Thomas Cook (10 page)

The hesitation towards railways was evoked by (the painter) J.W. Turner’s evocative canvas
Rain, Steam, and Speed, the Great Western Railway 1844
, in which a train races through a foggy landscape into an uncertain future. Elation at such power, coupled with a fear of its underlying strength, was a widespread response.

At the meeting Thomas managed to grab a few minutes on the dais and suggested that the group engage ‘a special train to carry the friends of Temperance from Leicester to Loughborough and back, to attend a quarterly delegate meeting’. The chairman approved and the meeting roared with enthusiasm. Next morning Thomas proposed the scheme to John Fox Bell, the resident secretary of the Midland Counties Railway Company, who answered, ‘I know nothing of you or your association, but you shall have your train.’
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This positive reaction was not surprising, as rivalry between companies had increased. The slow transition from trains just carrying goods to transporting both goods and people had suddenly changed and companies were competing for customers. The Midland Railway Company, eager for ways to increase traffic, ‘realised at once the advantages’.
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Monday 5 July 1841 seemed to have become an undeclared holiday, as about 500 passengers
⁷
responded to notices from the Temperance meetings and to the many posters and handbills put out by Thomas. As they arrived at Campbell Street Station,
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Leicester, the mood of anticipation was high. Apart from the novelty and thrill of hurtling along at breakneck speed over huge iron structures, the excessive excitement at travelling just twenty-two miles in one day reveals just the idea of how long it had taken for the idea of railways instead of coaches to take off.

The train surged forward. A wave of excitement communicated itself from the passengers to the well-wishers on the platform, who were anxious not to miss the excitement. They too added to the holiday atmosphere. Bridges
en route
were jam-packed with people trying to get a peep at the modern travellers speeding past below.

The passengers, who had purchased tickets for the not inconsiderable sum of one shilling (children half price), were, according to the
Leicester Chronicle
, crammed into a train ‘consisting of one second-class carriage and nine third-class [tub] carriages, each crowded with respectably-dressed, and, apparently, happy teetotallers. . . . They had with them the Leicester Independent band in uniforms, and two flags’ to divert them from the third-class carriages, which were roofless and seatless, differing little from cattle trucks.

The cast-iron engine, which was enveloped in clouds of smoke and making a terrifying noise, made everyone feel that they were taking part in something very up to date. Most people had seen trains before, but now this marvel of technology was part of their lives. Thomas wrote that ‘people crowded the streets, filled windows, covered the house-tops, and cheered us all along the line with the heartiest welcome’. He also mentioned something which would become a signature of his tours – music. On board there was ‘an excellent band . . . headed by their district officers and flags.’ There is no mention of the travellers in the open carriages being hit by sparks, grime and soot, but, if the wind was blowing the wrong way, that was what happened. Like wind, rain and snow, they were one of the hazards.

As the train pulled into Loughborough, it was greeted by the bugle, drums, trombones and trumpets of another brass band, and more thronging crowds waving banners. There was also much hymn singing and stirring speeches on the importance of abstaining from intoxicating drinks. Just how highly organised the Temperance movement was is seen in the references in descriptions of the day to bands, district officers and flags. The Loughborough flag was white satin trimmed with deep lace and white rosettes and its motto was ‘Do not drink wine nor strong drink’. Derby’s blue silk and red silk-fringed flag, with the prodigal son on one side and a mechanic on the other, was supposed to show the advantages of teetotalism.

A journalist then described the excitement of the crowds in Loughborough:

they proceeded in procession towards the market-place, and were met by a number of the Catholic teetotal society, with a banner, near the barracks. The number of spectators was immense; the Nottingham road from the canal nearly to the barracks being one crowd of human beings. A number of the dragoons at the barracks had got astride the roof, and being stripped to their shirts and their wide white trousers, their fine proportions appeared swelled to those of Patagonians. The windows were also crowded with fierce mustachoid faces, one of which, in particular, attracted our attention. This soldier, like those on the roof, was stripped, his head was clothed with a queer red woollen nightcap, his mustachois were black and large, and he regarded the moving, joyful crowd beneath him with the imperturbable gravity of a Turk.

Loughborough was well known to Thomas as it was the town to which Winks, once so close to him, had lived before moving to Leicester. Thomas later described the jolliness of the excursion:

We carried music with us, and music met us at Loughborough station . . . and cheered us all along the line with the heartiest welcome . . . the whole affair being one which excited extraordinary interest, not only in the county of Leicester but throughout the whole country. . . . All went off in the best style . . . and thus was struck the keynote of my excursions, and the social idea grew upon me.

As the band
⁹
played the national anthem, Mr Paget, who had opened his large grounds and gardens at Southfields for a gala picnic, ‘came forward to receive the leaders of the procession’. When Paget welcomed the thronging line of marchers, another precedent was set for future trips: local celebrities at stations to meet his tourists. Social standing in those days brought awe and influence. Marshalling people and supervising arrangements were other elements perfected on that historic day, which would become integral to Cook’s future tours. For him ‘arrangements’ was a cherished word – arrangements for banners, arrangements for bands, arrangements for posters and arrangements for dignitaries.
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The day-trippers who had come by train – including seven-year-old John Mason Cook and Thomas’s half-brother, Simeon – were joined by members from Derby and Nottingham. The number of participants was put at 3,000. Much to Thomas’s joy Simeon had forsaken drink and become a member of a teetotal choir, ‘able to render a plaintive song in a pecularlary [
sic
] pathetic manner’.
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The
Leicester Chronicle
described throngs of people in Loughborough ‘lining the streets and filling the windows as they passed by’. Once in the market place the crowd paused to raise their voices and sing, then they marched and held up placards as they were applauded by amazed onlookers. The mood was raised by Cook’s zest for life, his sense of style and all the props that would give a carnival atmosphere.

A stylish picnic lunch under the trees – something which would be a hallmark of thousands of tours – was laid out on white tablecloths. There was good bread and Yorkshire ham and later a high tea of cakes, crumpets and sandwiches. To compete with the fellowship, conviviality and companionship that is so associated with drinking in alehouses, groups played innocent games, such as ‘kiss in the ring’, ‘tag’, ‘drop the handkerchief’ and ‘blind man’s bluff’, then they dispersed themselves into new groups for dancing followed by a cricket match.

‘Hip, hip, hurray’ was chorused over and over again after each speech given by the various ministers present. The Revd J. Babington of Cossington made remarks on the evils of drunkenness and the benefits arising from total abstinence. He had signed the Pledge after hearing an address by Thomas and told of his brother, a surgeon at a London hospital, who ‘invariably found that persons who were brought into the hospital, who had been accustomed to drunkenness, were the most difficult to cure’.

Next was the speech given by the Revd Mr Boot, Baptist minister from Wolverhampton, who said ‘that Teetotalism was good for the body, the pocket, and the mind. It was good, too, for the drunken man – and it was good for the drunken man’s wife.’ Cheers greeted his words about the ‘great benefits that would accrue to every class of society from the universal adoption of the Total Abstinence principle’. He added that he hoped the time was not far distant when all intoxicating drinks would be confined – as they were once – to the apothecary’s shop. The Revd Mr Robinson, Primitive Methodist, hoped too that the time was not far distant when ‘the Teetotal banner would be hoisted in the midst of the burning sands of Africa, and also in the frozen regions of the north’.

Minister after minister spoke. Thomas, who was chairman, raised some laughs by asking people to ‘hold up their hands to show who were pledged Teetotallers’ – for he could not yet pretend to distinguish by the face a Teetotaller from those who were not – especially when he saw so many with suspiciously rosy cheeks. A regular forest of hands was held up. ‘Surely’, said the Chairman, ‘there must be some mistake, or else the police must have kept every drunkard and every “moderate” man out of Mr. Paget’s park!’ He then announced that a meeting was to be held in the Baptist school-room on Tuesday evening, and that a lecture was to be delivered on Thursday evening by Mr Higginbottom, surgeon, of Nottingham. The calendar of activities for those in Temperance was certainly crowded.

Eventually, the exhausted party assembled on Loughborough station with much jollity, were jammed into the return train and at 10.30p.m. alighted at Leicester Railway Station. The air of exuberance of the outing contrasted with the often stunted lives of many of the farm labourers, local factory workers and home-based frame-work hosiery knitters. The day had lifted them temporarily away from their dismal homes, many of which were pestilent, back-to-back hovels where occupants were prey to epidemics, vermin and sloth.

Thomas had the advantage of his trading beginning when the outdated medieval structure of holidays was in its closing stages. In many factories Christmas was the only recognised full day off work other than Sundays. Christmas and Good Friday were also the only full holidays which the Factory Act of 1833 prescribed for children under the age of twelve in the textile mills. Some manufacturers took advantage of a loophole under which, if children consented, they could work on those days. The same trend affected offices. The Bank of England closed on forty-seven holidays in 1761, forty in 1825, eighteen in 1830 and just four in 1834 – Good Friday, Christmas Day, May Day and 1 November.

But as the national income grew, improved hours and holidays could not be withheld indefinitely. The most important innovation was the weekly half-holiday. By the 1850s the building trades in some towns stopped work at four o’clock on Saturdays, leading to the one-and-a-half day weekend. Thomas strove to fill this spare time and each year benefited from the introduction of more holidays, which climaxed in the Bank Holidays Act of 1871.

When Thomas started his tours there had been a few organised package trips on railways here and there, but nothing long lasting. Some had been money-making concerns but most were for clubs, such as the ‘interchange of visits between the Leicester and Nottingham Mechanics’ Institutes’. Fares for group bookings had now been for sale for five years and outings had been organised by some railway companies in 1818. Thomas’s tours were the most enduring and most financially successful of the nineteenth-century travel entrepreneurs, but he could not claim to have invented train excursions. He later made clear that his was ‘the first publicly advertised excursion known in the country’
¹²
and the first personally conducted tour, even though it was ‘either the second or third train of the kind ever run on the Midland Railway’. When Thomas later wrote that the Loughborough outing had been ‘the starting point of that series of excursions and tours’, he also acknowledged the invaluable help of printing and advertising. In his
Guide to Leicester
he wrote, ‘Advertising is to trade what steam is to machinery.’ Indeed, he applied the same principle as with publishing: the more you do, the cheaper it is per copy. Later he wrote, ‘I now see no reason why a hundred may not travel together as easily as a dozen . . .’
¹³
The major cost of each train trip was the coaling and the ‘steaming up’, so the idea was to pack it with people.

Comparing Thomas’s career in travel with that of the inventor of the modern post, Sir Rowland Hill, shows how many started but soon ceased business. Hill organised the first ever seaside package trip but he did not manage to sustain it even though seaside holidays had begun to flourish in the late eighteenth century, and already Brighton, Weymouth and many other new resorts were well established. But, like many other tour operators, Hill was left behind. It was Thomas whose trips grew into an on-going enterprise. He was the pioneer who battled ‘against inaugural difficulties’ and placed the ‘system on a basis of consolidated strength’.
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W
ithin two months of the Temperance train outing to Loughborough, just as the hollyhocks were coming into flower, Thomas and Marianne packed up their home in Market Harborough. A new life was in front of them in the ancient city of Leicester, the ‘Metropolis of Dissent’. It was a suitable place for the Cook family to live, especially as two-fifths of the local churchgoers attended seven Baptist chapels each Sunday. Famed for its Radicalism and Free-Church/Puritan/Quaker/Nonconformist heritage
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and its hosiery and shoe trade, Leicester ‘was spread over an unusual extent of ground in proportion to its population’.
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It retained a pleasing variety of architectural styles – medieval, Tudor, Georgian and Regency – and the open-air market place still occupied the whole of the south-eastern quarter of the walled town, as it had since the tenth century. Factories and warehouses were spreading but did not yet impinge on its trees, gardens and wide new streets. Houses for workers were superior to those in Nottingham, most with four rooms
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and with yards and some even had little gardens.