Thomas Cook

The Holiday Maker

Jill Hamilton

• Publisher: Sutton
• Year: 2005
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9780750977388
• 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 'sightseeing' 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 sectors. One hundred and fifty years after his first overseas conducted tour, Jill Hamilton brings to life the complex man behind the famous name. There have been many accounts of the history of his firm, but this 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 nineteenth century. Cook did everything from starting soup kitchens to leading an innovative campaign for the repeal of the Corn Laws. During his fifty-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. 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 without mishap, but he sadly witnessed the accidental death of his only daughter in his own home. This book gives a new perspective not only on Thomas Cook himself but on the birth of the travel industry.

Table of contents

• 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