Thomas Cook (30 page)

Arrangements were made for the movements of 18,000 troops, 40,000 tons of supplies, 40,000 tons of coal and 800 whale boats. Twenty-eight large steamers and 6,000 railway trucks were required to transport the coal from Tyneside to Boulac and Assiout via Alexandria. John Mason and his Egyptian managers acted as overseers of the entire operation. They relied on the labour of 5,000 local men and boys, and completed their side of the contract in November 1884. But the prodigious effort was wasted, as the expedition arrived two days too late. Gordon had been killed on 26 January 1885, murdered by the troops of the Mahdi on the palace steps. When the news of the catastrophic death of General Gordon reached Britain, the anger and the storm of protest stirred the public in a way that had not been seen for ten years.
¹⁰
The Queen ‘led the chorus of denunciation which raved against the Government. In her rage, she dispatched a fulminating telegram to Gladstone, not in the usual cipher, but open . . .’.
¹¹
Gladstone was blamed and the government narrowly avoided defeat in the House of Commons. Thomas Cook & Son’s failed rescue also put them in a bad light.

The mood in England had changed since the excitement in the previous year with the introduction of the Third Reform Bill, which had given the vote to agricultural labourers, tripled the electorate and established the principle that the vote ought to be given to every adult as a matter of right. The qualifications of property and income were no more. But defeat came to Gladstone’s government four months later over an issue close to Thomas’s heart – that is, an increase in duties on beer and spirits. The Tories, backed by the brewing industry, went in fighting. On 9 June, amidst scenes of tumult and cries of ‘Buckshot!’ and ‘Coercion!’, the government lost by twelve votes. Lord Salisbury became prime minister. By chance, Salisbury, like Gladstone, was a client of Cook’s.

In 1885, problems once again threatened the calm of tours in Egypt. Salisbury’s Tory government all but decided to evacuate Egypt – the occupation was a legacy from the Liberals, and now was associated with the death of Gordon. Why should it continue? Salisbury dispatched Sir Henry Drummond Wolff to Constantinople to see Sultan Abdul Hamid II – Abdul ‘the Damned’ – who had come to the throne in 1876. Famed for his wives and concubines (and later by an unexpected devotion to the tales of Sherlock Holmes), he had been disliked by Gladstone, but was now courted by Tories. Despite a new and ambiguous convention, the British occupation continued.

Tourism spread in leaps and bounds – and so did the fortunes of Thomas Cook & Son. Thomas could boast that he carried his ‘Temperance Flag pure and unsullied Round the World’. Thomas wrote that in ‘1879 it was strongly urged upon my son to arrange for opening an Office in Melbourne, in connection with the Australian Exhibition. Under assurances of the support of the Colonial Railways Authorities an agent was sent to Melbourne, an office was opened.’

The heyday of Cook’s in the Far East and Australia had begun after the proclamation of Victoria as Empress of India in 1877. Tourist traffic was now two-way. While the Cooks took the British to India, they arranged for what they called ‘the wealthy natives of India’ – maharajahs, princes and rajahs – to travel to London and on to places like Monte Carlo and Paris. A handful of rajahs were unlikely to make much difference to overall trade, but it was their policy to look for overseas customers to counter the slowing-down at home – part of the knock-on effect of ‘the great depression’ in agriculture
¹²
in England, caused, according to some sceptics, by the repeal of the Corn Laws thirty years earlier. Britain’s ‘commercial Empire’ was now also overshadowed by both the United States and the recently united Germany. Another problem was that England had become so densely peopled that the soil could not maintain its population. More imported food had to come in; more manufactured exports and people had to leave. The agricultural depression would linger for another twenty years.

Offices were opened in Calcutta in 1883 following John Mason’s extensive visit in 1881. But at home the tensions between father and son, between altruism and commerce, increased. After a short while Thomas ignored it and slipped into his old way of going to the office. John Mason expressed real anger at his father. He went so far as to accuse him of dishonesty in diverting some of the bills for his new house in Leicester, Thorncroft, through the firm. All hope of reconciliation ceased. John Mason believed that Thomas was sacrificing tourism to his religious and philanthropic interests. There were also other deep-seated, unspoken hostilities. John Mason’s patience was running out. Finally, they split.

Thomas liked having people nearby and was content to retire to Thorncroft, his two-storey, double-fronted, red-brick villa at 244 London Road, Stoneygate, on Leicester’s outskirts.
¹³
A solid Victorian middle-class suburban family house, with a semi-circular drive and shrubbery, it had no pretence of being a country house. The front door led into a very light, double-storey square hall under a huge Paxton-inspired roof light. Doors from the hall opened into the dining room, breakfast room, drawing room and library. A wide staircase led up to a balcony with a circular landing leading to the bedrooms and bathroom. One visitor, Albert Bishop, recalled:

Mr Cook loved to have his friends round him at the Festive Season. There was a long table in the Dining room, generally full to capacity on Christmas Day. My father was always given the job of carving the turkey (of prodigious size) at one end of the table and generally one of the Mason family was at the other end to carve the huge sirloin of beef . . . We boys used afterwards to be allowed to play at puss-in-the-corner in the hall with some of the younger guests and I seem to remember in the early days Mr. Cook coming out of the Drawing room to watch benevolently . . .
¹⁴

He also remembered his closed-in carriage, ‘something like a glorified small bus (without top seats of course), with a seat down each side. The cushions were covered with blue cloth and when Mr. Cook called at our house to take Mother down to chapel, as he sometimes did, I used occasionally to get a ride . . . I felt myself to be a very grand and fortunate person.’
¹⁵

Even after Thomas’s retirement, Thomas Cook & Son continued to send tens of thousands of budget tourists to Jerusalem. Thomas kept up a correspondence with his agent, who ran the Jerusalem office with its reading room on the corner from the Souk and the Oriental bazaar. His old house, though, outside the old walled city, near the American Colony, became but a storeroom for the expanding camping paraphernalia needed for elegant tours.

T
here was much fashionable interest in embroidery in the 1870s and 1880s. William Morris had encouraged the women in his family, and his female friends, including Georgiana Burne-Jones, to take up needlework. After the Royal School of Needlework was founded in 1872, Morris’s sister-in-law, Bessie Burden, became its chief instructor. Another skilled embroiderer was W.B.Yeats’s sister, Lily, later employed by both Morris and his daughter May. So when Annie Cook started a sewing circle on Saturday nights in Leicester she was taking a small part in what would soon be called the ‘Arts & Craft Movement’.
¹

Running the Cook accommodation establishments and helping her father with tours to France and Italy had not been a sheltered life for Annie, but romance came late to her, at the age of thirty. She was now ‘spoken for’ by a young man, and had become secretly engaged to Mr A. Akin Higgins, a clerk in Ludgate Circus. The previous year when John Mason had heard of this he was furious, and said, ‘I could not have a brother-in-law a member of my staff.’
²
Higgins had to resign. As a proof of his devotion, Higgins followed Annie to Leicester to 28 Pocklington’s Walk in the town centre and managed to get a job as ‘a stock and share broker and general agent’. Marianne did not encourage the romance, and how often and where Higgins and Annie met is not recorded. Indeed, so little about him has survived that now no one knows whether he was lively and dashing, handsome or plain.

Annie returned home from a sewing class on Saturday 8 November, had supper with her parents and announced she was going to have a bath. She went upstairs and turned on the recently installed new-patent ‘instantaneous’ gas water heater. An offensive odour from the geyser caused her to go downstairs to ask her father to check it. The time was then about 11p.m. When he came upstairs Annie also pointed out to him black specks in the water. Having learnt to trust his judgement, she had confidence in him when he assured her it was nothing. She ran her bath.

On Sunday mornings Annie was in the habit of bringing her parents tea on a tray first thing. When she did not come, Thomas went into her room. Her bed was empty. He went to the bathroom; the door was locked. Why had she locked it? Using all his strength he forced the door and found her dead in the white enamel bath, purple in the face. Victorian baths were particularly deep and long, so she had slowly sunk into the water and drowned.

Had he miscalculated the danger of the fumes, or was there another cause? Dr Lankester rushed to the house. Rumours persisted that the love affair of this 34-year-old had taken a toll and that it may not have been an accident. Suicide, considered the greatest sin, was usually out of the question for anyone deeply religious. As Annie had been the best of children and would not have done something which would have given her parents so much anguish, the balance of probabilities is against suicide. At the inquest, Thomas admitted that he knew of the situation with the gas appliance before retiring.

A shadow fell across Thorncroft and its two occupants. For evermore a feeling of sorrow filled the rooms. Annie’s ghostly footsteps could almost be heard coming from the shadows. Whenever she spoke of her, Marianne had tears in her eyes.

The funeral took place on 12 November 1880. So many people were overcome by the tragedy of this girl who had devoted so much of her life to the Sunday school that her funeral and burial were attended by a large number of civic dignitaries, including the mayor, John Bennett, member of the United Baptist Chapel, who sat on the front pew.
³
The chapel was too small. At 2p.m. the Baptist minister read the first prayers of the burial service to the crowded congregation and to those jammed along the pavement and road outside. It was if a thousand voices were raised to sing the 23rd Psalm, ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters . . .’

There were emotional scenes; some quietly sobbed, while others openly wept. On they went, hymn after prayer, prayer after psalm. Then began the long procession accompanying the corpse on its last journey. At last, the melancholy cortege in silence arrived at Welford Road cemetery, the 28-acre municipal burial ground on the edge of Leicester opened in 1849.

Annie was the first of the family to be buried here. The sods of earth, damp from recent rain, had been piled around the newly dug grave, six feet deep, six feet long and three feet wide. More words were said, more amens chorused, more prayers offered. The minister quoted St Peter: ‘For all flesh is of grass . . . the grass withereth, and the flower falleth away . . .’. The little children from Annie’s Sunday school wept at her graveside.

Then came the final moment when the coffin was lowered. A solemn hush. Spades shovelled the sods of earth upon the coffin, made of English elm, which would not rot for centuries. More eyes were red with tears. Voices were low. Before they departed every hat was lifted, every bare head was reverently bowed, including that of Higgins, who had hoped to be her husband. He then vanished from the life of the Cooks; there is nothing more about him in the records.

The rumours never died down, but in a way they protected Thomas, whose misjudgement about the gas heater may have caused her death. At the inquest, the witnesses were Thomas, Lankester and Mr Akin Higgins; a verdict of ‘death by drowning’ was returned.
The Times
obituary was a little ambiguous:

and when the fatality occurred it [the heater] had only been used three times. On a previous occasion when the deceased used the bath she complained to an intimate friend [Higgins] that when in the bath she lost consciousness and that she hardly knew how she recovered herself, as she felt on the verge of death. She, however, had not complained of this to her father or mother. On Saturday night Mr. Cook noticed a very disagreeable smell after the apparatus had been lighted. No more, however, was thought of the matter until Miss Cook was found dead in her bath. Dr. Henry Lankester, who was called, said he found evidence which showed that there had been an exceedingly high temperature in the room, and this together with the offensive odour from the gas apparatus induced syncope [fainting] and Miss Cook was drowned. The room was fitted with electric bells, so that the deceased, had she had the power, could have called assistance at once.

Thomas’s pamphlet, ‘A Father’s Tribute’, was never published but was circulated privately – the only surviving copy is in the Leicestershire Records Office. He describes that fateful night and says, ‘My only bitter reflection on myself is that I did not turn off the gas and close the door.’
⁴
There is also the possibility that Annie may have had an undiagnosed heart problem and excessive heat in the bathroom may have caused her to black out and drown. Indeed, Higgins had said in the inquest that she had confided in him about a previous blackout.

The Archdeacon Lane Sunday School in the poorest area of Leicester had been central to Annie’s life, so at the cost of £7,000 Thomas built the Annie Cook Memorial Hall, complete with classrooms
⁵
close to the Baptist chapel where she had taught some of its 900 pupils. The Italian sculptor who chiselled a marble bust of her to be placed inside portrayed her looking demure in a finely pleated, high-necked blouse, but her eyes have a half-tender, half-tortured expression.
⁶