Now, nearly two centuries later, on 18 November 1852, over half a million men and women came to see another procession of ‘unexampled magnificence’. Twelve black horses with black plumes pulled the black-draped hearse, following Wellington’s empty-saddled horse with Wellington’s black boots turned in the stirrups, in the traditional manner of funeral parades. The bells of St Paul’s started their sonorous tolling; the streets were sombre. Black crepe even covered the muffled drums of the military bands which accompanied the solemn procession on its way from Chelsea Hospital to St Paul’s Cathedral where the duke was interred beside Napoleon’s other foe, Nelson. It augured well that Thomas was involved in what turned out to be a dress rehearsal for royal spectaculars.
In Leicester, come rain or shine, the building of Thomas’s hotel and Temperance Hall went on at a frenzied pace. The hotel was the first of the two buildings to be finished. With much excitement the Cook family moved into the house that would remain the nucleus of their peripatetic family life for the next ten years. John Mason frequently spent long periods in Derby with his grandmother, who set such an example of hard work. Annie, with dark eyes as brown and as lively as Thomas’s, was now nearly seven. With her eagerness to learn and her mischievous laughter, from the time she was a toddler Annie was Thomas’s favourite. When he returned home at night the mood of the house lifted. But, like the household accounts, which were written up every night with each penny scrupulously accounted for, her childhood was ordered and predictable. She could never roam in the nearby country lanes and fields with other children, climb fences and trees or run wild. Instead, she was expected to help her mother in running the hotel and to spend many hours practising the piano or speaking French. She was adored and cosseted by her parents, but, compared with the rough and tumble school days of her brother, who had frequently laboured through the night, her life was easy but dull. Despite the drudgery of checking that the bedrooms had been properly cleaned, the never-ending laundry and the counting of the sheets and assorted linen, her days were a little too protected and organised. Sheltered by her parents, young Annie passed into her teens. She also fulfilled the role of buffer, as Thomas and Marianne both focused on her, and were seldom really alone together.
On 7 May 1853, advertisements for ‘The New Temperance Hotel, Granby Street’11 were followed by notices offering tickets for two shillings each for a public breakfast in the Temperance Hall. No other building in Leicester then had such facilities: a library, a lecture room, a hundred-foot-long hall, a gallery which seated 1,700 people with space for a magnificent orchestra above the stage, a committee room plus various other rooms. Here people could have everything – except a glass of wine.
Among those who inaugurated this temple of Temperance were shopkeepers and craftsmen, factory owners and factory workers, farmers and agricultural labourers, Catholics and Quakers, Baptists and Anglicans. Temperance followers, like the members of YMCA clubs, crossed the rigid lines that separated churches and social classes and widened the limited spheres of many different cross-sections of society. Rain on the opening day did not deter the curious crowds, many of whom had arrived in special trains. Thomas was praised in the many speeches. Another guest was Henry Lankester, the Cook family doctor and surgeon to the Midland Railway Company, sixteen years younger than Thomas, who had moved from Poole and built up a large practice in the town. Like many of Thomas’s friends he was a Nonconformist, a Liberal and an anti-drink campaigner.
Thomas advertised his hotel, saying, ‘This new and beautiful edifice . . . with adaptation to the special character of hotel business . . . comprises commercial-room, dining-room, coffee-room, sitting-rooms, and numerous bedrooms, all newly furnished in style corresponding with the general appearance of the house . . .’ Just how much he had gained by compromising and finding the middle ground is seen in his arrangements for ‘those to whom tobacco-smoking may be offensive are free from the annoyance, a Room being appropriated to the use of smokers’.
‘Mine host’ was more and more absent, leaving the running of the hotel in the capable hands of Marianne. Each spring and summer Thomas was now spending at least two months in Scotland, shepherding nearly 5,000 visitors, alternating the east and west routes with four large train parties, each covering in all up to 2,000 miles by sea, rail and road. A pattern had begun in 1848 and, except for the year of the Great Exhibition, would go on until 1863. This was not just because Scotland was a popular tourist destination. Thomas had great affection for the country and made over sixty visits. His lifelong fascination with all aspects of printing and publishing added an extra dimension, and he enjoyed friendships with many Scottish printers and publishers, such as William Collins, who specialised in church history and pioneered school textbooks, and William Chambers, who was so impressed with the way Thomas escorted his troops of tourists that he called him ‘the Field Marshal’. Scotland had always been in advance of England in literacy, education, printing and publishing so was a place of particular appeal to anyone with a passion for printing, like Thomas. A survey in 1795 had shown that out of a total population of 1.5 million, nearly 20,000 Scots had jobs connected with writing and publishing – and 10,500 with teaching.12
Scotland had the best state education in Europe. It shamed England, which, except for charity and religious schools, still had neither free nor compulsory schools. Before the Act of Union, throughout the seventeenth century, Scotland’s parliament had passed various acts13 to ensure that there would be schools and paid teachers in every parish. Education had progressed because of John Knox’s insistence that everyone should be able to read both the Bible and his Book of Discipline of 1560, issued the same year that the Presbyterian religion became the official religion of Scotland. Apart from providing primary education, Scotland, in contrast to England’s two universities, had four,14 all open to a wide range of students15 and all with lower tuition fees.
The year 1853 also included plans for Thomas to take shiploads of visitors to the Dublin Exhibition, organised to boost the ailing Irish economy after the Famine. He wrote that ‘early in that year the late Sir C.P. Roney sent for me to Ireland, to confer and to cooperate with him in arranging for and working out a double system of excursion and tourist arrangements’:
Cheap excursions were to be worked by special trains, and a fortnight was to be allowed on the tickets; the tourist tickets were to be good for all trains, and valid for a month, at rates really double those of the excursions. I was to undertake the excursion department, whilst the various railway companies of England would take charge of the issue of tourist tickets with the view of encouraging travel in Ireland. I was to be able to give my travellers tickets for Cork, the Lakes of Killarney, Connemara, etc., at greatly reduced prices . . .
Thus was inaugurated the tourist system of Ireland, which, with certain modifications and extensions, has continued to this day.
Rival English agents were bringing tourists to the Dublin Exhibition, but Thomas organised both weekly and fortnightly excursions. At this stage he defined the difference between his excursion tickets and tour tickets: ‘The term excursion is generally used to designate a special trip, or trips, at very reduced prices, and under extraordinary arrangements . . . whilst the word tour takes a wider and more circuitous range, and provides the means of travelling at special rates, and by a more organized system, but taking the regular modes of conveyance.’16
There was also a major change in Melbourne. For the third time in five years Melbourne Hall had a new owner. When Lord Melbourne had died childless in 1848, his brother, Frederic, had become the 3rd Lord Melbourne, but he died five years later leaving no heirs. The title became extinct, but the property passed to their sister, Emily, who had married a second time, becoming the wife of Lord Palmerston, the most colourful and best-known foreign secretary in the nineteenth century. When in the government of his brother-in-law, Lord Melbourne, he had been responsible for setting up the first British consulate in Jerusalem and managed to bypass Turkish prohib
ition on building a Protestant church there by calling it ‘the Consul’s private chapel’. Emily’s son-in-law, who had now inherited the title of Lord Shaftesbury, had been the moving force behind the promotion of British links with Jerusalem and also went to extraordinary lengths to protect and promote the Jews in Palestine.
TWENTY
Crimea
In February 1854, Thomas’s grief had been acute when his mother Elizabeth Tivey, at the age of sixty-four, lay on her deathbed. Apart from his wife and Annie, it had been from her that Thomas had received physical affection. She had been the mainstay of the family. It had been through her strength that Thomas and his brothers had survived in those pre-railway days, cocooned in the little cottage with no money, few prospects and few possessions. Her instinctive reactions to events had kept them afloat and she had saved him from going down the mines. So great had been the bond between mother and son that Thomas had almost taken on the role of husband after her second widowhood. It was in him that she had confided, and they had often sat up at night talking, or she would listen while he read the Bible aloud. In stark contrast, John Mason’s relationship with his own parents was cold and his feelings hesitant and ambivalent, but he became close to Elizabeth and again lived with her in Derby for a few years, when he had a job as a compositor. Her death left the two men and Simeon quite desolate. Simeon’s Temperance Hotel in Corn Market was already being absorbed into her boarding house, which would become Simeon Smithard’s Private Temperance Boarding House.
Elizabeth had wanted to be buried beside John Cook in the little graveyard behind the Baptist chapel in Melbourne. But the train did not yet go there from Derby, so a hired hearse-carriage, with Thomas guarding the black-draped coffin, made its way in the dull winter light over the hills to the village of her birth. John Mason and Simeon, who had seen much more of her in the past ten years, sat in front of the draped coffin.
This was the first occasion on which Thomas had returned since Lord and Lady Palmerston had inherited Melbourne Hall, but they were then in London, as Palmerston was attempting to limit Britain’s spiralling involvement in the Crimean War. Within days of Elizabeth’s funeral, in an effort to prop up the Turks and prevent the Russians holding Constantinople and the Straits, the first of many British troops set out for the East.
Fighting began on 14 September 1854 when the Russians crossed the Danube and the British and French laid siege to the port of Sebastopol, the great naval port of the Russian Empire in the Black Sea. The initial cause of the war was a long dispute over the holy places in Jerusalem and Bethlehem and resulted in a spiralling quarrel between the French emperor, the Russian tsar and the Turkish sultan over the right to hold the custody of the churches and holy places. Quarrels were heightened by the loss of the star over the grotto in Bethlehem and a tug of war over the keys for the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
Napoleon III had insisted on confirmation of his role as the patron and defender of Roman Catholics in the Holy Land, and had sent an envoy to Sultan Abdul Medjid in Constantinople. Tsar Nicholas I also sent a series of demands, including the right to protect all Orthodox Christians throughout the Ottoman Empire, a right which had been held for centuries by the Greek Orthodox Church. Jerusalem’s priorities were fought out in a war which soon embraced other issues. For nearly two centuries, the Russians had kept covetous eyes turned towards the Mediterranean, but France and Britain had blocked them.
When Britain had declared war on Russia in March, Britain had to turn to the bond market for finance. Gladstone went to Lionel Rothschild and arranged loans of undisclosed millions over two years. The whole country had been in such a state of patriotic fervour that in some places the Russian Emperor, Nicholas I, was burned in effigy. However, in Leicester, William Biggs, like other Liberals, was an opponent of England’s involvement in the Crimean War and wrote a pamphlet entitled Never Go to War for Turkey. He, like John Bright, Richard Cobden and thousands of other Anti-Corn Law campaigners, joined the Peace Society and energetically denounced the war as un-Christian, against the principles of Free Trade and harmful to British interests. Bright said that ‘the Angel of Death has been abroad throughout the land; you may almost hear the beating of his wings’. He blamed Palmerston and the aristocracy for deluding the people.
Ignoring the huge backing given to the Peace Society by many of his friends, Temperance supporters and Corn Leaguers, Symington in Market Harborough was pleased to provide the British troops in Crimea with pea flour to make soup.1 This was used by Alexis Soyer, the chef at the Reform Club in London, who heroically went to Scutari and devised both a field kitchen and new methods of army cooking. Crimea was also the first war to use railways and telegraphs. Railway manufacturers in England sent track, locomotives and carts to build thirty-nine miles of tracks, the first railway ever used in battle. Seventeen engines pulled urgently needed supplies to the front.
Another innovation from the Crimean war were daily battle bulletins sent by the newly installed telegraph. From the shores of the Black Sea, each day the legendary Irish-born war correspondent, William Howard Russell, sent reports to The Times. The graphic and horrific tales of bungling, incompetence and the army’s mismanagement had far-reaching consequences. His reports of the unnecessary deaths and extreme suffering, plus the photographs taken by one of the pioneer war photographers, Robert Fenton, made Crimea the first media war. It also helped bring Lord Aberdeen’s government crashing down, and brought (much to the delight of the villagers in Melbourne) Palmerston in as prime minister. Most importantly, Russell’s articles inspired Florence Nightingale, ‘the lady with the lamp’, a trained nurse whose family came from Nonconformist stock in Derbyshire. Russell also brought to the world press the gory descriptions of the gallant charge of the Light Brigade of Lord Cardigan, in which 673 cavalrymen rode down a valley of death and became immortalised by Alfred Tennyson with the lines, ‘“Forward the Light Brigade! | Charge for the guns!” he said. | Into the valley of Death, | Rode the six hundred.’ A journalist as powerful as Russell had never held such sway before. He would soon cover the Indian Mutiny and the American Civil War, with his story of ‘The Battle of Bull Run’, and in fourteen years’ time he would use the same ferocious passion to mock Thomas and his tourists in Egypt.
Soon after the emotional blow of his mother’s death, Thomas took a brave step. He gave up his printing business so he could become a full-time tourist operator, having already been in travel commercially for ten years. Liverpool and Wales were augmented by more destinations and more trips to seaside resorts like Scarborough, with its steamboat trips, the town near Melbourne, Ashby-de-la-Zouch, with its baths, castle and pleasure grounds, the Lake District, the Isle of Man and Ireland.
Next, in 1855, with some trepidation Thomas decided to extend his business to non-English-speaking countries and he went off to France and Belgium to make advance preliminary arrangements. The highlight of the trip was to take visitors to the Universal Exhibition in the Champs Elysées. Napoleon III, not to be outdone by the English, was putting on an equivalent show to the great exhibition on a site of twenty-four acres with 20,000 exhibitors. Much to the surprise of many critics, Victoria and Albert accepted the invitation from the self-styled emperor and would make the first visit of a British monarch to France since 1431. This contrasted with the government of Victoria’s grandfather, George III, who had ignored post-revolutionary French titles, and referred to the emperor as ‘General Bonaparte’. So, as with his second Scottish trip, Thomas yet again followed the route of the Queen.
The Excursionist carried a proposal that ‘on or about 7 August we will start an excursion to the Continent for a fortnight, on condition that we have guaranteed by a deposit of 20s each person before the 9th of July, not less than 50 passengers’. Thomas was again in an only too familiar role, fighting reluctant companies for group concessions. This time his struggle was with the controllers of the cross-Channel traffic. Eventually, unable to make bookings on direct trains from England, he planne
d a circuitous route on the Great Eastern Railway.
His first party set off on 4 July with much gaiety and expectation, not on the Calais to Dover route, but via Antwerp, Brussels, Aix-la-Chapelle, Cologne, up the Rhine to Mayence, Mannheim, Frankfurt, Heidelberg, Baden-Baden, Strasbourg, Paris, Le Havre, Southampton, London and back to the Midland district. Apart from education and enjoyment, one of the aims of the trip was to cement a new era of peace. Travel, said Thomas, made people more tolerant of foreigners, and reduced the hatred and narrow-minded attitudes that led to wars.
Unfamiliar with either the languages or customs, he wrote:
the difficulties . . . were neither few nor small. In making arrangements we had a hard fight with Continental Companies; and it required unceasing vigilance to keep on the good side of hotel keepers, money changers, booking clerks, and others with whom we had pecuniary transactions. The fluctuating rates of currencies; the wretched and uneven appearance of coins and notes; the conglomeration of francs, centimes, thalers, gold and silver groschen, pfennigs, florin and kreutzers; the loss inevitable on every transaction; and the still more vexatious loss occasioned by the advantage taken of John Bull’s ignorance of the amounts and comparative value of ‘small change;’ – all these monetary perplexities caused continued annoyance to most of the Parties. . . .
Thomas Cook Page 14
