Thomas Cook
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Seventeen: The Great Exhibition
1. David Daiches and John Flower, Literary Landscapes of the British Isles (London, Paddington Press, 1979).
2. These first appeared under the nom de plume of Michael Angelo Titmarsh.
3. William Makepeace Thackeray, Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo, by way of Lisbon, Athens, Constantinople and Jerusalem (London, Chapman & Hall, 1846).
4. Yehoshua Ben-Arieh, Jerusalem in the Nineteenth Century: Emergence of the New City (Jerusalem, Yad Ishak Ben-Zvi Institute, 1979).
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Paxton was already known as an architect of genius when he was commissioned.
8. Chambers Biographical Dictionary, ed. Magnus Magnusson (Edinburgh, Chambers, 1990).
9. Albert, with his strict moral sense from his Lutheran childhood, showed concern for the poverty, housing, unemployment and malnutrition in Britain; he was particularly disturbed to hear that over 4.5 million people (about one-seventh of the population) were receiving Poor Relief. Wanting to help ‘that class of our community which has most of the toil, and least of the enjoyments, of this world’, he had much in common with Lord Ashley, who steered him to become the president of the Society for Improving the Conditions of the Labouring Classes for four years.
10. By 1815 the clubs collectively boasted over half a million members.
11. The average weekly wage for men on farms rose from 9s 7d in 1850–1 in 1850–1 to 13s 9d in 1879–81, but there were wide variations between north and south and from one district to another, G.E. Mingay, Rural Life in Victorian England (London, Futura, 1977).
12. The monthly issues of this publication were eventually issued in thirteen separate editions around the world.
Eighteen: Paxton, Prince Albert and the Great Exhibition
1. Stephen Halliday, Making the Metropolis: Creators of Victoria’s London (Derby, Breedon Books, 2003).
2. Avery, Victorian Times, figure for the year 1848.
3. Jeffrey A. Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851 (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1999).
4. Derek Beales, From Castlereagh to Gladstone (London, Nelson, 1969).
5. Chadwick, The Victorian Church.
Nineteen: Building Houses
1. Ingle.
2. Pudney.
3. Long since gone, but it ended up as a theatre and finally as a cinema.
4. Ingle.
5. J.D. Mackie, A History of Scotland (London, Penguin, 1991).
6. Excursionist, 1854 (Brendon).
7. Fairs had been popular in Birmingham from 1529; two of them, the Pleasure Fair and the Onion Fair, were held annually.
8. Quoted on the website www.chaddesley-corbett.co.uk.
9. Cook posters of the Birmingham Onion Fair in the 1890s are collector’s items.
10. Ingle.
11. Now a camping shop with rented offices above.
12. Arthur Herman, The Scottish Enlightenment (London, Fourth Estate, 2002).
13. Including the Act for Setting Schools in 1696.
14. St Andrews (1412), Glasgow (1451), Aberdeen (1495) and Edinburgh (1582).
15. Ibid.
16. Pudney.
Twenty: Crimea
1. Seaton, Thomas Cook.
2. Napoleon was buried in St Helena in 1821, but in 1840 his remains were returned to Paris.
3. David Roberts R.A., The Holy Land, Yesterday and Today, Lithographs and Diaries, texts by Fabio Bourbon (Shrewsbury, Swan Hill Press, 1997).
4. Ingle.
Twenty-one: The Second and Third Decades
1. Ingle.
2. F.M. Leventhal, Respectable Radical: George Howell and Victorian Working Class Politics (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971).
3. Brendon.
4. Mitchell and Leys, A History of the English People. Horace Walpole wrote a four-volume Memoirs of the Reign of King George III.
5. Brendon, quoting Excursionist.
6. It had been moved to Sydenham.
7. Sir Gilbert Scott, 1811–78, leading architect of the Gothic Revival, including the India Office, St Pancras Station and Glasgow University.
8. Completed and unveiled in January 1867.
9. Seaton, Thomas Cook.
10. Excursionist, September 1862.
11. Excursionist, April 1862.
12. Edmund Swinglehurst, The Story of Popular Travel (Poole, Blandford, 1982).
13. Pudney.
14. Ibid.
15. Thomas Cook Archives.
Twenty-two: A Leap in the Dark
1. Later pulled down to make way for some large mansion flats.
2. In the eighteenth century audiences sometimes broke into disorder, so iron spikes were erected in the front of some stages to protect actors from their hostility.
3. St Pancras was built in 1868.
4. Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966).
5. London University received its charter in 1836; Lord Burlington was its first chancellor.
6. Peter Sorensen in a footnote to his essay ‘New Light on Shelley’s “Ozymandias”: Shelley as Prophet of the “New Israel”’ (The Keats-Shelley Review, 16, The Keats-Shelley Memorial Association, Berkshire, 2002) quotes from the Norton Anthology of English Literature (7th edn, Norton, New York, 2000) and notes that according to Diodorus Siculus the statue was ‘the largest in Egypt’. He also quotes from Duncan Wu’s Romanticism, an Anthology (Malden, Mass., Blackwell, 1998): ‘Horace Smith and Shelley wrote competing sonnets to celebrate their having seen and admired the statue at the British Museum.’
7. Built by Robert Smirke.
8. Gay Daly, Pre-Raphaelites in Love (London, Collins, 1989).
9. Ingle.
10. Brendon.
11. Great Britons, BBC film.
12. Other clubs included the Oesterreichischer Alpenverein (Austrian Alpine Association), 1862; the Club Alpin Suisse (Swiss Alpine Club) and the Club Alpino Italiano (Italian Alpine Club), 1863; the Deutscher Alpenverein (German Alpine Association), 1869; the Club Alpin Français (French Alpine Club), 1874.
13. President between 1865 and 1868.
14. Sole editor of twenty-one volumes, he contributed 378 entries in the first edition.
15. Leslie Stephen, Playground of Europe (London, Longman, Green, 1871).
16. Lynne Withey, Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours: A History of Leisure Travel, 1750 to 1915 (London, Aurum Press, 1998).
17. Ibid.
18. Garibaldi’s name in England is now associated with the currant-filled biscuit commonly called the ‘squashed fly’ biscuit.
19. Verdi was then riding high, having won international acclaim for his operas Rigoletto, Il Trovatore and La Traviata.
20. Robert Blake, The Conservative Party from Peel to Churchill (London, Fontana, 1972).
21. ‘De Gustibus’, by Robert Browning, quoted by L.C.B. Seaman, Victorian England: Aspects of English and Imperial History, 1837–1901 (London, Methuen, 1973).
Twenty-three: America at Last!
1. Many restaurants in the Far East, including Singapore, still do so.
2. Daily News, 5 August 1869.
3. Swinglehurst.
4. Ingle.
5. Pudney.
6. Swinglehurst.
7. Brendon.
8. This is the only item in the Thomas Cook Archives from John Bright. They were not acquainted at this point, and Bright begins his letter with the formal ‘Dear Sir’.
9. It took thirty-five years from the time of Thomas’s visit for the trends of Temperance to come to a head. In 1900, thirty states allowed local governments to decide whether or not to allow the manufacture and sale of alcohol. By 1916, nineteen states had banned alcohol altogether. By 1919, the 18th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States was ratified, forbidding ‘the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors therein, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States’.
&nbs
p; 10. Robert Dale, Dale on the Ten Commandments (London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1871).
11. Thomas Cook Archives.
Twenty-four: For ‘All the People!’
1. The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth (London, Macmillan, 1888).
2. Ousby, The Englishman’s England.
3. Henry James, English Hours (London, Heinemann, 1905).
4. Lynne Withey, Grand Tours.
5. Laurence Sterne (1713–68).
6. Frances Trollope, A Visit to Italy, vol. 2 (London, Richard Bentley, 1842).
7. Withey, Grand Tours.
8. The Pall Mall Gazette was edited by W.T. Stead.
9. His reputation has been revived by Stephen Haddelsey’s Charles Lever: The Lost Victorian (Gerards Cross, Colin Smythe, 2000); contemporary notices favourably compared Lever with his rival, Charles Dickens.
10. Rae, The Business of Travel.
11. Disraeli’s Act of 1875, Trevelyan, Illustrated English Social History.
12. Brendon qualifies this figure from John Mason – it may be excessive.
13. Great Britons, BBC film.
14. David Duff, Eugenie and Napoleon III (London, Collins, 1978).
15. Pudney.
Twenty-five: The Holy Land
1. Words from a Band of Hope song.
2. Now an international hotel.
3. Now the Mena House Hotel.
4. This mummy was part of a group of coffins and mummies presented to the Prince of Wales by the Egyptian Government in 1869 which he passed to the British Museum. The museum’s Department of Ancient Egypt and the Sudan’s collection numbers over 110,000 objects, most of which came from private collectors in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century excavations.
5. Anthony Sattin, who earlier edited Florence Nightingale’s letters of her trip down the Nile, in his book Lifting the Veil (London, Dent, 1988).
6. William Howard Russell, A Diary in the East During the Tour of the Prince and Princes of Wales (London, Routledge, 1869).
Twenty-six: Jerusalem, Jerusalem
1. 1876 edition.
2. Great Britons, BBC film.
3. There is much dispute whether the site is on the west or east bank of the Jordan, i.e., in Jordan or Israel.
4. Excursionist, October 1873.
5. Stamford Mercury, 26 April 1872, quoted by Brendon.
6. Charles Dudley Warner.
7. Swinglehurst.
Twenty-seven: The Opening of the Suez Canal
1. Anonymous letter quoted in Gary Hogg, Suez Canal: A Link between Two Seas (London, Hutchinson, 1969).
2. Duff, Eugenie and Napoleon III.
Twenty-eight: Paris: War, 1870
1. A Catholic branch of the House of Hohenzollern which had already supplied Romania with a king in 1866.
2. Duff, Eugenie and Napoleon III.
3. William Carr, A History of Germany, 1815–1985 (London, Edward Arnold, 1987).
4. For train lovers like Thomas, it was fascinating to discover that one of the reasons for the German success was its systematic use of the railway system.
5. In Oberammergau Cook’s early parties were setting the pattern of being ‘an overwhelming majority among foreign guests’.
6. Carr, A History of Germany.
7. Pudney gives long extracts from John Mason’s long typed description of his journeys.
8. Roman Catholic services were in Latin until Vatican II in the 1960s.
9. Dr John Clifford wrote in the centenary volume of the Baptist Missionary Society, ‘Stirred by the earnest appeal of the veteran traveller, Thomas Cook, our Society started a Mission in Rome in 1873.’
10. Cook, Memoir of Samuel Deacon.
11. The wife of the former Baptist minister in Rome, Helen Crutch, has shared her research with me.
12. Cook, Memoir of Samuel Deacon.
Twenty-nine: Around the World
1. Jerusalem, compiled from material originally published in the Encyclopaedia Judaica (Jerusalem, Ketter Books, 1973).
2. Now the Beit Immanuel Guest House, Youth Hostel and Museum.
3. The handbook soon became a regular publication, and now, more than 130 years later, Thomas Cook’s European Timetable, still produced monthly, is a sought-after volume. A companion volume, Thomas Cook’s Overseas Timetable, is also published six times a year.
4. Cook did not invent – nor did he claim to have invented – the circular note. The credit goes to Robert Herries, a London banker in the 1770s.
5. Lee, Aspects of British Political History.
Thirty: Grandeur
1. The unpublished diary of George Jager, Palestine and Egypt, 1875–80, quoted in Shepherd, The Zealous Intruders.
2. In 1881.
3. Yehoshua Ben-Arieth, Jerusalem in the Nineteenth Century.
4. F.F. Fox (Melbourne Hall Agent) to Earl Cowper, 17 August 1874, Melbourne Hall archives, 260/5/25, supplied by Howard Usher, the archivist.
Thirty-one: Egypt
1. Stanley Weintraub, Charlotte and Lionel: A Rothschild Love Story (New York, Simon & Schuster, 2003). Shares purchased at £19 soon rose to £34 and at their maximum in 1935 would be valued at £528. Rothschilds earned nearly £100,000 from the deal.
2. Gertrude Himmelfarb, Marriage and Morals among the Victorians (London, Faber & Faber, 1986).
3. Swinglehurst.
4. 1 November 1882.
5. Brendon.
6. Excursionist, 1 November 1882.
7. Gordon had resigned as governor-general of the Sudan in 1881.
8. R.C.K. Ensor, England, 1870–1914 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1936).
9. J.A. Spender, A Short History of Our Times (London, Cassell, 1934).
10. There had been atrocities in Bulgaria ten years earlier. (Robert Rhodes James, The British Revolution: British Politics, 1880–1939 [London, Methuen, 1976]).
11. Lytton Strachey, Queen Victoria (London, Chatto & Windus, 1921).
12. Mingay, Rural Life in Victorian England.
13. Now the headquarters of the Leicestershire branch of the British Red Cross. A blue plaque was unveiled in May 1978.
14. Bishop to Budge, 1952 (Ingle).
15. Ibid.
Thirty-two: ‘My God, My God, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?’
1. The Arts & Craft Movement was founded after an exhibition of that name in 1887.
2. Swinglehurst.
3. Seaton, Thomas Cook.
4. Ingle’s research on Leicester.
5. In 1937 it was scheduled as part of a slum area, and during the Second World War was used as a warehouse. In 1946 the charity commissioners offered it for sale for £4,000 and was acquired by the Corporation of Leicester (Pudney).
6. The bust is in the custody of the Buckminister Road Baptist chapel, Leicester.
7. Ingle.
8. Cook, Birthday Reminiscences.
9. Sattin, Lifting the Veil.
10. Vesuvius erupted in 1903, destroying much of the railway, and again in 1906 and in 1929.
11. The 1841 trip to Loughborough was the beginning of Thomas Cook’s venture into the travel world, but he did not set up the firm for another three years.
12. The most respected of them all, George Adam Smith’s Historical Geography of the Holy Land, 13th edn (London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1907).
13. Cadbury’s did not start building the village of Bournville on the outskirts of Birmingham with its 143 cottages for another four years.
14. G.R. Heath, Thomas Cook of Melbourne (Derbyshire, ‘Penn-gate’, 1981).
15. April 1891 (Seaton, Thomas Cook).
16. Mr Logan.
17. Thomas Cook Archives.
18. Seaton, Thomas Cook.
19. Ibid.
20. Moore, Ellis of Leicester: A Quaker Family’s Vocation.
21. David Cannadine, Aspects of Aristocracy (London, Penguin, 1994).
22. Excursionist, 15 June 1897, during the year of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee.
23. The only future Lib
eral prime minister missing from the cabinet was David Lloyd George, who was then just a backbencher, having arrived in London in 1890 as the Liberal member for Caernarvon Boroughs.
24. Thomas Cook Archives.
25. Clement E. Stretton, The Development Locomotive, a Popular History (Newbury, Bracken Books, 1989).
26. Sir Roy Strong, The Story of Britain (London, Hutchinson, 1996).
27. The newly formed Birmingham University.
Epilogue
1. Sue Seddon, Travel (Stroud, Sutton, 1991).
2. Rae, The Business of Travel.
3. Ibid.
4. Ben-Arieh, Jerusalem.
5. In 1972 Thomas Cook & Son was purchased by a consortium headed by the Midland Bank. Twenty years later it was purchased by the German Westdeutsche Landesbank and the LTU Group.
6. The grave was redone by Thomas Cook & Son.
Select Bibliography
Books
Brendon, Piers, Thomas Cook: 150 Years of Popular Tourism, London, Secker & Warburg, 1991
Budge, Thomas J., Melbourne Baptists, London, Carey Kingsgate Press, 1951
Burns, A. Dawson, Temperance History, London, National Temperance Publication Depot, 1889
Cook, Thomas, A Memoir of Samuel Deacon, London, Thos. Cook, 1888
Ellis, I.C., Records of Nineteenth Century Leicester, St Peter Port, self-published, 1935
Ferneyhough, F., The Liverpool & Manchester Railway, 1830–1980, London, Robert Hale, 1980
Ingle, Robert, Thomas Cook of Leicester, Bangor, Headstart History, 1991
Leighton, William Henry, A Cook’s Tour to the Holy Land in 1874, London, Francis James, 1947
Patterson, A. Temple, Radical Leicester, Leicester, Leicester University College, 1954
Pudney, John, The Thomas Cook Story, London, Michael Joseph, 1953