Thomas Cook

Jill Hamilton

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN:
  9780750933254
• eBook ISBN:
  9780752495088
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

Thomas Cook (1808-92), the father of tourism, is a forgotten hero of his age. When he was born, neither of the words 'tourism' or 'sigtseeing' had been invented. Driven by his Baptist faith and the promotion of Temperance, Cook founded the travel industry -- now one of the world's biggest trade sectors. Over 150 years after his first overseas tour was conducted, this book brings to life the complex man behind the famous name.

There have been many accounts of the history of his firm, but this readable and provocative book is the first full-length biography of Cook himself. His early years in Melbourne, Derbyshire, as a gardener, carpenter and preacher, then in Leicester as a printer and travel organiser, give a vivid picture of the political influence of the Nonconformists in England in the 19th century.

Cook did everything from starting soup kitchens to leading an innovative campaign for the repeal of the Corn Laws. During his 50-year career in travel he drew on the same enthusiasm and originality to make holidays easier by introducing pre-paid inclusive tours, hotel coupons, traveller's cheques, the 'round the world' trip and the first travel newspaper.

Few people, though, know of his determination to improve the lot of the working classes, his abhorrence of drink and his deep faith. The sex, alcohol and over-spending now associated with holidays would horrify the man whose first escorted trip in 1841 was a Temperance outing to Loughborough in the Midlands. He also helped set up a Baptist Chapel in Rome in the 1870s, and from 1869 onwards he brought the largest number of British people to the Holy Land since the Crusaders. At the end of his life Cook could boast that he had escorted thousands of tourists abroad with few mishaps, but he sadly witnessed the accidental death of his only daughter in his own home. A moving and enthralling account, this book gives a new perspective not only on Thomas Cook himself but on the birth of the travel industry.

Notes

One: Religion, Railways and Respectability

1. Robert Ingle’s excellent Thomas Cook of Leicester (Bangor, Headstart History, 1991) is only 67 pages long (hereafter referred to as Ingle). Piers Brendon’s Thomas Cook: 150 Years of Popular Tourism (London, Secker & Warburg, 1991) (hereafter referred to as Brendon), published on the 150th anniversary of the firm, gives a detailed account of Cook, his son John, and the progress of the firm. Edmund Swinglehurst’s illustrated The Romantic Journey: The Story of Thomas Cook and Victorian Travel (London, Pica Editions, 1974) (hereafter referred to as Swinglehurst) gives detail about the firm right into the twentieth century, with emphasis on the places they visited. John Pudney’s The Thomas Cook Story (London, Michael Joseph, 1953) (hereafter referred to as Pudney) again tells the extraordinary story of the man and the firm.

2. Albert Bishop’s notes of memories of Thomas Cook sent to Thomas Budge in 1952.

3. Brendon quotes J.C. Parkinson’s article in ‘Tripping It Lightly’, Temple Bar, 12 August 1864.

4. Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church (London, Adam & Charles Black, 1971).

5. Max Weber’s treatise The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (German edn 1904–5, English trans. Talcott Parsons, New York, Allen & Unwin, 1930) describes the relationship between religion and economic forces – that the doctrines of Calvinism resulted in socio-psychological responses that pushed forward ‘the Protestant work ethic’. It would be appropriate if it was known as the ‘the Nonconformist work ethic’.

6. Peter T. Marsh, Joseph Chamberlain, Entrepreneur in Politics (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1994).

Two: A Nonconformist Childhood

1. G.E. Mingay, Rural Life in Victorian England (London, Futura, 1977).

2. The Oxford Companion to British History, ed. John Cannon (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997), states that more than 4,000 enclosure acts were passed through parliament in those 80 years, affecting roughly 21 per cent of the land area of Britain. The process continued throughout the nineteenth century.

3. John Cook was born in 1785.

4. The Marriage Act of 1753.

5. Derek Beales, From Castlereagh to Gladstone (New York, Nelson, 1969).

6. Thomas Cook, in Birthday Reminiscences, said that his mother ‘lived to the age of 64 and died in 1854’, so she would have been born in 1789 or 1790. Pudney contradicts: she ‘could not have been more than five or six years old’ at the time of her father’s death in 1792, implying that she was born between 1785 and 1787.

7. Dictionary of National Biography, quoted by Brendon.

8. France declared war on England on 1 February 1793.

9. According to the historian and soldier Sir Archibald Alison, the French Government never sent any money to maintain these prisoners, leaving them ‘to starve or be a burden on the British Government, which, on the contrary, regularly remitted the whole cost of the support of the English captives in France to the imperial authorities’. At least 10,000 French out of the whole 122,000 died. Between April 1814 and the end of August 1814, about 67,000 of the French prisoners crossed the Channel back to France.

10. The south coast was dotted with seventy-four circular Martello towers, each with walls 9 feet deep, armed with swivel guns and howitzers.

11. Charles Dickens’s description of a death in Dombey and Son (London, Bradbury & Evans, 1858).

12. Brendon.

Three: The Protestant Ethic

1. There is now a Baptist chapel on the site.

2. The Baptists split in 1633 when a number of members withdrew and formed the Particular or Strict Baptists. The remainder became known as General Baptists.

3. The Roman Catholic Church did not encourage people to read the Bible themselves until 1944 and then not fully until Vatican II in the 1960s.

4. One drawback was that if one monitor taught incorrectly, so did their ‘students’ who in turn became teachers. Errors snowballed.

5. Carl Stephenson and Frederick George Marcham, Sources of English Constitutional History (New York & London, Harper & Brothers, 1937).

6. The Congregationalist Union of England and Wales was established later, in 1831, although they date back to a sect called the Brownists (also known...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Chronology
• Preface
• One: Religion, Railways and Respectability
• Two: A Nonconformist Childhood
• Three: The Protestant Ethic
• Four: A Spade! A Rake! A Hoe!
• Five: A Long Way from the River Jordan
• Six: Lay Preacher
• Seven: Another New Career
• Eight: A New Life in an Old Town
• Nine: Total Abstinence
• Ten: ‘Excursions Unite Man to Man, and Man to God’
• Eleven: Leicester: Printer of Guides and Temperance Hymn Books
• Twelve: 1845: The Commercial Trips, Liverpool, North Wales and Scotland
• Thirteen: Scotland
• Fourteen: Corn Laws: ‘Give Us Our Daily Bread’
• Fifteen: Bankruptcy and Backwards
• Sixteen: 1848: Knowing Your Place in Society and Respecting Your Betters
• Seventeen: The Great Exhibition
• Eighteen: Paxton, Prince Albert and the Great Exhibition
• Nineteen: Building Houses
• Twenty: Crimea
• Twenty-one: The Second and Third Decades
• Twenty-two: A Leap in the Dark
• Twenty-three: America at Last!
• Twenty-four: For ‘All the People!’
• Twenty-five: The Holy Land
• Twenty-six: Jerusalem, Jerusalem
• Twenty-seven: The Opening of the Suez Canal
• Twenty-eight: Paris: War, 1870
• Twenty-nine: Around the World
• Thirty: Grandeur
• Thirty-one: Egypt
• Thirty-two: ‘My God, My God, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?’
• Epilogue
• Appendix: Three Cook Letters
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgements