Thomas Cook (11 page)

William Baines, a Congregationalist draper who had not paid the church levy, was imprisoned for seven months.
⁴
Outraged, his pastor, Edward Miall, openly vowed to confront the issue of church rates, become a champion of religious liberty and fight to separate church and state. Miall and the organisation he set up, the Anti-State Church Association, which in 1853 became the Liberation Society, moved to London, where he brought out a newspaper, the
Nonconformist
, to fight for the disestablishment of the Church of England. The same year as Baines was sent to prison, four more parishioners in Leicester who refused to pay fines for non-payment of rates were saved when an elderly lady stepped in to pay them.

In contrast to this, five years earlier the power of Nonconformists had created a new era, a new age with a radical council. In 1835 the Municipal Corporations Act converted the old corporations that had controlled English town life since the Middle Ages into 179 new municipal boroughs. Leicester, as other towns, started planning council elections. In 1836, as in many industrial cities and towns in England, Leicester turned over to the rule of Nonconformists. A Nonconformist lord mayor was supported by Nonconformist councillors, aldermen and town clerk. Now any male householder whose house was rated could cast a vote in council elections, a number greatly enlarged because of the repeal of the Corporations and Test Acts. Precise records of the religious affiliation of members, though, are either limited or have not been examined, so in most areas there is no certainty as to whether the elections brought in a similar dominance of Nonconformists in other places. Only in Leicester, Manchester, Salford and Birmingham, where the Nonconformist element was well recorded, have scholars analysed and published the composition of the borough councils, let alone the number of the MPs in the parliament after the Reform Act in 1832.

Most of the thirty-eight new council members in Leicester had been a mixture of Nonconformist Radicals, Liberals and Whigs. No longer was the town directed by the landed gentry. Only four Tories remained. The first mayor, a Unitarian, belonged to the chapel called ‘the Great Meeting’, as did the following seven, so the chapel earned the name the ‘Mayors’ Nest’. The Act of Toleration of 1689 had excluded Unitarians and Quakers, but that had not prevented the Unitarians of Leicester building it in 1708. The same defiant spirit now set out to reform the council.

In the same way that their Nonconformist ancestors, in contrast to Catholics, had created places of worship which were bare and unadorned, the new councillors stripped the town hall of the trappings of the former Tory Corporation. Wanting a total break with the past, they threw out much of what signified the pomp of English civic life. During the Reformation their ancestors had rejected and thrown out rosaries, relics, incense, statues of the Virgin Mary, pilgrimages, the intervention of saints, making the sign of the cross, lighting candles, buying indulgences, venerating images, and so on. Out went the silver-topped mace and gilded goblets and baubles. Anything described as the ‘paraphernalia and appurtenances which symbolised the dignity and extravagance of the old order’ went under the hammer at an auction in the Guildhall – much at knockdown prices. It was hoped, too, that much of this would bring in cash to make up for monies lost during the previous corrupt council.

Two of the new-look councillors who had agreed to auction these historic objects ‘at promptly one pm on 1st January 1836’ were men who were catalysts in Thomas’s life. One was a Baptist, the other a Quaker. The first was Winks, who had been pivotal in Thomas’s life; the other was John Ellis, the tall, portly Quaker industrialist. Like the majority of men who had a far-reaching influence on Thomas’s life from 1834 onwards, Ellis, or ‘Railway John’, from Beaumont Leys, was an anti-drink crusader. A farmer and factory owner who had purchased Belgrave Hall,
⁵
a mansion on the outskirts of the city, Ellis gave Thomas his first openings in major railway excursions. In Leicester, as in most other places, the men behind Temperance were mostly Nonconformist and/or Liberal – still an imprecise term. There were confusing and shifting alliances of Whigs, Conservatives, Peelites, Irish nationalists and Radicals for the next forty years.

An ambiguity over the use of the word ‘Liberal’ confuses the situation. At this stage there were only two political parties, the Whigs and the Tories. Before a clear two-party system emerged, there was
no
unified national Liberal party of any sort in Britain, even though there were local associations, each with its own ideology. ‘Liberal’ was an expression used to describe political leanings, as an adjective. It became a paradigm in political life, an inadequate umbrella used by a range of politicians, such as Radicals, anti-trade union Whigs like Lord Melbourne, fanatical Free Traders, or reformers, such as Ellis, Potter or Silk Buckingham.

‘Liberal’ meant different things in different places. The Liberal Party finally came into existence in the summer of 1859 at a meeting at Willis’s Rooms in St James’s organised by a group of Radicals, Free Traders, Peelites, Gladstonian Liberals and Old Whigs to combine to oust the government of Lord Derby. A large number of Radicals pushed for the disestablishment of the Church of England, for the redress of other Nonconformist grievances, for the widening of the franchise, for the limiting of the power of the House of Lords and Free Trade. The Conservative Party had been formed earlier in 1835. But it was not until 1868, nine years after the Liberal Party had been formed, that the first Liberal government was elected, with Gladstone at its head. Although Gladstone was a High Churchman and an Old Etonian, the party he led for twenty-five years was predominantly a party of religious Nonconformity – and remained so until the end of the century.

After the first Leicester elections, some of the tight-knit feeling between the Nonconformists was lessening. For centuries, the struggle against the Anglican monopoly in the council had given them unity, but without a common cause the Nonconformists were no longer in agreement, and two groups were fiercely against each other. On one side there were the ‘Improvers’, led by William Biggs,
⁶
one of the town’s largest hosiery manufacturers. They insisted on improvements to beautify the appearance of the city at the same time as installing and maintaining sewers, drainage and water supply. Leicester needed, they said, an imposing town hall, a wider high street and more recreational grounds for the working class. Opposing the ‘Improvers’ were the ‘Economists’, or ‘Economy Party’, led by Joseph Whetstone, chairman of the Finance Committee of the Council, who wanted to trim expenditure down to what was essential and to give priority to drains. The Public Health Act was still in the future,
⁷
and life expectancy was low in Leicester, as in other places, because of appalling sanitation, scarce drainage, the lack of fresh-water reservoirs and indifference to the accumulated rubbish and the factory effluents which polluted the River Soar. When delivering a fiery talk in Leicester, Biggs referred to the ‘merchant princes’ of nearby Derby as ‘the Medici of their day’. Biggs, like other men who owned large modern mills with mounting exports, helped finance the Anti-Corn Law League, furthered Free Trade and was sympathetic to Nonconformist men who fostered similar causes. He was soon singled out by Thomas.

Aware of the need to attract votes, Biggs allowed the newly formed Leicester Temperance Society to use his hosiery warehouse for Thomas’s ‘great tea meeting which comprised 1000 guests’, many of whom came from afar. Within weeks an advertisement appeared in the
Leicester Chronicle
saying that he was ‘a
Bookseller and Stationer
’ specialising in ‘all kinds of Periodicals, Unstamped Newspapers and Books of every description . . . Printing and Bookbinding in every department executed to order’. His printer’s shop at 1 King Street also sold pens, stationery and a few commemorative medals.
⁸
Time and money, though, were in short supply. While setting himself up in Leicester, for four years Thomas also arranged what he called ‘amateur performances’, Temperance railway outings. Destinations depended on where the new track had just been laid.

Thomas wrote that ‘a succession of trips, uniting Leicester, Nottingham, Derby, and Birmingham, all at that time connected with the Temperance movement, engaged my attention for two or three years’. There were also outings to and from Rugby and other nearby stations. Thomas wrote that the fares for all these local trains, except for Birmingham, ‘were 1/- for adults, and 6d for children under fourteen years of age. Return fares to Birmingham were generally 2/6, and for children half-price’. He added that these trips ‘were generally very successful. Most . . . were in connection with the Temperance movement, and I had no personal pecuniary interest in them beyond the printing of bills.’ He was, though, preparing the way for commercial sightseeing trips by providing classic tourist destinations on his itinerary, such as Mount Sorrel and the old spa town of Matlock, situated amidst romantic scenery on the Derwent.

As well as being a tour organiser on a non-paid basis for Temperance causes, Thomas occasionally climbed up onto rostrums and took up his old role of preacher. Three total immersion baptisms were performed by him on 28 July 1844 in Smeeton Westerby, a village south of Leicester near Foxton Locks on the Market Harborough to Leicester stretch of the Grand Union Canal. Leicestershire has plenty of inland waterways and is rich in meandering rivers, like the Soar and the Welland, so why a rivulet had been chosen is not known. But when some troublemakers broke down the embankments, an alternative venue was found. The General Baptist Repository
⁹
recorded that at ‘On Lord’s Day, July 28th, three persons, one male and two females, were added to our little flock by baptism. The sacred ordinance was performed in the canal, about a mile from the chapel . . . in front of a crowd estimated at from 800 to 1000 who listened with marked attention to an address by Mr T. Cook, Leicester, who afterwards immersed the candidates.’
¹⁰
Thomas remained active as a preacher, delivering yet another address to the Sabbath School at Smeeton a week later.

William Biggs, who served Leicester as mayor in 1842, 1848 and 1859, was also secretary of the local Liberal Association. After he led his party in winning the town’s two parliamentary seats from the Tories in 1838, the two new members were chaired through the town in a procession of about 20,000 people. This was the first time in history that non-Tories had won seats in Leicester.

Ellis was also typical of the Nonconformists in the new council. Blunt but charitable – his daughters
¹¹
tirelessly ran a local school and helped Leicester’s poor – he was chairman of the Midland Railway Company between 1849 and 1858 and the Liberal MP for the area for four years from 1848. A pioneer in passenger trains, he had recruited George and Robert Stephenson (of
Rocket
fame) to build the Leicester to Swannington railway in 1832, the third railway to be opened in Britain.
¹²

There was now a line all the way to London from Leicester – the population had grown to a staggering 48,167, of which about 3,000 men and women were employed in the hosiery factories, and 600 in the more recent shoe and boot industry. The city, according to the
Temperance Messenger
, contained 700 spirit and beer shops and public houses, ‘great numbers of dying drunkards . . . [and] a greater proportion of prostitutes than any town beyond the precincts of the metropolis’. Other urban evils included a high mortality rate, slum dwellings and bad drainage – a problem exacerbated by the flatness of the area.

Living in the heart of a city did not mean that Thomas forgot his four years in the market garden in Melbourne or the rural pleasures of growing vegetables and flowers. He started the
Cottage Gardener
, a ‘periodical of considerable size, which attracted great interest’.
¹³
Since the Royal Horticultural Society had been formed in 1804, various magazines had been launched, including the
Gardener’s Chronicle
in 1841 and the
Horticultural Register
.
¹⁴
The most influential of the garden writers, John Claudius Loudon, a self-made Scot, carried on the
Gardeners’ Magazine
for seventeen years.
¹⁵
Although too expensive for most gardeners, it did inspire local magazines, such as Thomas’s in Leicester.

Gardening was a consuming pastime in the new suburbs, and most people tried to follow the latest fashions. Contrarily, Thomas promoted the charm of small, simple productive gardens with honeysuckle, wild roses, strawberries and vegetables. The
Gardener
was not mentioned in
Botanico-Periodicum Huntianum
nor acknowledged as a predecessor in the better-known magazine called the
Cottage Gardener
, founded in London by George William Johnson in 1848. Alas, no copy of Thomas’s magazine, nor his
Garden Allotment Advocate
, survives.
¹⁶
Anxious to prop up the new allotment movement, Thomas also helped found the Leicester Allotment Society and in 1842 made a vain appeal for money for members to purchase potato seeds at cost price.
¹⁷
As well as doing everything he could to help the poor grow their own food, on another occasion, to alleviate the hunger in Leicester, he bought cheap potatoes in Northamptonshire and sold them at cost price. But his supplies were not up to the samples so he could not compete successfully with the established potato merchants, and his efforts came to nothing.

Just before Christmas 1842, Thomas gathered the information and printed the
Leicestershire Almanack, Directory Guide to Leicester and Advertiser
, priced at one shilling. Its 170 pages were packed with precise information, including the names and addresses of the Dissenting chapels and the times of services.

His output would soon rival that of Winks, who had become a printer and distributor of Baptist publications, as well as being the unpaid minister of the Carley Street chapel.
¹⁸
Thomas said that his own works printed and distributed ‘at least half a million tracts on Temperance and kindred subjects’ plus Baptist devotional works and hymn
¹⁹
books with such words as: