Thomas Cook (20 page)

Faced with the problem of finding comfortable accommodation for the ‘uncertain number of passengers who crowded upon us at the departure of the Train’ he set up ‘Moonlight Trips’, designed for workers who would sacrifice two nights’ sleep in a bed to ensure a day at the exhibition: ‘The moon was approaching the full, and I was moonstricken, and advertised a “moonlight trip to the Manchester Exhibition”. The neighbourhood of Newcastle caught the infection, and by the light of the moon we filled eighty large carriages on the first night and had to follow up the trip . . . By the next moon we tried Scarborough, Malton, and other distant places’, and on the first night there were so many passengers that they needed from ninety to nearly one hundred carriages.

Railway travelling is travelling for the Million: the humble may travel, the rich may travel. Taste and Genius may look out of third-class windows, meekly rebuking Vice and Ignorance, directly opposite them.

Thomas Cook,
Excursionist
, July 1854

T
housands in Leicester were in dire need during the terrible period of winter of 1855/6. Again Thomas showed that he was loyal to his goal to hearten the poor and help them to strive to improve their lot. With £500 raised by public subscription, he purchased vegetables and meat, and supervised a make-shift kitchen. Night after night, as merchant and chief cook, he produced around 15,000 gallons of ‘very superior soup’ to be carted through the town three mornings a week. Ever since the Society for the Poor and Wilberforce had set up soup kitchens in London in the late 1790s, at times of hardship country parsons doled out nourishing meat broth.

Soup kitchens are just one example of Thomas’s philanthropy. During one of his many regular steamer trips to Iona, he had collected more than £50 from the passengers for the Ionians to ‘replenish their Library and to stock them with Fishing Boats, Lines, Nets, etc.’. This led the
Daily Bulletin
of Glasgow to praise Thomas’s gesture, saying that ‘to these islanders Mr. Cook and his friends may be more useful than many Dukes’.
¹
The names of two of the boats purchased showed the appreciation of the islanders:
Brotherly Love
and
Thomas Cook
.

Frenetically busy with home arrangements, taking parties to Land’s End and the new romantic destination of the Scilly Islands, Thomas still did not neglect tours close to Leicester. Perhaps he was prompted by his tours to Land’s End passing through Exeter in Devon, but whatever the reason, soon the Earl of Exeter’s magnificent Burghley House, between Leicester and Peterborough, the largest palace of the Elizabethan Age, was on his itinerary. Lord Exeter, a train-hater, keenly welcomed all horse-drawn coaches. Thomas’s tickets for outings to grand houses were still selling well but nothing stopped petty mocking. To counter critics Thomas copied an article from a local newspaper, praising his tourists after a visit to Burghley House. The housekeeper had ‘not witnessed nor heard of a single act of rudeness or indiscretion; and on examining the rooms she could not perceive a trace of dirt, or disarrangement of any article’. Never immune to exploiting the kudos of rubbing shoulders with the aristocracy, Thomas added that, in his special meeting with the Marquess and Marchioness of Exeter, they had invited him to return, ‘so admirably did the visitors behave’.

In July, remembering his own deprived childhood, Thomas arranged Juvenile Excursions to Scotland with two packed trains from Newcastle, Sunderland and South Shields doing the return trip to Edinburgh in just one long day. He wanted young people to be introduced to

the scenes with which many of the more intelligent and well-read have been familiarized by history, tale, and song . . . Seven years ago we proposed to take down from the Midland towns a Special Train of youths for the modest sum of 5s from Leicester, Derby and Nottingham to Edinburgh and back. Hoping to meet with a ready response, we canvassed every hotel and lodging-house in Edinburgh for accommodation, and arranged for terms exceedingly moderate – generally fourpence to sixpence per head for sleeping accommodation, and about the same sums for breakfast . . . We found bed room[s] in Edinburgh alone for 1000 upon those terms. But all our enthusiastic dreams were exploded by a flat denial by one of the Companies.

As Thomas recounted, ‘The day was a glorious one for the Northern youths who made the trip, only marred by the Tea provided in the Corn Exchange by a person of Edinburgh, which was a dead failure and has left us two years of annoyance and litigation.’

Severe ups and downs in the economy for much of Victoria’s reign made the demands for Thomas’s business unpredictable. Even before the general recession of 1857, many trades were hurt by the high interest rates of the previous three years; for instance, by the winter of 1856–7 about 25,000 building workers in London alone were unemployed.
²

The year 1859 saw a book shaking the very foundations of science and religion. Charles Darwin published his
On the Origin of Species
, explaining evolution by natural selection, the theory that all life on earth had evolved slowly over millions of years ‘at hazard and at rare intervals’. The book, the most controversial publication of the nineteenth century, provoked Disraeli to shout the much-repeated question, ‘Is man an ape or angel? Sir I am on the side of the angels.’ One clergyman called Darwin the most dangerous man in England. Darwin’s theory was the second blow to the roots of Christianity. Geologists’ proof that the earth could not have been made in six days, or created in the year 4004 bc, showed that parts of the Bible were mere legends. This threat to the established order alarmed men like Thomas, and, odd though it seems, General Charles Gordon. Both were soon to see for themselves the historic proof of biblical events in the Holy Land.

By 1861 Paxton was again luring Thomas into a new scheme: a six-day excursion over Whitsuntide to Paris with the London Committee of Working Men, of which Paxton was the president. The idea, as described by Thomas, was for workers to ‘shake hands with the Parisian
ouvriers
’ and assure them of their feelings of good will and that ‘the British people have an earnest desire to live on terms of amity with neighbouring states’. Securing over a thousand cheap and clean beds was fraught with obstacles. Thomas had gone to Paris to organise accommodation:

I paid a visit to that city, with the view of facilitating the visits of English Excursionists, by providing for them cheap railway arrangements and suitable homes in Paris. I also travelled, in anticipation, from Paris to Brussels, Antwerp, &c., with the desire of combining Continental Tours with a series of Trips to the Exhibition. But in these projects I only met with very partial encouragement from the Railway Administrations of France and Belgium; and the English Companies had agreed upon unalterable terms betwixt London and Paris. Nevertheless, I was encouraged by the public spirit of Mr Church, Superintendent at that time of the Eastern Counties Railway, and of the Steamboats plying between Harwich and Antwerp; and with the hearty and liberal co-operation of that gentleman, I announced two Excursions from all parts of the Eastern Counties Railway to Belgium, the Rhine, Germany, and France.

On 17 May, six years after his last loss-making French trip, he set off again with 1,673 tourists, many of whom had never been out of their own counties. They were all attracted by a London to Paris return fare of just £1 and the sense of adventure promised in Thomas’s posters and pamphlets for ‘The Great International Excursion to Paris’. Among the pioneer tourists were assorted groups from every walk of life, including 200 men from Titus Salt’s cotton works in Bradford,
³
plus a group of rumbustious high-spirited Cockneys, and a journalist and a photographer from the
Illustrated London News
.

Just as 1841 had been a milestone in tourism in England, 1861 was a milestone in popular tourism abroad. Nothing before competed with it in size. Thomas was widening the frontiers of people who otherwise would have had limited horizons, who might not have left the safety of their own town and who were now enjoying climbing into boats and crossing the Channel. It was not just the poor whose families for generations had seldom ventured from their inland parish. Even in the eighteenth century Horace Walpole said that George III had not seen the sea until the age of thirty-four, and in the 1830s there were many boys in the sixth form at Rugby who had never seen the seaside.
⁴

Everyone had a great time, and the steamer returning to England was ‘a scene of enthusiastic excitement, expressed in song, speech, and hearty cheers’. It was a new epoch, a new dawn, but Thomas was left with a bill for £120 for advertising and again lost money. The whole trip was written off as a ‘labour of love minus profit’.

Thomas returned to London to a different sort of trouble. On 6 October
The Times
printed a leader denouncing ‘excursion mania’, and further, under the heading ‘Eagle Murder’, reported the shooting of an eagle in Iona for which Thomas was responsible. He managed to respond well to the criticism about excursions, saying that ‘every watering place on the English coast has been glutted with gossiping [
sic
], flirting, listless indolence . . . Bosh! Such thunder will never terrify anyone who understands what it is to travel in the Highlands.’
⁵

It was easier to defend tourists rushing off on their rambles than to explain away the death of the powerful eagle. Thomas’s explanation that the bird was ‘to form the centre of a case of ornithological specimens from Iona for visitors to see if a hotel was built on the island’ proved unconvincing and did not lessen the consternation among ornithologists. Thomas had not shot the bird himself, but the unfortunate incident was a bad omen for him. Future tours to Scotland were looking less promising.

Then the whole country went into mourning. Victoria’s 21-year marriage, one of the happiest in the history of royal marriages, was over. On 14 December 1861, Albert, aged forty-two, died at Windsor Castle. His death was attributed to typhoid fever, but it may have been a worsening stomach complaint. Devastated, Victoria sought seclusion as a grieving widow, but ensuring that Albert’s name was to be commemorated in many ways. The most elaborate and expensive monument ever created in England was planned on the site of the Crystal Palace itself,
⁶
opposite the new Albert Hall. Designed by Sir Gilbert Scott,
⁷
the 175-foot-high memorial, with the winged angels holding gilt trumpets, had twelve heads representing the arts and sciences: Michaelangelo, Wren, Inigo Jones, Raphael, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Goethe, Schiller, Milton, Shakespeare, Tasso and Dante.
⁸

That grim December of 1861, the month of Albert’s death and the official mourning period, coincided with John Mason’s wedding. Described then as a very dapper little man, thickset, with a small beard, he could well have remained a bachelor, as many people were cautious of being close to him. At the age of twenty-eight, his presence was formidable and, if provoked, he had a fearful temper, but the bride-to-be, Emma Hodges – the eldest daughter of a Unitarian and a prosperous elastic web manufacturer, who lived in a sizeable house in Mayfield Road, Stoneygate – was radiantly happy.
⁹
The extended Hodges family had earlier enjoyed an illustrious association with another Cook connected with travel and adventure. In the eighteenth century William Hodges (1744–97) had been the artist on board the
Resolution
on Captain James Cook’s second voyage to the South Pacific and Antarctic. As the banns for John Mason’s wedding had already been posted, despite Albert’s death, the marriage took place on the day after Boxing Day in the ‘Great Meeting’ chapel. Like her mother-in-law, Emma conceived almost immediately and the first of their five children, three sons and two daughters, was born in September 1862.

On the wedding certificate John Mason’s occupation was listed not as a printer or travel agent, but as ‘corn dealer’. Five years before the wedding, he had showed that he had his
own
methods of business. No longer dominated by the strong personality of his father, he took a job with the Midland Railways as superintendent of their excursion traffic on a salary of £75 per annum, a position he held for three years. Although in competition with his father, he was also in a good position to give him business.

In the early 1850s, Thomas’s second decade as a travel agent business had started on a high note with the construction of the Temperance Hotel and Temperance Hall, but he began his third decade in 1861 with less optimism. His religion, which had empowered him through boom and bust and widened his horizons, now scarcely lifted him from the despair caused by the Scottish railway companies dispensing with his services. Sadly, he wrote that ‘a thick Scotch mist overshadowed our Northern prospects; in England it was doubtful if there would be sufficient local traffic to justify the running of provincial Excursions; the Railway companies we usually served resolved to keep the London Trains under their own management, and not to employ agency’.
¹⁰

To counter this, in London he again leased premises as temporary hotels for the International Exhibition at South Kensington. The new pavilion, covering 23 acres between Cromwell Road and Exhibition Road, lacked both the elegance of Paxton’s Crystal Palace and the energy of Prince Albert but continued the theme of uniting art, science and manufacturing. The land was the site for the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum, to be built with profits from the Great Exhibition.

Yet again Thomas had to compromise. When he was not offered rail excursion concessions to take passengers to the exhibition, he leased large properties and set up boarding houses which would accommodate all classes of assorted visitors, including 200 rooms in two newly built red-brick tenements in the Fulham Road on the border of Chelsea and South Kensington, across the road from Pelham Crescent – ‘convenient for Exhibition Clubs, Family parties and for Visitors of both Sexes . . . Relations or Friends, in Parties of two or six persons, may have a Tenement to themselves . . . There are large cupboards . . . for storing Carpet Bags, etc.’ He spent £1,000 on furniture and each room accommodated between two and six people. As each room ‘had not yet been occupied’, each was ‘perfectly clean’,
¹¹
and he added that they were ‘free of bugs’.
¹²
Bed and a ‘plain substantial breakfast’ cost two shillings, and a smoking room was provided for those ‘who fancied they could not exist without a little smoke’.
¹³
Nothing was forgotten – even a raised stage in the courtyard for open-air meetings. Customers wanting superior services could pay six shillings a day for bed, breakfast and tea, both ‘substantial Meals with Meats’ and go to a ‘Select Boarding and Lodging House at No. 23 Ovington-square’, completed only ten years earlier, not far from the Albert Hall.