’ was chorused over and over again after each speech given by the various ministers present. The Revd J. Babington of Cossington made remarks on the evils of drunkenness and the benefits arising from total abstinence. He had signed the Pledge after hearing an address by Thomas and told of his brother, a surgeon at a London hospital, who ‘invariably found that persons who were brought into the hospital, who had been accustomed to drunkenness, were the most difficult to cure’.
Next was the speech given by the Revd Mr Boot, Baptist minister from Wolverhampton, who said ‘that Teetotalism was good for the body, the pocket, and the mind. It was good, too, for the drunken man – and it was good for the drunken man’s wife.’ Cheers greeted his words about the ‘great benefits that would accrue to every class of society from the universal adoption of the Total Abstinence principle’. He added that he hoped the time was not far distant when all intoxicating drinks would be confined – as they were once – to the apothecary’s shop. The Revd Mr Robinson, Primitive Methodist, hoped too that the time was not far distant when ‘the Teetotal banner would be hoisted in the midst of the burning sands of Africa, and also in the frozen regions of the north’.
Minister after minister spoke. Thomas, who was chairman, raised some laughs by asking people to ‘hold up their hands to show who were pledged Teetotallers’ – for he could not yet pretend to distinguish by the face a Teetotaller from those who were not – especially when he saw so many with suspiciously rosy cheeks. A regular forest of hands was held up. ‘Surely’, said the Chairman, ‘there must be some mistake, or else the police must have kept every drunkard and every “moderate” man out of Mr. Paget’s park!’ He then announced that a meeting was to be held in the Baptist school-room on Tuesday evening, and that a lecture was to be delivered on Thursday evening by Mr Higginbottom, surgeon, of Nottingham. The calendar of activities for those in Temperance was certainly crowded.
Eventually, the exhausted party assembled on Loughborough station with much jollity, were jammed into the return train and at 10.30p.m. alighted at Leicester Railway Station. The air of exuberance of the outing contrasted with the often stunted lives of many of the farm labourers, local factory workers and home-based frame-work hosiery knitters. The day had lifted them temporarily away from their dismal homes, many of which were pestilent, back-to-back hovels where occupants were prey to epidemics, vermin and sloth.
Thomas had the advantage of his trading beginning when the outdated medieval structure of holidays was in its closing stages. In many factories Christmas was the only recognised full day off work other than Sundays. Christmas and Good Friday were also the only full holidays which the Factory Act of 1833 prescribed for children under the age of twelve in the textile mills. Some manufacturers took advantage of a loophole under which, if children consented, they could work on those days. The same trend affected offices. The Bank of England closed on forty-seven holidays in 1761, forty in 1825, eighteen in 1830 and just four in 1834 – Good Friday, Christmas Day, May Day and 1 November.
But as the national income grew, improved hours and holidays could not be withheld indefinitely. The most important innovation was the weekly half-holiday. By the 1850s the building trades in some towns stopped work at four o’clock on Saturdays, leading to the one-and-a-half day weekend. Thomas strove to fill this spare time and each year benefited from the introduction of more holidays, which climaxed in the Bank Holidays Act of 1871.
When Thomas started his tours there had been a few organised package trips on railways here and there, but nothing long lasting. Some had been money-making concerns but most were for clubs, such as the ‘interchange of visits between the Leicester and Nottingham Mechanics’ Institutes’. Fares for group bookings had now been for sale for five years and outings had been organised by some railway companies in 1818. Thomas’s tours were the most enduring and most financially successful of the nineteenth-century travel entrepreneurs, but he could not claim to have invented train excursions. He later made clear that his was ‘the first publicly advertised excursion known in the country’12 and the first personally conducted tour, even though it was ‘either the second or third train of the kind ever run on the Midland Railway’. When Thomas later wrote that the Loughborough outing had been ‘the starting point of that series of excursions and tours’, he also acknowledged the invaluable help of printing and advertising. In his Guide to Leicester he wrote, ‘Advertising is to trade what steam is to machinery.’ Indeed, he applied the same principle as with publishing: the more you do, the cheaper it is per copy. Later he wrote, ‘I now see no reason why a hundred may not travel together as easily as a dozen . . .’13 The major cost of each train trip was the coaling and the ‘steaming up’, so the idea was to pack it with people.
Comparing Thomas’s career in travel with that of the inventor of the modern post, Sir Rowland Hill, shows how many started but soon ceased business. Hill organised the first ever seaside package trip but he did not manage to sustain it even though seaside holidays had begun to flourish in the late eighteenth century, and already Brighton, Weymouth and many other new resorts were well established. But, like many other tour operators, Hill was left behind. It was Thomas whose trips grew into an on-going enterprise. He was the pioneer who battled ‘against inaugural difficulties’ and placed the ‘system on a basis of consolidated strength’.14
ELEVEN
Leicester: Printer of Guides and
Temperance Hymn Books
Within two months of the Temperance train outing to Loughborough, just as the hollyhocks were coming into flower, Thomas and Marianne packed up their home in Market Harborough. A new life was in front of them in the ancient city of Leicester, the ‘Metropolis of Dissent’. It was a suitable place for the Cook family to live, especially as two-fifths of the local churchgoers attended seven Baptist chapels each Sunday. Famed for its Radicalism and Free-Church/Puritan/Quaker/Nonconformist heritage1 and its hosiery and shoe trade, Leicester ‘was spread over an unusual extent of ground in proportion to its population’.2 It retained a pleasing variety of architectural styles – medieval, Tudor, Georgian and Regency – and the open-air market place still occupied the whole of the south-eastern quarter of the walled town, as it had since the tenth century. Factories and warehouses were spreading but did not yet impinge on its trees, gardens and wide new streets. Houses for workers were superior to those in Nottingham, most with four rooms3 and with yards and some even had little gardens.
William Baines, a Congregationalist draper who had not paid the church levy, was imprisoned for seven months.4 Outraged, his pastor, Edward Miall, openly vowed to confront the issue of church rates, become a champion of religious liberty and fight to separate church and state. Miall and the organisation he set up, the Anti-State Church Association, which in 1853 became the Liberation Society, moved to London, where he brought out a newspaper, the Nonconformist, to fight for the disestablishment of the Church of England. The same year as Baines was sent to prison, four more parishioners in Leicester who refused to pay fines for non-payment of rates were saved when an elder
ly lady stepped in to pay them.
In contrast to this, five years earlier the power of Nonconformists had created a new era, a new age with a radical council. In 1835 the Municipal Corporations Act converted the old corporations that had controlled English town life since the Middle Ages into 179 new municipal boroughs. Leicester, as other towns, started planning council elections. In 1836, as in many industrial cities and towns in England, Leicester turned over to the rule of Nonconformists. A Nonconformist lord mayor was supported by Nonconformist councillors, aldermen and town clerk. Now any male householder whose house was rated could cast a vote in council elections, a number greatly enlarged because of the repeal of the Corporations and Test Acts. Precise records of the religious affiliation of members, though, are either limited or have not been examined, so in most areas there is no certainty as to whether the elections brought in a similar dominance of Nonconformists in other places. Only in Leicester, Manchester, Salford and Birmingham, where the Nonconformist element was well recorded, have scholars analysed and published the composition of the borough councils, let alone the number of the MPs in the parliament after the Reform Act in 1832.
Most of the thirty-eight new council members in Leicester had been a mixture of Nonconformist Radicals, Liberals and Whigs. No longer was the town directed by the landed gentry. Only four Tories remained. The first mayor, a Unitarian, belonged to the chapel called ‘the Great Meeting’, as did the following seven, so the chapel earned the name the ‘Mayors’ Nest’. The Act of Toleration of 1689 had excluded Unitarians and Quakers, but that had not prevented the Unitarians of Leicester building it in 1708. The same defiant spirit now set out to reform the council.
In the same way that their Nonconformist ancestors, in contrast to Catholics, had created places of worship which were bare and unadorned, the new councillors stripped the town hall of the trappings of the former Tory Corporation. Wanting a total break with the past, they threw out much of what signified the pomp of English civic life. During the Reformation their ancestors had rejected and thrown out rosaries, relics, incense, statues of the Virgin Mary, pilgrimages, the intervention of saints, making the sign of the cross, lighting candles, buying indulgences, venerating images, and so on. Out went the silver-topped mace and gilded goblets and baubles. Anything described as the ‘paraphernalia and appurtenances which symbolised the dignity and extravagance of the old order’ went under the hammer at an auction in the Guildhall – much at knockdown prices. It was hoped, too, that much of this would bring in cash to make up for monies lost during the previous corrupt council.
Two of the new-look councillors who had agreed to auction these historic objects ‘at promptly one pm on 1st January 1836’ were men who were catalysts in Thomas’s life. One was a Baptist, the other a Quaker. The first was Winks, who had been pivotal in Thomas’s life; the other was John Ellis, the tall, portly Quaker industrialist. Like the majority of men who had a far-reaching influence on Thomas’s life from 1834 onwards, Ellis, or ‘Railway John’, from Beaumont Leys, was an anti-drink crusader. A farmer and factory owner who had purchased Belgrave Hall,5 a mansion on the outskirts of the city, Ellis gave Thomas his first openings in major railway excursions. In Leicester, as in most other places, the men behind Temperance were mostly Nonconformist and/or Liberal – still an imprecise term. There were confusing and shifting alliances of Whigs, Conservatives, Peelites, Irish nationalists and Radicals for the next forty years.
An ambiguity over the use of the word ‘Liberal’ confuses the situation. At this stage there were only two political parties, the Whigs and the Tories. Before a clear two-party system emerged, there was no unified national Liberal party of any sort in Britain, even though there were local associations, each with its own ideology. ‘Liberal’ was an expression used to describe political leanings, as an adjective. It became a paradigm in political life, an inadequate umbrella used by a range of politicians, such as Radicals, anti-trade union Whigs like Lord Melbourne, fanatical Free Traders, or reformers, such as Ellis, Potter or Silk Buckingham.
‘Liberal’ meant different things in different places. The Liberal Party finally came into existence in the summer of 1859 at a meeting at Willis’s Rooms in St James’s organised by a group of Radicals, Free Traders, Peelites, Gladstonian Liberals and Old Whigs to combine to oust the government of Lord Derby. A large number of Radicals pushed for the disestablishment of the Church of England, for the redress of other Nonconformist grievances, for the widening of the franchise, for the limiting of the power of the House of Lords and Free Trade. The Conservative Party had been formed earlier in 1835. But it was not until 1868, nine years after the Liberal Party had been formed, that the first Liberal government was elected, with Gladstone at its head. Although Gladstone was a High Churchman and an Old Etonian, the party he led for twenty-five years was predominantly a party of religious Nonconformity – and remained so until the end of the century.
After the first Leicester elections, some of the tight-knit feeling between the Nonconformists was lessening. For centuries, the struggle against the Anglican monopoly in the council had given them unity, but without a common cause the Nonconformists were no longer in agreement, and two groups were fiercely against each other. On one side there were the ‘Improvers’, led by William Biggs,6 one of the town’s largest hosiery manufacturers. They insisted on improvements to beautify the appearance of the city at the same time as installing and maintaining sewers, drainage and water supply. Leicester needed, they said, an imposing town hall, a wider high street and more recreational grounds for the working class. Opposing the ‘Improvers’ were the ‘Economists’, or ‘Economy Party’, led by Joseph Whetstone, chairman of the Finance Committee of the Council, who wanted to trim expenditure down to what was essential and to give priority to drains. The Public Health Act was still in the future,7 and life expectancy was low in Leicester, as in other places, because of appalling sanitation, scarce drainage, the lack of fresh-water reservoirs and indifference to the accumulated rubbish and the factory effluents which polluted the River Soar. When delivering a fiery talk in Leicester, Biggs referred to the ‘merchant princes’ of nearby Derby as ‘the Medici of their day’. Biggs, like other men who owned large modern mills with mounting exports, helped finance the Anti-Corn Law League, furthered Free Trade and was sympathetic to Nonconformist men who fostered similar causes. He was soon singled out by Thomas.
Aware of the need to attract votes, Biggs allowed the newly formed Leicester Temperance Society to use his hosiery warehouse for Thomas’s ‘great tea meeting which comprised 1000 guests’, many of whom came from afar. Within weeks an advertisement appeared in the Leicester Chronicle saying that he was ‘a Bookseller and Stationer’ specialising in ‘all kinds of Periodicals, Unstamped Newspapers and Books of every description . . . Printing and Bookbinding in every department executed to order’. His printer’s shop at 1 King Street also sold pens, stationery and a few commemorative medals.8 Time and money, though, were in short supply. While setting himself up in Leicester, for four years Thomas also arranged what he called ‘amateur performances’, Temperance railway outings. Destinations depended on where the new track had just been laid.
Thomas wrote that ‘a succession of trips, uniting Leicester, Nottingham, Derby, and Birmingham, all at that time connected with the Temperance movement, engaged my attention for two or three years’. There were also outings to and from Rugby and other nearby stations. Thomas wrote that the fares for all these local trains, except for Birmingham, ‘were 1/- for adults, and 6d for children under fourteen years of age. Return fares to Birmingham were generally 2/6, and for children half-price’. He added that these trips ‘were generally very successful. Most . . . were in connection with the Temperance movement, and I had no personal pecuniary interest in them beyond the printing of bills.’ He was, though, preparing the way for commercial sightseeing trips by providing classic tourist destinations on his itinerary, such as Mount Sorrel and the old spa town of Matlock, situated amidst
romantic scenery on the Derwent.
As well as being a tour organiser on a non-paid basis for Temperance causes, Thomas occasionally climbed up onto rostrums and took up his old role of preacher. Three total immersion baptisms were performed by him on 28 July 1844 in Smeeton Westerby, a village south of Leicester near Foxton Locks on the Market Harborough to Leicester stretch of the Grand Union Canal. Leicestershire has plenty of inland waterways and is rich in meandering rivers, like the Soar and the Welland, so why a rivulet had been chosen is not known. But when some troublemakers broke down the embankments, an alternative venue was found. The General Baptist Repository9 recorded that at ‘On Lord’s Day, July 28th, three persons, one male and two females, were added to our little flock by baptism. The sacred ordinance was performed in the canal, about a mile from the chapel . . . in front of a crowd estimated at from 800 to 1000 who listened with marked attention to an address by Mr T. Cook, Leicester, who afterwards immersed the candidates.’10 Thomas remained active as a preacher, delivering yet another address to the Sabbath School at Smeeton a week later.
William Biggs, who served Leicester as mayor in 1842, 1848 and 1859, was also secretary of the local Liberal Association. After he led his party in winning the town’s two parliamentary seats from the Tories in 1838, the two new members were chaired through the town in a procession of about 20,000 people. This was the first time in history that non-Tories had won seats in Leicester.
Ellis was also typical of the Nonconformists in the new council. Blunt but charitable – his daughters11 tirelessly ran a local school and helped Leicester’s poor – he was chairman of the Midland Railway Company between 1849 and 1858 and the Liberal MP for the area for four years from 1848. A pioneer in passenger trains, he had recruited George and Robert Stephenson (of Rocket fame) to build the Leicester to Swannington railway in 1832, the third railway to be opened in Britain.12
Thomas Cook Page 8
