Another obvious stately home to put on the new itinerary was Melbourne Hall. None of Thomas’s family had lived in the village for over thirty years, but its hold on him had never ceased. Unlike Chatsworth, Melbourne Hall remained out of reach. Only the romantically landscaped grounds were to be open. Nobody could step inside the ancient house, but Thomas would be allowed to stroll through the gates, once closed to him. Again, the sun shone on 10 August when Thomas, leading nine horse-drawn carriages carrying 109 passengers, set off from Leicester. From the gentle rolling hills, they diverted past the wild expanses of Charnwood Forest with its rocky crags. The horses pulled the coaches up a steep hill to Mount St Bernard Abbey,5 the first Roman Catholic abbey built in England since the Reformation. It had almost been a celebration of the passing of the Catholic Emancipation Act in 1829 and had been conceived as an act of reparation for the destruction of the monasteries in general at the time of the Reformation.
Unlike many Nonconformists then, who were intolerant of both Catholics and ‘popery’, Thomas did not hold an inveterate hostility. As he had not made any prior arrangements to visit the abbey, it seems that it may have been the result of last-minute urging by someone in the party. Even though the monks would not allow Thomas and his trippers entry, their excuse was music to Thomas’s ears. A party who had visited the previous day had misbehaved with ‘exhibitions of intemperance, insulting observations, and acts of willful damage to the property’.6 With a little persuasion permission was given for the men with Thomas, but not the women, to enter the abbey. But the inspection was brief, as, by mid-day, the coach party had to be at Melbourne, where a ‘powerful brass band of eighteen’ was waiting to greet them in the centre of the town.
The excitement of the arrival in Melbourne, with loud music and speeches, heightened the mood of the visitors. In contrast, the visit to the gardens at Melbourne Hall was a timid affair with no refreshments and no repast. But Thomas could now wander beneath the leafy arches of the trees, walk through the world’s longest yew tunnel, continue down the long parterres, sit beside the winged statues set in alcoves of more clipped yew hedges and gaze at the iron arbour with the fanciful title of the Birdcage.
Two weeks later, on 29 August, another stately home was on Thomas’s schedule. A well-advertised ‘Pleasure Party’ arrived at the Duke of Rutland’s Belvoir Castle, which dates from the eleventh century, not far from Melton Mowbray, famed for its pork pies. Thomas’s visitors were allowed to tour inside the castle, and again they benefited from a threepenny guide, the Hand-Book of Belvoir Castle, from the presses in Granby Street. Packed with facts about history and architecture, the booklet also told visitors ‘how to behave in the castle and grounds’ and, in a patronising tone, instructing them to observe the niceties of polite society:
It is very seldom indeed that the privileges extended to visitors of the mansions of the nobility are abused; but to the shame of some rude folk from Lincolnshire, there had been just causes of complaint at Belvoir Castle: some large parties have behaved indecorously, and they have to some extent prejudiced the visits of other large companies. Conduct of this sort is abominable, and cannot be too strongly reprobated. We are sure that Leicester visitors will not knowingly commit the slightest infraction on the rules of good behaviour, and all we desire of them is to observe the ‘notices’ which hang in the different apartments of the Castle; and in the promenades through the surrounding walks, to satisfy themselves with observations, and not damage in the slightest degree shrubs or flowers, or deface by writing, seats, walls, statues, or any objects of interest. A word to the wise is enough.
This invaluable booklet – ‘Designed as a Guide to an Excursion Party from Leicester to Belvoir, Aug. 29, 1848; with a Description of the Route from Leicester, and Places of Interest in the Locality of the Castle.’ – was a forerunner of the extensive facts and helpful information which were to be a hallmark of all Thomas Cook tours.
The Duke, a public-spirited man who was the Lord Lieutenant of the county for fifty years, allowed the visitors to tour inside the house in groups of twenty-five – as long as they behaved ‘with propriety and decorum’. To discourage tourists from bringing ‘numerous basket accompaniments and annoyance of picnic parties’, Thomas suggested they took refreshments ‘on economical terms’ at the nearby Belvoir Inn. Apart from wanting to avoid careless cooking and the tough meat so often served at such inns, strict Temperance men went out of their way to avoid contact with any establishments serving liquor. Yet, over and over again, as he ferried larger and larger groups through the front doors of giant, forbidding mansions, Thomas was compromising – and not just his Temperance ideals. Considering his principles on the rights of the working class, it is a shock to come across his forelock tugging – as seen in the sycophantic prose describing his upper-class hosts in his Hand-Book of Belvoir Castle – which far exceeded the usual deference to the aristocracy. Even if we remember that he aimed to establish regular paying visits to stately homes and that their owners looked with nervous anxiety at such intrusions, his words are over the top: ‘This liberality on the part of the aristocracy of the country constitutes a pleasing feature of the present times, and is calculated to produce a good moral effect in binding together in one harmonious chain the different sections of society. May God speed the day when the sons of toil shall live happily in the enjoyment of the just rewards of their labour, and the rich shall live at ease in the undisturbed possession of the wealth and greatness to which they have a legitimate claim!’
Apart from tours to stately homes, there were also events such as excursions to see Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s famous Great Britain steamship when in 1846 she suffered a major mishap, being stranded after running ashore on the rocky coast of Ireland at Dundrum Bay. The grounding was caused – it is said – by deviations in the ship’s compass resulting from the effects of the iron of the hull. Despite the fascination of the ship, it is surprising that Thomas managed to find enough local customers, as the slump in England was acute. At one stage at least one-third of Leicester’s population was out of work, and the Union Workhouse in Sparkenhoe Street was full, but even so demand for Thomas’s trip outstripped the available places.
Then, in February 1848, came the electrifying news of the coup d’état in France. While the deposed Louis-Philippe and his Queen, disguised as Mr and Mrs Smith, crossed the Channel to Dover, another political adventurer, Louis Napoleon, beaky nosed and moustached, left his apartment in Carlton Gardens, London, and crossed the Channel the other way. Louis-Philippe retired to Claremont in Surrey,7 the former home of George IV’s son-in-law Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, king of the Belgians, whose wife was Louis-Philippe’s daughter. The Elysée Palace was not empty for long. By the end of the year Louis Napoleon was president and assuming the grandeur, but not yet the imperial title, of his late uncle Napoleon Bonaparte. During his twenty-two years in power, he would make investments in Egypt which would impact on Thomas’s business.
On 21 September 1848, Thomas was again organising a Temperance train outing. To mark the twelfth anniversary of the Leicester Temperance Society, a ‘Rural Festival’ was held at Cossington. The Leicester Chronicle of 23 September reported that there were around 1,500 members and friends. Tea was served in the grounds of the rectory at the invitation of the Revd John Babington, the Church of England rector, then president of the society, ‘on the gravel walk, beneath an extensive grove, adjoining the rectory, upon a table 126 yards long’.8 This trip marked Thomas’s return to the railways. By the end of 1850 he once again had ‘arrangements’ with almost all the railway companies of the Midlands, the North of England, the North West, the Eastern Counties and some southern lines.
On Wednesday 6 November, at 10.15a.m., a train departed from Leicester to Cambridge carrying about 800 passengers who had come from as far as Birmingham, Sheffield, Derby and other places to present Thomas with a gold watch and chain (‘value about £25’) inscribed, ‘Presented to Mr. Thomas Cook by subscription, in approval
of his able arrangements of special trips. Leicester, November 6th, 1850.’ A group of loyal local passengers had formed a committee for ‘his having for nine years zealously and satisfactorily served the public as a projector and manager of Cheap Excursions’. According to his calculations, he had escorted a total of 15,246 passengers over 7,525 miles with fares of £5,090 9s 9d.
Just as Thomas was now on the brink of take-off, Lord Melbourne died at the age of sixty-nine. As the family stood beside his deathbed, his sister Emily, Lady Palmerston, was sure that he had gone to Heaven. Her son-in-law, Lord Ashley, had his doubts.9
SEVENTEEN
The Great Exhibition
The unplanned development of rail travel in the nineteenth century produced far-reaching and much criticised upheavals. By 1850, 6,000 miles of railway track had been laid, altering forever Britain’s townscapes and landscapes. The road system, in decline since the departure of the Romans, had begun to improve in the eighteenth century, when the turnpike movement produced roads with surfaces fit for the ‘flying coaches’.1 Further improvements in transport occurred with the construction of canals, as a fundamental element in the industrial revolution. Now, both roads and canals were losing passengers and freight to the new rail network.
Thomas, anxious to pre-empt the mounting number of competitors who were also utilising trains, set up tours to new destinations. His survival depended on creativity, stamina and an ability to keep just a little ahead of the competition. He let his old ambition surface and began seriously to ‘give his attention to Eastern routes’, knowing that many would clamour to make such a journey. Indeed, the advantages of trips to ‘the Eastern Lands of the Bible’ were acknowledged by many clergymen. The stories of David and Jesus made Jerusalem a unique and sought after destination.
There was an enormous desire for many Protestants to return to the roots of their faith, and to see the places mentioned in the Bible. For some Nonconformists, the motivation for visiting the Holy Land was to return to the very beginnings of the Church, to pre-Roman Christianity, before it had become an institution and before Jesus’ teachings had been embellished and altered by the disciples and the popes. The historic evidence of Christianity and continuity back to the times of Abraham and Sarah was now being scrutinised by archaeologists and scholars.
In the nineteenth century one of the first well-known English writers to make a trip was the tall, stooped, bespectacled master of satire, William Makepeace Thackeray. P. & O. Line, which had regular ships to Alexandria, was promoting Mediterranean ‘cruises’ with round tickets, including shore excursions. Thackeray was given a free passage in exchange for writing up his experiences.2 Far from producing an uncritical and laudatory book3 about his excursions, he painted a vivid picture showing the difficulties of travelling, stressing that in the Holy Land he had had to travel in a party ‘well mounted and well armed’.
When in London again Thomas discussed Holy Land tours with Silk Buckingham, who compared North America’s 8,000 miles of rail tracks with Palestine where there were none. And it was expensive. There were taxes on departing from Jaffa, on arrival in Jerusalem and on accommodation. Few of the roads were passable and in many places the old Roman highways were hardly more than mule tracks. Tourists had to move around on donkeys, mules, camels or horses, generally, as Thackeray had pointed out, in convoys. Armed escorts were the norm, but most tourists had to pay what was jokingly called the ‘Sultan’s tax’, a kind of protection money given to local chieftains, plus baksheesh for obtaining reductions in some of the regular taxes.4 Many local costs were unpredictable and difficult to calculate in advance. On top of this there were also sandstorms, fleas, mosquitoes and the odd raiders on horseback.5
For those intrepid enough to persevere, the journey from Jaffa to Jerusalem took about fourteen hours, made up of two or three to Ramleh and then about eleven to Jerusalem. The hills to Jerusalem were so steep that it took two hours more going up than it did coming down. In an effort to beat the winter winds and storms which brought havoc to the Mediterranean, Christian pilgrims generally arrived in November and stayed most of the winter.6 When Princess Caroline, George IV’s estranged wife, had visited in 1817, her sailing boat had been chased by pirates and nearly shipwrecked in a storm. Then, when finally anchored in Jaffa, the royal party had been barred from landing because they had insufficient permit paperwork, forcing them to sail to Acre.
Buckingham sympathised with Thomas’s idea of ‘bringing together people of various nationalities and social distinctions’ to the Holy Land, but argued that, despite the rough crossing of the Atlantic, the United States was a better bet. Before Christmas, Thomas was on his way, ready to make arrangements for breakthrough tours to New York and beyond. But the destination was changed at the last minute.
Just as Thomas had escorted his first commercial trip to Liverpool in 1845, in 1850 he again chose it to initiate a new phase in tourism: tours to America. After visiting shipping companies about reduced fares for packages, he took a train home, via Derby Station. Here he met his good acquaintance Ellis and his fellow director Paxton, who, by chance, was the architect of the forthcoming Great Exhibition in London. Paxton casually made a daunting proposal which would change Thomas’s whole life.
A year earlier, in 1849, Prince Albert had started preparations for the biggest and most diverse exhibition ever held in Europe. This ‘Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations’ would show everything from railway carriages and textiles to butter churns and Bovril, and confirm London as an exemplary modern metropolis, a major player on the world stage. In contrast to previous exhibitions on the continent, London would invite contributions from every corner of the earth.
Albert and the other organisers, including Paxton, feared that not enough people would come to the exhibition. The expertise of Thomas and his competitors was needed to tempt and move large numbers of visitors from all over Britain. Each operator could have the exclusive rights on certain lines coming into London. Thomas’s territory was to be the southern part of the Midland Line. He would receive a fee for every excursion passenger who purchased a fifteen-shilling ticket. Thomas jumped at the idea, especially as he knew he could have the assistance of John Mason, who was just seventeen and had recently finished his printer’s apprenticeship.
When Paxton7 met Thomas in Derby, the nine-acre site in Hyde Park, near Knightsbridge barracks, was waiting for the 2,000 tradesmen to start erecting the massive prefabricated building. Paxton’s showplace palace of iron and glass, an overpowering example of the new mass-manufacturing processes, would turn out to be the star of the exhibition, based on designs similar to the giant greenhouses he had already built for the Duke of Devonshire. It relied on wrought-iron sash bars invented by John Loudon in 1816, which could be bent in any direction and still maintain their strength.8 Loudon had died in 1843, so Paxton received the credit.
Albert’s plans to stage a large industrial exhibition in London had earlier been met with scepticism by many members of the upper classes, who were aghast at royalty thrusting itself into trade and modernity. Albert, who had been a keen visitor to the Frankfurt fairs in his youth, persisted, and thought England could easily compete with the continental fairs. The idea had initially come to him from Henry Cole, then Assistant Keeper of the Public Records and a member of the Royal Society of Arts of which Albert was president. Cole, who had earlier published the first Christmas card in England and helped launch the new postal service, had returned from France in 1849, bubbling over with enthusiasm for the Paris Exposition.
Unlike the fairs that exhibited the latest styles in expensive and fashionable items, such as fine silks, velvets and Empire-style chairs, the Great Exhibition was to assert Britain’s domination in arts, sciences, industry, commerce, armaments and medicine. It would stimulate trade and create jobs by obtaining orders for both the products and the machines which made them.9 Albert, keen that the exhibition should be self-financing, asked his banker, Lionel Rothschild, to underwrite
£50,000 of the £200,000 initially required. (It actually made a large profit.)
The first of the 1,060 iron columns went up in the autumn of 1850, followed by 300,000 panes of glass which were fixed with over 200 miles of sash bars – a celebration of the end of that old enemy of light and air, the outdated window tax. Being prefabricated, it took 2,000 men only eight months to finish and cost just £79,800. As glazing was moved on special trolleys, one man alone could fix 108 panes in a day.
Fears that the structure would collapse in the first high wind were soon dispelled. As autumn progressed into winter, the light which poured through its glass was so dazzling that Punch magazine christened the pavilion a ‘Crystal Palace’. In less than twelve months, this pavilion, which was waterproof and more than a third of a mile long and 408 feet in width, would be complete – and, at 108 feet high, tall enough to enclose the lofty elm trees on its site. The splendid gala opening was planned to take place just eighteen months after the day that Albert had agreed to Cole’s idea. Paxton’s impact would go far beyond Hyde Park, soon becoming the prototype of all the classic glass-and-iron functional buildings of Victorian England. Its influence would be seen in the glass dome in the British Library reading room and the stately glass roofs of new railway stations, everywhere from King’s Cross to Sydney.
As well as transporting thousands of travellers to the exhibition, Thomas decided to provide accommodation. Before the exhibition he tramped the streets of London looking for cheap, clean beds. Most boarding house owners declined to register with him at fixed prices, as they were sure prices would surge when the Great Exhibition finally opened. In the end Thomas gambled and took out a few leases to create lodging houses for the summer. ‘The Ranelagh Club Mechanics Home’, rented from a Mr Thomas Harison in Ranelagh Road, Pimlico, near Vauxhall Bridge, could accommodate a thousand people a night. Here, for 1s 3d a night, each male guest would have a partioned-off area in a dormitory that contained a bedstead with sacking and a good hair mattress, blankets, coverlid (bedcover), soap, towel, ‘every convenience for ablution’ and a key to his unit. The partitions between areas were seven-feet-high boards. Boots and shoes could be cleaned for a penny a pair. Thomas thought of everything, even the warning, ‘Should parties get into that state where they could not look after themselves at night, there would be a policeman in attendance to take care of them that they should not annoy other people.’ To help people pay for their trips, Thomas started ‘travel clubs’ and ‘Exhibition Clubs’ which helped workers save part of their wages. Since the end of the previous century, the numbers of friendly societies that took subscriptions from members and insured them against death, illness and burial expenses had been increasing.10 People could now put sixpence each week into ‘travel clubs’, which would later develop into people paying for their holidays in advance instalments, which was useful in days when there where were no high street banks in small towns and the average weekly wages for men on farms was just under ten shillings.11
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