Thomas Cook (6 page)

There in Melbourne’s Baptist chapel, which exhibited the best proportions of Georgian architecture, Thomas and his fellow worshippers stared at the Baptistery in front of the pulpit, a deep bath sunk below the surface and usually hidden by the hinged covering boards.
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It had been filled with water. In front of him was the vision of the Jordan’s crystal-clear waters 4,000 miles away. Thomas, steeped in the old ‘hell-fire’ school of the Nonconformist faith, readied himself to plunge, fully clothed, into the icy water.

All eyes were on Winks. His slight build, fine features and posture made him appear taller and more important than an ambitious former draper’s assistant. Born in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, in 1792, after the French Revolution, he had somehow managed to get some extra education and become a Baptist lay preacher at Killingholme. Then aged thirty-one, he made his mark on Melbourne. His acquired learning did not veil his lowly childhood. Reciting from the Letters of St Paul, he
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delivered his message with a fierce eloquence: ‘As Christ died and was buried, and rose again the third day . . . the rising again out of the water declares us
to be risen to a new life
. . .’.

Winks’s message was full of hope. Minute by minute Thomas’s faith was becoming more intense with the approach of the act of immersion. Slowly, he took off his coat and velvet cap and readied himself to become ‘newly risen to a new life’. Lowering himself, he entered the depths. The day was icy. It had snowed only a few weeks earlier. Already outside there were a few snowdrops, violets and wood anemones to herald the end of winter. Soon the cowslips would follow.

As though inducted into some infinite scheme, with his head submerged, holding his nose and mouth closed, Thomas was at one with the water. This was the moment when, for a few seconds, by re-enacting a ritual, Baptists shared a precise experience with Jesus and John. By going through the ceremony he was keeping alive a tradition which had not stopped for eighteen centuries. On that Sunday morning Thomas was immersed three times as Winks recited, ‘I baptise you in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.’ Then the words of Mark 1: 4–12 came booming, filling the chapel.

Shivering and gasping for air, Thomas scrambled dripping from the bath. ‘Glory be to thee, O God! Glory to thee!’ He had been saved.

The bystanders broke into a rousing hymn. Whether the organ had at that time been installed is not known. Many chapels were then austere and more often than not devoid of musical instruments. Silence and a brief eerie gloom descended. The ritual allowed Thomas to feel that he was an integral part of an ancient tradition. He belonged. The nullity, the void, were gone. From that very moment he never ceased to be an ‘earnest, active, devoted young Christian’.
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Thomas would have to stay in wet clothes until the congregation broke bread and mouthed more prayers.

A journey from Derbyshire to the Jordan would be roughly 3,000 miles as a crow flies, but 4,000 miles by boat via the Atlantic and Mediterranean to the nearest port, Jaffa. No ships went directly to the Holy Land, as passengers had to transfer from liners to smaller boats at Alexandria or Constantinople. A further two or three days by donkey or horse would then have to be endured on unpaved roads that were impassable when the winter rains came. High costs, too, not to mention the discomfort of such an expedition, added to the feeling of distance. In any case, there was no longer the slightest need for Christians to make pilgrimages, as people were told to look for the Heavenly Jerusalem and not seek its rival, the Earthly Jerusalem. Salvation could be found within.

Thomas’s visits to the Trent increased. When he could sneak away, well before dawn, he would tiptoe from his warm bed and go either to its banks, or to its brook, which meanders through Melbourne. He would sit for hours under the low branches of the mighty alders with their black fissured trunks, which leaned over the deep waters of the river. The muddy banks usually smelled swampy. Fishing, though, was a sport of the rich. Fishing rights were the prerogative of landowners, who frequently leased out the rights, so most stretches of the river were out of bounds. Poaching laws limited the lower classes to hunting rabbit, hare, wildfowl and, in some places, fish. Frequently, Thomas would start work at two or three in the morning, so he could have a few hours to go fishing late in the afternoon.

The fast-moving currents pulled the water in wondrous patterns. In the summer, Thomas would sometimes join the local boys and swans drifting in the water, as he enjoyed bathing, but he was not a powerful swimmer. Luckily, there were the rope-like stems of the ivy above the protruding roots of the gnarled old alders offering their branches as life-savers to help them ashore.

T
hese years in Melbourne of self-education moulded Thomas’s personality. Elizabeth opened an enterprising ‘village shop’ at Quick Close selling books, probably religious ones, and earthenware. She had been illiterate when married, so becoming a bookseller was a surprise. Either she had acquired the ability to read herself since Thomas’s birth, or, more likely, Thomas was the force behind this enterprise. It may have been an outlet for some of the pamphlets printed by Winks, who left shortly before the shop opened.

Winks moved to Loughborough, a picturesque town in the heart of England, renowned for hosiery, shoes, church bells, bell-ringing and the world’s largest bell foundry. Lower-priced machines allowed him to start an up-to-date printing works and become an official printer to the General Baptist Association. Large sections of the public were becoming literate, and a new era of information was born, together with popular romances, magazines, newspapers, religious tracts and Bible stories. The question of whether Thomas followed his mentor to Loughborough remains unanswered. The
Encyclopaedia Britannica
(1911 edition), and Fraser Rae’s book on the Cook firm published in 1891, both say that Thomas was a printer at Loughborough, but this is not mentioned elsewhere.

Having cast his grandfather Thomas Perkins as hero, Thomas was keen to perpetuate his work by spreading the Word. The vision of this proselytising preacher had been reinforced by Winks and Elizabeth. But Thomas lacked the qualifications to be ordained. Criticisms about the lowly status and illiteracy of preachers and their unedifying noises in the pulpit had led to higher standards for the education of Baptist ministers. Despite improvements during the Evangelical Revival, in 1811 Lord Sidmouth had complained of dissenting ministers who had not been able to read and write. He tried to put through a bill requiring Nonconformists to produce a ‘certificate of fitness’ from six reputable householders recommending a man as fit to preach. The outcry was so loud that Sidmouth was forced to withdraw his bill, but it had drawn attention to the need to raise standards. Despite this, in 1828, when the Midland General Baptist Church wanted to put fresh efforts into home missions, Thomas’s lack of schooling was overlooked.

His attempt to begin a career of lay preaching, district visiting, Bible distribution and impressing religion and morality on an unsettled population coincided with a triumph for both the Nonconformists and Catholics. It was a crisis with the Catholics which opened the door. Fearing a rebellion in Ireland, the Duke of Wellington, who had become prime minister that year,
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demonstrated that staunch Tories were moving with the times by putting through the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. Following this act, in April 1829, much to the joy of the 60,000 Irish Catholics in Liverpool and 40,000 in Manchester, the Catholic Emancipation Act
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was passed. The next month, in May, the first Roman Catholic took his seat in the House of Commons. Such was the feeling against Catholics that the king sobbed as his gouty hand signed the bill and some Protestants attributed the bad weather in the summer to its passing.
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It was the beginning of the lessening of divisions between members of the Church of England and members of other religions.

Thomas realised that to qualify as a missionary or preacher he needed to be a practised speaker. In the early hours with his friend John Earp he would climb through the chapel windows and rehearse, ‘each in turn became preacher and audience’.
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This pulpit style was later used by him when herding tourists.

After diligently studying theological dogma Thomas was appointed an Evangelist. An ‘impressive service, in which he was solemnly set apart for the work’,
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was later described in the
Home Mission Register
. But an entry in the Melbourne Baptist Minute Book on 28 October 1828 showed there were reservations:

It was agreed that Brother Nailor should send a letter to the committee of the Home Mission, on behalf of Brother Cook, as a recommendation, so far as regards his piety – and as a suitable person for the important work as an Evangelist, so far as we judge him fit, whatever other qualifications are requisite we as a Church not knowing the extent of the work devolving on a person in that station we leave the case to the discretion and judgement of the Committee.
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Thomas’s job was to ‘carry the gospel of salvation through faith in the Lord Jesus, to the ignorant and neglected’. In the wake of Captain James Cook hundreds of uncivilised corners of the world had been changed by the Bible and the British flag, but now there was an emphasis on spreading ‘the word’ locally in Britain.

When the blossom appeared on the apple and pear trees, about the time of his twentieth birthday, Thomas, with ‘deep regret’, left Melbourne and became a Village Evangelist for the Baptist Missionary Society. At £36 per annum it was not a profitable calling, but he was doing God’s work. Rain, hail and shine, he strode out across fields silently rehearsing his speeches and sermons. Summer turned to autumn, and to the long dark winter. Undeterred by falling snow, or by the difficulty of negotiating muddy paths, he went on. A hat, some well-worn clothes, writing paper, quills, ink, prayer book, the Bible and a rug in his shoulder-bag were his only possessions. It was usual then, when walking over dark fields at moonless nights, to use a lantern, but for Thomas this was an unheard-of expense. For him the long dark nights, on the move or in lodgings, were often candleless. His habit of rising to catch the first glimmer of morning light so he could read would stay with him all his life.

Thomas’s duties were to hold meetings, conduct services, find converts, preach the Word, distribute pamphlets, help out at Sunday schools, sell Bibles and Testaments. Superhuman joy could be reached through a conversion experience. As a lay-preacher he was poised to snatch people from temptation. He urged them to see ‘the Light!’ and replace the nullity and void in their lives with Him. The Nonconformist chapels provided moral cement to shape the long days of the labourers, underpaid piece workers and factory employees toiling under miserable conditions. The number of drunks, gamblers, dissolute wife-beaters and the generally depraved would have been higher if it had not been for the efforts of the chapels.

Preaching was a precarious existence, attracting hecklers and mobs delighting in hissing and throwing objects at do-gooding busybodies and, above all, at those speaking about salvation. Wesley and his co-preacher, George Whitefield, founders of the Methodist Church, had raised the levels of oratory but had withstood stones, rotten eggs and the dead cats of hecklers. Preaching would empower Thomas all his life, as did the habit of taking risks and stretching physical endurance.

At this stage, he could have provoked unwanted responses as he was bold and had a certain nonchalance. This, though, was balanced by an earnestness which rang through everything he said. Hiding his shyness, like a confident actor he developed a hearty platform manner. Defiantly, he would try to match the words of the hecklers such as when he later condemned hissing as ‘Gooseism and Snakeism’, telling an offender to ‘return to Jericho until his beard is grown. Let us have no more of his puppyism and cowardly sidewinds’.
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This independence provoked one Baptist minister in the area to criticise Thomas:

Calling on Mr. Taylor on one occasion, he was treated kindly and accompanied on the road some distance; but regarding him as a kind of innovator on established order, he said to the young missioner before parting – ‘Young man, I advise you to give up this work at once; you have a cold already, and if you continue the work you will not live long.’ But Mr. Cook did not give it up, and, though more than sixty years have passed since then, he is still living.
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Thomas’s itineraries were brisk and took him through the counties of Rutland, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire and many new industrial areas where conditions were still grim. So far efforts to improve the lot of children had been ineffective, and movements to improve factory conditions still had a long way to go. Robert Owen had fought strenuously for the second Factory Act of 1819, which forbade the employment in cotton mills of children under the age of nine, but there was no adequate provision for inspection to check if factories were implementing improved conditions. Droves of pauper children were handed over to the mill-owners to work long hours in shifts and sleep in apprentice-houses. Days could well last from 5a.m. to 8p.m. with only brief breaks.
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It was not until 1833 that a Factory Act set up inspectors.

There was a battle ahead to relieve the plight of wretched children in rags, starving orphans on the streets, tenants sinking in debt and squalor and widows without sustenance. Apart from the alms from the church, the poorhouse or, with luck, a better job, there was little hope. William Blake called for the building of a New Jerusalem ‘among these dark Satanic Mills’. His epic
Jerusalem: The Emanation of The Giant Albion
portrayed a world of spiritual freedom, a new land.
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Lord Ashley fought for reform and lent his weight to various bills, resulting in the 1842 Mines Act and later the Factory Act, known as the ‘Ten Hour Bill’. The Mines Act prevented women, girls and boys under ten from working underground; the ‘Ten Hour Bill’ limited the hours of women and young persons in the textile industry to ten hours a day for five days a week and eight hours on Saturday.