Thomas Cook (16 page)

This invaluable booklet – ‘
Designed as a Guide to an Excursion Party from Leicester to Belvoir, Aug. 29, 1848; with a Description of the Route from Leicester, and Places of Interest in the Locality of the Castle
.’ – was a forerunner of the extensive facts and helpful information which were to be a hallmark of all Thomas Cook tours.

The Duke, a public-spirited man who was the Lord Lieutenant of the county for fifty years, allowed the visitors to tour inside the house in groups of twenty-five – as long as they behaved ‘with propriety and decorum’. To discourage tourists from bringing ‘numerous basket accompaniments and annoyance of picnic parties’, Thomas suggested they took refreshments ‘on economical terms’ at the nearby Belvoir Inn. Apart from wanting to avoid careless cooking and the tough meat so often served at such inns, strict Temperance men went out of their way to avoid contact with
any
establishments serving liquor. Yet, over and over again, as he ferried larger and larger groups through the front doors of giant, forbidding mansions, Thomas was compromising – and not just his Temperance ideals. Considering his principles on the rights of the working class, it is a shock to come across his forelock tugging – as seen in the sycophantic prose describing his upper-class hosts in his
Hand-Book of Belvoir Castle
– which far exceeded the usual deference to the aristocracy. Even if we remember that he aimed to establish regular paying visits to stately homes and that their owners looked with nervous anxiety at such intrusions, his words are over the top: ‘This liberality on the part of the aristocracy of the country constitutes a pleasing feature of the present times, and is calculated to produce a good moral effect in binding together in one harmonious chain the different sections of society. May God speed the day when the sons of toil shall live happily in the enjoyment of the just rewards of their labour, and the rich shall live at ease in the undisturbed possession of the wealth and greatness to which they have a legitimate claim!’

Apart from tours to stately homes, there were also events such as excursions to see Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s famous
Great Britain
steamship when in 1846 she suffered a major mishap, being stranded after running ashore on the rocky coast of Ireland at Dundrum Bay. The grounding was caused – it is said – by deviations in the ship’s compass resulting from the effects of the iron of the hull. Despite the fascination of the ship, it is surprising that Thomas managed to find enough local customers, as the slump in England was acute. At one stage at least one-third of Leicester’s population was out of work, and the Union Workhouse in Sparkenhoe Street was full, but even so demand for Thomas’s trip outstripped the available places.

Then, in February 1848, came the electrifying news of the
coup d’état
in France. While the deposed Louis-Philippe and his Queen, disguised as Mr and Mrs Smith, crossed the Channel to Dover, another political adventurer, Louis Napoleon, beaky nosed and moustached, left his apartment in Carlton Gardens, London, and crossed the Channel the other way. Louis-Philippe retired to Claremont in Surrey,
⁷
the former home of George IV’s son-in-law Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, king of the Belgians, whose wife was Louis-Philippe’s daughter. The Elysée Palace was not empty for long. By the end of the year Louis Napoleon was president and assuming the grandeur, but not yet the imperial title, of his late uncle Napoleon Bonaparte. During his twenty-two years in power, he would make investments in Egypt which would impact on Thomas’s business.

On 21 September 1848, Thomas was again organising a Temperance train outing. To mark the twelfth anniversary of the Leicester Temperance Society, a ‘Rural Festival’ was held at Cossington. The
Leicester Chronicle
of 23 September reported that there were around 1,500 members and friends. Tea was served in the grounds of the rectory at the invitation of the Revd John Babington, the Church of England rector, then president of the society, ‘on the gravel walk, beneath an extensive grove, adjoining the rectory, upon a table 126 yards long’.
⁸
This trip marked Thomas’s return to the railways. By the end of 1850 he once again had ‘arrangements’ with almost all the railway companies of the Midlands, the North of England, the North West, the Eastern Counties and some southern lines.

On Wednesday 6 November, at 10.15a.m., a train departed from Leicester to Cambridge carrying about 800 passengers who had come from as far as Birmingham, Sheffield, Derby and other places to present Thomas with a gold watch and chain (‘value about £25’) inscribed, ‘Presented to Mr. Thomas Cook by subscription, in approval of his able arrangements of special trips. Leicester, November 6th, 1850.’ A group of loyal local passengers had formed a committee for ‘his having for nine years zealously and satisfactorily served the public as a projector and manager of Cheap Excursions’. According to his calculations, he had escorted a total of 15,246 passengers over 7,525 miles with fares of £5,090 9
s
9
d
.

Just as Thomas was now on the brink of take-off, Lord Melbourne died at the age of sixty-nine. As the family stood beside his deathbed, his sister Emily, Lady Palmerston, was sure that he had gone to Heaven. Her son-in-law, Lord Ashley, had his doubts.
⁹

T
he unplanned development of rail travel in the nineteenth century produced far-reaching and much criticised upheavals. By 1850, 6,000 miles of railway track had been laid, altering forever Britain’s townscapes and landscapes. The road system, in decline since the departure of the Romans, had begun to improve in the eighteenth century, when the turnpike movement produced roads with surfaces fit for the ‘flying coaches’.
¹
Further improvements in transport occurred with the construction of canals, as a fundamental element in the industrial revolution. Now, both roads and canals were losing passengers and freight to the new rail network.

Thomas, anxious to pre-empt the mounting number of competitors who were also utilising trains, set up tours to new destinations. His survival depended on creativity, stamina and an ability to keep just a little ahead of the competition. He let his old ambition surface and began seriously to ‘give his attention to Eastern routes’, knowing that many would clamour to make such a journey. Indeed, the advantages of trips to ‘the Eastern Lands of the Bible’ were acknowledged by many clergymen. The stories of David and Jesus made Jerusalem a unique and sought after destination.

There was an enormous desire for many Protestants to return to the roots of their faith, and to see the places mentioned in the Bible. For some Nonconformists, the motivation for visiting the Holy Land was to return to the very beginnings of the Church, to pre-Roman Christianity, before it had become an institution and before Jesus’ teachings had been embellished and altered by the disciples and the popes. The historic evidence of Christianity and continuity back to the times of Abraham and Sarah was now being scrutinised by archaeologists and scholars.

In the nineteenth century one of the first well-known English writers to make a trip was the tall, stooped, bespectacled master of satire, William Makepeace Thackeray. P. & O. Line, which had regular ships to Alexandria, was promoting Mediterranean ‘cruises’ with round tickets, including shore excursions. Thackeray was given a free passage in exchange for writing up his experiences.
²
Far from producing an uncritical and laudatory book
³
about his excursions, he painted a vivid picture showing the difficulties of travelling, stressing that in the Holy Land he had had to travel in a party ‘well mounted and well armed’.

When in London again Thomas discussed Holy Land tours with Silk Buckingham, who compared North America’s 8,000 miles of rail tracks with Palestine where there were none. And it was expensive. There were taxes on departing from Jaffa, on arrival in Jerusalem and on accommodation. Few of the roads were passable and in many places the old Roman highways were hardly more than mule tracks. Tourists had to move around on donkeys, mules, camels or horses, generally, as Thackeray had pointed out, in convoys. Armed escorts were the norm, but most tourists had to pay what was jokingly called the ‘Sultan’s tax’, a kind of protection money given to local chieftains, plus
baksheesh
for obtaining reductions in some of the regular taxes.
⁴
Many local costs were unpredictable and difficult to calculate in advance. On top of this there were also sandstorms, fleas, mosquitoes and the odd raiders on horseback.
⁵

For those intrepid enough to persevere, the journey from Jaffa to Jerusalem took about fourteen hours, made up of two or three to Ramleh and then about eleven to Jerusalem. The hills to Jerusalem were so steep that it took two hours more going up than it did coming down. In an effort to beat the winter winds and storms which brought havoc to the Mediterranean, Christian pilgrims generally arrived in November and stayed most of the winter.
⁶
When Princess Caroline, George IV’s estranged wife, had visited in 1817, her sailing boat had been chased by pirates and nearly shipwrecked in a storm. Then, when finally anchored in Jaffa, the royal party had been barred from landing because they had insufficient permit paperwork, forcing them to sail to Acre.

Buckingham sympathised with Thomas’s idea of ‘bringing together people of various nationalities and social distinctions’ to the Holy Land, but argued that, despite the rough crossing of the Atlantic, the United States was a better bet. Before Christmas, Thomas was on his way, ready to make arrangements for breakthrough tours to New York and beyond. But the destination was changed at the last minute.

Just as Thomas had escorted his first commercial trip to Liverpool in 1845, in 1850 he again chose it to initiate a new phase in tourism: tours to America. After visiting shipping companies about reduced fares for packages, he took a train home, via Derby Station. Here he met his good acquaintance Ellis and his fellow director Paxton, who, by chance, was the architect of the forthcoming Great Exhibition in London. Paxton casually made a daunting proposal which would change Thomas’s whole life.

A year earlier, in 1849, Prince Albert had started preparations for the biggest and most diverse exhibition ever held in Europe. This ‘Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations’ would show everything from railway carriages and textiles to butter churns and Bovril, and confirm London as an exemplary modern metropolis, a major player on the world stage. In contrast to previous exhibitions on the continent, London would invite contributions from every corner of the earth.

Albert and the other organisers, including Paxton, feared that not enough people would come to the exhibition. The expertise of Thomas and his competitors was needed to tempt and move large numbers of visitors from all over Britain. Each operator could have the exclusive rights on certain lines coming into London. Thomas’s territory was to be the southern part of the Midland Line. He would receive a fee for every excursion passenger who purchased a fifteen-shilling ticket. Thomas jumped at the idea, especially as he knew he could have the assistance of John Mason, who was just seventeen and had recently finished his printer’s apprenticeship.

When Paxton
⁷
met Thomas in Derby, the nine-acre site in Hyde Park, near Knightsbridge barracks, was waiting for the 2,000 tradesmen to start erecting the massive prefabricated building. Paxton’s showplace palace of iron and glass, an overpowering example of the new mass-manufacturing processes, would turn out to be the star of the exhibition, based on designs similar to the giant greenhouses he had already built for the Duke of Devonshire. It relied on wrought-iron sash bars invented by John Loudon in 1816, which could be bent in any direction and still maintain their strength.
⁸
Loudon had died in 1843, so Paxton received the credit.

Albert’s plans to stage a large industrial exhibition in London had earlier been met with scepticism by many members of the upper classes, who were aghast at royalty thrusting itself into trade and modernity. Albert, who had been a keen visitor to the Frankfurt fairs in his youth, persisted, and thought England could easily compete with the continental fairs. The idea had initially come to him from Henry Cole, then Assistant Keeper of the Public Records and a member of the Royal Society of Arts of which Albert was president. Cole, who had earlier published the first Christmas card in England and helped launch the new postal service, had returned from France in 1849, bubbling over with enthusiasm for the Paris
Exposition
.

Unlike the fairs that exhibited the latest styles in expensive and fashionable items, such as fine silks, velvets and Empire-style chairs, the Great Exhibition was to assert Britain’s domination in arts, sciences, industry, commerce, armaments and medicine. It would stimulate trade and create jobs by obtaining orders for both the products and the machines which made them.
⁹
Albert, keen that the exhibition should be self-financing, asked his banker, Lionel Rothschild, to underwrite £50,000 of the £200,000 initially required. (It actually made a large profit.)

The first of the 1,060 iron columns went up in the autumn of 1850, followed by 300,000 panes of glass which were fixed with over 200 miles of sash bars – a celebration of the end of that old enemy of light and air, the outdated window tax. Being prefabricated, it took 2,000 men only eight months to finish and cost just £79,800. As glazing was moved on special trolleys, one man alone could fix 108 panes in a day.

Fears that the structure would collapse in the first high wind were soon dispelled. As autumn progressed into winter, the light which poured through its glass was so dazzling that
Punch
magazine christened the pavilion a ‘Crystal Palace’. In less than twelve months, this pavilion, which was waterproof and more than a third of a mile long and 408 feet in width, would be complete – and, at 108 feet high, tall enough to enclose the lofty elm trees on its site. The splendid gala opening was planned to take place just eighteen months after the day that Albert had agreed to Cole’s idea. Paxton’s impact would go far beyond Hyde Park, soon becoming the prototype of all the classic glass-and-iron functional buildings of Victorian England. Its influence would be seen in the glass dome in the British Library reading room and the stately glass roofs of new railway stations, everywhere from King’s Cross to Sydney.