Thomas Cook (8 page)

T
he turning point for Thomas came, once again, from his local Baptist minister. The new incumbent in Market Harborough changed the course of his life, just as Winks had done in Melbourne – and like him he had lived for a few years at Loughborough, about twenty miles away. Francis Beardsall, a pioneer of the Temperance movement, converted Thomas to the cause of combating the use of Britain’s ‘oldest drug’, alcohol.

The Temperance movement had started a few years earlier in the dark mills of Lancashire when ‘the Seven Men of Preston’ signed a pledge to abstain ‘from all liquors of an intoxicating nature’. Under the leadership of the weaver and cheese-maker Joseph Livesey,
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the movement snowballed. Like so many related movements – anti-slavery and Free Trade, for instance – it would bring into the fore such self-made men as John Horniman in tea, James Barlow in cotton, W.H. Darby in shipping; Cassell, Saunders, Chambers and Collins in publishing; George Eskholm in brass manufacture and Charles Watson in ventilation systems.
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At a meeting a year later in Preston, in 1832, Dicky Turner, a reformed drunkard, stuttered that ‘nothing but tee-tee-total will do’. Livesey replied, ‘That shall be the name!’ Temperance soon became one of the biggest mass pressure groups in the history of the British Isles
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and a major cause in Victorian Britain. With it went Nonconformity, preaching and tuneful hymns. Due to the widespread public concern about drunkenness, parallel organisations, such as the London Temperance Society,
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had been started in many other places. Their aim was to reduce drinking by moral persuasion, by parliamentary acts and prohibition. Worthy, competent, patronising, necessary and ever-so-slightly dull, these organisations spread and multiplied.

The long-standing members of the Baptist chapel, a severe group as Thomas was to discover, had agreed that Beardsall could be both their minister and the representative of the British and Foreign Temperance Society as long as it did not interfere with his pastoral duties. A survey, some fifty years later, shows that Beardsall was at the forefront of a powerful trend for pulpit Baptists. It listed 1,000 out of 1,900 Baptist ministers as total abstainers.
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A few days before Christmas, when many homes were being decorated with holly and mistletoe, and women were preparing festive fare, decisions were made by many not to pour brandy over the Christmas pudding. Thomas was one of them. On New Year’s Day, January 1833, six weeks after arriving in Market Harborough, two months before his wedding, he signed the Pledge. Initially, the Temperance campaign was only against spirits. Wine, ale, beer or port were allowed in moderation. Before long, though, they too were added to the forbidden list. But far from being negative, Temperance was a complex organisation with much popular appeal. Members realised that social gatherings would fill the void of the pub and also strived to promote all forms of learning.

The old Church of England vicar, the Revd Richard Carey,
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officiated at the Mason–Cook marriage on 2 March 1833, in the thirteenth-century stone Anglican church of St Peter’s, Barrowden. Thomas promised to endow his bride with all his worldly goods, which then consisted of nothing but his carpenter’s tools, his prayer book and his Bible. One of the witnesses who signed the certificate was Marianne’s uncle, Henry Royce. Later, his grandson, the motor and aeronautical engineer Sir Frederick Royce, brought fame and money to Derbyshire with his Rolls Royce factory.
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After the newly weds set up home in Adam and Eve Street, Thomas worked as ‘a wood and brass turner’, specialising in toys and Windsor chairs.
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A boy was born on Plough Monday ten months after their wedding, on 13 January 1834. Just as Thomas had been named after one of his grandfathers, so now was the new baby. He was christened John, after John Cook, and also given the surname of Marianne’s father, which was generally used not as a middle name but as part of his everyday name. A moral fastidiousness was instilled in John Mason from the cradle. The solemnity of home with its daily prayers and Bible readings was reinforced by the imposition of quietness in the house on the Sabbath, when the family sat through at least two services.

A second son, Henry, was born the following August. However, before the second wedding anniversary, grief descended on their new household. Henry, an alert, happy little baby, named after Marianne’s father, died when four weeks old. It was their first great loss and something from which neither would really recover. Morbid thoughts of death were not alleviated by prayer and Marianne wept over the tiny grave. Tennyson’s lines epitomised such grief :

You’ll bury me, my mother, just beneath the hawthorn shade, And you’ll come sometimes and see me where I am lowly laid . . .
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Shortly afterwards she overcame her ‘nervous disposition’ and opened up their house ‘for the accommodation of Temperance travellers’.
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The need for good, clean accommodation for the growing band of professionals, the commercial travellers, was the result of increased trade from the Industrial Revolution. Inns were often dirty, noisy and expensive.
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Evenings for Thomas were filled with Temperance meetings and his new role as a superintendent at adult education classes run at night by the Baptist Church. Classes for workers outside the academic setting was part of the Adult School movement; inspired by the Sunday schools, it had been growing for over fifty years. Many organisations, especially the Temperance movement, began to provide tuition so that artisans could acquire the accomplishments essential for advancement. Attempting to educate the deprived and convert sinners swallowed many of Thomas’s hours, leaving few to spend with either his family or his own business to ensure a satisfactory income. Children were taught to accept the dominant position of their father, but John Mason’s strained relations with his father can be traced back to this time.

Preston always kept its position as ‘the Jerusalem of the teetotal movement’ in the face of a proliferation of offshoots. The British Association for the Promotion of Temperance in 1835 was followed by the National Temperance Federation, the Temperance Society, the Irish Temperance League, the Church of Ireland Temperance Society, the Royal Naval Temperance Society and countless others. Some groups, such as the Bible Christian Church, went further and also denounced animal food. William Harvey, a Bible Christian and Mayor of Salford, was prominent in the United Kingdom Alliance for the Total Suppression of the Liquor Trade, the most powerful of all the prohibitionist pressure groups.

After Thomas attended a Temperance lecture in Market Harborough Town Hall given by John Hockings, known as the ‘Birmingham Blacksmith’, before Christmas 1836, Temperance became his ‘guiding star’. Abstinence was now a lifelong mission. Fired with zeal, he was one of seven men in the drawing room of William Symington, who, following the men in Preston, pledged ‘to abstain from ardent spirits and to discountenance the causes and practice of Intemperance’. Religious-like rituals unified followers. For example, in Market Harborough there were seven men – not five or eight – who took the pledge, reciting the same words. Symington, who became president, was the first of the group to take the pledge; Thomas, who became secretary, was the last.
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Symington, a tea and coffee merchant and an active member of the Congregational chapel, lived above his shop in the high street. Coming from Lanarkshire, the birthplace of the movement, he had an advantage over newer converts. When Thomas became the secretary and Symington the president, they began a close friendship which lasted for fifty years. Little deflected them from their passionate drive to rescue people from the evils of drink. Their offices became the meeting places of a lively group of young men full of ideas to change the world and ways to entice drinkers away from pubs.

Market Harborough, notorious for having the most discordant anti-teetotal mob, kept its place for a few years as one of the strongest small towns in the Temperance movement. Before long, though, it was eclipsed by Leicester, where Thomas Cooper, the Chartist, did much for the cause. Meetings in the town hall
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and Thomas’s house were often targets for the burgeoning anti-Temperance brigade. It was the same in thousands of other towns in Britain. What was happening in Market Harborough reflected what was happening in other parts of the British Isles. Before long members of the Society of Licensed Victuallers were outnumbered – but not overpowered or weakened. They managed to limit legislation against drink. Far from stifling the movement, their intransigence hastened its growth. But drunkenness continued. For a large number of people, the only refuge from depression and misery was the bottle. A copper or two, obtained by pawning the last rag, could buy oblivion. According to the reformer George Sims, ‘Drink gave the poor the Dutch courage they needed to go on living,’ but excessive drinking could not be condoned because it shattered such a large number of lives. Women and children were the greatest victims. Many social problems were related to alcohol.

Group celebrations, from weddings to burials, frequently degenerated into drunken commotions. For many workers, the long-awaited pay day could be the start of prolonged drinking bouts or ‘randies’ and bare-fisted fights over grievances. Pay day, with wages being frittered away by jovial men downing drink after drink, was often followed by days of despair when wives had not enough to pay the baker or the butcher. Wife-beating was not uncommon. In contrast, in some mining towns where Temperance flourished, women put on their second-best clothes along with starched stiff aprons on pay day and sat waiting for their men to return home and throw their wages, sovereign by sovereign, into their laps.

As the message of abstinence was one that many did not want to hear, Temperance associations devised ways to make life without the bottle attractive. It was an uphill struggle. English middle and upper classes served and drank wine at dinner. Working-class men consumed beer and cider, frequently home-made, while their wives and children drank weak tea, often with no sugar or milk. Pubs, with their gossip, conviviality, mirrors, woodwork and a roaring fire on chilly days, were the centre of village life. Rough taverns, too, with sanded floors and all sorts of games and pastimes, were also places where people could ‘drown their cares’ and slip away from the oppression of reality. The consumption of cheap gin, particularly by factory workers, increased. Tobias George Smollett, the Scottish doctor and author, described the sign over many spirit-bars in London, saying, ‘Drunk for a penny; dead drunk for 2d; straw (to sober off on) for nothing.’

Innumerable booklets and posters highlighted the dangers of drink. One series was by the artist and cartoonist George Cruickshank, once a prodigious imbiber and son of a man who died an alcoholic.
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He was famed for his witty and amusing caricatures of George IV
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and illustrations for Charles Dickens’s
Oliver Twist
. Dickens, though, who had little time for Evangelicals or Nonconformists, stressed in
Sketches by Boz
that the English vice of heavy drinking was caused by shocking living conditions. Sneering at the efforts of ‘well-disposed gentlemen, and charitable ladies’, he added that the cure should be directed ‘against hunger, filth, and foul air’; then, and only then, would ‘gin-palaces . . . be numbered among the things that were’.

During the previous century, to counter the importation of foreign brandy, legislation had sent the distillation of spirits in England spiralling upwards. Then the numbers of drinking establishments had increased with the Duke of Wellington’s 1830 Beerhouse Act, which allowed any ‘householder desirous of selling malt liquor, by retail, in any house, may obtain an excise license on payment of two guineas, and for cider only, on paying one guinea’. Beer-houses could open from 4a.m. until 10p.m. every day – except when divine service was held on Sunday and other holy days.
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Politicians thought that if milder drink, such as ‘malt liquor’ and other ales, were promoted, the consumption of others would fall. The result was 30,000 new beer-houses – and people continued to drink gin.

John Mason’s ‘pathetic’
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childhood was intimately described in a scathing article in the Tory magazine
Blackwood’s
that was too libellous to have been published during Thomas’s lifetime. This public display of self-pity and anger dramatised John Mason’s early years by graphically describing how he had hungered for attention and a decent education. The article put the blame on Thomas because of the ‘narrow means at home’ and Thomas using the time which he might have spent with his family on either activities.
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These circumstances prevented ‘a lengthened or elaborate education: the scholar still at the hornbook was already earning wages; at fourteen he left school altogether, and what he knew in after-life (and he knew much) he had acquired for himself. He was broken to harness almost as an infant, and we hear of him, a child of eleven, marshalling troops of other children at a school-feast.’

Some of the criticism was true. Thomas was home day after day, but not really part of his son’s life until he was older. The article, though, fails to state that John Mason was sent to a Dame’s School and then to a larger school in Leicester
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or that he must have had adequate food because he was taller than his father, well-built with good posture.

John Mason’s immense muscular strength, gained from pulling the presses in the printing office where he set type, was also described:

for those were the days before the adaptation of steam and the labour entailed severe physical exertion. But to use his strength was a joy to him: he thought nothing of walking six miles every day to and from his work, or of sitting up the whole night through to strike off a thousand or two double-royal posters, which without rest or pause, he would himself distribute next morning through the neighbouring towns.