Thomas Cook

by Jill Hamilton

  Anthony Trollope’s mother, Fanny, the daughter of a provincial clergyman, who lived for many years in Florence and published thirty-two novels and six travel guides between 1832 and 1856, had also made a point of reproving the new tourists. Quoting Laurence Sterne5 to the effect ‘an English man does not travel to see English men’, she censured the middle-class travellers who ‘every year scramble abroad for a few weeks, instead of spending their money at Margate or Brighton’,6 most of whom, she despaired, seemed content to spend their time with their fellow countrymen.7 Dickens too had criticised the middle- and upper-class travellers who went about Europe endlessly and aimlessly, absorbing nothing and ‘worsening each other’.

  Writing under the pseudonym of Cornelius O’Dowd in Blackwood’s Magazine in February 1865, in an article titled ‘Continental Excursionists’ which was later reprinted in the Pall Mall Gazette,8 Charles Lever9 fulminated against Thomas Cook, his tourists and the rise of recreational travel. Eight years earlier, in 1857, Lever, an eminent Anglo-Irish novelist, had gone to live in Florence and had seized the job as British Vice-Consul for La Spezia, a job he managed to carry out by and large from Florence, before he was promoted to be the British Consul in Trieste.

  Lever’s job as consul was to protect British visitors, not to abuse them, but he used his literary skills against the burgeoning mass tourist and Thomas, calling him ‘that fussy little bald man whose name assuredly ought to be Barnum!’ (P.T. Barnum ran a circus in America which toured Europe.) He added that Thomas was swamping Europe with ‘everything that is low-bred, vulgar and ridiculous’ and that Thomas’s tourists were a ‘new and growing evil’ and that he had ‘devised the project of conducting some forty or fifty persons, irrespective of age or sex, from London to Naples and back for a fixed sum . . . the cities of Italy deluged with droves of these creatures, for they never separate, and you see them forty in number pouring along a street with their director – now in front, now at the rear, circling round them like a sheepdog – and really the process is as like herding as may be. I have already met three flocks, and anything so uncouth I never saw before, the men, mostly elderly, drear, sad-looking; the women, somewhat younger, travel-tossed, but intensely lively, wide-awake, and facetious . . .’. In a century when even Balzac ate with his knife and blew his nose on his napkin, there was plenty for people like Lever to sneer at.

  Then Lever regaled his Italian friends in jest, saying that Thomas was letting loose felons who were really convicts refused by the Australian colonies, ‘and that they were sent to Italy by the English Government under arrangement with Mr. Thomas Cook, who was to drop a few in each Italian city’.10 These soon became much-repeated rumours. Thomas lashed out against Lever, saying that a lack of schooling did not necessarily mean that tourists had no insight into either the people or the places they were visiting. Europe was no longer a vast playground for cultured English tourists exploring its architecture and galleries. A counter-attack, reprinted in the Excursionist, said, ‘He, a British Consul, to whom in case of difficulty or emergency I may possibly have to appeal for that protection which is my right, deliberately asserts that he has spread among the Italians of his acquaintance a report that I am engaged by the Government of this country to take gangs of convicts abroad, and by leaving three or four at each of the different cities I visit gradually distribute the sweepings of our prison-houses over Europe.’

  The slanging match went on. There was a fear among many of tourism overwhelming unspoilt destinations in a similar way to the rising tide of mass production. Lever responded with another article in Blackwood’s under the title ‘A Light Business Requiring No Capital’:

  the Continental bear-leader, who conducts tribes of unlettered British over the cities of Europe, and amuses the foreigner with more of our national oddities than he would see in a residence of ten years amongst us . . . these Devil’s dust tourists [who] have spread over Europe injuring our credit and damaging our character. Their gross ignorance is the very smallest of their sins. It is their over-bearing insolence, their purse-strong insistence, their absurd pretension to be a place abroad that they have never dreamed of aspiring to at home . . . Foreigners may say, ‘We desire to be able to pray in our churches, to hear in our theatres, to dine in our restaurants, but your people will not permit it.’ They come over, not in twos and threes, but in scores and hundreds, to stare and laugh at us. They deride our church ceremonies, they ridicule our cookery, they criticize our dress, they barbarize our language. How long are we to be patient under these endurances? Take my word for it, if these excursionists go on, nothing short of war, and another Wellington, will ever place us where we once were in the opinion of Europe.

  Attacks on the working class to keep them in their place were again being taken up by the English press. Thomas retaliated and stressed that culture should not be confined to the elite; it could be diffused by education and travel. He avoided saying that his travel company, from opening up the narrow world of the poor workers, now also catered for the comfortable middle classes:

  Let us ask why Mr. Lever’s susceptibilities should be outraged, and his refinement trampled on, because thirty or forty Englishmen and Englishwomen find it convenient to travel in the same train, to coalesce for mutual benefit, and to sojourn for a like time in the same cities? Reference to a modern compilation shows me that this hypercritical gentleman started upon his career as a student of medicine in Dublin, and that he subsequently took a German degree, and that after practising for a short time he forsook his profession for novel-writing as being at once more profitable and less laborious. Apart, then, from his talent for producing fiction – of which I would speak with all possible respect – Mr. Lever is an Irish gentleman of the precise class to which the English clergymen, physicians, bankers, civil engineers and merchants, who honoured me by accepting my escort to Italy last year, indisputably belong. By what right, then, does he constitute himself their censor? By what right does he assume them incapable of properly enjoying and intelligently appreciating the wonders of nature, and the treasures of art, brought before them by travel? Drawn from the same sphere of society as himself, educated in a like way, and possessing doubtless many tastes and sympathies in common with him, the only social advantage he can claim is the doubtful one of having lived nearly all his life abroad. It is surely a moot point whether the surroundings and moral tone of the curious little colonies of English people scattered up and down the Continent are so vastly superior to those enforced by public opinion at home, as to entitle the self-expatriated Briton to look down upon us with contempt.

  Seeing his tours threatened Thomas wrote to the foreign secretary, the Earl of Clarendon, a Whig who had backed the abolition of the Corn Laws. But Clarendon did nothing, saying that his consul was covered by writing under a pseudonym. Next Thomas published a shilling pamphlet which admonished Lever, saying, ‘He would reserve statue and mountain, painting and lake, historical association and natural beauty, for the so-called upper classes, and for such Irish doctors with German degrees as choose to be their toadies and hangers-on. I see no sin in introducing natural and artistic wonders to all . . .’ To ensure maximum coverage Thomas reprinted it in the Excursionist in April 1865, but by then he had conflicting emotions. While attracting the middle and upper classes, he remained loyal to the working class. Even though Thomas had a foot in each camp, in the next issue of the Excursionist, in May, he wrote about ‘the odious and offensive stench of exclusiveness’.

  The Morning Star, which described itself as an outpost of ‘Manchester radicalism’, took up the cudgel for Thomas and on 11 September, objected to the

  lofty, lordly, genteel, and grumbling tone . . . The one theme perpetually harped on is the vulgarity and impertinence of people who presume to travel by excursion trains, or with cheap return tickets, or in companies, or in any way that is not grand, expensive and solitary. Every one (that is, everyone who writes) is indignant at the insolence of such people in daring to invade the sacred Contin
ental haunt which, by virtue of a previous sojourn of a fortnight’s duration, he has come to regard as his own exclusive possession. He cannot any longer enjoy the mountains or the castles, the picture-galleries or the glaciers, the cathedrals or the lakes, since these Cockney people or manufacturing people will persist in coming to look at them. You would fancy, to read his indignant sarcasms, that the Louvre was his private residence, that the Mer de Glace was his birthright, that the Cathedral of Milan was built by one of his noble ancestors, that Lago Maggiore was a pond in his own demesne.

  These articles were timely, as the ‘war of classes’ was becoming heated with mounting agitation for parliamentary reform. Disraeli had earlier asserted the need for change and the Tories now agreed. He introduced resolutions which lowered the franchise qualifications and redistributed seats, thereby limiting the predominance of any one class. Gladstone, however, objected to what he called fancy franchises and dual voting while the extreme Liberals, known as ‘the Tea-Room party’, demanded the vote for the ‘compound householder’. In July 1867 at last the Bill was passed which gave working men in cities and towns the vote. Now all adult male householders in boroughs who paid rates and male lodgers who paid £10 a year in rent could have their say – but in country areas property requirements remained a little higher. At the elections the following year the newly enfranchised urban householders brought the first unequivocally Liberal government into power and made Gladstone prime minister. It was a triumph for the Nonconformists – the first government ever underpinned by the forces of Nonconformist conviction. Gladstone intended to abolish compulsory church rates, launch national education, repeal the laws which blocked Nonconformists from teaching at English universities and, in recognition that it only ministered to a twelfth of the people in Ireland, disestablish the Church of Ireland. The new government cautiously started admitting the lower classes to the political nation. In just three years, legislation would be passed which allowed trade unions the right to exist as pressure groups. Seven years later ‘peaceful picketing’ would be legalised.11 Attitudes, too, were changing.

  A few years later the tables were turned on Sir Leslie Stephen and Lever. An article in the Daily Telegraph came out in defence of mass travel:

  It is, or has been, the fashion among some empty-headed persons to sneer at ‘Cook’s Tourists’. Pretending to imagine that the pleasure of travel should be reserved for the upper classes, they protested against the beauties of Nature being examined by any but persons of the highest quality and seemed to think that the grey Highlands, the quaint Belgian cities, the castled Rhine crags, the glaciers, the mountains and waterfalls of Switzerland, the blue plains of Italy were exhibitions which should be open only to the holders of high priced stall tickets. What little mischief those notions occasioned was soon blown aside when, in the course of the last thirty years, a man has catered for the comfort of upward of three million persons – numbering among them Dukes, Archbishops and members of every class of respectable society – not merely to their satisfaction, but without the occurrence of a single accident throughout the whole period, he can well afford to disregard either spoken scoff or printed satire.

  Since Paxton had opened the route for him to Newhaven, over five years 75,000 tourists had been on Cook’s Tours on the Newhaven– Dieppe route to the continent alone.12 In 1866, while John Mason was on his way to the United States, Thomas took a party of about fifty to Italy. When they arrived in Florence, they discovered that every hotel in Rome was booked for Holy Week. He was offered the Torlonia Palace – ‘one of the most magnificent buildings in Rome’ – near St Peter’s, for ten days at a cost of £500. Members in his group agreed to chip in an extra £4 each and Thomas made up the difference. He let nothing drag down the general mood of enjoyment in travel. When the harmony of the party was disturbed by a few grumblers, he spoke out: ‘We have no sympathy with individual expressions of discontent, by which it was attempted to destroy the harmony of the party. Those who travel to Italy must expect sometimes to have to sit on hard seats and place their feet on hard floors . . .’.13

  The Seven Weeks War, otherwise known as the Prussian–Italian War, which began in June 1866, did not interfere much with Thomas’s itinerary. Prussia, allied with Italy, attacked Austria, backed by the countries of Southern Germany and succeeded in pushing Austria out of Lombardy. France, anti-Prussian in sentiment, remained neutral. Thomas and his tourists arrived at the Italian lakes en route to Venice just as the Austrian troops were being evacuated, and stayed on to see the splendid arrival of King Victor Emmanuel II. Soon they were in Venice, where they visited the Accademia, the Arsenale and the Palazzo Mocenigo, once the home of Byron, the Bridge of Sighs and the Palace of the Doges.

  While regular tours continued, another major exhibition was being planned in Paris, the Palais de l’Industrie of 1867. Beforehand, in Paris Thomas was gratified by a visit from a private secretary to Napoleon III, who offered assistance. Like the working-men’s expedition, this trip would be another landmark in his career. He managed to provide transport for about 20,000 tourists from Britain and accommodate about half of them, as well as many Americans, in various leased buildings in the Rue de la Faisanderie. Once again Annie, now nearly twenty-two years old, helped arrange, supervise and act as interpreter. Arrangements were similar to those for the previous exhibition in London. As Thomas wrote: ‘. . . the second Paris Exhibition . . . was held in the Champ de Mars. In connection with this exhibition I opened extensive accommodation in the Rue de la Faisanderie; and in connection with several private houses we accommodated 12,000 persons, giving them good English fare for breakfast, tea, and bedroom, for five francs a day. This was a great success; but M. Chardon and myself jointly took another great house, for which we paid a rent of £100 a week, charged 20 francs a day and lost money by it.’

  With 52,000 exhibits this was to be the fair to beat all fairs, but the small and weakening Napoleon III did not realise that the 1867 extravaganza would be his last international event before his disastrous fall. Over eighty sovereigns, rulers and politicians were invited to the opening of the fair, including the Tsar, the Sultan of Turkey, the Khedive of Egypt and the brother of the Mikado of Japan, but Victoria and the Pope were unable to attend. For the King of Prussia and Prussia’s formidable chief minister, Prince Otto von Bismarck, though, the gaiety and music of the exhibition was the overture to war,14 which would break out again in just three years.

  In September 1868, a branch line opened from Derby making it easier to travel to Melbourne from Leicester. Thomas advertised its inauguration with a poster which included the words, ‘Melbourne being the native place of the Agent for Midland Railway Excursions, he was anxious to have the privilege of arranging the First Excursion to that town.’

  With hedges full of trailing brambles, canes heavy with ripe blackberries, and elder trees loaded with bunches of round black fruits, the journey through the early autumn countryside gave Thomas a feeling of nostalgia. After a few tunes from the brass band, local dignitaries and streamers welcomed the locomotive and Thomas took his sightseers on a tour of the gardens at Melbourne Hall. As usual the owner, Lady Palmerston, was not in residence. Although Lord Palmerston had died three years earlier, she still did not find much time to visit Melbourne. Her three houses in the south, Broadlands, Brocket Hall and her mansion in Piccadilly, took up most of her time. But her voluminous correspondence shows she took an active interest in both local affairs and the garden at Melbourne Hall. After the tour of the gardens, Thomas laid flowers on his mother’s grave at the Baptist chapel.

  Though John Mason may have had cheerful memories of Melbourne from early holidays there with his grandmother, it is unlikely that he now had time to return. His diary entries over the autumn and winter of 1868–9 show that he travelled 20,000 miles, all over Europe, in his quest to further routes and traffic.15

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The Holy Land

  Thomas’s entrepreneurial mind again turned to the Middle E
ast. James Silk Buckingham, whose advice on the Middle East had discouraged Thomas, had now died, and so he threw caution to the wind. The general belief was that once the Suez Canal was finished in 1869, nearby ports, such as Jaffa, would attract many tourists visiting the Canal to Jerusalem. Anticipating an increase in British ships sailing through the Mediterranean and bringing more visitors, the Turkish authorities had rebuilt the road from the coast to Jerusalem. The steamship services to Jaffa and Beirut operated by Austrian Lloyd and the French Messageries Maritimes now ran much more regularly than the sailing ships that had carried Thackeray twenty-five years previously.

  Thomas was planning his first trip ‘to the Levant, Egypt and Palestine, tours to which region I had long contemplated’ at the end of 1868. His first trip to the Holy Land would be exploratory as this was the era of science, and a large number of intellectuals, following the trend of Voltaire and Gibbon, were confronting religion and questioning the authenticity of the virginal conception, the miraculous birth in Bethlehem, the Resurrection and how the universe came into being. Thomas believed that faith would be intensified and deepened by people visiting the source of their creed.

  For the first tour thirty-two bookings were received for the Nile and Palestine, and thirty just for Palestine. After landing in Alexandria the tourists went by train to Cairo, one of the legendary cosmopolitan cities in the east. Despite the squalor and the clamour for ‘baksheesh’, Thomas fell in love with Egypt. Everything was exciting, bewildering – the noise, the smells of incense, cigarette smoke and opium, the beggars, the fortune tellers, the open display of sexuality, the mixture of Jews, Greeks, Arabs, Lebanese, black Sudanese, Turks, Europeans. The coins and notes were confusing and tourists often felt they were ‘being had’, when they were haggling to buy souvenirs to post home, but they could not resist the bazaars in the labyrinths of tiny streets crammed with veiled women, men with turbans or a fez on their heads, sitting cross-legged beside piles of carpets, sandalwood, brass pots, perfumes, silks, a snake in a cage or the latest copy of The Times from London. As always, Thomas emphasised the good things – the magnificent panoramas with ruins, the tranquillity, the Nile busy with feluccas, the palm trees, the minarets and the mosques. The tourists rode horses to the Great Pyramids one starry night to see the silhouette of the Sphinx against the dark sky.