Thomas Cook (32 page)

Old age had not dulled Thomas’s desire to help the poor. Far from forsaking his roots, he enjoyed the role of the local boy made good when he returned to Melbourne. Following philanthropists who had built tenements in London, he started planning a project on the hill, just two streets away from Quick Close, at a slightly lower level than the High Street but above green fields. Land was purchased and an up-to-the-minute architect was engaged to make drawings for a block of fourteen memorial cottages, a Baptist mission hall
¹³
and four holiday flats for Baptist ministers, with a bakehouse, laundry and wash-house and a spacious mission hall on which a pale green and cream 8-inch-wide border below the ceiling was painted and stencilled with a William Morris-inspired motif. Each flat would be furnished and fully equipped and rented at fourpence a week to ‘poor and deserving people belonging to the Baptist denomination’. Another flat was for a caretaker and another three, named the Houses of Call, were reserved for Thomas and friends when visiting Melbourne and as holiday homes for pastors and their families – with the proviso that they conducted services in the mission hall.
¹⁴

Before the building was finished, a lovely garden was planted in the front, crowded with hardy flowers, such as hollyhocks, roses, campanulas, peonies, pinks, Michaelmas daises and polyanthus. An organ was then installed so there would be always be music to accompany hymns. Bearing the names of his daughter and his wife, the cottages are also an unspoken memorial to his youth. The circle of his life was now complete. At last he had a bed and base, a little home of his very own, in Melbourne. And it was all new, clean, warm, modern and up-to-date.

Every detail was arranged by Thomas. He was giving something back to the church which had encompassed every part of his life. The
Barton Church Magazine
¹⁵
described the gala opening on 10 March with a description of weather which must have reminded Thomas of the hardships of his youth: ‘a keen wind and numberless snowflakes dancing in the air – the outermost fringe of the fierce blizzard then ranging over land and sea.’ His old friend John Earp, who had climbed through the chapel windows at dawn with him over fifty years earlier, was there. Like Thomas, his career as a preacher had also been brief, but it had given him the confidence to become a wool buyer and maltster. The old Baptist chapel down the road was not forgotten. As a former printer and publisher, Thomas gave a tall bookcase similar to the ones he had already given to the chapels at Barton and Market Harborough.

Thomas’s support of the Liberal Party was constant. The National Temperance Federation, which had been formed in 1884, was becoming more and more closely associated with the Liberals, whereas the Conservative Party still appeared to be aligned with the interests of the drink trade. Thomas hurried from his flat in Melbourne to Leicester on 13 July 1892 to cast his vote at the polls for the local Liberal candidate.
¹⁶
Two days later, on 15 July, Thomas Cooper, one of the old leaders of the Chartist Movement, died in Lincoln. Three days after that, on 18 July, Thomas lay on his deathbed at Thorncroft, London Road, Leicester, aged eighty-three. ‘My flesh and my heart faileth; but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever’ (Psalm 73: 25). Comfort came from the words of his favourite hymn, ‘Forever with the Lord’. A sudden pain and paralysis on his side hit him after supper around 8p.m. Friends and staff passed in and out of the room. Lankester was called.

Thomas left the world with a prayer in his heart and, one assumes, the knowledge that ‘man has been brought nearer to God’, with a vision of Jerusalem and the Jordan.
¹⁷
An obituary in the
Leicester Chronicle
made the pertinent remark, ‘The total blindness which overcame him did not affect his spirits or prevent him from making an excursion to the Holy Land.’
¹⁸

The son of the minister, Albert Bishop, described the music and gloom in the dark chapel after mourners had filed past Cook’s coffin on 25 July in the Archdeacon Lane chapel: ‘I could almost hear the beat of the wings of the Dark Angel of Death and catch a glimpse of the white wings of the Angel of Light as he carried the soul of the Departed to Him who made us all leave this Earth-bound place for another life elsewhere.’ The minister, remembering Thomas’s soup kitchens and cost-price potato seeds for men with allotments, emphasised that he had become a champion for the weak and poor ‘in the times of terrible distress in Leicester fifty years ago’.
¹⁹

The draped hearse was drawn by six black horses adorned with plumes of black feathers. Behind, the mayor, Alderman Thomas Wright, headed the procession of twelve horse-drawn carriages. Making its way to the north-east corner of Welford cemetery, the mourners were led by the Cook family, headed by three grandchildren. John Mason, though, was absent. His excuse was that he could not return in time from a trip to Norway, although there was a gap of nearly a week between the death and the funeral. Thomas had eschewed being buried with his parents in the chapel yard in Melbourne where the soft green grass, violets and daisies grew over the old coffins. In Leicester, marble covered the tomb of Annie and Marianne, giving an air of perpetuity and importance – as did the nearby tombstones of Thomas’s old mentors – Winks was just 30 yards away and Ellis was 50 yards away. Only Annie, Marianne and Thomas lie there together. When John died nine years later, he chose to be buried in a vault lined with ivy and white lilies in the Anglican section on the other side of Welford Road Cemetery. He had become a member of the Church of England. In a similar way to the children of so many financially successful Nonconformists, he enjoyed the status of being a pillar of the established Church.

Thomas might have been the world’s best-known railway excursion and tourist pioneer, but he was no millionaire. Time after time, profits had been given away to the poor or to religious establishments and he had subsidised many of his beloved tours to the Holy Land. He had handed over more money than he saved. Having also in 1879 let John be the ‘holder of all the capital in the business’, he left just £2,731 gross. His home in Leicester was sold to a member of the Ellis family.
²⁰
When John Mason died seven years later he left an estate of around £700,000 – another example of the triumph of town over the country, of industrial riches over land.
²¹

The
Leicester Daily Post
of 20 July reported that Gladstone, a man also driven by religious conviction, praised Cook: ‘thousands and thousands of the inhabitants of these islands who never would for a moment have passed beyond its shores, have been able to go and return in safety and comfort, and with great enjoyment, great refreshment, and great improvement to themselves.’
²²
A few days after Thomas’s death, Gladstone, the old warrior, won the general election, becoming prime minister for the fourth time. Gladstone’s cabinet contained two of Britain’s first Nonconformist prime ministers – Henry Campbell-Bannerman as Secretary for War and Herbert Asquith
²³
at the Home Office. Another Baptist, David Lloyd George, the MP for Caernarvon Boroughs, who was waiting in the wings, would be Britain’s third Nonconformist prime minister.

Thomas had received no state honours during his lifetime, and there were none now. But he had founded both a dynasty and the most familiar name in the British travel business. It is strange that he is seldom grouped with other self-made Nonconformists of the mid-nineteenth century who set up companies which continue today, such as Boot (chemist shops), Cadbury (chocolate), Fry (chocolate), Wills (tobacco), Rowntree (toffees and sweets), Morley (hosiery), Clark (shoes), Barclay (banking) and Lever (soap).

Unlike many newly enriched tradesmen in industrial England who were not satisfied until they found themselves accepted by the gentry, Thomas had remained a strictly urban man, ignoring the process of gentrification. He never got beyond the lower middle class. However, by breaking down ‘the barriers of prejudice’
²⁴
and using class boundaries as hurdles to be leapt over, he had opened the doors for people from every walk of life to venture out on Grand Tours, making travel no longer a daunting experience.

His lasting memorials are worldwide and his face is on all Thomas Cook traveller’s cheques, although it is usually his name that is remembered, not his face. Just over a century after his death in Leicester, a bronze statue of Thomas wearing a frock coat and carrying a rolled umbrella and suitcase was erected outside London Road Railway Station.

A month after Thomas’s death two things occurred that would have given him pleasure: John Mason became president of the Leicester Temperance Society; then in August, tours to the Holy Land were given another boost when the railroad from Jaffa to Jerusalem was completed. Trains ran in each direction daily, and carried an increasing number of pilgrims and tourists.

Thomas made travelling easier and cheaper for Europeans, Americans, Indians, Australians and New Zealanders of all classes. There had been tours before but few which included advance tickets for transportation, food and sightseeing for such large numbers. As Clement E. Stretton said, Thomas was ‘the first person to hire a special train at his own risk, sell railway tickets to the public, and personally travel with the train to look after the comfort of his passengers’.
²⁵

When Thomas was born, most power had rested with the upper classes, but now the new middle classes were snapping at their heels. Class divides were lessening. The two-party system had emerged, and both parties drew their voters from across all classes.
²⁶
Nothing exemplified the new tolerance more than the larger-than-life bronze statue of the old champion of the Dissenters, Oliver Cromwell, unveiled in 1899 outside the House of Commons. He was now also seen as a champion of parliamentary democracy – part of the new Liberal interpretation of history. Plans to erect the statue had been passed during the premiership of Rosebery, the second Liberal prime minister, who was also said to have secretly paid for it.

Thomas would also have been pleased to witness another milestone in the long struggle of the Nonconformists. In 1900 Joseph Chamberlain, the Unitarian MP from Birmingham, became the first chancellor of a university
²⁷
in England not to have been a member of the established church. Chamberlain was also the first commoner in 240 years to hold such a post. With the election of the first Nonconformist prime minister in Britain, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, in 1905, the long struggle for the Nonconformists was over. The sharply defined religious beliefs that had so divided the nation were disappearing. But even though people now accepted that social and economic inequalities were not really part of a divine plan, they still existed. The earlier persecution of the Nonconformists, which had made so many of them champion wider freedoms, was gone.

I
t is difficult to visualise how Thomas would have responded to his obituary in
The Times
. It praised his ability to ‘organize travel as it was never organized before’, but revamped the old snobbish refrain. Out came the clichés that there were too many of his uncultured tourists filling up destinations which, until recently, had been exclusively for the upper and middle classes. They complained that they were being forced to mix with sight-seeing compatriots they considered to be less congenial: ‘The world is not altogether reformed by cheap tours, nor is the inherent vulgarity of the British Philistine going to be eradicated by sending him with a through ticket and a bundle of hotel coupons to Egypt and the Holy Land . . . If only Messrs Cook could guarantee a benefit to mind and manners as easily as they can guarantee a comfortable journey!’
¹

Cook’s had a monopoly of the boats on the Nile, and, during the first twenty years of conducting passenger traffic on it, ‘from three to four millions Sterling (pounds) had been circulated in Egypt by travellers’.
²
In 1894 the Egyptian side of Cook’s business was shifted into a company registered as Thos. Cook & Son (Egypt) Limited, with nominal capital of £200,000 divided into 20,000 shares of £10 each, John Mason holding nearly two-thirds. Anxious to reassure old customers, the
Excursionist
explained that management was still in the hands of Thomas Cook and everything was the same as before. Cook’s had already made Egypt’s share of the global tourist market significant. By the end of the century the firm had annual net profits of about £82,000 in Egypt with almost half of the enterprise’s revenue coming from their Nile fleet. An adjunct of empire though they now were, nowhere was their ‘presence more conspicuous and welcome than on the tawny bosom of old Father Nile.’
³
In 1896–8, Cook’s Nile steamers were again used as military transport, this time to move General Kitchener and his troops south to the Sudan, to defeat the Mahdi’s successors.

Thomas would have been pleased that his special low-price excursions to the Holy Land continued. Tours to the Middle East were booming. Clients now ranged from most of the British royal family and the Kaiser Wilhelm II to the new Tsar, Nicholas II, who became the Emperor of Russia in 1894. One advertisement promoted £60 trips from Liverpool: ‘Once in two weeks, a special boat will leave Liverpool bringing tourists to visit Italy, Egypt and Syria, Asia Minor and Greece, and returning home sixty days after their departure. The journey will cost £60, one pound per day . . . reduced the price almost by half, in the hope of bringing many more tourists . . .’
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The following year, in 1898, when John Mason escorted the German Kaiser, more than 3,000 tourists flocked to Jerusalem with Thos. Cook. But just after this trip, seven years after Cook was buried, the year after Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, John Mason died of a disease. He had, as on his earlier trips, drunk the local water instead of wine. Two of his three sons, Frank and Ernest, took over the business until 1928, when they sold it to the International Sleeping Car Company, Wagons-Lits of Belgium.
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Ernest, who had presided over the banking and foreign exchange business of the firm, died a bachelor in 1931 and left £1,054,769 6
s
4
d
, most of which, along with his 21,000 acres of estate, went into the Ernest Cook Trust. Money from the Trust supports educational and research projects relating to the countryside, the environment and architectural conservation. He also left his collection of paintings to the National Arts Collection Fund for provincial galleries.