Thomas, more than proud that he was behind the setting up of the first General Baptist Mission in Rome,9 described his own role: ‘The Mission at Rome was originated by myself, and I was mainly influenced in my efforts in connection therewith by comparing the simplicity of the early Baptist disciples in Rome with the General Baptists of the Midland counties in England.’10
At first, though, the Baptist mission was in rented premises. A building boom in Rome following 20 September meant that prices were soaring and buying a property was no longer straightforward as some changed hands so quickly that their titles were not registered properly. Most of the earliest temporary Protestant churches were in the so-called ‘Quarter of the Foreigners’, which then extended in a triangle from Piazza del Popolo to Piazza Venezia – from the Tiber to the Spanish Steps. These new churches joined the already well established English places which had already become landmarks: Babington’s Tea Rooms, the Keats–Shelley house, the Church of San Lorenzo in Lucina, the setting for a scene in Browning’s The Ring and the Book, the artists’ quarter, many British antique shops on Via del Babuino and the historic coffee bar of Café Greco.11
Initially, two Baptist missions opened, one in Piazza San Lorenzo in Lucina and the other, with which Thomas was connected, closer to the Coliseum near the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore. The first Baptist missionary to be appointed there, in 1873, the Revd N.H. Shaw, the former pastor of Dewsbury Baptist Church, managed very quickly to convert a Roman Catholic priest, Cavaliere Paulo Grassi, the incumbent of a nearby church, who became known in the mission, somewhat condescendingly, as a ‘native preacher’. Thomas described his own role with the Mission in Rome, saying that it
was originated by myself, and I was mainly influenced in my efforts in connection therewith by comparing the simplicity of the early Baptist disciples in Rome with the General Baptists of the Midland counties in England. Having the privilege of attending the Communion Service of the Church at Rome, then under the care of the Rev Dr Cote, and subsequently with the Church formed by Mr Wall, I was impressed with the earnestness and simplicity of manner which characterized the members of those infant Churches; and I then pleaded through the [General Baptist] Magazine and in public associations for the establishment of a General Baptist Mission in Rome. The result of those appeals and efforts led to the purchase of premises, and the erection of a chapel and minister’s residence at a cost of several thousands of pounds.12
TWENTY-NINE
Around the World
Thomas, as always, encouraged people to have contact with the biblical past, places linked to the lives of the prophets, apostles and Jesus.1 In Palestine, tourists could touch the ruins of the magnificent buildings put up during the reign of King Herod and see the terraced gardens with their olive trees, wild figs, worn stones, rosemary and vines while on their way to Bethlehem. Visitors to Damascus were reminded that in the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament there is a description of a battle fought there by Abraham. Thomas proudly wrote in his travel newspaper, the Excursionist: ‘The educational and social results of these four years of Eastern travel have been most encouraging. A new incentive to scriptural investigation has been created and fostered; “The Land and the Book” have been brought into familiar juxtaposition, and their analogies have been better comprehended; and under the general influence of sacred scenes and repeated sites of biblical events, inquiring and believing spirits have held sweet counsel with each other.’
The following year the Palestine arrangements were put on a new basis. An office was set up at Jaffa to receive and make bookings and itineraries for tourists to travel to Jerusalem and other places. Clients had the choice of booking hotels or hiring horses and tents. The new office opened in the modern part of the port, near large shops, a German bank, schools and town gardens with a bandstand. Among the German and Turkish residents were Baron Ustinov (grandfather of the actor Peter Ustinov), who owned the Park Hotel in Auerbach Street with a rooftop overlooking the sea.2 When the Palestine tours were extended to the Houran and the Land of Moab, Thomas was pleased that they received letters signed by sheikhs, including the Sheikh of Petra, and Bedouin associates assuring the dragoman contractor of the protection and safety of their parties. Thomas also had the offer of a clergyman in the Lebanon to accompany a party to the Houran. Tourists could follow in the footsteps of the Babylonians, Assyrians, Jews, Arabs, Persians, Greeks, Roman legions and Crusaders: ‘. . . from Cairo to Sinai, and from Petra to Moab and Bashan, the way is open for arrangements under direction of Mr Howard . . .’
On 26 September 1872, Thomas set off on his inaugural 212-day, 270-guinea ‘Round the World’ tour. With a party of ‘four from Great Britain, one Russian, one Greek, and four Americans’ he sailed west from Liverpool to New York on a 29,000-mile journey that was to take over six months. A hundred years earlier, during his voyage on the Endeavour, another Cook, Captain James Cook, navigator and explorer, had been the first captain to circumnavigate the world in a westerly direction and the first to circumnavigate the world in both directions. Now Thomas would head a tour which would do likewise. The trip also fulfilled Thomas’s hope to be acknowledged as a writer as his essays and articles appeared in The Times (see Appendix). This enlarged version of the Grand Tour, described by Thomas as his ‘crowning achievement’, anticipated Phineas Fogg in Jules Verne’s bestselling book Round the World in Eighty Days, and shrank the horror of distance of crossing oceans, showing that such a trip could become a pleasurable excursion.
When they crossed the United States – by train with a few connecting stage coaches – in one of his regular Sunday letters home Thomas had much to say about his thrifty laundry arrangements: ‘My Very own Marianne, I intended to enclose you, as a curiosity, my Salt Lake washing bill but don’t know what has become of it. The items were three undershirts, two flannel so called “large articles”; twenty five collars, front cuffs and handkerchiefs – all for the sum of $4.30 . . . That was my only “wash up” since I left home and I don’t think I will wash again until we reach British India.’
As he would not be in India until after Christmas and he had left Salt Lake City in late October, this was a gap of eight weeks between washing his clothes. The eight-month trip included a twenty-four-day trip on the paddle-steamer The Colorado, crossing the Pacific from San Francisco to Japan, a distance of 5,250 miles. After a quick tour of Japan, China and India, Thomas finally touched down at Aden. Australia was not on the itinerary. Many meant to go, but only the most determined endured the salt beef and the waves before improved liners shortened the distance and passengers did not have to share cabins with cockroaches.
The final leg of the journey took Thomas through the Suez Canal. The Cook office in Cairo was serving the thousands of people who each year were sailing through Suez en route to the East. Cooks offered three routes from London to Cairo: via Gibraltar by sea; via the Orient Express to Istanbul and then by sea; and across Europe to Brindisi by rail and then by Austrian Lloyd steamer to Alexandria. Not all British holidaymakers though travelled with Thomas Cook & Son – one then staying at Thebes was the scientist Thomas Huxley, ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’, promoter of Darwin’s theories, who had invented the word ‘agnostic’.
In Egypt, Thomas saw that John Mason had established the reputation of Thomas Cook & Son as one of the top tourist operators in the world. John Mason’s abilities were also involved in another innovation of Thomas Cook & Son, Cook’s Continental Time Tables and Tourist’s Handbook, which listed, in infinite detail, all the main railway, diligence and steamship routes across Europe.3
Other ground-breaking improvements were perfected by John Mason. Inclusive tours paid for in advance together with hotel coupons to cover the cost of hotel rooms and meals made it unnecessary for tourists to carry large sums of foreign currencies. His ‘Circular Notes’,4 launched in 1874, were the forerunners of traveller’s cheques which allowed tourists to obtain currency in exchange for a paper note. So huge was the demand for these that C
ook’s Banking and Exchange Department was opened in 1878. Oscar Wilde paid the firm of Thomas Cook the compliment that ‘they wire money like angels’.
Thomas certainly admired John Mason’s abilities, but he could never go along with his priorities, his intolerance or his temper. They had seen each other often in Leicester, but nothing healed their differences. Now they saw each other in Egypt and it was no better. John Mason, his face flushed with rage and frustration, would raise his voice and tell Thomas that his preoccupation with religion was a handicap to the company. John Mason’s temper was illustrated by the story of how he once threw a dragoman off a steamer into the Nile for being impertinent. Neither father nor son would compromise. It had again been agreed that John Mason would take over the entire business, but Thomas continued to meddle. Some of the quarrels demonstrated that he was unable to relinquish his position. Both men would fly into a rage, saying and writing harsh things which neither man seems to have regretted. Even so, Thomas repeatedly staked everything on reconciliation, while John Mason distanced himself.
In Egypt a letter, written by John Mason from his portable writing desk, was opened by Thomas. On the eve of his departure, Thomas wrote telling Marianne about the continuing row: ‘I am not going to distress myself. I know my heart is right towards him and towards yourself, and my dear girl [Annie] also, and I shall not be moved from the path of Duty to either Division of my family. He does not like my mixing Missions with business; but he cannot deprive me of the pleasure I have had in the combination; it has sweetened my journey and I hope improved my heart without prejudice to the mercenary object of my tour. I shall neither be expelled from the office nor stifled in my spirit’s utterance, and I have told him so very plainly . . .’
Pushing the bickering and wrangling aside, on his return Thomas enjoyed the interest in his trip. In late February he spoke to a packed audience in the Corn Exchange about his world travels; the Leicester Journal reported that ‘the large audience was held spellbound’.
The row between father and son went on. John Mason insisted that all business arrangements without profit cease. Neither would yield. Thomas could not stop being a Bible-loving Evangelist and a vocal Temperance campaigner, especially when in the previous year there had been a victory for the Temperance movement with legislation that showed the influence of the Temperance movement. The new Licensing Act curbed the drink trade and imposed opening hours on public houses. While the brewers, the whisky and gin distillers, and wine and spirit importers were up in arms, those who believed in Temperance did not think the new laws went far enough.5
THIRTY
Grandeur
Thomas, writing regularly in the Excursionist, frequently stated that Cook’s offered ‘to all classes and to everybody the cheapest Tourist tickets ever presented to the English public’. Long and flowery though his descriptive pieces often were, he used restraint when writing about either religion or Temperance in the magazine. It was the same on his tours. Although Thomas himself seldom missed a chance to visit a mission or church and often invited members of his tours to accompany him, he did not pressure them. Whether in New York or Alexandria, he was involved with missions, and the clergy took up not just his time but his money – money which John Mason claimed belonged to the firm. For instance, in Jaffa, Thomas purchased the building for Miss Arnott’s mission school; and he also helped other Protestant church establishments in Bethlehem and Jerusalem. Apart from giving financial aid, he tried to visit these missions at least once or twice a year. On one visit in 1874, the harsh winter caused endless problems for tourists, when storms blew up from Egypt, as it could be bitterly cold in the winter months in the hills of Judea and Mount Lebanon. In Hermon, tourists1 were held up for three days in an Arab village because of unexpected snowstorms. One member of the party told the story of a minister, who, though ill, recovered enough to baptise a fellow traveller in the Jordan, but died in Jerusalem soon afterwards:
November 20: Poor Dr Gale succumbed, entirely losing his mind, and had to be left at a wayside place until a doctor could be sent to him. November 21: Dr Gale brought in by wagon and carried in. He is quite childish – mind gone. November 25: Poor Dr Gale died about 5 this morning. Not been able to speak. Saw him last night and was recognized by him. His effects and burial left to Dr DeAss [De Haas] American consul. Melancholy thought to leave our friend dead and unburied. Got on steamer all right. All thankful to leave Holy Land.
Edwin Hodder, author of On Holy Ground (London, 1874) wrote dismissively:
If the traveller told the plain truth and spoke naturally, he would say the first thing that struck him on entering Jerusalem was the number of costermongers selling pistachio and peanuts, the quantities of sherbert consumed at street stalls, the low row of cafés and cigar shops, and the knot of Englishmen (distinguishable anywhere by their hideous costumes) lounging outside the Mediterranean Hotel.
Nothing, though, would discourage either Thomas or the growing number of tourists. Russian pilgrims also increased in number. Prussia, too, made her mark with a Lutheran church built in Jerusalem. A group from southern Germany established new Knights Templar colonies, and archaeologists started searching, among other things, for the lost tomb of the German Crusader, Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. Crates of newly unearthed antiquities found their way to Berlin and other cities. The widening stream of travellers and archaeologists exporting biblical antiquities to European and American museums would later be accused of plundering. In October 1873 Thomas was writing that he hoped to transfer a house in Bethlehem to a religious society. This had been made over in part payment of the money stolen from a tent on his first visit.
Later Cook’s set up an office in King David Street2 in the Old City near the Jaffa Gate, only a few alleyways up from the Holy Sepulchre. Before modern hotels were built, tents were erected just outside the Jaffa Gate. Visitors often wrote of how ‘Cook’s Tours’ supplied them with tents and riding horses for further journeys. Because the area around the Jaffa Gate was a jumping off place for tours and expeditions, it became known as the ‘station’, and other tourist agencies set up their headquarters too. Nearby, the family boarding house of Mr E.L. Kaminitz grew into a big hotel in Jaffa Road. Various crafts connected with the new transport industry, such as coach building and repairs, harness and blacksmithing,3 also sprang up. Similar expansion was taking place at other tourist destinations worldwide.
To cater for the huge increase in international tourism Thomas Cook & Son offices were opened up in many places, including Rome. In 1873, the London office was moved down Fleet Street to Ludgate Circus, where John Mason supervised the building of purpose-built offices, with a goods receiving depot, a branch post and telegraph office, reading room, waiting room and a daily bulletin of weather in Europe and the Middle East. As Thomas explained, ‘Our business was growing to such a magnitude, that we were not only justified but bound, to give our patrons and ourselves the best accommodation . . .’
Within a year of the opening of the grand headquarters, Thomas was contemplating a country seat. At the height of the disputes with John Mason, Thomas decided that, if he was to retire from the firm, Melbourne Hall, which was advertised for lease, could be his base. This was quite out of character. Most of his life he remained uninterested in the acquisition of land or trophy houses filled with antique furniture set in rolling acres. Nor did he seek entry to London clubs or gilded salons. Perhaps this was because he knew he would never have been fully accepted into the class that frequented them. Anyway, this one deviation from his usually modest ambitions was rejected. The then owner of Melbourne Hall, Earl Cowper, thought it more appropriate if a true ‘gentleman’ and member of the Anglican Church was the occupant. This rejection sheds light on both the heightened sense of privilege of the British upper classes in the nineteenth century and the ongoing intolerance against Nonconformists. Relations between the Church of England and the chapels were still, in 1874, when this letter was written, often embittered:
Mr.
Cook has applied to lease Melbourne Hall. He would like to make it a shew place with special trains &c and would no doubt make it answer so that the place would cost him little or nothing – They are a great nuisance in grounds of that size & to the place generally & Mrs. Gooch [previous tenant] was obliged to put a stop to them. I have seen Mr. Cook once & he seems to be a highly respectable and intelligent man but he would be sadly out of place at Melbourne Hall – He is a Baptist and here they do great mischief I consider to the place by the narrowness of their views in matters of Education &c. They will not even support the Infants School on which Churchmen and Dissenters join – it is most desirable if possible to have a gentleman and a Churchman in so leading a position – He will be here on Monday & if your Lordship will sanction it I should throw cold water on his application at any rate, but if he would like to take a suitable site on lease for building a good house it would I think be desirable to offer facilities for this . . .
If the rumour be correct will Mr Cook, who has ‘personal’ experience of trippers, close his portals against the fraternity, or will he nobly disregard the broken bottles and sandwich papers and empty fusee-boxes [match-boxes] and create a rival Alton Towers with its special trains to Melbourne?4
Earl Cowper continued in his objections, saying that he did not ‘wish by any means that Melbourne Hall should be turned into a show place. If I had understood that this was Mr. Cook’s intention I should have written at once to state my decided objection.’
As always when Thomas received snubs and setbacks, he could divert himself with other activities, such as the mission in Rome, which he frequently visited. Here, as seen in his correspondence, he too was capable of religious bigotry. After one visit in the winter of 1875–6 he wrote on his return in February a letter which was published in the Missionary Observer in the edition of March 1876:
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