Thomas Cook (24 page)

The
Morning Star
, which described itself as an outpost of ‘Manchester radicalism’, took up the cudgel for Thomas and on 11 September, objected to the

lofty, lordly, genteel, and grumbling tone . . . The one theme perpetually harped on is the vulgarity and impertinence of people who presume to travel by excursion trains, or with cheap return tickets, or in companies, or in any way that is not grand, expensive and solitary. Every one (that is, everyone who writes) is indignant at the insolence of such people in daring to invade the sacred Continental haunt which, by virtue of a previous sojourn of a fortnight’s duration, he has come to regard as his own exclusive possession. He cannot any longer enjoy the mountains or the castles, the picture-galleries or the glaciers, the cathedrals or the lakes, since these Cockney people or manufacturing people will persist in coming to look at them. You would fancy, to read his indignant sarcasms, that the Louvre was his private residence, that the Mer de Glace was his birthright, that the Cathedral of Milan was built by one of his noble ancestors, that Lago Maggiore was a pond in his own demesne.

These articles were timely, as the ‘war of classes’ was becoming heated with mounting agitation for parliamentary reform. Disraeli had earlier asserted the need for change and the Tories now agreed. He introduced resolutions which lowered the franchise qualifications and redistributed seats, thereby limiting the predominance of any one class. Gladstone, however, objected to what he called fancy franchises and dual voting while the extreme Liberals, known as ‘the Tea-Room party’, demanded the vote for the ‘compound householder’. In July 1867 at last the Bill was passed which gave working men in cities and towns the vote. Now all adult male householders in boroughs who paid rates and male lodgers who paid £10 a year in rent could have their say – but in country areas property requirements remained a little higher. At the elections the following year the newly enfranchised urban householders brought the first unequivocally Liberal government into power and made Gladstone prime minister. It was a triumph for the Nonconformists – the first government ever underpinned by the forces of Nonconformist conviction. Gladstone intended to abolish compulsory church rates, launch national education, repeal the laws which blocked Nonconformists from teaching at English universities and, in recognition that it only ministered to a twelfth of the people in Ireland, disestablish the Church of Ireland. The new government cautiously started admitting the lower classes to the political nation. In just three years, legislation would be passed which allowed trade unions the right to exist as pressure groups. Seven years later ‘peaceful picketing’ would be legalised.
¹¹
Attitudes, too, were changing.

A few years later the tables were turned on Sir Leslie Stephen and Lever. An article in the
Daily Telegraph
came out in defence of mass travel:

It is, or has been, the fashion among some empty-headed persons to sneer at ‘Cook’s Tourists’. Pretending to imagine that the pleasure of travel should be reserved for the upper classes, they protested against the beauties of Nature being examined by any but persons of the highest quality and seemed to think that the grey Highlands, the quaint Belgian cities, the castled Rhine crags, the glaciers, the mountains and waterfalls of Switzerland, the blue plains of Italy were exhibitions which should be open only to the holders of high priced stall tickets. What little mischief those notions occasioned was soon blown aside when, in the course of the last thirty years, a man has catered for the comfort of upward of three million persons – numbering among them Dukes, Archbishops and members of every class of respectable society – not merely to their satisfaction, but without the occurrence of a single accident throughout the whole period, he can well afford to disregard either spoken scoff or printed satire.

Since Paxton had opened the route for him to Newhaven, over five years 75,000 tourists had been on Cook’s Tours on the Newhaven– Dieppe route to the continent alone.
¹²
In 1866, while John Mason was on his way to the United States, Thomas took a party of about fifty to Italy. When they arrived in Florence, they discovered that every hotel in Rome was booked for Holy Week. He was offered the Torlonia Palace – ‘one of the most magnificent buildings in Rome’ – near St Peter’s, for ten days at a cost of £500. Members in his group agreed to chip in an extra £4 each and Thomas made up the difference. He let nothing drag down the general mood of enjoyment in travel. When the harmony of the party was disturbed by a few grumblers, he spoke out: ‘We have no sympathy with individual expressions of discontent, by which it was attempted to destroy the harmony of the party. Those who travel to Italy must expect sometimes to have to sit on hard seats and place their feet on hard floors . . .’.
¹³

The Seven Weeks War, otherwise known as the Prussian–Italian War, which began in June 1866, did not interfere much with Thomas’s itinerary. Prussia, allied with Italy, attacked Austria, backed by the countries of Southern Germany and succeeded in pushing Austria out of Lombardy. France, anti-Prussian in sentiment, remained neutral. Thomas and his tourists arrived at the Italian lakes en route to Venice just as the Austrian troops were being evacuated, and stayed on to see the splendid arrival of King Victor Emmanuel II. Soon they were in Venice, where they visited the Accademia, the Arsenale and the Palazzo Mocenigo, once the home of Byron, the Bridge of Sighs and the Palace of the Doges.

While regular tours continued, another major exhibition was being planned in Paris, the Palais de l’Industrie of 1867. Beforehand, in Paris Thomas was gratified by a visit from a private secretary to Napoleon III, who offered assistance. Like the working-men’s expedition, this trip would be another landmark in his career. He managed to provide transport for about 20,000 tourists from Britain and accommodate about half of them, as well as many Americans, in various leased buildings in the Rue de la Faisanderie. Once again Annie, now nearly twenty-two years old, helped arrange, supervise and act as interpreter. Arrangements were similar to those for the previous exhibition in London. As Thomas wrote: ‘. . . the second Paris Exhibition . . . was held in the Champ de Mars. In connection with this exhibition I opened extensive accommodation in the Rue de la Faisanderie; and in connection with several private houses we accommodated 12,000 persons, giving them good English fare for breakfast, tea, and bedroom, for five francs a day. This was a great success; but M. Chardon and myself jointly took another great house, for which we paid a rent of £100 a week, charged 20 francs a day and lost money by it.’

With 52,000 exhibits this was to be the fair to beat all fairs, but the small and weakening Napoleon III did not realise that the 1867 extravaganza would be his last international event before his disastrous fall. Over eighty sovereigns, rulers and politicians were invited to the opening of the fair, including the Tsar, the Sultan of Turkey, the Khedive of Egypt and the brother of the Mikado of Japan, but Victoria and the Pope were unable to attend. For the King of Prussia and Prussia’s formidable chief minister, Prince Otto von Bismarck, though, the gaiety and music of the exhibition was the overture to war,
¹⁴
which would break out again in just three years.

In September 1868, a branch line opened from Derby making it easier to travel to Melbourne from Leicester. Thomas advertised its inauguration with a poster which included the words, ‘Melbourne being the native place of the Agent for Midland Railway Excursions, he was anxious to have the privilege of arranging the First Excursion to that town.’

With hedges full of trailing brambles, canes heavy with ripe blackberries, and elder trees loaded with bunches of round black fruits, the journey through the early autumn countryside gave Thomas a feeling of nostalgia. After a few tunes from the brass band, local dignitaries and streamers welcomed the locomotive and Thomas took his sightseers on a tour of the gardens at Melbourne Hall. As usual the owner, Lady Palmerston, was not in residence. Although Lord Palmerston had died three years earlier, she still did not find much time to visit Melbourne. Her three houses in the south, Broadlands, Brocket Hall and her mansion in Piccadilly, took up most of her time. But her voluminous correspondence shows she took an active interest in both local affairs and the garden at Melbourne Hall. After the tour of the gardens, Thomas laid flowers on his mother’s grave at the Baptist chapel.

Though John Mason may have had cheerful memories of Melbourne from early holidays there with his grandmother, it is unlikely that he now had time to return. His diary entries over the autumn and winter of 1868–9 show that he travelled 20,000 miles, all over Europe, in his quest to further routes and traffic.
¹⁵

T
homas’s entrepreneurial mind again turned to the Middle East. James Silk Buckingham, whose advice on the Middle East had discouraged Thomas, had now died, and so he threw caution to the wind. The general belief was that once the Suez Canal was finished in 1869, nearby ports, such as Jaffa, would attract many tourists visiting the Canal to Jerusalem. Anticipating an increase in British ships sailing through the Mediterranean and bringing more visitors, the Turkish authorities had rebuilt the road from the coast to Jerusalem. The steamship services to Jaffa and Beirut operated by Austrian Lloyd and the French Messageries Maritimes now ran much more regularly than the sailing ships that had carried Thackeray twenty-five years previously.

Thomas was planning his first trip ‘to the Levant, Egypt and Palestine, tours to which region I had long contemplated’ at the end of 1868. His first trip to the Holy Land would be exploratory as this was the era of science, and a large number of intellectuals, following the trend of Voltaire and Gibbon, were confronting religion and questioning the authenticity of the virginal conception, the miraculous birth in Bethlehem, the Resurrection and how the universe came into being. Thomas believed that faith would be intensified and deepened by people visiting the source of their creed.

For the first tour thirty-two bookings were received for the Nile and Palestine, and thirty just for Palestine. After landing in Alexandria the tourists went by train to Cairo, one of the legendary cosmopolitan cities in the east. Despite the squalor and the clamour for ‘baksheesh’, Thomas fell in love with Egypt. Everything was exciting, bewildering – the noise, the smells of incense, cigarette smoke and opium, the beggars, the fortune tellers, the open display of sexuality, the mixture of Jews, Greeks, Arabs, Lebanese, black Sudanese, Turks, Europeans. The coins and notes were confusing and tourists often felt they were ‘being had’, when they were haggling to buy souvenirs to post home, but they could not resist the bazaars in the labyrinths of tiny streets crammed with veiled women, men with turbans or a fez on their heads, sitting cross-legged beside piles of carpets, sandalwood, brass pots, perfumes, silks, a snake in a cage or the latest copy of
The Times
from London. As always, Thomas emphasised the good things – the magnificent panoramas with ruins, the tranquillity, the Nile busy with feluccas, the palm trees, the minarets and the mosques. The tourists rode horses to the Great Pyramids one starry night to see the silhouette of the Sphinx against the dark sky.

Egypt, like the Holy Land, was also ‘an alcohol free land’,
¹
where neither wine, whisky or beer were openly consumed by the population. The Koran bans the consumption of alcohol, although a thirsty Thackeray had found that a bottle of Bass beer or some local wine could be procured. Thomas, who had spent nearly thirty years fighting to suppress the use of alcoholic beverages, saw his convictions made real in Muslim countries.

The flamboyant Khedive, Ismail Pasha, grandson of Muhammad Ali and son of Ibrahim Pasha, was planning a grand celebration for the opening of the Suez Canal in November. Nine years since the first spadeful of sand had been turned – amidst conditions described by critics as slave labour – the engineers of the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez were finishing the giant sluice gates. The canal, 101 miles long, would cut 4,000 miles off the sea journey to Britain from India: it would no longer be necessary to sail around the capes of Africa or South America. A trip from Australia to England, one of the longest passenger journeys in the world, would be reduced from eight to about five weeks.

The canal was the result of Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt seventy years earlier in 1798. Scientists and artists from l’Institut de France, who had accompanied his army, had discovered the Ptolemaic ruins of the Suez Canal connecting the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. Returning to Paris, Napoleon made a speech about plans to resurrect this waterway, which had started way back in about 1400 bc. Speeding up communication and cargo between the East and the West would bring outposts in France’s empire closer.

Ferdinand de Lesseps persisted with Napoleon’s plans. In 1854, he obtained a concession from the Khedive, Sa’id Pasha, in Egypt, but failed to raise the money in America, Britain and Russia. Finally, France and Egypt put up just enough – a year after Louis Napoleon, now Emperor, had married Eugenie, a cousin of none other than de Lesseps. An estimated 1.5 million Egyptians worked on the canal and 125,000 died, many from cholera.

Many British politicians believed a canal would bring an excess of French interests to Egypt, Syria and India. Hostility to the canal was widespread. British entrepreneurs had already set up a short cut overland. Passengers going to India often travelled overland to Brindisi, then by ship to Alexandria, by train to Cairo, and then to the Red Sea. Every year, thousands of people went from Alexandria by rail to Cairo – staying at the legendary Shepheard’s Hotel – before going on to Port Said in the Red Sea to board a ship to India. Shepheard’s, with marble columns, chandeliers, faded carpets and muted lighting, was one of the most famous old Middle Eastern hotels, catering both for travellers in transit to India, and the growing number of businessmen. Egyptian investment and trade with Britain had increased during the American Civil War when mills in Birmingham and Manchester, starved of American cotton, utilized the acres of cotton trees on the banks of the Nile. Such fine fibres were imported that British businessmen invested a great deal to increase its production.