Thomas Cook (14 page)

In order to bring down the price of bread, the League fought vigorously for the repeal of the iniquitous law that kept the price of corn high. After it was set up in Manchester in 1839, the League spread like wildfire, fanned by urban discontent, the recession, a few bad harvests and rising prices. Unemployment affected labourers, poor tenants, wheat growers, textile workers, craftsmen and manufacturers. Some were not just hungry, but were malnourished and near death. In the late 1830s and the ‘hungry forties’, starving labourers set fire to farmers’ ricks and there were clashes with the military. In the Potteries, the Black Country and the cloth towns of the west, men could no longer find jobs, and the high price of bread brought them and their families near to starvation. Radical action was urged at many meetings.
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Already adept at banging the drum against such issues as smoking, drink and the poor, Thomas now put the Anti-Corn Law campaign through his printing presses. While his
Cheap Bread Herald
spoke of the ‘moral injustice’ and ‘class legislation’ which only helped the landowners, Thomas addressed meeting after meeting with intense fervour. His speeches, forthright and to the point, were delivered with the passion of someone who had known the suffering of hunger as a child. Behind the impassioned speaker was his childhood persona: the hungry boy smelling the aroma of freshly baked crusty loaves, but being unable to taste them because his mother could not afford it. Similar misery and suffering had fuelled his horror of alcohol.

Since 1815, the price of corn and other cereals had been protected by the Corn Laws because it was argued that agriculture needed to be propped up. Wheat had trebled in price from 43 shillings a quarter (28lb) in 1792, the year prior to war against France breaking out. It rose to 126 shillings in 1812, the year Napoleon had marched across Russia to Moscow.
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When prices had dropped after Waterloo, many farmers were ruined and rents could not be paid. While the Corn Law of 1815 safeguarded landlords, it both penalised consumers and caused political unrest. Cereal crops may have appeared not to be relevant to the warehouses in Lancashire piled high with unsold cotton goods, but both were the subject of tariffs, and both were arguments in the strategy of the Leaguers. This protection was implemented when foreign corn, including much from the United States, was prohibited if, due to a good harvest, the home corn fell to a specified price. In the following years import duties fluctuated dependent on the price of home corn.

The religious fervour of Leaguers was shown by the name of the newspaper, the
Free Trade Catechism
, and in such mottoes as ‘Give us our daily bread’, as the theme of many of the speeches. Free Trade was put up as a panacea capable of overcoming all economic and social ills.

Among the many arguments in the Anti-Corn Laws agenda was the suggestion that a high-rate of duty on imported grain would provoke foreigners to retaliate by boycotting British exports. Thomas proudly told how he was one of the agitators: ‘I was intensely interested in the progress towards Free Trade; and in connection with the repeal of the Corn Laws I took a very active part in promoting interest and excitement among the people. I published a little paper entitled the
Cheap Bread Herald
, in which my main object was to accelerate the downfall of Protection.’
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He further spoke of the havoc wrought by farmers keeping the price of wheat high and bakers who cheated with underweight loaves. Appalled at bogus claims and false advertising, he formed a committee to expose bakers and force them to price their bread honestly. His motivation was similar to that behind the soup kitchens he was later to organise:

On such evenings there generally collected together about 1,000 people to listen to my statements from my public window of my house, and during most of the time I had the satisfaction of issuing exposing placards headed ‘Down Again,’ as prices continued to fall. A committee was formed to work with me, and very strenuous efforts were made to compel the bakers and breadsellers to sell bread by weight, and much excitement was created in the town. One Monday morning we sent out a number of men to purchase a loaf from every baker and breadseller in Leicester; the loaves were ticketed with the name of the shop where each was bought and the price paid, and in the evening, in response to an invitation by placard, at least 2,000 people assembled in the Amphitheatre in Humberstone Gate to witness a public Assize of Bread.

One by one, the loaves of bread from the shops, of all shapes and sizes, were carried up to the raised platform, where, by permission of the town clerk, the borough scales were waiting. Each loaf of bread was weighed. Loaf followed loaf. Now performing as a cross between the preacher that he was and the auctioneer he could have been, Thomas announced the weight of each loaf. The scales revealed the truth of his hypothesis. Bakers were found to be cheating their customers by not using enough flour. In some instances, 4lb loaves were little over 3lb. Whenever Thomas announced a large discrepancy, the audience roared and cheered. He added: ‘The names of the dealers and their prices were all published, and great excitement was caused in the trade, but the magistrates were with us and enforced numerous fines – not only for the omission to weigh the loaves, but also for adulteration. An analyst was employed, and a number of fines were inflicted for adulteration.’

There may have been justice in the attacks on the Whigs by many members of the Corn League, such as Thomas, who liked to point out their folly, disunion and incompetence.
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Indeed, he was not averse to attacking the Whigs as if they were Tories. Meanwhile, he fell foul of the law by failing to pay stamp duty on the
Cheap Bread Herald
for an issue which had included a paragraph referring to the French Revolution of 1848. As this was deemed as general news and the Stamp Duty Act specified that only papers and periodicals which did not carry general news were exempt from stamp duty, Thomas received an urgent summons calling him to London to face the Court of the Exchequer.

From London’s Euston Station he walked south. Everywhere there were signs of dash and style: swift carriages with coachmen in top hats, phaetons, barouches, broughams, waggonettes, gigs, four-wheeled chaises and four-in-hands jostled beside horse-drawn buses
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and hackney cabs. London, choking with traffic, poverty and riches, seemed to have more people and horse-drawn vehicles than anywhere else in the world. Behind the grandeur were tenements, open sewers, pickpockets, thugs, beggars, drunks, prostitutes and abandoned children running wild. Thomas could smell the Thames before he saw it. It also exuded the dank mists of winter, which, combined with the products from smoking chimneys, created murky smog.

In Kingsway he turned left into Fleet Street, where on the corner of Whitefriars Street, since it had moved from Manchester in 1843, was the office and nerve centre of the National Anti-Corn League. It was significant that it was in Fleet Street, the home of newspapers, as it was the first political lobby group to use modern media methods to further its cause – an example Thomas followed. From Fleet Street he walked to his appointment with the solicitor of the Inland Revenue at Somerset House in the Strand on the Thames. Buttoning up his waistcoat and holding himself tall, he walked along the Strand then turned left past the gatehouse into the paved courtyard to the eighteenth-century royal palace on the river front. Men with bundles of papers under their arms hurried down narrow, gloomy cream corridors. The old rooms were now divided into offices filled with members of the legal profession and Inland Revenue. Thomas defended himself: ‘He took in my letter, presented it to the Board, and came out, stating that the Board, seeing that the objects I had in view were of a benevolent character, agreed to withdraw the summons on payment by me of a sovereign, which would not cover the expenses incurred. He told me that I was at perfect liberty to say what I liked in my paper about Whigs or Tories. I might denounce them all if I liked, but if I touched the revenue they would touch me.’

On his return walk to the station Thomas saw the graceful pale curve of Regent Street, with its domes, balustrades and shops, and Piccadilly. This sortie to London reinforced his resolve. Galvanised by his near-prosecution by the Inland Revenue, Thomas was soon on a rostrum again making ‘an energetic speech’ to help send a petition to parliament protesting against the use of grain in the distillation of liquor.

Thomas always stood firmly behind the Anti-Corn Leaguers, but he was no political radical, let alone aligned to any of the newly formed trade unions. Although the Anti-Corn Leaguers and the Chartists both revolted against the middle-class ascendancy established by the Reform Bill, there was much rivalry between the two organisations. The Chartists pushed for the fulfilment of the six points of the People’s Charter of 1838 (see p. 56). From the time of their first national convention in London, marked differences separated the northerners (who were fundamentally anti-industrialist) and the men from the Midlands and London.
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Anti-Corn Leaguers were making such a major contribution to politics that their power was feared by the Tories and Protectionists. The subject of Protectionism versus Free Trade raised tempers, produced slogans and filled newspapers. So prevalent was the agitation that if the Corn Laws had not been defeated, it was rumoured that there could well have been a cataclysmic event as there had been in France. In 1846, Gladstone, then at the Board of Trade, prepared the bill for revoking the Corn Laws.

Just before dawn on 16 May 1846, at 4.15a.m., in one of the most symbolic nights in British parliamentary history in the Palace of Westminster, voting cut across parties, across class, across family. When the tellers counted the votes, the Ayes had it. Almost overnight Britain moved from Protection to Free Trade. Paradoxically, the Irish Famine had been one of the excuses which Sir Robert Peel, the Conservative prime minister, used to bring about the repeal of the Corn Laws, but it did little to help the starving millions there, who needed charitable aid and money. As not enough people in Ireland could afford to buy Irish wheat, meat and dairy produce, its export to England continued – as before.

Trade restrictions remained an unremitting political issue into the next century.
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Britain, according to many farmers and critics, had sacrificed the interests of agriculture to industry. Nobody was sure how far the legislation would affect trade. Would cheap goods and food flood through the newly unbarred ports? British farmers were assured of a certain amount of protection by the sheer cost of shipping grain combined with the hazards of rats and mice in the hulls of ships. At that stage there was no large surplus of foreign grain awaiting entry.

T
he repeal of the Corn Laws that year had not brought the anticipated relief. Many people were still hungry and others, including Thomas, were surrounded by chilling circumstances. Misfortune appeared to be delivering him blow after blow, but this may have been a result of spreading himself too thinly. He was busy, organising trips, campaigning and producing pages on everything, from the evils of drink and smoking to the joys of cheap bread and travel. On top of this, some of the tourists on his first trip to Scotland were suing for compensation for their perilous night on the ship to Scotland. A further trip to Scotland the following year had failed to attract sufficient customers and had lost money. The final blow was the failure of the
National Temperance Magazine
, into which he had put so much effort. Whether its closure was a reflection of difficult times, or because readers had fallen away because of a fall in quality, is not known. In the very last issue of the magazine, in August 1846, he told readers of the ‘painful and sudden reverses’ which made it impossible for him ‘to sustain his position. After ten years of ceaseless toil in the Temperance cause’, he was forced to give in to ‘those influences which have driven several Temperance publishers from the field’. His farewell message, written in the third person, had a desperate ring: ‘Borne down by heavy responsibilities and legal oppressions, he has no alternative but to bid, at least temporarily, farewell to his esteemed friends and supporters.’
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The bleak picture of a debtors’ prison painted by Dickens just ten years earlier in
Oliver Twist
(1837–9) remained. Those who failed to pay taxes, rent or debts usually pawned or sold their household belongings – everything from silver-plated hairbrushes to wedding rings – and, if they still failed to meet their creditors, they ended up in special jails. As in the workhouses, inmates often made potato sacks and baskets.

Declared bankrupts were now exempt from prison, so Thomas quickly made himself his own petitioner. Bankruptcy hearings for ‘T. Cook, printer of Granby Street, Leicester’ took place in Nottingham on 15 January and again on 12 February 1847. The records do not reveal any further proceedings. Thomas was discharged and his print works and travel company continued seemingly unaffected, and he did not move from his old address. He may have been bailed out by John Ellis. Chagrined and bothered though Thomas was by his bankruptcy, he was determined not to lose his base. Like many Victorians, he followed the homespun philosophy of another railway man, Samuel Smiles,
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who promoted the values of hard work, thrift and progress. This author of
Self Help
was a former administrator on the Leeds and Thirsk Railway and South-Eastern Railway.

Thomas’s personal setbacks did not prevent him appreciating that it was another year of triumph for Nonconformists. As with the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts nineteen years earlier, they had again managed to chip away at the status of the Church of England. The Manchester Act 1847 reduced the number of bishops in the House of Lords from forty-three to twenty-six – a reduction that was seen as a stepping stone for the Dissenters in their long campaign against discrimination.