Thomas Cook (9 page)

The description could have fitted Thomas himself. They were hardships similar to the ones he had endured, and many parents then imposed the same rigours on their children that they had experienced themselves. As Thomas included his son in some activities, it seems that the author of the article was unduly biased. Reputable magazine though
Blackwood’s
was, there is also a question mark over the veracity of all the facts. It states that at the age of six, in 1840, John Mason went to Melbourne to see his grandmother by making a circuitous four-day journey by himself, taking two omnibuses, a canal boat, a train and a cart. The first day he walked from Market Harborough to Kibworth; the second he walked from there to Leicester; the third he was at West Bridge station and caught a train to Long Lane (now the town of Coalville), a terminus near to the Leicestershire collieries, part of the Leicester and Swannington line, which went via Leicester; then he went by canal to Shardlow, where he caught a horse-drawn omnibus to Derby; on the fourth day he caught Green’s carrier’s cart to Melbourne.
²⁰
Contrary to the article, it seems that his father may have accompanied him part of the way. Thomas later wrote that his sole railway journey had been from Leicester to Long Lane.

Then, overnight, there was a new era with the first queen on the throne since Queen Anne. In May 1837 Victoria celebrated her eighteenth birthday. On 18 June 1837, while holding a drawing-room at St James’s Palace, remembering that the day was the twelfth anniversary of Waterloo, her uncle King William IV, said, ‘Let me but live over this memorable day.’ A day and a half later, Victoria was queen. Lord Melbourne, who had been prime minister since 1835, showed tact and wit in introducing her to her new duties. He almost fell in love with her as an uncle might with a niece, and she in turn idolised him – but briefly. Even before her second anniversary as queen she began finding him dull. He was completely displaced after she sent a marriage proposal to her cousin – her mother’s nephew – Albert of Saxe-Coburg, who had no time for him or his right-wing views. One of the many imaginative decisions of this German prince would later affect Thomas’s career.

C
hampions of Temperance were dismissed by many as interfering busybodies and were often the targets of physical assaults, sneers and stones from those who relaxed with a jug or two. Cook later wrote, ‘my house in Adam and Eve Street
¹
was violently assailed, and brick bats came flying through the window to the imminent danger of Mrs. Cook and myself’.

Violent heckling, hissing and booing in the streets sometimes assailed Thomas. Once, the large bone of a horse’s leg was hurled at him. Picked up from a pile of bones in the narrow street, it crashed into his neck. Stunned for a moment, Thomas fell to the ground. His old itinerant preaching days had taught him that the meek did not get results. Not a man to ‘turn the other cheek’, he managed to get up and chase his assailant. Finally, at the entrance of the Talbot Hotel yard, the attacker was caught and later convicted and fined in the magistrates’ court.

Committed abstainers stuck to their pledge not to drink any form of alcohol during their own life, and promised not to provide it to others – something which put aspects of Thomas’s life in conflict. His father-in-law, like many farmers, was also a brewer, and most employers, including Thomas in his wood-turning workshop, provided their workers with beer by brewing a sack of malt, usually barley. Cutting this off caused much resentment among Thomas’s workforce of three. His half-brother Simeon, who was living with him as an apprentice, enjoyed his beer and the companionship that went with it so much that he ran away, breaking his indenture. While Thomas drew in men and women to sign ‘the pledge’ and kept drinkers away from the notorious drinking club in the town, known as ‘The Tenth’, temptation soon pulled them back into old ways.

Discord then came from the chapel itself. The kinship network of the Baptist chapel had helped Thomas’s Windsor chair and toy workshop, but it also soured his relations with its members. In a row over an unexplained business deal between him and a Mr Knowles, they took Knowles’s side, even though he does not appear to have been a member of the congregation. The episode was dealt with as ‘Disciplinary Action’ by the senior members of the Market Harborough chapel. The Minute Book for 24 August 1837
²
contains a reprimand over some of Thomas’s financial dealings:

That in Mr. C’s transaction with Mr Knowles we think he acted totally unbecoming as a tradesman and a Christian professor. That we are sorry to be compelled to believe on unquestionable evidence that he has been disgracefully inattentive to his word . . . J. Buckley [John Buckley the new minister] and Wm. Bennett shall visit him and endeavour to bring him to proper state of mind, and that he be suspended from the privileges of the Church till the next regular church meeting, when the matter shall again be considered, and if possible decided upon.

Thomas’s expulsion from the church on 8 October lasted for five months. Upsetting though it was to have accusations of being duplicitous, this setback coincided with a burst of activity against drink and the beginning of his publications promoting the cause of Temperance. So great was his success in putting together pithy words for pamphlets and newspapers in his modest print works that the house at Adam and Eve Street became the retail outlet for the South Midland Temperance Association. He was co-editing two monthly magazines which both sold for a penny, the
Monthly Temperance Messenger
, first issued in November 1839, and the
Children’s Temperance Magazine, a Cabinet of Instruction and Amusement for Little Teetotallers, edited by a Father
, which ran for eight years from January 1840.
³
Like his gardening magazines, no copies of the children’s magazine have survived, but one envelope from a grateful reader shows their impact:

The person to whom this letter should go

Lives in Adam and Eve Street, Market Harbro’:

He neither drinks Ale, nor Brandy nor Wine,

Nor anything else on the Publican’s sign;

He edits a book on the Teetotal plan,

And tries to reform the world if he can;

But lest you should not find him out by his book,

He is a Wood Turner, and named
THOMAS COOK
.

The following year, Thomas recorded that he was publishing ‘near’ 100,000 tracts and distributing 100,000 more. He was also carrying on with his wood-turning business. None of these activities, though, were bringing in enough money. A newspaper cutting from the
Harborough Advertiser
⁴
quotes a resident as saying that Thomas was then apparently ‘hard up, and he came to my mother and asked her to give him some work. My mother said, “You can make me a music stool!” . . . That relic, a four-legged music stool, is now in my possession.’

To embark on any new enterprise in those years was full of risks. In Leicester in February of that year, one of the worst winter months ever recorded, Poor Relief had to be paid to a quarter of the people.
⁵
One American wrote that ‘in Lancashire the mills were on short time; in Leicester wool spinning was at a standstill – everywhere the workers were degraded by poverty, low wages and the cruel bread-tax which takes food from their mouths to swell the incomes of the land-owners; or by poor-rates to feed the millions who have been made paupers by this very taxation system.’
⁶

Two years earlier, the People’s Charter had been issued by a group of reformers, the Chartists, who would, now and again, clash with Thomas. He knew one of its founders, Thomas Cooper, well. Cooper, who had been born in Leicester, had become leader of the Leicester Chartists before spending two years in prison in Stratford for sedition,
⁷
and moving to live in Lincoln. Like Thomas, he strove against wrongs and injustices. The politico-religious sermons of Cooper became a feature of Chartist meetings in Leicestershire. Methodism and Nonconformism helped the spread of Chartism. Many of the leaders, including Cooper and J.R. Stephens, had been raised in Methodist or other Nonconformist homes. Using methods similar to the old-style Methodists, they marched to Chartist hymns with such lines as ‘The Charter springs from Zion’s hill’ sung to familiar tunes. Such phrases as ‘Jesus Christ was the first Chartist’ were used, as for many members Chartism was a way of bringing Christian teaching into reality.

The Charter denounced the Reform Act as a sell-out to the aristocracy and upper middle class. Their Six Points demanded universal male suffrage, annual parliaments, equal electoral districts, the abolition of property qualifications for MPs and their payment and voting by secret ballot. Other aims were to promote education and to guarantee ‘the free circulation of thought through the medium of a cheap and honest press’.
⁸
Later, although the Anti-Corn Leaguers competed with the already well-established Chartists, on the whole they attracted different classes of workers.

Thomas was finding that distributing Temperance tracts, pamphlets, periodicals, pledge cards and medals
⁹
of the South Midland Temperance Association to the growing numbers of societies was costly. Even though the financial responsibility remained with the Association, difficulties arose because of lack of capital. He said that he would continue to take risks, but ‘something must be done, and done soon, or myself, and your printer, will be sufferers to a serious extent’. Six members put up £5 each. However, two months later, in April 1841, it was agreed that ‘a Committee be appointed to make arrangements with Mr. Cook for the future management of the Tract Depot, in order that all responsibility may be taken from the Association, and that Mr. Cook carry it on, in future, on his own responsibility’.
¹⁰
Thomas was, at last, in charge of the repository completely.

Hurrah for the Trip – the cheap, cheap Trip!

Thomas Cook,
Excursionist
, July 1854
¹

T
he introduction of the postal service in 1840 is a landmark in modern communications. In January that year, a month before Victoria’s wedding to Prince Albert, the ‘penny post’ was launched, allowing anyone to send an envelope anywhere. Purchasing an adhesive
²
penny stamp and gluing it to a letter became the rage and letters as we know them began to be shifted daily across the British Isles. In the first year 168 million letters were posted; ten years later this figure was an incredible 347 million, which included tens of thousands of subscription magazines and newspapers from Thomas Cook’s outlet. The following year Thomas himself would make an impact on communication. Like so much in his life, it came about through either the chapel or his crusade against drink. As secretary of the district association embracing parts of the two counties of Leicestershire and Northamptonshire, he thought nothing of walking fifteen miles to Leicester to a Temperance meeting, and he did just that on 9 June 1841. Spring had already turned to summer, and the day was warm. Carrying water, bread and a waterproof cloak, he allowed four hours for his hike. Meetings were a regular part of his life, but this one was of particular interest. Lawrence Heyworth from Liverpool, a well-known railway and Temperance man and director of the Midland Railways, was to speak and preside.

Thomas, in a similar way to many men of this era, used a stick shod with iron when walking across the hilly countryside, so his brisk step was accompanied by a rhythmical click. He was still slight in figure, his hair still dark brown and thick, and even in the hot weather he seldom discarded his waistcoat and jacket. The cost of a coach or omnibus fare was out of the question, as was a horse. Carriages flew past, but, accustomed to privation, he felt no envy.

When about halfway on the long hike and passing the Congregational church at Kibworth Harcourt,
³
Thomas had a flash of brilliance, which he later often recalled, saying that his ‘mind’s eye has often reverted to the spot’. His idea was that an excursion by train for Temperance supporters would be ‘a glorious thing’ so that ‘the newly-developed powers of railways and locomotion could be made subservient to the promotion of Temperance!’

Dismissing the caution with which many people looked on trains, Thomas dreamt up the idea of a train trip. The idea developed as he strode over the last six or eight miles. But such an outing by train was not really extraordinary. Trains had first concentrated on freight, but by the early 1840s railway mania was gripping the nation. Nine years earlier the
Annual Register
(1832) had reported that ‘the bulk of the half a million third-class passengers who are carried on this railway in the course of the year are strictly the working classes, weavers, masons, bricklayers, carpenters, mechanics, and labourers of every description, some of whom used formerly to travel by carts, but the greater number on foot’. Thomas was in the habit of finding counter-attractions, events and entertainment to entice men away from alcohol, to get men and boys off the streets and out of pubs or ale houses. Like other temperance reformers in Britain and America, he and his committee arranged diversions such as picnics
⁴
in parks, coffee houses, reading rooms, libraries and excursions accompanied by fiddles, hornpipes or a brass band.

Trains were often in the news. Newspapers had hyped up anticipation about the launch of the royal train, which would take the Royals from Slough to Paddington in London at the speed of fifty miles per hour. Prince Albert, always behind the advancement of technology, was anxious to counter the prejudice against railways and had requested the Great Western Railway to build an ornate state carriage with a crown on the roof. Carriages were then cheerless with bare boards and small apertures for windows, while the trains were shunted here and there with interminable pauses and delays at lonely sidings.