From London’s Euston Station he walked south. Everywhere there were signs of dash and style: swift carriages with coachmen in top hats, phaetons, barouches, broughams, waggonettes, gigs, four-wheeled chaises and four-in-hands jostled beside horse-drawn buses6 and hackney cabs. London, choking with traffic, poverty and riches, seemed to have more people and horse-drawn vehicles than anywhere else in the world. Behind the grandeur were tenements, open sewers, pickpockets, thugs, beggars, drunks, prostitutes and abandoned children running wild. Thomas could smell the Thames before he saw it. It also exuded the dank mists of winter, which, combined with the products from smoking chimneys, created murky smog.
In Kingsway he turned left into Fleet Street, where on the corner of Whitefriars Street, since it had moved from Manchester in 1843, was the office and nerve centre of the National Anti-Corn League. It was significant that it was in Fleet Street, the home of newspapers, as it was the first political lobby group to use modern media methods to further its cause – an example Thomas followed. From Fleet Street he walked to his appointment with the solicitor of the Inland Revenue at Somerset House in the Strand on the Thames. Buttoning up his waistcoat and holding himself tall, he walked along the Strand then turned left past the gatehouse into the paved courtyard to the eighteenth-century royal palace on the river front. Men with bundles of papers under their arms hurried down narrow, gloomy cream corridors. The old rooms were now divided into offices filled with members of the legal profession and Inland Revenue. Thomas defended himself: ‘He took in my letter, presented it to the Board, and came out, stating that the Board, seeing that the objects I had in view were of a benevolent character, agreed to withdraw the summons on payment by me of a sovereign, which would not cover the expenses incurred. He told me that I was at perfect liberty to say what I liked in my paper about Whigs or Tories. I might denounce them all if I liked, but if I touched the revenue they would touch me.’
On his return walk to the station Thomas saw the graceful pale curve of Regent Street, with its domes, balustrades and shops, and Piccadilly. This sortie to London reinforced his resolve. Galvanised by his near-prosecution by the Inland Revenue, Thomas was soon on a rostrum again making ‘an energetic speech’ to help send a petition to parliament protesting against the use of grain in the distillation of liquor.
Thomas always stood firmly behind the Anti-Corn Leaguers, but he was no political radical, let alone aligned to any of the newly formed trade unions. Although the Anti-Corn Leaguers and the Chartists both revolted against the middle-class ascendancy established by the Reform Bill, there was much rivalry between the two organisations. The Chartists pushed for the fulfilment of the six points of the People’s Charter of 1838 (see p. 56). From the time of their first national convention in London, marked differences separated the northerners (who were fundamentally anti-industrialist) and the men from the Midlands and London.7
Anti-Corn Leaguers were making such a major contribution to politics that their power was feared by the Tories and Protectionists. The subject of Protectionism versus Free Trade raised tempers, produced slogans and filled newspapers. So prevalent was the agitation that if the Corn Laws had not been defeated, it was rumoured that there could well have been a cataclysmic event as there had been in France. In 1846, Gladstone, then at the Board of Trade, prepared the bill for revoking the Corn Laws.
Just before dawn on 16 May 1846, at 4.15a.m., in one of the most symbolic nights in British parliamentary history in the Palace of Westminster, voting cut across parties, across class, across family. When the tellers counted the votes, the Ayes had it. Almost overnight Britain moved from Protection to Free Trade. Paradoxically, the Irish Famine had been one of the excuses which Sir Robert Peel, the Conservative prime minister, used to bring about the repeal of the Corn Laws, but it did little to help the starving millions there, who needed charitable aid and money. As not enough people in Ireland could afford to buy Irish wheat, meat and dairy produce, its export to England continued – as before.
Trade restrictions remained an unremitting political issue into the next century.8 Britain, according to many farmers and critics, had sacrificed the interests of agriculture to industry. Nobody was sure how far the legislation would affect trade. Would cheap goods and food flood through the newly unbarred ports? British farmers were assured of a certain amount of protection by the sheer cost of shipping grain combined with the hazards of rats and mice in the hulls of ships. At that stage there was no large surplus of foreign grain awaiting entry.
FIFTEEN
Bankruptcy and Backwards
The repeal of the Corn Laws that year had not brought the anticipated relief. Many people were still hungry and others, including Thomas, were surrounded by chilling circumstances. Misfortune appeared to be delivering him blow after blow, but this may have been a result of spreading himself too thinly. He was busy, organising trips, campaigning and producing pages on everything, from the evils of drink and smoking to the joys of cheap bread and travel. On top of this, some of the tourists on his first trip to Scotland were suing for compensation for their perilous night on the ship to Scotland. A further trip to Scotland the following year had failed to attract sufficient customers and had lost money. The final blow was the failure of the National Temperance Magazine, into which he had put so much effort. Whether its closure was a reflection of difficult times, or because readers had fallen away because of a fall in quality, is not known. In the very last issue of the magazine, in August 1846, he told readers of the ‘painful and sudden reverses’ which made it impossible for him ‘to sustain his position. After ten years of ceaseless toil in the Temperance cause’, he was forced to give in to ‘those influences which have driven several Temperance publishers from the field’. His farewell message, written in the third person, had a desperate ring: ‘Borne down by heavy responsibilities and legal oppressions, he has no alternative but to bid, at least temporarily, farewell to his esteemed friends and supporters.’1
The bleak picture of a debtors’ prison painted by Dickens just ten years earlier in Oliver Twist (1837–9) remained. Those who failed to pay taxes, rent or debts usually pawned or sold their household belongings – everything from silver-plated hairbrushes to wedding rings – and, if they still failed to meet their creditors, they ended up in special jails. As in the workhouses, inmates often made potato sacks and baskets.
Declared bankrupts were now exempt from prison, so Thomas quickly made himself his own petitioner. Bankruptcy hearings for ‘T. Cook, printer of Granby Street, Leicester’ took place in Nottingham on 15 January and again on 12 February 1847. The records do not reveal any further proceedings. Thomas was discharged and his print works and travel company continued seemingly unaffected, and he did not move from his old address. He may have been bailed out by John Ellis. Chagrined and bothered though Thomas was by his bankruptcy, he was determined not to lose his base. Like many Victorians, he followed the homespun philosophy of another railway man, Samuel Smiles,2 who promoted the values of hard work, thrift and progress. This author of Self Help was a former administrator on the Leeds and Thirsk Railway and South-Eastern Railway.
Thomas’s personal setbacks did not prevent him appreciating that it was another year of triumph for Nonconformists. As with the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts nineteen years earlier, they had again managed to chip away at the status of the Church of England. The Manchester Act 1847 reduced the number of bishops in the House of Lords from forty-three to twenty-six – a reduction that was seen as a stepping stone for the Dissenters in their long campaign against discrimination.
Well before Christmas optimistic sentences flew from Thomas’s pen: ‘The year 1847 opened more auspiciously for Scotland, and I had that summer three large excursions, the railways from York to Berwick to Edinburgh being available.’ This sudden jump in trade was despite the discomfort of train journeys – well illustrated by Frederic Chopin’s descriptions of his trips the following year. Henry Broadwood, the maker of fine pianos, booke
d a ticket for Chopin and three others for the arduous twelve-hour journey from Euston to Edinburgh: one extra seat for his legs, one for his new servant Daniel and one for his pianist/manager. In October, when returning to London, the rail link over the Tyne was still not completed on the east-coast route, so he was forced, as Thomas’s tourists often were, to walk across the bridge at Berwick.
After one of these journeys north, Thomas, with a large party, followed the Queen and Prince Albert. Travelling across moors, around estuaries, sea cliffs, beaches and rocks, and on perilous routes by sea and land, his group were five days behind the Queen – sailing around Bute, along the Crinan Canal and from the Atlantic coast to Oban. From there, like the Queen, they went to the islands of Staffa and Iona, circumnavigating the island of Mull, and afterwards visited Glencoe and Fort William and went on the Caledonian Canal to Inverness. Being in the wake of a royal party set an example which would be repeated.
Thomas’s empathy with the mysterious islands of Iona and Staffa matched that of Mendelssohn. The appeal of seeing the graves of warrior kings, ecclesiastical dignitaries and many a shipwrecked mariner was sadly contrasted with the poverty of the inhabitants. Mendelssohn’s gift to the people there was his Hebrides Overture or Fingal’s Cave,3 a musical celebration of its wild shores. He wrote after his tour in 1829: ‘. . . many huts without roofs, many unfinished, with crumbling walls, many ruins of burnt houses; and even these inhabited spots are but sparingly scattered over the country. Long before you arrive at a place you hear it talked of; the rest is heath, with red or brown heather, withered fir stumps, and white stones, or black moors where they shoot grouse. Now and then you find beautiful parks, but deserted, and broad lakes, but without boats, the roads a solitude . . .’
Thomas tried to help the islanders in practical ways. After one trip he took up the cause of ‘the Social Condition of the people of the Western Highlands and Islands of Scotland’, saying that it was ‘impossible for tourists visiting the Hebridean district to be indifferent to, or unmoved by, the symptoms of destitution and distress’. He argued that the large parties going to Staffa and Iona with him ‘frequently evinced a kind and sympathetic regard for the isolated and suffering inhabitants of that interesting island, where learning and piety, thirteen hundred years ago, concentrated their sway and diffused their influence, and where still remain relics of ecclesiastical, monarchical, and chieftain greatness’.
Scottish history, from real life and from romantic novels, came to life for Thomas through places, scenery and such characters as Rob Roy MacGregor, Flora MacDonald, Bonnie Prince Charlie and the feuds and raids with Borderers, Lowlanders or Islemen. Novelty was found in everything, from the fauna with its Highland cattle to the exquisite flora, especially the dwarf Arctic birch,4 which runs in and out of the heather, and the dwarf willow.5 There were few railways in Scotland then, so, when not travelling in ferries, Thomas took tourists in coaches on the many roads that crisscrossed the country, extensions of the military routes built by the English after Culloden.
‘The great Highland coach road between Inverness, Dunkeld, and Perth became a favourite route long ere the first sod of a railway was turned,’ wrote Thomas. He also took tourists on the roads between Inverness and Aberdeen, the Deeside, by Balmoral, Braemar, Spital or Glenshee, Blairgowrie, Aberfeldy, and to all points of the Highland roads to Inverary, Glencoe, etc. He explained the arrangements:
Here were commenced my first great combinations of special tickets for circular tours, but still the privileges were restricted to the large excursion parties that I took from England, for whom I got very great reductions of fares, and before the termination of the decade now under review I frequently took to Scotland as many as 5,000 visitors in a season. From every part of England visitors came to the Midland Counties to join in with my Scottish excursion, immense numbers falling in with me en route. I had generally to take two, and sometimes three special trains from Newcastle. On the opening of the Caledonian line, I began to work alternately over the east coast and west coast routes, but the popular way was by Newcastle and Berwick. Every new season my plans had to be submitted to the committees that controlled Scotch traffic, but for a number of years I had no great difficulty, so popular and successful were the excursions.
SIXTEEN
1848: Knowing Your Place in Society and
Respecting Your Betters
The year 1848, the year the potato crop failed in Ireland for the third time, was a year of revolutions. Crop failures throughout Europe from 1845 onwards, aggravated by industrial depression in towns, created a fertile atmosphere for revolt. Trouble erupted in Austria, Poland, Prussia, Hungary, Sicily, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, France, Piedmont, Venetia and Greece. Britain was the only major European nation, except Russia, to escape some sort of rebellion in that dramatic year. But the government was nervous, and with renewed vigour it countered the efforts of agitators.
Times were again really bad for many, including Thomas in Leicester: ‘1848 was a blank in my Railway Excursions,’ he wrote, ‘owing to the unwillingness of Companies to negotiate.’ He was suffering from his recent bankruptcy and the railway companies’ decision to run excursions themselves. Many now employed excursion managers so they could bypass outside agents like Thomas, whose arrangements with the railways were not long term, so he had no comeback. Thomas’s plans for the Scottish tours had been approved each season by the committees that controlled traffic in Scotland, so it had always been a hand-to-mouth affair. Nor did he have a monopoly of the trade, as there were now other excursion operators, some good, some inefficient, but all ready to take away his customers. Just as Scotland was the mainstay of his operations, in return dozens of Scottish hotels and boarding houses relied on his trade. Many of them, pretty little places covered in roses and honeysuckle tucked away in the hills, changed hands.
Now, after being a celebrated railway excursionist, Thomas had the indignity of going back to horse-drawn carriages. It would be several years before he got into his stride again. Unwilling to abandon his touring company, Thomas organised ‘numerous Coach Trips to Belvoir Castle, Melbourne Gardens, &c. &c.’, mostly in Leicestershire and nearby counties. Oddly enough, Thomas never took tours to Bosworth Field, where the final battle of the Wars of the Roses had ended with Richard III slain by Henry Tudor’s army.1
Thomas’s bumper coach visits to ancestral homes were a century, almost to the year, before their large-scale opening up after the Second World War. In the 1940s and 1950s, when the Marquis of Bath charged tourists a shilling to enter Longleat, or the Duke of Bedford a similar sum to enter Woburn, it was seen as an innovation. Long forgotten were the many stately homes that had earlier allowed visitors. The visitors, though, were usually not members of the working class. The Elizabethan home of the Devonshires, Chatsworth, in the 1760s had welcomed guests on ‘two public days in a week’, and the ‘strangers’ book’ at Wilton, in 1776, listed 2,324 visitors. By the 1790s, Woburn restricted visitors to Mondays, yet other grand houses continued to receive visitors by the hundreds. Housekeepers pocketed so many tips from visitors that Horace Walpole joked that he was tempted to marry the housekeeper of Strawberry Hill, his stuccoed and battlemented pseudo castle at Twickenham.2 Until the time of Thomas’s day trippers, no entrance fees were fixed,3 but, seeing the market potential of stately homes and gardens, Thomas blazed a trail. Increased numbers of paying visitors were a symbol of social change, something which many owners, even those who opened their houses and gardens, feared. The Duke of Devonshire, known as the ‘bachelor Duke’, was an exception.
A lonely man hampered by poor hearing, he became close to two architects, Jeffrey Wyattville and Joseph Paxton. With them he created magnificent settings for his newly acquired paintings and antiques at Chatsworth, in the heart of the Peak District National Park, reputedly the finest stately home in Britain. Like many avid collectors, the Duke enjoyed displaying his collections, so the powdered footmen of Chatsworth opened the stately doors to Thomas�
�s tourists. With awe the visitors ascended the main staircase to the majestic statue of Mercury and stood enthralled under the richly painted ceilings. Room after room, including the new long wing designed by Wyattville, was crammed with portraits in ornate gilt frames and one of Europe’s finest collections of drawings. One sumptuous suite had, between 1570 and 1581, housed Victoria’s ancestor, Mary Queen of Scots, for eleven of the long years of melancholy captivity imposed on her by her cousin Elizabeth. By visiting Chatsworth, once again, Thomas was following the footsteps of Victoria and Albert, who had stayed there in 1843. Lord Melbourne, who had also been invited, had left an unhappy man. Victoria had few minutes to spare to talk to him and found him duller than ever.4
More exciting than the house, for some, were Chatsworth’s 105 acres of gardens. Here they could see tall palm trees and exotic lilies from South America inside Paxton’s massive Great Conservatory – ‘the great stove’, at the time the largest glass building in the world. One water lily had such large leaves that a child could float on it.
Paxton, born into poverty in 1803 in Milton-Bryant near Woburn in Bedfordshire, had left school at fifteen. His first job, like Thomas’s, was as a garden boy, but in the Horticultural Society’s Chiswick Gardens beside the Duke’s garden at Chiswick House. When Thomas first went to Chatsworth in 1847, Paxton had become the controller of most of the affairs of the Duke, having worked for him twenty-one years. Paxton seemed to bring prosperity to much that he touched – even his railway shares. Unlike thousands of unlucky investors in trains, he chose the Midland Railway and as the company grew he became one of its active directors under the chairmanship of Ellis. Meetings between Thomas and Paxton on the visits in 1847 are not recorded, but it is more than likely that they discussed arrangements. In just three years’ time, Paxton would be the catalyst for Thomas as a tour operator.
Thomas Cook Page 11
