Thomas Cook (5 page)

T
homas finished school at the age of ten, perhaps as a consequence of his brother Simeon’s birth, and started labouring with mattocks, trowels, scythes and spades in the vegetable gardens run by John Robey. Wearing patched baggy breeches, thick knitted socks pulled up over the knee, hat pulled down over his face, he heaved sacks, propagated plants, watered, spread manure and dug for six days each week. As Robey often suffered from the effects of too much drink, Thomas would be overloaded with work. However, it introduced him to the habit of travelling. He went off in all weathers, hawking vegetables and plants to nearby villages, crying out, ‘Peas! Beans! Seeds! Plants for sale!’ and even walking as far as the Derby market eight miles away.

Getting around was always on foot, in the saddle of a horse, a mule or donkey, or in a cart. Mostly it was on foot. A horse cost more to keep than a man. A normal day’s ration for a horse was up to twelve pounds of hay, oats, bruised barley or Indian corn – and grass. Sometimes Thomas took a cart to Derby, now full of potteries because the Trent provided the constant water supply needed for the steam-driven factories.
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Ever since the end of the eighteenth century, both the population and the potteries on the banks of the Trent had been growing. The smell, though, was awful. Since the invention of the new bone china – cheaper to manufacture than porcelain – there were smoky buildings where bones were boiled, burnt and crushed to make bone-ash to mix with clay.

A year after the future Queen Victoria was born in London in 1819, Thomas’s stepfather, Smithard, followed his predecessor to the grave. With three young children on her hands and funeral expenses to pay, Elizabeth was miserably poor. In one of Thomas’s reminiscences he later recalled
²
that ‘after his [Smithard’s] burial my mother took me into her bedroom and laying her hands on my head said “Now, Tommy, you must be father to these two boys.”’ In eleven years, Elizabeth, from having been considered a spinster on the shelf, had been married and widowed twice. An avid student, Thomas could not enrol at the charity school in the town, started by a sister-in-law of Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, as his mother, like so many parents, was about to rely on his income. This habit of parents using the earnings of children to supplement the family spending on food, rent and clothes later became one of the obstacles to comprehensive elementary education in England. Had Thomas not attended the local Sunday school over the next six years, his education would have been woeful. From 1822 to 1828, he was in turn a scholar, teacher and superintendent.

Thomas knew that his life was, and always would be, hard. It could have been worse. Inadequate though his pitiful wage of a penny a day was, labouring made him strong and there was occasionally a surplus of vegetables to take home. But one legacy from this job was a deep wound to his right leg, after falling on broken glass, which would cause him severe pain in old age. The village of Melbourne was on the edge of the coalfields, where injuries were horrific, but his mother always protected him from going down the mines. Some village boys and girls were already part of this grim workforce. At least labouring meant that Thomas worked in the fresh air, not in dark tunnels.

Factories, hungry for fuel, consumed coal at tons every second, so coal mines were a combination of rabbit warrens and the pits of Hades. The mines caused the tall trees to disappear, felled in the haste to find more and more pit props. In parts of Derbyshire and Leicestershire more wealth now came from what lay beneath the soil than from what sprouted from it. As factory chimneys and dreary rows of red-brick streets increased, fewer fleeces were spun in homes. It is sometimes said that Thomas was employed on the Melbourne estate. This confusion arose because Robey, like the majority of farmers in the area, was a tenant or sub-tenant of the Melbourne family.

Traditionally many wage-earners and piece-workers in Melbourne had combed and spun wool and pulled threads through stocking-frames, but new machines in factories were forcing them to put away spinning wheels and wooden frames and take
³
up the intricate art of blonde lace-making, even though it did not pay as well. These part-machine-made laces, which were finished off by hand, were used for furnishing fabric, long trailing veils and dresses.

Britain, fast becoming the workshop of the world, improved its trade, but not conditions and wages. As a result, agricultural labourers repeatedly packed up and went off to find jobs in towns or to emigrate to the United States or Australia.
⁴
Others, found guilty of crimes – some serious, others petty or political – were torn from their families and sent as convicts to Australia.

There was no disappointment when George IV’s coronation was deferred owing to the trial of the ‘vilest wretch on earth’, Princess Caroline, whom he proceeded to divorce on the grounds of alleged adultery on her journey to the Holy Land. The postponed coronation of 1822 coincided with Thomas’s new job. When fourteen years old, he swapped scythes and spades for a hammer, chisel and saw and started a five-year apprenticeship as a carpenter and wood-turner to John Pegg – a prominent name in the annals of the Melbourne Baptist church. Tradition dictated that such trainees lived with their employer, so he moved in with Pegg. It is often said that Pegg was his uncle, married to his mother’s sister, Anne, but Thomas, in his reminiscences, never said that he was a relation. He just states that the John Pegg was married to ‘Mary’. Years later Thomas described Pegg’s drinking in the
Temperance Mirror
: ‘The turner sought his relaxation and enjoyment night after night in a snug corner in the village public-house, where much of his time was wasted and his means so dissipated that, notwithstanding a good business, he lived and died a poor man.’
⁵

Again the labour and hours were arduous. One of his challenges was splitting ash planks with a handsaw into pieces to make farm-stool shafts. In this job, as in his last, the man in charge of Thomas was more than partial to a jar or two of strong brew, leaving Thomas with extra burdens when he was drunk or hungover. Thomas’s horror of drink dates from this experience, but there is also the possibility that perhaps he, too, at some early stage of his life may also have been inclined to drinking, and, as said earlier, that it may also have caused his grandfather to fall down the stairs.

Much traffic passed through Melbourne. Since ancient times its inns – the White Lion, Three Tuns, Sir Frances Burdett, New Inn, Bull’s Head, King’s Head, Lamb, Melbourne Arms, the Swan and the Old Pack-Horse Inn – had been a stopping place for coaches and the pack horses on the ‘miry and almost impassable’
⁶
highway between Derby and Leicester.

Of all the residents of the Lamb family who lived at Melbourne Hall, Lady Caroline Lamb was the most gossiped about. In 1825 it was the house to which she was banished because she had been causing trouble in London. Her affair with Byron had ended in 1813, but she was still ‘passionately infatuated’ with him and behaved in such a notorious manner that she became the most famous jilted lover of the nineteenth century. The Lamb family wanted William to commit her to a lunatic asylum. Instead, they sent her for a short time to Melbourne Hall. Lady Caroline would be seen walking out of the gates into the village itself.

The villagers were accustomed to seeing her in the muddy lanes wearing thin shoes, strange dresses and weird feathered hats, leftovers from the days when she had been part of the
haut monde
. She did not mind walking in the rain, getting wet in thin clothes or being splashed with mud. When children made fun of her, jeering and laughing, she snapped at them and lost her temper. One of the visitors during her banishment to Melbourne was the Duke of Devonshire. When his magnificent coach passed through the village, little did Thomas foresee that in just over twenty years this kindly man would impinge on his life.

An entry in the Minute Book of the Melbourne Baptist church for 18 December 1825 states that Thomas and three others ‘were proposed for baptism and fellowship’.
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The minister at the time was the Revd H. Joseph Foulkes Winks. An articulate pulpit man and prolific printer who enjoyed chewing on his pipe, he became a father figure to Thomas. Indeed, it is difficult to overestimate his influence.

Thomas looked up to this articulate minister, who opened up books and ideas to him. As the overriding ambition of Winks was to spread ‘the word’, he had set up a press in a room over a granary owned by John Earp’s family.
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Magazines and books were now the vehicles in which to disseminate religious news and views. Winks earnestly wanted to supply Baptist Sunday schools and churches with cheap literature, Christian magazines and books for children.

It seems that Thomas picked up the rudiments of printing – the key to his success – from Winks. There is no other time when he could have studied the complicated trade
⁹
and learnt to proof-read, something helped by his diligence at spelling. Trainees, ‘printers’ devils’, were given the most unpalatable tasks. Their duties included placing each metal letter of every line either with their fingers or instruments similar to tweezers. In contrast to the delicate job of setting up the type was the pulling and heaving of the mighty presses, returning foundry type to their cases, cleaning up the mess and carrying huge stacks of printed paper.

Winks’s kindness then extended in many directions. Horrified at the sight of beaten horses straining and slipping, often in vain, to pull loads along icy roads or up steep hills, he championed animal rights. Already, in 1824, what was to become the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (the ‘Royal’ was bestowed by Victoria in 1840) was backed by both Wilberforce and later by Lord Ashley, better known by his later title, the Earl of Shaftesbury, and for campaigning for legislation to prohibit the worst forms of child labour and cruelty to animals. Winks was particularly active in helping to abolish cock fighting (banned in 1849), bull running (banned in 1835), dog fighting and badger baiting. He earned the nickname ‘Gibbet Parson Winks’, as he campaigned against the use of the gibbet – the wooden structure from which criminals were hung. Yet, despite all his good works, he was a bit of a dandy. Ten years later, when he had his best coat stolen, the ultra-Tory
Leicester Herald
remarked that it had been made in Birmingham for fashion but that his waistcoat had been made in Leicester for cheapness. Another newspaper in Leicester, the
Herald
, was equally critical, commenting that, after Winks had been elected to the council, he ‘struts past his old acquaintances with his beak pointing upwards, like a bantam cock’.

I
t was a long way from the Jordan. In the iron-cold stillness of that February morning in Lent 1826, clusters of friends and relations waited in groups outside the Baptist chapel in Melbourne. Three months earlier, just after his seventeenth birthday, Thomas had made the decision to go through the ritual of total immersion.

Thomas was small. His most arresting features were his serene but dreamy expression, ready smile, bushy eyebrows and dark brown eyes that were once described as ‘black and piercing’. His thick dark hair showed no signs of its future balding, nor were there indications of his becoming ‘that fussy little bald man’,
¹
as he was described by a detractor when in his sixties. His physical stamina and will to persevere, which would later enable him to escort tourists up hills and mountains with ease, were not yet obvious. Despite his restless and fidgety nature, he cultivated a talent for listening – but never for too long. This, together with an ability to remember minute details, would keep him in good stead all his life. Constantly on the go, he was continually doing something.

It is not difficult to imagine the scene there in the middle of England that chilly February morning. Thomas, like the orator and the audience, was transported far away to a sunny New Testament scene beside the Jordan, below Jerusalem, where Jesus was baptised. Inside the chapel, many of the congregation found that it reminded them of the ritual of immersion. In the silence they imagined the same sandy stretch where John the Baptist had baptised Jesus Christ. After Jesus’ resurrection he commanded his disciples to baptise in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (Matthew 28: 19–20). Because there is no life without water, water is central in the customs of many religions. The Jordan is mentioned on 170 occasions in the Old Testament, but only about fifteen times in the New Testament, where it refers to the activities of John the Baptist, Jesus and the disciples.

The Jordan is distinct from any other river on earth. There are many rivers which are more impressive, but the Jordan was the place of the spiritual awakening of Jesus, which led to Christianity. At the baptism of Jesus, John the Baptist had said, ‘Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world’ (John 1: 29).

The uniqueness of the Jordan for geographers is due to it being one of the few major waterways which do not mingle with the vast sheets of water which spread tentacles of liquid around the earth. It is unlike the waters of the Trent, which like all British rivers empty into the sea. Rising from many headstreams and mountains of melting snows in Syria and Lebanon, it flows through the oval-shaped blue Sea of Galilee (Lake Tiberias), then narrows through a funnel, squeezing its water in a valley flanked by two clay banks. It then meanders south for 200 miles. Just before its waters reach the Dead Sea, the plains turn into grotesquely shaped hills of desolation, then the waters flow through Qasir al-Yahud, a West Bank area just north of the Dead Sea where John the Baptist urged his followers to turn away from their sins.

The next dramatic landmark is below the Wadi Qelt, the Wilderness of Jesus’ temptation. This rocky valley, five miles long and 100 yards wide at the bottom, is hemmed in by walls of rock rising 700 sheer feet. One side is broken by a raised area, fertile and green, with a Roman aqueduct flowing along it. The other side is now dominated by the Greek Orthodox monastery of St George of Koziba and St John, founded in 420, which clings dramatically to a rock face. Outside, the monastery is alive with rock doves and Mediterranean swifts hurling themselves out of the numerous eaves, filled with festoons of hanging bats. The monastery houses many relics, including part of John the Baptist’s skull. Lastly, the river empties into the Dead Sea, the lowest spot on earth. The water goes nowhere. Nor does it ever flood. In the torrid heat and weird geological mysteries of the Jordan Valley, 1,286 feet below sea level, the water evaporates, leaving salt behind.